Recovery Nerds on The Incredible Hulk

Whew! Summer has its plusses and minuses. Among the plusses: Summer movie season. Among the minuses: Kids out of school means no time to blog about summer movie season.

This past weekend, Mark and I left our kids in the care of our wonderful babysitter, who, next to The Junky's Wife is the love of our son's life. (Seriously, I don't even come close. I'm a distant fourth behind Daddy, JW and the babysitter.) Then we headed off to perform our weekly movie night ritual: stopping for take out at a local sandwich shop (where we are now officially regulars) before heading out to enjoy the latest blockbuster.

This week brought The Incredible Hulk starring Edward Norton. The "starring Ed Norton" part is important, because this movie wasn't on the original spreadsheet, where we painstakingly plotted out our summer movie watching. It was a late addition, after we saw previews in which Ed Norton flexed his acting muscles and looked just the right kind of tortured for the part, but maybe that's just those Fight Club overtones he carries with him. (What a great addiction movie that is!)

The Incredible Hulk was decent, as action movies go. The theater we were in had a good sound system, so the whole place vibrated as the Hulk walked. And the special effects -- the ease with which he broke and threw, um, almost anything -- really knocked home (so to speak) his size and power. They were the kind of scenes that make you exclaim things like, "Holy crap!"

But, of course, what Mark and I were looking for were some good addiction parallels. After all, there was Ed Norton with his Fight Club self in a life that was clearly out of control and unmanageable. And he did (I think I can tell you this, since it's hardly a spoiler) work on some (gasp!) breathing and anger management techniques. However, our hopes that the movie might explore this quest more deeply were in vain. It was not Bruce Banner grappling with his inner monster that kept the Hulk from going on killing rampages, so much as it was his outer codependent in the form of Liv Tyler. Sigh! (Poor Discovering Alcoholic -- waiting days for this, only to have me gloss the whole addiction subtext in one disappointing paragraph.)

My favorite part came during a cameo by the hot-in-recovery Robert Downey Jr., who was reprising his Iron Man role as Tony Stark. Mark did that comic book nerd thing and leaned over to excitedly whisper to me the movie makers were setting the stage for some future comic book thing I'd never heard of. I love that man. Um, Mark that is, not Robert Downey Jr. Well, ok, mostly Mark.