I went and saw Hancock today. The film, about a strung-out superhero in need of rehabilitation, has been maligned by critics. Ironically, this was the exact reason my interest had been piqued, and even more ironically it was exactly what critics seem to dislike about the story that I thought worked so well.
In short: I loved Hancock. The film seemed real and I very much enjoyed the fact that the story was (deliberately) obtuse and unpredictable. I was entertained from start to end.
Perhaps the true reason I felt so drawn to Hancock was the feeling I was watching something of my own creation. Some of you will recall that many years ago I used to scratch down voluminous amounts of prose. These were often in the form of snippets of stories, or very short self-contained tales. I have a book full of this somewhere. One of them was called Brando Pineapple, and was about superheroism in the Australian outback. The tale is still kicking around in my head (along with many others) today.
Someone made a movie based on this story, and called it Hancock!
I’ll skip the details, but I assure you the similarities are astounding. In my story Hancock was called Brando, and ‘the girl’ was called Jelly. The situations were different, but the key element (let’s call it, in the spirit of not spoiling the tale, the ‘inversely proportional conceit’) was the same. Even the endings were similar (even though my version of the story was never close to completed).
So you can imagine watching Hancock was, for me, an unexpectedly amusing and somewhat moving experience 🙂
(As an addendum, one of the trailers before the film was for an apparent remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still, starring Keanu Reaves (as Gort?). I had no idea the film was coming, and no idea what the trailer was for until the very end. But my mind said The Color Out Of Space. Alas not. A true, big-budget Lovecraftian masterpiece is apparently still not in the near future…)
