Hellboy? Hell Yeah!

I’d like to say that I was extremely productive and that I accomplished a lot today.
However, clearly I wouldn’t like it enough to have actually been extremely productive and accomplished enough so that I could legitimately say that I had.
Instead I got up a bit before 10, sat around for a while, showered, dressed, headed over to the comic shop – new comics came out on Thursday this week because of the holiday, but I was too lazy to stop by there before today – had lunch, went to Target and bought a few things, then came home and took a nap.
Among the things I bought at Target was the latest Futurama DVD, The Beast With a Billion Backs, which I watched after I got up from my nap.
It was better than Bender’s Big Score, but it still seemed a bit off, and didn’t have as many laughs as a standard episode of the series would have had.
Still, there was one particular scene that was completely awesome and which made up for all of the other areas in which it was lacking.
Speaking of awesomeness, I went to see Hellboy II last night with Scott and Stacy and a bunch of other people I’m too lazy to list and I enjoyed the…err…hell out of it.
Not really going to post a review of it, other than, as already mentioned, to note that it was awesome, and also to say that I never thought I would have enjoyed something that included a Barry Manilow song as a rather central element, and yet I did.
I will say, though, that while the movie was near-perfection, I do have three complaints. It included one of my favorite supporting characters, Johann Krauss, a German scientist accidentally converted into a swirling mist of ectoplasmic vapor – voiced, oddly enough, by Family Guy creator Seth McFarlane, who did a decent job, particularly for Johann as presented in the movie – but it did not include my absolute favorite supporting character, Roger, the pantsless homunculus.
Also not featured: pulp hero Lobster Johnson. This is a shame, as there was a perfect opportunity in the movie to give audience at least a fleeting glimpse of the character.
My final complaint? No cybernetic Nazi gorillas.
These are, of course, mere quibbles, and I have absolutely nothing in the way of real complaints about the movie (other than that it annoyed me to have to wait four damn years for it to come out).
So yeah; I liked it. It had the requisite amounts of humor, action, and creepiness that should accompany any Hellboy story.
I should mention that a year or two before Hellboy hit the comics scene, I’d come up with an idea that was quite similar to the high concept behind Hellboy.
For the uninitiated, Hellboy is a demon who was brought to Earth through the machinations of a group of Nazi occultists during World War II. However, the ritual that summoned him was disrupted by Allied soldiers led by a paranormal researcher, and the demon, who was just a child, was adopted by the US military and raised by the paranormal researcher, eventually growing to become the world’s foremost paranormal investigator, who rejected his original destiny, which was to destroy the world.
My idea didn’t involve Nazis, but had a similar notion in that it involved the redemption of a demon. Basically, a demon takes possession of a child, and a priest is called in to exorcise it. In hearing the message of the Gospels, the demon, against all conventional wisdom and theology, becomes converted, and vows to join with the priest in the fight against the forces of darkness of which it was once part.
Of course, it was never much more than the germ of an idea, and likely wouldn’t have turned out to be anywhere near as entertaining as Hellboy even if I hadn’t been too lazy to actually do anything with the idea.
Up next as far as movie-going is The Dark Knight, on Friday, which we’ll be seeing in IMAX. After that, I can’t think of anything else that’s coming out that I’m interested in seeing.
When I got home from work yesterday, I watched the season finale of Reno 911! on my DVR, and then got to work on a picture for the upcoming remodel of the Heroic Portraits site. I went into obsessive mode, and got so caught up in it that I neglected to eat – as often happens – or to leave myself enough time to do so before leaving for the movie, so the hot dog and two boxes of candy I had at the theater had to fulfill that function.
When I got home, I pretty much immediately went back to working on the picture until the wee hours of the morning.
Of course – as also often happens – when I looked at the picture in the light of day I decided that it sucked and that I hated everything about it and that the whole thing had been a colossal waste of time.
Oh well.
In any case, if I should happen to stumble upon some motivation this weekend I’ll probably get to work on putting together a site that is at least a marginal improvement over the current version.
Maybe.