"Hulking Out" Revisited: Hulk vs. Zak Penn vs. Werner Herzog

I likened the rejection of civilization to becoming the Incredible Hulk in my previous post, so quickly, before I head out to see that documentary about people living outside civilization, I must note two odd bits of Hulk-related movie trivia.

•Zak Penn, writer on the superhero movies X2, Elektra, and Fantastic Four, and the upcoming Incredible Hulk and Avengers, is seen in staged arguments with notoriously driven and combative director Werner Herzog (archnemesis of actor Klaus Kinski) — about a documentary Penn and Herzog were ostensibly attempting to produce debunking the Loch Ness Monster — in a mockumentary about the aforementioned documentary, called Incident at Loch Ness.

•Since then, Penn wrote the initial script for next year’s Incredible Hulk movie but was too busy to complete it, so it has been revised (according to the swell movie site DarkHorizons) by the man playing Bruce Banner in the movie — Ed Norton, who wants to make the film more of a fresh start, a la Batman Begins (a mere five years after the last attempt, which was directed by Ang Lee, if indeed this proves to be a true reboot).

And wouldn’t it have been better, by the way, if Brokeback Mountain had contained at least one inside joke line about Lee’s earlier film, maybe repeating Banner’s line: “What scares me the most is that when it happens, when it comes over me, when I totally lose control, I like it”?