Among its many failings — mediocre casting, visual effects and scriptwriting, for starters — the cardinal sin of Ang Lee's The Hulk was miring itself in the middling morass of its protagonist's split psyche. Once the thematic mainstay for comic book-based film adaptations — Superman II and III; Spider-Man 2 and 3; every Batman movie ever made (Bruce Wayne even dated a shrink in Batman Forever, for pete's sake) — this Freudian well began to run dry just in time for Lee's turgid rendering of arguably the comic-book kingdom's ultimate exemplar of "duality of soul." Batman Begins succeeded because Christopher Nolan, perhaps the preeminent surveyor of fractured cinematic psyches, expanded the "crisis of conscience" motif from the micro to a meta-examination of our post-9/11 world (which early indications suggest will continue in The Dark Knight). And Iron Man was a box-office breath of fresh air partly because Tony Stark, while reshuffling his priorities, never veers from his basic wiseacre, fun-loving persona.

The CliffsNotes' version of Bruce Banner's psychological journey in The Incredible Hulk, the unofficial sequel to Lee's 2003 misstep, goes from battling to suppress/eradicate the not-so-jolly green giant to harnessing and maybe even living in harmony with his inner id. Holed up in a Brazilian favela, we find Banner (Edward Norton) living in clandestine self-exile, whiling away his days searching for an ever-elusive cure and new ways to keep his heart-rate below 200 beats per minute. He's beleaguered, cursed with access to an astounding brute power that, by also proscribing physical exertion, strong emotions and even sexual potency, ironically robs him of his manhood. He is also besieged, still being hunted by his nemesis, Gen. "Thunderbolt" Ross (William Hurt, taking over for Sam Elliott). Ross enlists the aid of a past-his-prime military commando, Emil Blonsky (Tim Roth), who eventually takes a shine to the Super-Soldier serum he receives in order to better combat the Hulk.

Ross and Banner's explosive, CG-enhanced enmity stretches from South American slums to a college campus in Virginia to the Big Apple, where Hulk must lock horns with Blonsky's abominable alter-ego after it goes Cloverfield on the streets of Harlem. The Captain Ahab-Moby Dick traveling roadshow grows redundant, whilst Banner and Betty Ross' (Liv Tyler) star-crossed romance suffers from lazy development, Tyler's stilted performance and evident allusions to King Kong and Beauty and the Beast. Louis Leterrier, working off a script co-written by Norton and Zak Penn, sets up easy, trite bogeymen - the government, man's proclivity to play God — for a papier-mâché plot that, for all its wise refocus of purpose, eventually devolves into the F/X realization of the idiom "Hulk Smash!"

This is a fanboy's Hulk, from its visual razzmatazz to the expansion of its character's base to the copious nods to the erstwhile television series, including a shot of Bill Bixby as Banner watching an episode of The Courtship of Eddie's Father, a brief reprise of the show's plaintive closing ditty, and the de rigueur Lou Ferrigno walk-through ("You're the man," exhorts Norton's Banner). However, the most enduring aspect of The Incredible Hulk might be found in the few minutes comprising its opening credits and later, the closing cliffhanger. During the former, as imagery of the Hulk's gamma-induced birth is recreated using Norton's Banner and Tyler's Betty (essentially attempting to rewrite/erase the history of Lee's original?), a collage of news reports and government documents flashes fleeting glimpses of two names: Stark Industries and Nick Fury. Along with the film's coda and its much-ballyhooed Robert Downey, Jr. cameo, the two bookends hint at the ongoing assembly of a contiguous Marvel movie universe first teased by Samuel L. Jackson's cameo after Iron Man's closing credits. It is illustrative of the state of the genre (and season) when the director of the Transporter movies conjures more popcorn-munching verve than Ang Lee. It is also indicative of The Incredible Hulk's relative stature when Downey's mere 2-minute throwaway overshadows the 112 minutes that precede it. — Neil Morris

Opens Friday areawide

CATCHING SALINGER

Item: One of the creators of this short-feature nonfiction is James Renner, a Free Times reporter. I know on which side my measly bread is buttered. The verdict on Catching Salinger, to quote old Citizen Kane posters, "It's Terrific!" The feelgood hit of the year! The summer's biggest sleeper! The perfect date flick! It moves like Star Wars! It revives the nostalgic spirit of old-time adventure serials! It gets away from the campy, silly J.D. Salinger of the 1960s and goes back to the original, dark, brooding psychotic J.D. Salinger of the '30s and '40s! etc.

Well, would'ja believe it's a cute scrap of micro-cinema? Blend of literary appreciation and zero-budget DIY schtick centers around a fan-prankster-eye view of, yes, Jerome David Salinger and his semi-autobiographical debut novel Catcher in the Rye, which catapulted him to literary stardom in 1951, and became the most ubiquitous red-covered little paperback outside of Chairman Mao's. Yet Salinger withdrew, Garbo-like, from press and public scrutiny and has been living as a near-recluse in New Hampshire, granting no interviews. Considerable legends grew about him, claims, for example, that Salinger's continued writing furtively, cramming safety-deposit boxes with manuscripts to be published posthumously. Locals James Renner and Charles Moore, two Catcher in the Rye enthusiasts, along with cameraman Rob Lucas, motor from Cleveland one winter on a fuzzy quest to hit major Eastern US landmarks in the combined lives of Salinger and his fictional boy hero, teenage boarding-school dropout Holden Caulfield. Holy Grail would be to drive right up to Salinger's doorstep and video a historic face-to-face, but initially these pilgrims claim no master plan. They'll just freestyle with their internet-downloaded map and see what happens. They may not even get out of Ohio.

Renner's background in improv-satire with the troupe Last Call Cleveland reflects in road-comedy/reality-show stuff; Blair Witch Project jokes, solo soliloquies about the awkwardness of masturbating in shared motel suites, or a mock intervention of Rob's alleged drinking problem. Salinger-centric narration (voiced over by a child) do rope us back to a Cliff'sNotes outline of Catcher in the Rye. This is no super-deluxe annotated Salinger appreciation; nothing about the bizarre trivia that Salinger's actor-son played Captain America in a cheapo Marvel Comics movie adaptation, no answering charges brought in Slate and other iconoclastic journals that Salinger's invisibility is, paradoxically, a weird bid for attention. Nothing especially about the purported Catcher obsessions of both John Lennon assassin Mark David Chapman (recently dramatized in not one but two theatrical features) and Reagan shooter John Hinckley. Docu-philes might find this a collegiate stunt compared to Stone Reader, the one in which a loner filmmaker investigated an ultra-obscure, one-shot novelist and his tiny fandom. You never even learned what the book was about, and that wasn't even the point; theme remained the cloistered quality of the literary experience and the invisible threads connecting authors to readers. Catching Salinger does bring off an unspectacular but satisfactory resolution at the 60-minute mark, not overstaying its welcome, and not making you think of the protags as show-off stalkers. And if J.D. Salinger ever gets to see this film, he might chuckle now and then, who can say? As for me, I'll probably put Catching Salinger in my Ten Best Movies of 2008 list. Easy enough; I'll just avoid watching everything else the rest of the year. Now that's taking one for the team! — Charles Cassady Jr.

Catching Salinger: 7:40 p.m. Saturday, June 14, at Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque, 11141 East Blvd., 216-421-7450.

THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNEW IT

In equal measures intriguing and hamstrung by its severe local-interest subject matter, the one-hour documentary The End of the World As We Knew It is a talking head-a-thon, giving us Viewers of a Certain Age the inside story of Cleveland radio station 107.9, AKA "The End," from 1992 to 1999. Remember where you were during the Clinton Administration? Probably at work; there were actually some jobs then. And if your job was advantageously located or your car antenna particularly powerful (since their transmitter was pretty weak), you may have jammed to the End in the closing years of the 20th century.

The station burned brightly but briefly in the NE Ohio commercial radio firmament by playing (and sometimes hosting concerts by) alternative-rock and music artists whose only other airwave exposure would have been the college stations (which kind of get kicked to the curb of the narrative, rather unfairly). "The End" announced its non-formula format in radio-legend fashion, playing R.E.M.'s "The End of the World As We Know It" in continuous rotation for an entire day, thus entering Gen-Xer lore here, or what passes for it. Keeping to an idiosyncratic playlist of what was good and interesting, not just what was in the corporate push-box, 107.9 FM "broke" singles by the Smiths, Tori Amos, the Cranberries, Barenaked Ladies and Reel Big Fish. Rather disappointingly, the documentary is fearfully short on actual performance footage and chats with the musicians, except for Reel Big Fish. Maybe it's RBF's generosity or maybe it's how far the star of ska has fallen that they were the act most accessible to filmmaker Mike Wendt.

Most of this is instead nice little DJ anecdotes, so much so that you expect a Woody Allen voiceover to pop in at intervals: "...That reminds me of another great radio story..." We hear about the live remote broadcasts from listeners' homes, the Flats Riverfest, what a great time it was to be in radio, and nary an unkind word uttered about anyone and anything, nay, not even when FCC rulings allowed a giant corporate media company in to take over the End and replace the format with the corporate formula du jour. One does starve for the brand of piss- and-vinegar that local media commentator John Gorman brings to the topic. The eternal replay of REM? That's cool but not as cool to my mind as one college station here, WCSB, I think, that on the night of the LA riots, looped the late Sam Kinison screaming "AARGH AAAAARRGH! SHOOT ME I'M IN HELL!!!" for a couple hours straight. But that is a whole other incipient documentary. I hope. — CC

The End of The World as We Knew It: 9:30 p.m. Saturday, June 14 at Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque, 11141 East Blvd., 216-421-7450.