Odds & Ends

Saturday, August 01, 2009

Miffion Impossible
I haven't been covering MIFF in quite my usual still-not-very-comprehensive-at-all fashion this year. I am of course tempted to blame a Chinese denial of service attack, but this has actually been due to a deadline on my thesis, with my next chapter (following on from the work here) due, well, now. I had thought it would be out of the way before MIFF, but no, I'm still plugging away.

My planned schedule has been whittled back to the must-sees: so far that has consisted of Duncan Jones' Moon and the revival of Richard Lowenstein's cult classic Dogs in Space, which I saw tonight. I will write up both on Cinepohobia, but as the second sessions for both are sold out I haven't felt massive urgency. Suffice to say Moon is exceptionally good, and Dogs in Space deserves its reputation, even if it's hard to make any grand claim for its artistic merit.

For MIFF coverage that involves things like actual reviews, I suggest you head over to the sites of Paul Martin, Luke Buckmaster, and Mark and Stuart at Hoopla. As usual, Paul's blog is particularly handy for the information he collates, such as sessions that are selling fast or sold out.

By the way, since I'm here: Ridley Scott directing another Alien movie?!?!?!?!? How is this not on the front page of the paper?

Oh, and here's our first look at Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr Fox. I guess now we know what a Wes Anderson stop motion Roald Dahl adaptation looks like... but apart from that I have no idea what to make of this.



And, finally - the long-talked about Comic-Con presentation for the Tron sequel has surfaced. I do know what to say about this. My message is very simple, and directed at all thirty-something nerdy males out there. It's this: no matter what you may have convinced yourself, Tron was not a good movie.

The world would be a better place if more people could remember that.

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Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Based on a True Story...
Until this evening the work of the low budget studio The Asylum had not made it onto my radar. According to a disconcertingly authoritative entry on Wikipedia - and it is precisely for things such as this that Wikipedia emerges as the most reliable source - the studio's specialty is low-budget, direct-to-DVD movies that are extremely close in their conception and / or titles to major studio blockbusters. The business model seems to be to rely on legitimate crossover interest, or just plain confusion, for their profit. It was this outfit that made the rival War of the Worlds back in 2005, along with The Da Vinci Treasure, Pirates of Treasure Island, Transmorphers, Allen Quartermain and the Temple of Skulls, The Day the Earth Stopped, and The Terminators. It shows a certain nutty chutzpah that I have to respect, and they fit in with a long tradition of pseudo-shyster filmmakers such as (in their very different ways) Edward D. Wood or Roger Corman.

They were drawn to my attention by Ain't It Cool's posting of the trailer to their latest epic, the title of which I won't give away. Let's just say nobody will complain they weren't warned. (If it's blocked in your country you can try the YouTube version here).




Snakes on a Plane proved that even big studios aren't above this kind of batshit marketing. Of course, Asylum went and made Snakes on a Train to exploit that, just reinforcing the symbiosis between these guys and the majors. And at least they're getting films made: good filmmakers like Martin Scorsese and James Cameron came out of Roger Corman's exploitation factory, so I don't see why they couldn't emerge from Asylum, too. And frankly, it would be nice if a big Hollywood blockbuster would feature some imagery as insane as the shark eating the Golden Gate Bridge, or the very last shot of this trailer.

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Thursday, May 07, 2009

Round Up
You may have noticed Cinephobia spluttering back to life in the last couple of weeks, with reviews of Mary and Max and Star Trek following a period of some inactivity. The irony of this, as I've mentioned before, is that I'm actually doing more film writing than I have for ages: it's just that it's for a PhD, not this site.

I hope to have a detailed retrospective essay up in a about a week or so, but in the meantime, a quick round-up of various things...

Facebook

I've created a page for Cinephobia on Facebook. This will effectively just carry the existing RSS feed, and be an alternative way for people to access the page. You can find that page here (Facebook login probably required).

I'm trying to work out how to do a similar thing via Twitter, but I don't want to have to update each site manually; if anyone knows how I can set Twitter to update either from the RSS feed or Facebook that would be most helpful.

Cinetology

I'm sure any readers that I have that discovered me back when I was writing for Luke Buckmaster's website InFilm have discovered this already, but nevertheless I thought I'd note that he now has a blog up at Crikey (here). Those who missed getting Luke's comments on non-Australian films once InFilm went Australian-only will no doubt enjoy reading Luke's comments again.

Spock

The new Star Trek opens today, and if you really want to nerd it up, you could enjoy the following "video essay" on Spock by critic Matt Soller Zeitz. As I said in my review, this really is Spock's movie rather than Kirk's, so there may be merit in a pre-movie refresher.



Trailers

The trailer for the Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are has been licking around for a while, but I thought I'd post it anyway. It caused a bit of a stir because it actually looks good (there have been big behind-the-scenes problems with the film). Of course, you can't really tell from a trailer, but certainly some of the imagery here - notably the shots of Max in his wolf suit - are very evocative of Maurice Sendak's book.

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Sunday, November 09, 2008

Up Trailer Up
Here's the new trailer for Pixar's Up:



I like this a lot. As many others have noted - as early as the appearance of the first concept art - this whole project has a strong Miyazaki vibe. Again, Pixar seem willing to nudge their material in a slightly more whimsical direction: perhaps they did, in fact, learn something from their excursion into formulaic mediocrity with Cars.

For an intriguing comparison, compare it to the much more conventional looking Bolt, from the Disney side of the merged Disney / Pixar hybrid:



Bolt was started before the merger of the two studios; there was some gorgeous early art and test footage released when the film was known as American Dog, before the original director Chris Sanders was booted from the project (read Cartoon Brew's report about that here; and some of the concept art can be seen here). Now it looks much less interesting, and in fact much of the character design - particualrly Bolt himself - is downright ugly. Who knows what to make of this (or the similar removal of Glen Keane off the helm of Rapunzel Unbraided); certainly some seem to have had trouble reconciling such apparently hard-headed corporate behaviour with John Lasseter's carefully cultivated nice guy image.

I can buy the idea that scrapping everything and starting over might become necessary, even if they need to fire the director. But the Bolt trailer makes it look very much of a piece with every other animals-on-an-adventure animated film we've seen in the last few years. Meanwhile, the Pixar films seem to be gaining some licence to do some slightly different things. Perhaps the head honchos at Disney / Pixar see Disney as being the kids label and want to differentiate Pixar as the more boutique / adult / risk-taking brand?

Of course, that's a lot more speculation than two brief trailers can sensibly stand. We'll have to wait and see.

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Saturday, October 04, 2008

Back Again
When I uploaded my review of WALL-E a couple of days a go, I was surprised to see it was more than a month since I posted something. Surprised, because I'm doing lots of film-related writing at the moment, so it seems like the page should be ticking over. But it's all been for things outside the page, notably my Masters. Over the long term this should generate some interesting content for the page, but there are also going to be times where I disappear for a few weeks to write things.

You may also have noticed that the Wall-E has a comments facility; this will be the norm on new reviews from here on. To get consistency across the site, I've switched the Odds and Ends comments over to the same system. I am a little uneasy about handing my comments over to a third party provider, in case they disappear one day, but the positives of improved interaction and consistency across the site were too attractive to ignore. I've copied the old comments across, but had to do it manually (thank goodness my site isn't more popular) due to eccentricities of the integration of the blog into my site, so the dates on all comments have been reset to October this year. Otherwise they should be unchanged.

As is often the case after such disappearances, there are a few things I'm interested in sharing. There's the new Bond song, for one, by Alicia Keys and Edward Scissorhands Jack White:



Most people seem to hate it (and particularly, the wailing vocals): I actually like it, in a weird way. Certainly it made a better first impression than Chris Cornell's "You Know My Name," from Casino Royale. I didn't really like that at all, until I saw it in the movie with that awesome opening credit sequence by Daniel Kleinman. (Incidentally, Kleinman has been dumped from Quantum of Solace, replaced by design group MK12, who worked on director Marc Forster's previous films.) I could just be strange though, as I also enjoyed Madonna's "Die Another Day."

Incidentally, the new trailer for Quantum of Solace is up over at 007.com and is even better than the teaser. I'm pumped for this, no matter how bad the title is.

Speaking of the Quantum of Solace theme song, here's another fake one, I believe from the same radio team that came up with the last one I posted. The YouTube video for this one isn't as much fun, but the "big bags of solace" line in the lyrics kills me.



There's also a trailer out for Oliver Stone's W., which suggests Stone is back to his rabble-rousing best. You Tube below, or go here.



If this is what he does with George W, imagine what he could achieve if Sarah Palin makes the White House?



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Monday, June 30, 2008

Quantum of Solace Trailer
Here's the new trailer for Quantum of Solace (aka the Bond movie with the title that makes everyone snicker but which has actually kind of grown on me). High definition version, which as always is worth it if you can, here.



I've said way to much about Bond over the years for it to be worth any detailed comment, but it is kind of cool. I love that finally we have some linkage between the films, in a way we haven't had since the sixties. This looks like it could be the Bond revenge story that should have, but didn't, follow the best Bond movie of all, On Her Majesties Secret Service.

You also have to love that Bourne-ish shot following the motorcycle jump.

Also - the first review I've seen anywhere of Baz Luhrmann's Australia, is here, from some random mallgoer in America. As such, the word "review" is used loosely but it's interesting to see such an early word on a film about which I am now increasingly curious - no matter who the source. Tha trailer for that one is here.

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Saturday, June 07, 2008

Because We All Remember How the Last Movie I Posted the Trailer For Turned Out
Baz Luhrmann's Australia hadn't really been on my radar, despite its profile. I think it was partly the stink of self-indulgence that hung over the project, as well as my increasing reservations about Lurhmann's style. I enjoyed Strictly Ballroom without loving it, and Romeo + Juliet really impressed me, but by the time of Moulin Rouge I thought Luhrmann's self-conscious technique had become a liability.

However, the appearance of the first trailer on the internet has put this right at the top of my list. Luhrmann - as best as we can tell - appears to have limited his stylised approach to the framing story and gone for a more old-school epic style of shooting for the rest of the film. I realise a trailer can make anything look good, but damn: this movie looks absolutely gorgeous. We never really have had a really good Australian western, despite a few attempts and the fact that the genre is so suited to being trasnposed here (it isn't cool to say this, but Man From Snowy River probably got closest). Luhrmann just might have cracked it.

For the full, high-def experience (very much the preferred option) click here, but if you can't do that, a YouTube version is below.


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Wednesday, May 07, 2008

The Other Jones
Because obviously I'm now officially part of the hype machine, here is the new trailer for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. {placeholder text - if you can see this, ignore it!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!! !!!!!! !!!!!!!! !!!!!!! !!!!!!!! !!!!!!! !!!! !!!! !!!!!! !!!!!! !!!!!! !!!!!! !!!!!! !!!!!!!



I'm psyched, even if the trailer looks disturbingly CGI-ish.

Updated: ... and here's the almost identical third trailer.

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Iron Man 2: Early Review
I saw Iron Man the other day. I enjoyed it, but don't have enough to say about it to warrant a full review. Suffice to say it reminded me a lot of the first Spider-man film; well-written, with good characters and performances and a healthy sense of conviction in the exercise by all involved, but at the same time lacking the really big show-stopping scenes that would have made it more memorable (the climax is really just two guys in metal suits punching each other.) It made me think of these comments by Paul Rameker in an article I've linked to before, over at David Bordwell's page:
I have a theory. In the contemporary comic-book blockbuster, the sequels will always be better than the first entries. Spider-Man 2 is better than Spider-Man, X-Men 2 is better than X-Men, and I will bet that The Dark Knight will be better than Batman Begins, just as Batman Returns was better than Batman. The pattern seems to me to be that the first film in the series is relatively impersonal - the franchise must be established as a franchise, meaning that few boats will be rocked, and the director must prove that they can handle both a film on that scale, and can be trusted with the property with all the investment it represents.

But once they've done so, in the above cases where the first films enjoyed significant economic (and critical) success, the directors are given a bit more leeway, are allowed to drive the family car a little further and a little faster. In each case, the second film in the series by the same director has been significantly more idiosyncratic. Batman Returns has much more of Burton's sense of humor and interest in the grotesque; X-Men 2 is a much more serious and ambitious film narratively and thematically, more obviously the product of a prestige filmmaker (Singer's never been an auteur by any stretch, so that will have to do). Spider-Man seemed sort of anonymous in terms of style, but Spider-Man 2 had a much more extensive and playful use of classic Raimi techniques: short, fast zooms; canted angles; rapid camera movements; whimsical motivations for techniques, like the mechanical-tentacle POV shot (virtually a repeat of his flying-eyeball POV from Evil Dead 2).
I would second all that and also add that these days, the sequel will get more money spent on it than the original; this and the more straightforward stories allowed once the "origin" story is out of the way means the second film in a series can usually be more action-focused. (Yes, this is a good thing.) The old idea that sequels gradually fade away in terms of quality should be considered completely dead, at least as far as first sequels go; third films in series remain much dodgier propositions.

Another example: the Bourne series, which - whatever you think of it's hyperkinetic style - really only emerged as the default reference points for action filmmaking when the sequels appeared.

Thus I'm excited about Iron Man 2 (Iron Men?), assuming the first film does well enough to warrant a sequel, and that they can keep Robert Downey Jr interested and out of jail. I fully expect to better than Iron Man, just as I'm looking forward to The Dark Knight (despite not being amongst those who consider Batman Begins a gold standard for comic book blockbusters) and Quantum of Solace (which is very much a first sequel in the reborn Bond series that began with Casino Royale).

Speaking of which, here's the new trailer for The Dark Knight, featuring lots of the late Heath Ledger. His performance looks incredible, and surely show-offy enough to get a posthumous supporting actor Oscar.


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Friday, March 14, 2008

Round-Up of the Frivolous Things
The site has had, until yesterday, another quiet few weeks, what with one thing another. Whenever I go through one of these periods where I don't have time to get something substantial up (or where, as was the was the case over the last week or so, I'm labouring over something that starts as a short post and ends as a great big one) the temptation is always to keep the page ticking over by posting the various silly things and rumours on this page. But then I get self-conscious about how lightweight some of this stuff is.

After I've just published a "proper" article or post, though, I've got no such qualms. So on the coat-tails of my piece on Film Theory, it's time to catch up on the frivolous stuff from the internet.

Bees! Bees! Millions of Bees!

This one came from Jaime J. Weinman's Something Old, Nothing New, where Weinman was taking about Irwin Allen's The Swarm.



A very dumb clip, but it gets me every time: as a commenter over at Weinman's blog put it, the way the guys says "Millions of bees!" makes it sound like he's selling them, not getting killed by them.

Bosko Says What?

Everyone loves it when a cartoon character swears. Via Cartoon Brew.



Clampett Update

There's been some good stuff on the internet about Bob Clampett over the last few eeeks: this post by Kristin Thompson looks at some freeze frames from his work and Michael Barrier talks about the cult of Clampett. The latter follows a debate that had played out following Barrier's earlier comments about the merits of Clampett's Buckaroo Bugs; you can follow that earlier debate through links from the more recent piece.

If you're not that familiar with Clampett, I would humbly point you towards my earlier essay on him, which was intended as introduction for the uninitiated.



Wall-E.T.

The main trailer for Pixar's Wall-E is out. YouTube below, but the much nicer HD version is here.



People are really flipping out over this movie. I don't know - I don't find the trailer as completely convincing as others do, and Pixar have lost that aura of invincibility. But here's hoping.

Speed Racer Trailer

Now here's one that redefines the term "garish." YouTube below but this one you really need to see in HD (here).





Who knows what to make of this. It kind of looks hideous and badly shot, but then I've commented just recently on what good action directors the Wachowskis are.

Harry Potter and the Multiple Films

And apparently Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is to be two movies. Given the really good bits of the last book are in the second half (see here for my comments when the book came out) this strikes me as unwise. Perhaps they can give the first half of the book, where the kinds are wandering the country, an epic Lord of the Rings-ish scope. But I think they risk getting a real dud out of this.

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Friday, February 15, 2008

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Quicktime Trailer
How very, very strange is it to actually see new Indiana Jones footage? But here it is, in the new Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull trailer. High quality download links (which gave Quicktime error messages for me - hopefully you have more luck) here, or YouTube below.



A couple of the effects look overly computerised (that ravine-side car chase looks like the awful brontosaurus chase in King Kong, and some of the temple stuff looks like it belongs in one of the Stephen Sommers Mummy movies). But I really like the feel of the warehouse stuff: it has a good, classic Indiana Jones-ish feel to it.

Incidentally, this film isn't far away: it comes out in May. So this is a pretty late teaser trailer. By comparison, The J.J. Abrams Star Trek re-launch has been pushed back to May 2009, but already has a trailer. Paramount and Lucasfilm really seem to be soft-pedalling Indiana Jones so far; it really seems that the bitter lessons of the overhyping of The Phantom Menace back in 1999 really struck with Lucas.

For an interesting comparison, if you got the Yahoo movies link (the first link in this post) you can also see the trailers for the original three Indiana Jones films.

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Saturday, January 26, 2008

Franchising
This year is shaping up as a particularly big year for what you might call the "mega-franchises": the really big, big franchises that are particularly prestigious and long-running: there are new installments scheduled in the Batman, Indiana Jones, Star Trek and James Bond series.

The last few days have seen interesting developments on all of these properties, so I thought I'd do a quick run down on all of them.

The Dark Knight

Heath Ledger's tragic death death was immensely sad, obviously on its own terms but also for film fans: to take just a single example,
Brokeback Mountain is one of the best films I've seen in recent years, and Ledger was vital to that success. But nerds (not to mention Hollywood execs) are a ruthless bunch, and the attention of the online film sites very quickly turned to what this meant for the latest Batman movie, The Dark Knight. (The Digital Bits also had a thought for Terry Gilliam, who was making The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus with Ledger: "Man, Terry Gilliam just can't catch a break.")

The answer is it won't appreciably affect the movie: Ledger's role was complete. But it creates some trickiness in the marketing. In one sense, its a plus... there was already a lot of buzz about Ledger's performance, and if it is indeed a good one, the fact that they are releasing it posthumously just makes it more iconic. I don't think the trailer we've seen so far will be seen as in poor taste; it shows the Joker but it doesn't seem "wrong" in any way. If you haven't seen it already, it's in YouTube form below (and in much better quality here).



But as some have noted, it's going to seem in poor taste if we start having Ledger's face grinning down from bus stops. My hunch is that the solution will be to run with the more oblique approach of the early posters, which still highlight the Joker (the film's main drawcard, after all) but don't hit us over the head with Ledger's presence.





Indiana Jones

The trailer's coming on the 15th of February, and Ain't It Cool have a totally unverified but fairly convincing description of it here. Spoiler alerts apply.

I'm excited about this... but I don't know. The pulp science fiction elements (to put it delicately for the spoiler shy) of the plot sort of make sense given the 50s setting, but still don't feel right for Indiana Jones. But we'll see.

Star Trek

Here's the trailer for the re-launched Star Trek:



(Clearer and in the correct proportions here).

For those who haven't been following this, this is a re-launch by J.J. Abrams that gives us young Kirk and Spock - hence the Enterprise being built in the trailer (why are they building it on Earth, not in orbit?). I could be wrong, but that doesn't quite look like the original series' version of the ship in the trailer; perhaps the venerable design has again been given a subtle reworking? (The lines generally seem a little closer to the first re-jigged version from the movies, but then the warp nacelles look like more like the TV series version).

James Bond

The new Bond film has been confirmed to be called Quantum of Solace. Along with Risico and The Property of a Lady (both popular rumoured titles for the new movie) it's one of the few unused Fleming titles left. You can see why they kept away from it - you don;t want a three word title where many people will struggle with two of the words - but it has grown on me and certainly seems thematically apt given it will apparently centre on the fall out from the events of the last film. (Semi-serialized Bond films, just like the 60s. Awesome). The reaction to it has generally been pretty ignorant, largely ignoring the fact that the title has its roots in Fleming and misrepresenting the generally positive fan reaction. For a spirited defense of the title, see CommanderBond.Net here.

Here's the official plot summary, also courtesy
CommanderBond.Net:

QUANTUM OF SOLACE continues the high octane adventures of James Bond (DANIEL CRAIG) in CASINO ROYALE.

Betrayed by Vesper, the woman he loved, 007 fights the urge to make his latest mission personal. Pursuing his determination to uncover the truth, Bond and M (JUDI DENCH) interrogate Mr White (JESPER CHRISTENSEN) who reveals the organisation which blackmailed Vesper is far more complex and dangerous than anyone had imagined.

Forensic intelligence links an Mi6 traitor to a bank account in Haiti where a case of mistaken identity introduces Bond to the beautiful but feisty Camille (OLGA KURYLENKO), a woman who has her own vendetta. Camille leads Bond straight to Dominic Greene (MATHIEU AMALRIC), a ruthless business man and major force within the mysterious organisation.

On a mission that leads him to Austria, Italy and South America, Bond discovers that Greene, conspiring to take total control of one of the world’s most important natural resources, is forging a deal with the exiled General Medrano (JOAQUIN COSIO). Using his associates in the organisation, and manipulating his powerful contacts within the CIA and the British government, Greene promises to overthrow the existing regime in a Latin American country, giving the General control of the country in exchange for a seemingly barren piece of land.

In a minefield of treachery, murder and deceit, Bond allies with old friends in a battle to uncover the truth. As he gets closer to finding the man responsible for the betrayal of Vesper, 007 must keep one step ahead of the CIA, the terrorists and even M, to unravel Greene’s sinister plan and stop his organisation.

Sounds good to me.

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Sunday, August 26, 2007

The Beowulf Express
A new trailer / preview reel for Robert Zemeckis' Beowulf has hit the net. The best version is here, but there's a YouTube version below in case that's too much of a download. Unfortunately, though, the trailer is sufficiently dark and choppy that it looks pretty awful when it's been Youtube-ised.



I'll skip my standard spiel on the uncanny valley (see here for some of my earlier comments). What this Beowulf trailer made me think about is how conflicted I am about the potential of these sort of highly digitised movies. By that I mean movies where most or all of the environments are either computer generated sets, or highly manipulated with computers, whether these use human actors (as in Sin City) or live-action-like motion-capped animation (a la Polar Express or Beowulf). The divide between the animated and non-animated films in this genre seems to be largely trivial now: because these projects use animation that is motion-capped off real performers, and which aspires to photorealism, in an aesthetic sense they are essentially the same thing. (True animated films, like those made by Pixar, are a different beast again.)

The films I'm thinking of are distinguished instead by their aspirations to harness realistic-looking performers to highly artificial environments.
There are a whole lot of techno-geek directors who seem to have decided this is the way of the future: Zemeckis is one, but there's also James Cameron (with his uber-sci fi project Avatar), Robert Rodriguez (Sin City), George Lucas (given how far the new Star Wars films went down this road), and Peter Jackson & Steven Spielberg (with their upcoming Tintin movies, which I talked about here).

As I said, I have mixed feelings about this. Looking at this Beowulf footage, and discounting the pointless pseudo-animation on the humans, you can see that there is enormous potential in this technology: it frees filmmaker form all sorts of logistical and technical shackles that go with traditional techniques. And we saw in Sin City that you could get a really distinctive look in this way.

Yet so far for the most part what we are seeing is the aesthetics of computer games transferred to the cinema. The elimination (or minimisation) of sets means that we get the free-floating camera familiar to gamers. The fact that it's all put together in the computer, rather than having to work around the realities of celluloid and lenses and light, gives us the same cinematographic tics you get in games (bleach-bypassed looks like in 300, or other highly synthetic visual schemes). The bad animation in the Zemeckis films is reminiscent of game cutscenes. And when you add in all the other cliches of computer-effects (massive battle sequences, swarms of objects or creatures), you start to get a series of fairly indistinguishable looking films.

I'm not such a luddite that I think the emergence of computer game aesthetics in cinema is an inherently bad thing. But what we're seeing at the moment is the influence of computer game cliches. Filmmakers are being granted enormous freedom, but having won that freedom they're all choosing to do the same thing.

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Sunday, May 06, 2007

The Crudtastic Four
Before the disappointing Spider-man 3 there is a trailer for the next Fantastic Four movie: my possibly unfair assumption is that it will suck, which might burst the recent superhero revival bubble somewhat (although there is still the next Batman film to come).

But it could be so much worse. For example, had you realised that in 1994, Roger Corman produced a version of The Fantastic Four? The rights to the series were contractually tied to the production of a movie by a certain date; if no movie was made, the producers' option would lapse. So a movie was produced, on an absolutely rock-bottom budget, with no intention of ever releasing it (at least not through conventional channels). And of course, it now circulates as a bootleg.

Here's the trailer:



And here's the ending. Spoiler and shonky rubber arm warnings apply:



The funny thing is, the costume for the Thing is actually not so bad.


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Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Harry Potter and the Adults Who Read Children's Books
For those who are keeping track of such things, here's the latest trailer for the new Harry Potter. (It's available in much better quality here).



The fifth Harry Potter book is easily the weakest so far, but it may well make the best film. The other films have been too crammed with plot to be very satisfying; J.K. Rowling's plots generally don't condense very well. Yet Order of the Phoenix, the book, was different in that it was very light on plot for a book of its length. The most interesting thing about it was its vision of Hogwarts' conversion to a repressive fascist institution under a government in denial, but this element felt lost in a book that was much too long. With everything shrunk down to two hour length, however, it could make a very strong through-line indeed.

I also like the bold new long-haired look for Draco Malfoy.


Oh, wait: that's Luna Lovegood.


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Sunday, December 24, 2006

The Daily Grind
The trailer for the Tarantino / Rodriguez collaboration Grindhouse can be found here, or at a much lower quality on the embeded link below. I suspect the trailer is more fun than the movie will be, but then I said that about Kill Bill. I like the irony of them advertising two movies for the price of one after Kill Bill gave use one movie for the price of two. Perhaps it's their way of clueing us in that the movie will be overlong.

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