gwax's rumblings

I saw Avatar last night in RealD 3D and, I have to say, it is a very pretty, rather fun, awe­some to watch movie. The 3D for Avatar was incred­i­bly well done but it gave me such a bad headache and nau­sea that it almost wasn’t worth it. Luckily, I was able to imme­di­ately go home and go to sleep, thus not deal­ing with the dis­com­fort much. Needless to say, I think that I’m going to stick to 2D movies for the fore­see­able future.

Diatribe about 3D aside, Avatar is a pretty great movie. Sure it’s Dances with Wolves in space but Dances with Wolves was a good movie so why not put it in space. Actually, more than that, to me Avatar was Dances with Wolves meets Dinotopia in space. The color palettes of Avatar were vibrant and pretty in much the way that the palettes of Dinotopia were; fur­ther­more, the crea­tures and world were suf­fi­ciently real­ized to make it seem like a place that one might really want to go. In fact, I think Avatar has pro­vided me with the first arti­fi­cial set­ting that I have had a strong desire to visit since Dinotopia.

So, hav­ing dis­cussed the pain (lit­er­ally) of the 3D, the ade­quacy of the story (ade­quate being the right word), and the beauty of the world, let’s talk about the spe­cial effects. For quite a while, I have been adamantly opposed to the use and overuse of CGI in the film indus­try. Certainly, some stu­dios do CGI cor­rectly (Pixar, DreamWorks) but when mixed with live action, I tend to think that the Jurassic Park or Aliens approach of rely­ing pri­mar­ily on live action, pup­pets and robots is a much safer and more visu­ally appeal­ing approach. The clear­est exam­ple of where real is good and CGI is bad is to look at the orig­i­nal Star Wars tril­ogy in com­par­i­son to the new Star Wars tril­ogy. Somehow, thank­fully, James Cameron has not fallen in the same way that George Lucas has; Avatar beau­ti­fully mixes the real with the CGI and I did not once feel as though things had fallen into the uncanny val­ley.

Hopefully Avatar will end up prof­itable in spite of its truly ludi­crous bud­get (offi­cially $237M + $150M mar­ket­ing) and James Cameron will be allowed to keep mak­ing crazy as heck sci­ence fic­tion stuff (it was at >$232M after its open­ing week­end so odds are pretty good). The out­stand­ing ques­tion now is whether he’s going to make a sequel to Avatar or whether he’s going to make Battle Angel Alita like he’s been talk­ing about for a while.

So yeah, over­all, I am inclined to rec­om­mend the Dances with Wolves meets Dinotopia in space movie, oth­er­wise known as Avatar but I do not rec­om­mend it in 3D unless you’ve got some dra­mamine to take before­hand. Actually, that’s an idea; maybe I’ll pop a cou­ple dra­mamine and try see­ing it again, you know, for science.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (Transformers 2) is not what one would refer to as a good movie in the sense that Forrest Gump or Seven Samurai might be con­sid­ered good. Transformers 2 is, how­ever, an awe­some movie in the sense that sum­mer block­busters are designed to be awe­some. It’s pretty typ­i­cal to see a movie that’s got crazy effects and action but with a story/plot that mostly exists to give pause and glue to hold things together, which is some­what far­ci­cal, in my opinion.

The log­i­cal con­clu­sion to the trend of sum­mer block­busters is that story/plot isn’t actu­ally that impor­tant and, if done wrong, can really drag a movie down. So, what hap­pens if you reach that log­i­cal con­clu­sion and make a movie that is an open acknowl­edg­ment of the friv­o­lity of plot in sum­mer block­busters? You end up with some­thing that is a gor­geous, shiny, mov­ing piece of art, that pleases your senses but not your intel­lec­tu­al­ism; you end up with some­thing that every tra­di­tional movie-watcher will think is ter­ri­ble as they hunt for plot and a, so to speak, good movie.

This is the case for Transformers 2. Critics, in look­ing for plot and tra­di­tional qual­ity, have failed to see the gor­geous, shiny, sense-satiating, mon­ster of an expe­ri­ence that Transformers 2 is. The crit­ics made a sim­i­lar expe­ri­ence with Speed Racer, which was not very com­pelling but nonethe­less exces­sively beautiful.

In addi­tion to the amaz­ing expe­ri­ence that Transformers 2 is, its qual­ity has also inspired, what is prob­a­bly the finest review of any­thing, ever. io9 puts it quite well in their review, Michael Bay Finally Made An Art Movie, which I com­pletely agree with. Excerpt below:

Transformers: ROTF has mostly got­ten pretty hideous reviews, but that’s because peo­ple don’t under­stand that this isn’t a movie, in the con­ven­tional sense. It’s an assault on the senses, a bar­rage of crazy imagery. Imagine that you went back in time to the late 1960s and found Terry Gilliam, fresh from doing his weird low-fi collage/animations for Monty Python. You pro­ceeded to inject Gilliam with so many steroids his penis shrank to the size of a hair fol­li­cle, and you smushed a dozen tabs of LSD under his tongue. And then you gave him the GDP of a few sub-Saharan coun­tries. Gilliam might have made a movie not unlike this one.

In short, read this review; ignore the other reviews; go see Transformers 2; get over­stim­u­lated; and enjoy the cul­mi­na­tion of all that is the sum­mer blockbuster.

Thanks to hunch, I recently dis­cov­ered the anime Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, or just Gurren Lagann, which I have really been enjoying.

Gurren Lagann is, at its heart, a mecha anime and, as any­one who knows my love of Transformers and Battletech will under­stand, that is a plus in my book. The art is great and the bat­tle scenes are just awe­some. On top of that, there are some pretty great char­ac­ters in the show; I am espe­cially fond of Kamina. Also, Gurren Lagann has already run its full 27 episode course, which means that I can watch it and enjoy a degree of com­ple­tion, which is a thing that I really enjoy being able to do.

As far as anime series go, Gurren Lagann is the first one that I’ve seen and really enjoyed since Trigun. I wouldn’t say that Gurren Lagann is not Samurai Champloo cal­iber but it’s cer­tainly worth hunt­ing down and giv­ing a shot.

I finally got around to watch­ing the end of Battlestar Galactica (sure took me long enough) and I have to say that I was some­what dis­pleased, to say the least. Don’t get me wrong; the series, as a whole, was quite pleas­ant and I did enjoy watch­ing the end but, still, some­what displeased.

SPOILERS FOLLOW:

Points of contention:

• Luddism: We had lots of tech­nol­ogy and lots of war so let’s throw away all of our tech­nol­ogy. Seriously? Going one step fur­ther; you think that you can actu­ally just throw away all of your knowl­edge. It’d be zero to super-polymers age in one day. Oh, le sigh.
• Religion: God this, des­tiny that, mag­i­cal know-how the other; ugh, give me a break.
• Starbuck: What’s the deal with her? Just going to write her out with no expla­na­tion at all? Talk about sloppy. Talk about cop-out.
• Prehistory: If that’s sup­posed to be Earth, how do you explain lin­guis­tic evo­lu­tion? Where are the records of ships and tech­nol­ogy? What about the super fancy mate­ri­als? I bet they didn’t degrade in the past 150 thou­sand years.
• Matrix Architect: Didn’t we get the this has hap­pened a bunch of times before idea out of the way in The Matrix Reloaded? It was a so-so idea then and it’s even more so now.
• etc.: Those were the big ones, at least.

Seriously, you guys couldn’t come up with a bet­ter way to write a con­clu­sion to this thing? I guess mediocre clo­sure is still bet­ter than no clo­sure. Thanks for the four/five sea­sons of pretty great, Battlestar Galactica. Oh well, time to catch up on Lie to Me and Dollhouse, I guess.

Let me add Outlander to the list of awe­some movies that you’ve never heard of. Outlander came out in US the­aters last Friday and hav­ing fol­lowed it for a while, I went and saw it. Now, let me come clean here, Outlander isn’t a par­tic­u­larly good movie but it sure as Hell is a totally awe­some movie. That said, I do rec­om­mend going to see it while it’s still on the big screen.

Vikings ver­sus aliens really should be all the syn­op­sis that you need to con­vince you to go see it but, I guess if you want more, I can give you a brief syn­op­sis. Earth is actu­ally an unde­vel­oped, aban­doned seed colony for the space­far­ing human race. Kainan, a man from space, crash lands his ship on Earth in viking-age Norway. Kainan soon real­izes that a par­tic­u­larly nasty alien, called a Moorwen, had stowed aboard his ship and is now on the loose. There are sub­se­quently a lot of spaceman/viking integration/culture-shock dynam­ics and even­tu­ally it becomes vikings+spaceman vs. alien monster.

Just to be clear, I keep say­ing that this is vikings vs. aliens because that’s both what it pur­ports to be and what it deliv­ers phe­nom­e­nally well. Outlander has cult clas­sic writ­ten all over it.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is not that bad. With the crap that George Lucas has been putting out recently, I’m sur­prised the new Indiana Jones movie was not worse. The increased use of spe­cial effects and CG def­i­nitely hurt the movie but not as much as that Gungan idiot hurt Star Wars. Ultimately, the goal and end­ing of the movie were pretty poor but the early and mid­dle parts of the movie were plenty decent as far as Indiana Jones’ style is concerned.

Funny that aliens and fly­ing saucers are less rea­son­able than the hand of God but I think that’s just the way my mind says the world of Indiana Jones is sup­posed to be.

Saturday evening, I went out with some friends and saw The Fall, which was, I must say, a gor­geous movie. The movie is quite artis­tic, pretty and rather fun. It gets a wee bit on the odd side at a num­ber of points and there are a few WTF?! moments but, over­all, the film is quite coher­ent and a very nice way to spend a cou­ple hours. Unfortunately, The Fall, being thor­oughly inde­pen­dent, is suf­fer­ing very poor dis­tri­b­u­tion and show­ing up in a rather small num­ber of the­aters but, in my opin­ion, it’s worth seek­ing out one of those the­aters and see­ing it.

In today’s edi­tion of George brings you obscure movies that you should have heard of, District B13. This 2004, French film, pro­duced by the great Luc Besson, stars David Belle, founder of Parkour and involves acro­bat­ics and ass-kicking that eas­ily match the bet­ter things com­ing out of Asia recently. Take one part post-apocalyptic action film, add a dash of drug lords, some neu­tron bombs, two parts crazy mar­tial arts, a lib­eral sprin­kling of really good French traceurs, bake for an hour and a half and you get, well, a pretty phe­nom­e­nally awe­some movie. No wires or spe­cial effects necessary.

Ralph Bakshi is a par­tic­u­larly inter­est­ing American maker of ani­mated films. I expect rel­a­tively few of you have ever heard of Ralph Bakshi and almost as few have seen any of his works, which is why it is nec­es­sary that I bring Ralph and his works to your attention.

My first encounter with Ralph Bakshi came when, at a young age, I saw the box for his 1977 film Wizards at my local video rental loca­tion, Video Revolution, and thought that it looked phe­nom­e­nally cool (same image as the poster image to the right). For rea­sons I do not recall, I didn’t man­age to actu­ally watch Wizards until I was in high school and, let me tell you, it’s a pretty fan­tas­tic movie. Wizards is set in the far, far, post-post-apocalyptic future and tells the story of a war between two wiz­ard broth­ers, Avatar and Blackwolf of the land of good and evil respec­tively. If I recall cor­rectly, the war is pre­cip­i­tated by Blackwolf’s dis­cov­ery of ancient Nazi war pro­pa­ganda. The film does a fan­tas­tic job of alter­nat­ing between light, dark and flat out sur­real; I highly rec­om­mend it.

It wasn’t until just recently that, in decid­ing to hunt down a copy of Wizards, I learned the iden­tity of Ralph Bakshi. Being the obses­sive con­sumer of media that I am, I decided to see what else Ralph has done and, lo and behold, Ralph Bakshi was respon­si­ble for Cool World. Cool World was a rather odd mix of car­toons and live action that I am rather fond of in spite of the rather poor crit­i­cal acclaim that it gar­nered in its time; I must be a mem­ber of the cult for which it is a cult hit. Upon real­iz­ing that Ralph was respon­si­ble for Wizards and Cool World, it became nec­es­sary for me to track down his other works and what should turn out to be his sem­i­nal work? None other than the film ver­sion of Fritz the Cat. Fritz the Cat is note­wor­thy both as the first inde­pen­dent ani­mated film to gross more than $100 mil­lion in the box office and as the first X-rated ani­mated fea­ture film. R. Crumb did not like Bakshi’s take on Fritz the Cat and killed off the comic char­ac­ter in retal­i­a­tion but, by most accounts, R. Crumb is a whack-job and the film was great; I have obtained the film but have not yet had the chance to watch it so I must with­hold my per­sonal views for now.

Ralph Bakshi is one of the behe­moths of mid-20^th cen­tury ani­ma­tion, respon­si­ble for many things beyond the few that I have men­tioned, and I would be doing you a dis­ser­vice if I didn’t bring him to your atten­tion. Having done so, the dis­ser­vice of not watch­ing Bakshi’s works is now yours to remedy.

Ok, blo­gos­phere, or what­ever you inter­we­b­zor­workpeo­ple want to call your­selves, this is a plea for help. I try not to depend on other peo­ple for much but this is truly impor­tant to me and if you can help me, I will be gra­cious towards you in quan­ti­ties hard to express.

There was a movie that I saw on tele­vi­sion when I was young (some­where between 6 and 13 (so 1989–1996 prob­a­bly)) that involved some kid wak­ing up in his bed, see­ing a weird glow­ing over the hill behind his house and then get­ting abducted by aliens that wanted to do ter­ri­ble things to him. Eventually, this kid escapes from the aliens and returns to his home and finds com­fort with his fam­ily. Unfortunately, it turns out that the kid’s fam­ily have already been taken over by the aliens and turned into aliens them­selves and another adven­ture ensues. The kid, returns again to his home and man­ages to destroy the aliens, which I think resolves the mat­ter but might not. I admit that I remem­ber very lit­tle of the movie but I know that, if I were to see it again, I would instantly rec­og­nize it. So, if any of you have any idea what I might be talk­ing about, please let me know and I will inves­ti­gate the leads.

Really, the key bits are the kid wak­ing up from sleep­ing to see some weird glow­ing behind the hill in his back yard, going to inves­ti­gate, find­ing aliens try­ing to eat him, escap­ing, return­ing home, find­ing his par­ents are aliens in dis­guise, repeat­ing the whole escap­ing part and then being left unsure as to whether his par­ents are real or not. Seriously, this movie is some­thing that I remem­ber with a com­bi­na­tion of intense curios­ity and trau­matic pecu­liar­ity, which I would like to track down for my per­sonal edi­fi­ca­tion. I think the title was some­thing like Martians ate my Parents or Martians ate my Family but I am not certain.

Please, track­ing down this movie will either serve to resolve some weird issues that I have holed up in my psy­che or, at the least, it will enable me to source some weird mem­o­ries that I can’t seem to rid myself of.

I don’t gen­er­ally ask too much of you, Internet, but this I ask of you for your own good: go see the new Transformers movie and go see it now. I saw the new Transformers movie at the ear­li­est pos­si­ble show­ing, last night at 8pm, and was com­pletely blown away.

The new Transformers movie is every­thing that the first gen­er­a­tion car­toons and movie were and so much more. With this new movie, the trans­form­ers have finally become every­thing that they should have been before. Now, under­stand, as I say these things, that I have loved and wor­shiped the first gen­er­a­tion car­toons since I was a child.

The new Transformers movie improves on the old car­toons in a num­ber of ways and adds depth in ways I could not have imag­ined. The biggest improve­ments come as a result of the free­doms found in PG-13 movies tar­geted at teenagers and twenty-somethings, specif­i­cally the shear bru­tal­ity of the Decepticons and inter­per­sonal inter­ac­tions that haven’t been dumbed down or overly cleaned up. Where Megatron was once a greedy and self-serving mega­lo­ma­niac, he is now a cruel and bru­tally vio­lent sadist; it feels as though Megatron has come into his own as never before. There is a depth and amus­ing fish-out-of-water awk­ward­ness to the Autobots that makes them both endear­ing and sur­pris­ingly human. Michael Bey has done a fan­tas­tic job of direc­tion and, com­bined with fan­tas­tic cin­e­matog­ra­phy, every scene appears to come across as total per­fec­tion; there are times when the ten­sion is pal­pa­ble, oth­ers when the comic relief smooths things over, slow-motion at just the right moments and then the action sequences are amazing.

From about five min­utes into the film, clear through the end, I was stuck in a deer-in-headlights state of paral­y­sis, unable to escape the onslaught of awe­some­ness that was bom­bard­ing my senses. The cul­mi­na­tion of all my expec­ta­tions and the majesty of the films orches­tra­tion left me, quite lit­er­ally, in tears as the cred­its began to roll. If you’ve already seen the new Transformers movie, I’m sure that you already know that I’m right, but if you haven’t seen it yet, I can’t under­stand why you’re still read­ing this instead of going to see it right now. Seriously, go now; it’s more impor­tant than any­thing else you could pos­si­bly be doing.

Dear Internet, go out and see the movie Hot Fuzz at your next pos­si­ble option. Every moment that you delay going to see Hot Fuzz increases the extent of the dis­ser­vice that you are per­pe­trat­ing against your­self. Hot Fuzz is the best, fun­ni­est, most enter­tain­ing movie that I have seen in a very long time. Hot Fuzz is a buddy cop movie by the guys who made Shaun of the Dead and it man­ages to com­bine all the best ele­ments of, make fun of and pay homage to all the good action and police movies of the past. I was totally engaged and laugh­ing for nearly every minute of the entirety of this movie.

Bottom line, if you haven’t seen Hot Fuzz yet, you should be check­ing movie list­ings right now and get­ting your­self to the next avail­able show­ing. No hyper­bole, this is the best movie that I have seen in a very, very long time (and I have seen some pretty good movies recently). Don’t delay, don’t wait for the DVD, just go see this movie now, right NOW!.

Ok, Internet, I know we’ve been doing a poor job stay­ing in touch with each other lately and I don’t really feel like point­ing fin­gers, so let’s put that behind us. After all, right now, I have some­thing impor­tant that I want to talk about: Voltron. In my ran­dom being up late, eat­ing a snack and watch­ing some tele­vi­sion, I hap­pened to par­take in a rerun of Voltron on Adult Swim. This rerun led me to a cou­ple of real­iza­tions, which I would like to share with you. Realization 1: the Power Rangers were the biggest ripoff of Voltron any­one could have pos­si­bly per­pe­trated; seri­ously, Power Rangers would have been more aptly titled Voltron: The Live Action Series. Realization 2: Voltron was a ter­ri­ble show; don’t get me wrong, The Transformers was only 90% as glo­ri­ous rewatch­ing it in my 20s as it was before I was 10 but Voltron, rewatched in my 20s, is ter­ri­ble. Internet, if you have fond mem­o­ries of Voltron, please, take my advice don’t ever watch it again; let your fond mem­o­ries remain unclouded for the prod­uct itself will fail to deliver.

I recently came across a trailer for the movie Land of the Blind at the begin­ning of some DVD or other. Strangely, prior to the trailer, I hadn’t heard hide nor hair of Land of the Blind. Anyway, work­ing on the premise that the pre­view seemed mighty neat, I set about find­ing an oppor­tu­nity to watch it. Having now watched this film, I have to say that I can’t under­stand why it didn’t show up on the radar. Land of the Blind flew so low that there are only 17 reviews of it aggre­gated on Rotten Tomatoes (as opposed to the more com­mon 200ish).

Anyway, Land of the Blind fol­lows a polit­i­cal rev­o­lu­tion in a total­i­tar­ian state, from the stand­point of a mil­i­tary under­ling that befriends the head of the rev­o­lu­tion. The movie starts out kind of nor­mal and polit­i­cal but then descends into bizarre and polit­i­cal before finally descend­ing into crazy and con­fus­ing. Basically, I feel Land of the Blind has been done a ter­ri­ble injus­tice and in order to rec­tify the mat­ter I am rec­om­mend­ing it to you folks. If you’re my friend, you’ll prob­a­bly like it (Sherv, Riad, it’s right up your alleys).

This evening I watched The Paper Chase with a few of the other law stu­dents here. For those of you that don’t know, The Paper Chase is about a few law stu­dents (one in par­tic­u­lar) going through their first year at Harvard Law School, with a par­tic­u­lar focus on their con­tracts class (and it’s pro­fes­sor). If you would like to get some idea of what law school is like, I rec­om­mend watch­ing this movie as it has a lot of very accu­rate ele­ments. In spite of its accu­racy, The Paper Chase does not match up with my expe­ri­ence in a few key ways: none of my pro­fes­sors are quite as mean as Professor Kingsfield and none of my class­mates are quite as self-servingly cut­throat as most of the other stu­dents in the movie. The movie does, how­ever, give a seem­ingly accu­rate por­trayal of the work­load, class struc­ture, stress lev­els, sleep depri­va­tion and gen­eral style of the expe­ri­ence. I should like to add the caveat to every­thing pre­vi­ously said in this post that I’ve only fin­ished one month of my first term and things could change dra­mat­i­cally between now and finals.

I have just now dis­cov­ered that Pee-Wee’s Playhouse exists in re-runs on Adult Swim (Cartoon Network) and let me tell you, Internet, the tele­vi­sion shows that existed while I was a child were decid­edly bizarre. In fact, when I think about it, there were some really won­der­ful shows on tele­vi­sion when I was a child (Transformers, Bill Nye, etc.), some really f***ed up ones and an awful lot of over­lap. Of course, on top of Pee-Wee Herman being a very strange children’s show star, there’s also the part where he got arrested for expos­ing him­self in pub­lic; I won­der how many peo­ple in my gen­er­a­tion that left an effect on and what those effects were. I won­der if every gen­er­a­tion gets to look back on their child­hoods in the way that tele­vi­sion re-runs and down­load­ing old shows from the Internet allows me to; my guess would be not and it leaves me won­der­ing what strange effect that’ll leave on my generation.