VFX Holiday Preview: 5 Movies to Watch

We offer our holiday preview with five examples of VFX craftsmanship that runs the gamut from explosive to bloody to sublime to howling to out of sight!

By Bill Desowitz | Friday, November 13, 2009 at 5:50 pm

Posted In | Magazines: VFXWorld | Site Categories: Films, Visual Effects

It's Elementary when it comes to Sherlock Holmes' vfx. Courtesy of Warner Bros Pictures.

Well, 2009 is winding down and we have a monster VFX film yet to come along with a few lesser films that are still worth our attention. So here are five films to definitely check out this festive holiday season.

5.) Sherlock Holmes (Warner Bros., Dec. 25)
There's no James Bond this year, so why not refashion Arthur Conan Doyle's legendary 19th century sleuth into a superhero that's a cross between 007 and Jim West? Robert Downey Jr. is "quirky and kind of nuts" -- and so is Holmes in Guy Ritchie's conspiracy-driven thriller. Here Holmes' fighting skills are as lethal as his intellect, and Jude Law's Watson proves an adroit foil with his skills as soldier, surgeon, womanizer and gambler. Vfx from Double Negative and Framestore look to be explosive and adroit in recapturing Victorian London.

The Wachowskis turned to James McTeigue again for mayhem -- this is no Speed Racer. Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.

4). Ninja Assassin (Warner Bros., Nov. 25)
The studio promises a blood fest in this refashioned martial arts actioner from director James McTeigue and produced by Joel Silver (Sherlock Holmes) and the Wachowskis. Raizo (Rain) is one of the world's deadliest assassins but has become a myth. When his friend is executed by his former clan, he goes into hiding and comes back for revenge. Nearly 800 vfx shots, ranging from CG blood, CG weapons, CG dismemberments, CG embers and matte paintings have been executed by nearly 10 vendors, including Pixomondo, Trixter and Evil Eye. Dan Glass (the overall supervisor) worked with Chas Jarrett, Bjoern Mayer and Chris Townsend.

Peter Jackson is up to his old Heavenly Creatures tricks with this twisted Our Town dreamscape. Courtesy of Paramount Pictures.

3.) The Lovely Bones (Paramount, Dec. 11)
Peter Jackson's adaptation of Alice Sebold's best-selling novel is one of the year's most awaited releases and has Best Picture potential written all over it. In 1973, a young girl (Saoirse Ronan) is murdered by a local pedophile (Stanley Tucci), and enters an afterlife with a weird sense of humor. Jackson ,who potentially returns to his Heavenly Creatures kind of movie, has expanded the afterlife with the help of Weta Digital (supervised by Christian Rivers). Not exactly heaven, her refuge is more of an in-between state of mind until she can resolve the issues surrounding her death -- and is the imaginatively metaphoric province of dreams filtered through the lovely New Zealand landscape.