My editor gave me what I thought was a no-brainer assignment "Just write an article on 10 of the hot CG/animation movies in the coming year." Like any aging rocker I thought, "Right. This'll be a piece of cake. Let's grab a beer and get to work." Little did I know what a difficult assignment it would turn out to be. First of all, there are over fifty CG/FX/animation flicks slated for release in 2000 that I am interested in seeing. So I whittled down the list to 10 films that are coming out in the first half of the year that should prove to be the most interesting from the POV of AWN's most faithful...that being you, dear readers. An alternate list of 10 other films not covered here but of definite interest are the Y2K releases of Battlefield Earth, Tomb Raider, Mission Impossible 2, The Flintstones Viva in Las Vegas, X Men, Kingdom in the Sun, Shrek, Rules of Engagement and The Grinch Who Stole Christmas.

Tom Cruise in New Line's Magnolia. © New Line Productions,Inc.

Magnolia - New Line Cinema
If you, like I, are a techno-animation-CG-special effects freak but still find off-beat "small" films your most worthwhile intellectual enterprise, then you'll be pleased to know that Magnolia has the redeeming quality of being quirky-smart with the added delight of employing some very interesting visual effects.

Written, directed and produced by Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights), the film stars Jeremy Blackman, Tom Cruise, Melinda Dillon, Philip Baker Hall, Philip Seymour Hoffman, William H. Macy, Julianne Moore, John C. Reilly, Jason Robards and Melora Walters, among others, and weaves a mosaic of American life through a series of comic and poignant vignettes.

With nine independent plot lines as a palette to work from, Magnolia production designers Mark Bridges and William Arnold and cinematographer Robert Elswit worked closely with Paul Thomas Anderson to achieve the film's look -- bringing personal intensity into a cusp-of-the-millennium milieu. "We looked at films with really, really close, tight palettes, films that were warm and beautiful and tried to analyze what made them so and visually tried to do that with Magnolia," explains Bridges. "It was about real control with colors and shadows, letting the textures get richer and richer as the characters deepen throughout the film." In addition to the designs for 1999, Bridges and Arnold also designed the three segments for Magnolia's prologue, jumping between a 1911 prison yard, a 1958 tenement and the early 1980s. Anderson further made the experience authentic by using a hand-cranked Pathé camera to give the film a genuine 1911 period look.

The special effects I alluded to? ILM was the principal here and provided the shots necessary for "the frog sequence." This is all I am sworn to New Line to reveal about the effects as Paul Thomas Anderson is adamant on not revealing anything about this picture until everyone's had a chance to see it. But let me put it to you this way: Once you hear about it, you'll be hopping to a nearby theater just to catch what all the croaking's about.

Magnolia will be released nationwide January 7, 2000.

Supernova. ©MGM.

Supernova - MGM
When a guy like me sees who's actually behind a film like this, he begins to get excited. Not because it's a story fussed over by the likes of director Walter Hill and the cavalry-riding-producer-cum-script-doc Francis Ford Coppola. Not because the visual effects are being supervised by no less than Mark Stetson (The Fifth Element) and the crew at Digital Domain. And it's not even because of its interesting cast, though if there's a chance of seeing tawny beauty Angela Bassett in a form-fitting spacesuit I must admit I would be more than tempted to fork out eight bucks. Nope. None of it.

It's simply the idea that someone will attempt for the umpteenth time to retell 2001: A Space Odyssey as well as Kubrick and Shepperton Studios did. I wanna see if they pull it off. This time. No other picture has to date in my opinion. Not The Black Hole, not Alien, not Event Horizon, not Star Trek V, and not even Titan A.E. as far as I know (read more about that one later, dear reader).