The First International Zhengzhou Animation Forum and Trade Fair in Zhengzhou, Henan Province, China, brought together provincial officials and 50 foreign visitors from the US, Europe and Asia.
In a world where gaming satisfaction is only a minute away with the advent of high-speed internet and next generation consoles, it makes me think back to the games of old, and what our new tech could have done to salvage them. Hit the jump for more!
The holiday season means one thing: family. Fortunately Namco Bandai has provided a great coping mechanism. No, not eggnog. With the release of Dragon Ball Revenge of Piccolo and Tekken 6, we've got fighting, fighting, and more fighting!
CG films particularly look great in 1080p, but there is something about Pixar films that's even more special. Their attention to detail simply pops in HD. For UP, when Carl and Russell head to South America, the richness of the jungle landscapes they created allows the audience to get lost in the world. The colors are so vibrant, especially the feathers of Kevin, the mysterious bird. Additionally, the 5.1 Dolby Digital soundtrack just adds to the experience. Carl and Russell's flight through the storm is a moment where the sound just envelops you. These are the kind of moments with good home theater systems you can understand why people are beginning to prefer watching films at home instead of the theaters, where cheap theater owners dim the light in the projectors and haven't updated their audio systems in decades.
Pixar put a great deal of work into getting fur to work for this film and now we finally get to see the full extent of their effort at home. This Blu-ray captures the tiny hairs on Sulley and the tight fuzz of the Snowman perfectly. But it also captures the thick scaly skins of characters like Mike with a sense of density that wasn't apparent on the DVD. Also the brilliant color palette is eye-catching in 1080p, while the blacks are deep. Equally the Disney's DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround soundtrack is remarkable. The closet door warehouse sequence was a standout moment when I first saw the film in theaters, and the soundscape during that sequence on this disc is just as rousing. Being enveloped in that scene makes the moment even more intense.
So often, professional partnerships are like marriages, they end in divorce. Director Herbert Ross (THE GOODBYE GIRL) and writer Neil Simon capture this dynamic so well in THE SUNSHINE BOYS. Little disagreements and the same petty arguments build into something dramatic. Eventually, the twosome can't even be in the same room with each other.
Willy Clark (Walter Matthau, THE ODD COUPLE) and Al Lewis (George Burns, OH, GOD!) were one of vaudeville's biggest comedy acts. They haven't spoken in 11 years. Clark is now represented by his nephew Ben (Richard Benjamin, WESTWORLD), who has to beg to get him potato chip commercials. He can no longer remember lines and he doesn't take direction very well. Then a new TV special commemorating the history of comedy comes along. Ben gets his uncle booked, but that's the easy part. He has to convince Willy to make up with his old partner first.
Mecha, mecha, and more mecha! Full Metal Panic is reminiscent of those classic mech-oriented anime that began to appear in the US after the Robotech boom in the 80’s. It’s got everything you expect: robot action, advanced technology, war-weary soldiers, and a budding romance beset with the comedy and melodrama that is high school!
Day 3 of the View Conference was a fantastic day for me, highlighted by presentations from Isaac Kerlow, Glenn Entis, Roger Guyett and Michael Giacchino.
Too much work, too little sleep. So many friends, old and new. Amazing things flying on the big screen. This is VIEW Conference 2009. But everything has a price, like not being able to make it for the first session in the morning.
SpongeBob SquarePants’s been around for either a decade or ‘eleventy-seven’ years. Scooby Doo aside, I can’t think of another TV cartoon character who’s broken into the mainstream with the same staying power as the classic Warner and Disney characters. The Flintstones and Scoob may be fondly remembered by many, but when was the last time you completely cracked up watching them? (For me frankly, never.)
This week sees new looks at some hot 2009 fall releases and the first looks at some big summer 2010 releases. What films for fall 2009 and summer 2010 are you excited about seeing?
Getting Buzzed
8) How to Train Your Dragon (March 26, 2010)
Trailer
On paper this one looks so promising, but the first trailer has dampened my excitement. I don't like Jay Baruchel as the voice of the lead character. It's distracting casting of a hot young star. I'm also not a fan of the salamander-looking dragon design. I'm still hoping there is more KUNG FU PANDA here than MONSTERS VS. ALIENS.
Based on Jon Ronson's nonfiction book, this fictional account starts with a note that more of this is true than you would believe. In the hands of director Grant Heslov and writer Peter Straughan, the film tells the mind boggling history of the Army's history with training psychic spies.
Reporter Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor, STAR WARS prequels) stumbles into the story of the military's psychic spies. Following the break up of his marriage, he goes to Iraq to prove himself. There he meets Lyn Cassady (George Clooney, CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND), the legendary Jedi warrior of the military's New Earth Army. Lyn agrees to take him on his secret mission in Iraq and reveals the history of his fellow Jedi warriors.
A stranger comes to your door. He makes you an offer. You have 24 hours to decide whether to push a button inside a box. If you push the button, someone you do not know will die and you will receive one million dollars. What would you do? What would you think or feel? What would you feel if you pushed the button? Too bad this film isn't interested in these moral dilemmas.
Norma and Arthur Lewis (Cameron Diaz, BEING JOHN MALKOVICH, & James Marsden, X-MEN) are given this proposition from Arlington Steward (Frank Langella, FROST/NIXON), a mysterious man with a severally burned face. The Lewises are living above their means. They're sending their son Walter (Sam Oz Stone) to the private school Norma teaches at, but they can't really afford it. Just like they can't afford the sports car Arthur drives. He's spending his astronaut paycheck before NASA even approves him.
With these problems floating over their heads, they contemplate the ramifications of pushing the button. But not enough time. Director/writer Richard Kelly (DONNIE DARKO) is far more interested in the mystery of where the box came from. This plot heavy thriller borrows from many sci-fi flicks, especially INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS. As the plot gets more complicated, the less we care about Norma and Arthur.
Too many of the plot elements that had potential are just red herrings. Norma has a deformed foot, which gives her a unique perspective on Mr. Steward's scarred face. This is supposed to pay off in an emotional scene that ultimately amounts to nothing. So does Arthur's obsession with Mars. So many of the elements seem like padding. I've not read the Richard Matheson short story on which the film is based, but I'm sure it had to be expanded on to make a feature film. Because this is the case, what seems poignant in a short tight story seems anticlimactic after nearly two hours of sci-fi mumbo jumbo.
So often when a story stops working, elements that might have worked in a better told story become comical. Overly menacing extras elicit chuckles instead of chills. Awe inspiring science elicits eye rolls. Ominous music makes everything seem so overwrought, especially when the ending leads to nothing new. At one point Arthur takes the box apart to see how it works. He finds nothing inside. I know how he feels.
The sparkling energy behind VIEW is Maria Elena Gutierrez who is driving a group of partner institutions, private and public sector, in investing in innovation and knowledge-sharing in the field of Technology and Creativity.
We are entering PETE in festivals to take advantage of her shelf life. In the meantime, I am working on other projects - preproduction and scripts.
We are entering PETE in festivals to take advantage of her shelf life.
In the meantime, I am working on other projects - preproduction and scripts.
Now I have a bit more time for drawing. Here are some recent drawings and sketches.
This Weekend's Film Festival is a follow-up to the July 30, 2008 edition — The Power of Education. In this second course, we get another look at the power of language. There's a story of a white teacher trying to teach inner city kids. Then there's one where one of those kids plays a black teacher trying to teach inner city kids. Then a French teacher tries to teach inner city kids from various ethnic backgrounds. And finally a drug-addicted white teacher tries to inspire inner city kids. While there are similar plot lines to many of this week's films, the films couldn't be more different. Prepared to be inspired.
The death of so many TV to film adaptations is that what works as a half hour on TV feels padded and drawn out as a feature film. Trey Parker and Matt Stone took the essence of their button pushing television series and expanded on it. Filled with hilarious songs, the film allowed Parker and Stone to be even more outrageous than they could be on TV. And they get to stick it to their critics real good.
Stan, Kyle, Cartman and Kenny are dying to see the big screen debut of their favorite Canadian comedy duo, Terrance and Phillip. Titled "Asses of Fire," the foul-mouthed feature influences the children of South Park to use the worst language thinkable. I can't even write the title of the big song from the film. Irate, Kyle's mother Shelia Broflovski (Mary Kay Bergman) wages war against Canada. And when I mean war, I literally mean war.
Okay, “King’s Seal” aside, which is nothing more than an unexplained ploy to drive the plot, Bleach The Movie 2 scores a big win!
If you were a sixteen-year-old girl and a rich, handsome older man promised to take you away from your boring life and jet you off to Paris, buy you expensive clothes and expose you to a sophisticated world you only dreamed of experiencing, what would you do? That's the key question at the center of AN EDUCATION. The viewer watches the main character make all the wrong decisions, but can you blame her?
Jenny (Carey Mulligan, PRIDE & PREJUDICE) is a smart young girl working hard to get into Oxford on scholarship. Her father Jack (Alfred Molina, SPIDER-MAN 2) is an unrelenting tightwad who pushes her to succeed. Her mother Majorie (Cara Seymour, THE NOTORIOUS BETTY PAGE) just smiles and nods in the background. On a rainy day while she is waiting by the bus stop, the charming David (Peter Sarsgaard, GARDEN STATE) offers to give her a ride home in his sports car under the pretense that he's only a music fan looking out for the cello she is carrying. Soon Jenny becomes drunk on David's lavish world.
In conjunction with the very good ROSE RED, Stephen King and Ridley Pearson concocted this gimmicky prequel story based on the backstory of the TV miniseries. The novel was published as "real life" diaries from Ellen Rambauer who lived in a haunted house. Two of the characters in ROSE RED are credited with editing and writing the afterward for the book. This neutered TV movie version of the diary lacks the scares of the miniseries and the sexual tension of the book.
In 1907, Ellen Gilcrest (Lisa Brenner, THE LIBRARIAN) married the charming John Rimbauer (Steven Brand, THE SCORPION KING), a wealth man who built her a mansion for their engagement gift. But as her husband, he becomes domineering, especially in the bedroom. During their honeymoon to Africa he takes other women into bed with them. On the trip, she gets very ill and is nursed back to health by Sukeena (Tsidii Leloka, ROSE RED), who becomes her best friend and travels back to the States with the Rimbauers. Back in Seattle, Ellen is plagued by deadly supernatural run-ins at the house and becomes convinced that she must keep building onto the mansion in order to beat the spirits.
X2 writer Michael Dougherty's anthology horror flick has been sitting on Warner Bros. shelves for years now. Through some midnight screenings, it has gained a bit of cult status. Quality is certainly not the reason why this fright fest has gone direct-to-DVD. While I have my theories on why WB was reluctant to release this chiller, they are only speculation. But keep reading and you might discern some of my thoughts about why the studio might get skittish with this horror flick despite its mild violence quotient compared to other resent gore fests.
The film tells five interlocking stories all set in one town on Halloween. Emma (Leslie Bibb, IRON MAN) is not nearly into Halloween as much as her husband Henry (Tahmoh Penikett, TV's BATTLESTAR GALACTICA). When she blows out the candle on their jack 'o lantern, Henry warns her that there are Halloween rules that need to be followed. Steven Wilkins (Dylan Baker, HAPPINESS) is the town principal with a persistent son named Billy (Connor Christopher Levins, EIGHT BELOW) and a secret in the backyard.
Italian horror master Dario Argento teamed up with Lamberto Bava, the son of the Italian horror master Mario Bava, to craft what Bravo named one of the 100 scariest films of all time. With one single scary moment, this gore fest simply puts a new tag on zombies as an excuse to fill the screen with blood and neon green puss. From the first example of his work, Lamberto is not his father, who is credited as the creator of the modern slasher film.
Director Bava, producer Argento and co-writer Franco Ferrini based the film on a story by Dardano Sacchetti. As is the case with so many films, the premise had potential, but its execution ends up simply being an excuse to exploit oozing viscera. Cheryl (Natasha Hovey) is a conservative young woman who receives a ticket for a movie premiere from a guy who looks like an extra from MAD MAX. She urges her friend Kathy (Paola Cozzo, DEMONIA) to ditch class and attend the show. At the theater, they meet the cute guys George (Urbano Barberini, CASINO ROYALE) and Ken (Karl Zinny). The film they see is a gruesome tale involving a prediction from Nostradamus regarding demons taking over the world. The root of the curse lies in a mask that makes the wearer bleed and soon transform those unfortunate souls into puss-spewing demons. When the movie patrons try to flee they discover that the doors have been bricked over since they entered.
After a slow week last week, this week the buzz meter is at 11. First trailers for big fall releases and new trailers for hotly anticipated 2010 film make this an exciting week for getting peeks at what is to come.
Getting Buzzed
8) Collapse (Nov. 6, 2009)
Trailer
Former LAPD officer turned indie reporter Michael Ruppert has been screaming about the economy's cracks long before the recent collapse. Many disregarded him as paranoid, but with many of his past prediction already coming true, are his most dire predictions of an economic apocalypse all that farfetched? AMERICAN MOVIE director Chris Smith interviews the controversial figure in a documentary commonly compared to Errol Morris' FOG OF WAR.
Twelve years after he made his first big screen impression in BLACKBOARD JUNGLE as a cocky student, Sidney Poitier stepped behind the teacher's desk to educate a class full of cocky students. As he'd do many times in his career, Poitier takes good material and makes its so much better with his intense performance.
Here he plays Mark Thackeray, an engineer, who can't find work in his field, so he takes a post as a teacher in an East end London school. His class is filled with unruly seniors who have no use for what Thackeray has to teach them. He especially has problems with Bert Denham (Christian Roberts), who simply wants to push the rookie teacher as far as he can. Eventually the teens push him too far and he snaps. He then realizes that everyone treats them like children, so he will treat them like adults. The change in approach works and he builds respect through respect. But fellow teacher Gillian Blanchard (Suzy Kendall, THUNDERBALL) warns him that he shouldn't be in a room alone with Pamela Dare (Judy Geeson, THE PLAGUE DOGS), because she might be young, but she's still a woman who desires Thackeray.
