If you haven't already seen This Film Is Not Yet Rated, I recommend it. But along with everything discussed in it, this very short, succinct, beautifully-stated video, the creators of South Park explain why the MPAA is evil to small filmmakers, regardless of the kinds of movies that they are making.
And just for fun, the entirety of This Film Is Not Yet Rated. For some reason, part one has embedding disabled, so you will have to go to YouTube to watch it.
Friday, June 22, 2012
Saturday, June 9, 2012
Disney Releases "Wreck-It Ralph" Trailer
It's been awhile since they revealed the existence of the movie, and they have finally gotten around to releasing the first trailer.
Saturday, June 2, 2012
Is This Real?
I found a teaser poster for American Reunion, the fourth movie in the American Pie series, and... what?
Is this real? Can it be real? Am I missing something? When I first saw it, I assumed that it was some sly joke, created by someone trying to subtly communicate the stupidity of the movies. But after a quick Google search, this poster cropped up in a number of places. I think it might actually be legit!
This is mind-blowing. In the book Keys To The Kingdom, Kim Masters interviewed a bunch of industry insiders who recounted an interaction between Michael Eisner and Dawn Steel.
"Forget what you want to do," Eisner interrupted. "This is what I've done. Get 'Star Trek' finished up, then your vice-president of production in features. Congratulations."How true that must be.
"I don't know anything about movies."
"Neither does anybody else. Good-bye, good luck, and break a leg."
Friday, June 1, 2012
Favorite Movie Poster
I'm a child of the 80's. This causes me a great deal of consternation since I frequently worry that I'm simply being a curmudgeon when I say that kids today don't know what good movies and cartoons look like. I feel decently confident that this isn't the case, and actually have some data to back up that belief, but it's always in the back of my mind.
One thing that keeps my mind at ease is that I don't rate things based on whether they were in my personal childhood or not. In fact, I feel that I can trace the downward spiral of children's entertainment to the early 1990's, which was very much still in my childhood, and I frequently find works from the 1980's and 70's that I didn't even know existed, but are leaps and bounds ahead of the crap being produced today.
A decent theory that to explain this decline, while not covering everything necessary to explain the phenomenon, is that cable TV fragmented the child market, triggering a drop in quality to both increase profit while also catering to the lowest common denominator. Companies saw profit vectors shrink or simply fail completely, and they responded by retracting investment and development.
Whatever the reason, there are few examples more stark to me than An American Tail. The movie was a case study in not talking down to children. And much to the joy of any movie fan, the poster was also a fantastic example of what can be done when an artist decides what should be painted and not an executive.
The entire poster is dreary and dark, with brown, rusty, desaturated colors. Roger Ebert, in a negative review, even described the movie as "dark and gloomy." The only two points of the poster that are uplifting are Feivel, standing out from the poster in both color and structure, and the glaring light of the Statue of Liberty, which was just completed in the timeline of the movie.
The poster was painted by Drew Struzan, who's painted nearly every great movie poster of the past thirty years. I also chose to include the poster that doesn't have the movie info on it. This is simply as how Struzan painted it. It is magnificent. Fievel lets you know what the movie will be about, but the rest of the poster lets you know what the texture will be. This poster is a work of art.
The success of the first poster stands in contrast to the failure of the second. It's here where I see the degradation of children's entertainment.
This poster is so god-awful twee that it makes me want to vomit. You've got tons of bright, smiling characters, a tag-line so stupid that it could only have been written by an executive, and some character renditions with posing so poor that they may have been drawn by an intern.
There is no symbolism, no message. It does communicate something from the poster, though, and that is "adults need not apply," and holy shit, is that an accurate statement. The movie was 100% kiddie-fare, which is why everyone remembers the first one and not the second one.
Let's go back a bit further still, to the release of Don Bluth's first film, The Secret of NIMH.
Just look at the difference. This was a time where what mattered was the wonder and magic of the story. It was about making kids sit back in awe and think about what they had seen. It wasn't just about delivering bright, screaming characters, thrown on screen to spout stupid one-liners to drooling children.
During this time, from the 1980's into the 1990's, we saw a transition in entertainment. For whatever reason -rising budgets, cable TV, home video- movie inventiveness and quality, especially in productions aimed at children, took a nose-dive. Children's entertainment became engineered. The Disney Renaissance birthed an explosion of quality that, I think, saw its zenith on television with Batman The Animated Series and on the big screen with The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Both of those productions were essentially born in the 1980's, and were the last of their breed.
I am very happy to be seeing a new increase in quality. Cartoon Network has produced some really fantastic shows, and both the new Thundercats and The Legend of Korra have breathed new life into the adventure cartoon. Brave looks primed to deliver a new family film like we had in the early and mid-eighties. Truly, I feel that we may very well be entering a new renaissance.
But that's material for another post. This post is about how two movies, five years apart, and exemplified by their posters, represented the fall of a golden age, and the rise of engineered ultra-mass-media.
One thing that keeps my mind at ease is that I don't rate things based on whether they were in my personal childhood or not. In fact, I feel that I can trace the downward spiral of children's entertainment to the early 1990's, which was very much still in my childhood, and I frequently find works from the 1980's and 70's that I didn't even know existed, but are leaps and bounds ahead of the crap being produced today.
A decent theory that to explain this decline, while not covering everything necessary to explain the phenomenon, is that cable TV fragmented the child market, triggering a drop in quality to both increase profit while also catering to the lowest common denominator. Companies saw profit vectors shrink or simply fail completely, and they responded by retracting investment and development.
Whatever the reason, there are few examples more stark to me than An American Tail. The movie was a case study in not talking down to children. And much to the joy of any movie fan, the poster was also a fantastic example of what can be done when an artist decides what should be painted and not an executive.
The entire poster is dreary and dark, with brown, rusty, desaturated colors. Roger Ebert, in a negative review, even described the movie as "dark and gloomy." The only two points of the poster that are uplifting are Feivel, standing out from the poster in both color and structure, and the glaring light of the Statue of Liberty, which was just completed in the timeline of the movie.
The poster was painted by Drew Struzan, who's painted nearly every great movie poster of the past thirty years. I also chose to include the poster that doesn't have the movie info on it. This is simply as how Struzan painted it. It is magnificent. Fievel lets you know what the movie will be about, but the rest of the poster lets you know what the texture will be. This poster is a work of art.
The success of the first poster stands in contrast to the failure of the second. It's here where I see the degradation of children's entertainment.
This poster is so god-awful twee that it makes me want to vomit. You've got tons of bright, smiling characters, a tag-line so stupid that it could only have been written by an executive, and some character renditions with posing so poor that they may have been drawn by an intern.
There is no symbolism, no message. It does communicate something from the poster, though, and that is "adults need not apply," and holy shit, is that an accurate statement. The movie was 100% kiddie-fare, which is why everyone remembers the first one and not the second one.
Let's go back a bit further still, to the release of Don Bluth's first film, The Secret of NIMH.
Just look at the difference. This was a time where what mattered was the wonder and magic of the story. It was about making kids sit back in awe and think about what they had seen. It wasn't just about delivering bright, screaming characters, thrown on screen to spout stupid one-liners to drooling children.
During this time, from the 1980's into the 1990's, we saw a transition in entertainment. For whatever reason -rising budgets, cable TV, home video- movie inventiveness and quality, especially in productions aimed at children, took a nose-dive. Children's entertainment became engineered. The Disney Renaissance birthed an explosion of quality that, I think, saw its zenith on television with Batman The Animated Series and on the big screen with The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Both of those productions were essentially born in the 1980's, and were the last of their breed.
I am very happy to be seeing a new increase in quality. Cartoon Network has produced some really fantastic shows, and both the new Thundercats and The Legend of Korra have breathed new life into the adventure cartoon. Brave looks primed to deliver a new family film like we had in the early and mid-eighties. Truly, I feel that we may very well be entering a new renaissance.
But that's material for another post. This post is about how two movies, five years apart, and exemplified by their posters, represented the fall of a golden age, and the rise of engineered ultra-mass-media.
Monday, May 21, 2012
WATCH THIS: Redux Riding Hood
It only took over a decade to finally make this available to the public, Disney is good at shit like that, but here it finally is. The Oscar-nominated short Redux Riding Hood.
And the trailer, just for the hell of it.
And the trailer, just for the hell of it.
Thursday, May 17, 2012
4k Home Theater Cinema Test
 |
| The Sony 4k VPL-VW1000ES projector in all its glory |
The tests reveal what many people, myself included, have thought for some time: even with 1080p, huge resolutions are only necessary for those with huge displays. I have a 42" TV in my living room. I absolutely cannot tell the difference between 1080p and 720p unless I am sitting very close.
The only way that this resolution will EVER make sense is with a huge projector screen. I have never been one to say "Ennh! Crazy Kids! Black & white TV's are good enough!" I am not that guy. But when a technological advance is indistinguishable from the previous generation in standard use, there is no point aside from numbers.
For the home-theater aficionados among us, though, this is kick-ass. As Engadget showed, the 4k resolution is quite noticeable on a large screen, and the Sony doesn't suffer the significant drop in brightness that many home projectors did back in the transition to HD from SD in the late 1990's. If you have the money, and more important I think, the space, this is one delicious luxury. For the first time in history, a well-funded home theater can be a comparable experience to a real theater.
Monday, May 7, 2012
WATCH THIS: 38-39°C
38-39°C is a truly remarkably film. I had no idea that stuff of this experimental level was coming out of CalArts. The story is pretty abstract, to its detriment, and unless told, you would be unable to figure out that it is an artistic take on a father/son relationship. But I don't care about that. I care about the eye-popping richness of the animation. This is epic work.
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