There’s a small moment in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation that’s stuck with me more than the rest of the movie (a movie which is little else besides small memorable moments). It’s the morning when Bill Murray’s character Bob is supposed to leave Tokyo, but he’s all tore up because he’s fallen for the young, idle Charlotte, who’ll stay in Tokyo after he’s gone. Whomever that group of Japanese suits is that’s been hauling from him from job to job wants a picture with him (because he’s a movie star I guess) so they all line up. But when they go to take the photo, Murray’s smile fades and his gaze wanders to watch Charlotte walk to the elevator. The look on his face is packed with enough longing and conflict and anguish to fill a sushi boat—yet his expression is pretty bare. It’s kind of a frown, but not exactly. He looks more tired than anything. It calls to mind the zombie mimicking instructions from Shaun of the Dead: “Vacant, with a hint of sadness. Like a drunk who’s lost a bet.” It’s also sad as hell. It’s not the realization that they’ll never see each other again that gets to me, it’s that damned stare.
Continue reading A Blank Stare Is Worth A Thousand Words
Author: Alex Hiatt
Not All Anime Is For Shitty Kids
Only Yesterday, a grown ass man’s anime.
I kinda hate Dragon Ball Z. And Sailor Moon. And Pokémon. Not because any of them are particularly bad or anything—they’re Saturday morning cartoons, so who cares. But their ubiquity in pop cultural memory has forever colored our impression of anime at large. The great big sparkling eyes and the spiky hair the hyperviolence and the hypersexualized portrayal of girls and the over the top melodrama and the overbearing cuteness are all things seen as inseparable from the medium itself.
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Life of Pi: An Allegory, or rather, a ‘Tell-egory’
(Still taken from the wonderful site BeforeVFX.Tumblr.com)
Life of Pi (2012)
Directed by Ang Lee
Screenplay by David Magee
127 min.
Disclaimer: No, I haven’t read the book, and I understand full well that there are probably differences between the book and the movie, and that I would possibly ‘understand’ more about the story the movie tries to tell if I’d read the book.
Warning: Spoilers ahead.
I could not talk about the Oscar winner for Visual Effects without first bitching about its visual effects, but I’ll try to keep it short, as my thoughts on VFX have already been made clear enough. Basically, the CG in Life of Pi is certainly impressive, no doubt. More than once, I went back and paused on frames to gawk at the insane level of detail they crammed into the animals, which are animated with eye-popping fluidity. They may be too fluid, however, because I found myself slipping in the uncanny valley here and there—the most jarring moments being when footage of an actual tiger is juxtaposed with a CG tiger in quick succession. By and large though, the omnipresence of CG animals isn’t too bothersome. It’s integrated into the physical set well enough that it usually feels like it’s really there.
Continue reading Life of Pi: An Allegory, or rather, a ‘Tell-egory’
I Do Declare ‘Compliance’ To Be The Worst Movie of 2012
Compliance (2012)
Written and Directed by Craig Zobel
90 min.
Warning: Spoilers ahead.
You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, I know, but when I see a title like Compliance, a red flag goes up in my head. It’s one thing to make a title short (Jaws is brilliant) but it’s another to give away the entire movie’s theme right off the bat. (Gee, I wonder what Shame is about. Perhaps it’s about doubt? No, that’s probably Doubt. What do you think the characters achieve in the movie Atonement? And so on.) When a writer/director/producer/studio chooses a title like Compliance, they’re announcing to the world that their movie is About Something That Should Be Taken Seriously, unlike those plebeian popcorn flicks with actually-great titles such as Drag Me To Hell or The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. As a result, I tend to avoid such seemingly one-note movies. But, I am also ever critical of my arbitrary biases, so I recently decided to test my hypothesis by Netflix-ing this one.
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When Effects Lose Their Effect
Unless I’m in the mood for a truly down-to-earth story, I watch movies in order to be transported to places I’ll never go and live moments I never could in real life. In a word, I want escapism. And I get annoyed when I try to escape into an ostensibly escapist movie, only to be jolted out of it because the creators fucked up when it came to immersion. Although aspects such as the story and the characters are undeniably the most important, immersion is also very crucial. Many elements combine to form a truly immersive experience: score, sound design, acting, lighting, camerawork, and, of course, effects.
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