• It’s one of those movies where if I hadn’t seen it, I’d have wondered if it was any good. Now I know.
• I was constantly comparing it to the comic in my head, and therefore didn’t get as far into the movie as perhaps I could have. I had the same problem the first time I saw Lord of the Rings. However, unlike Lord of the Rings, I don’t think I will be seeing this movie again.
• The dramatic engine sputtered out somewhere around two thirds of the movie, and it became empty spectacle. I no longer cared about character or plot.
• The opening credits explaining the history of the superheroes was cool. The over-use of topical music was not. At times, I felt like I was watching Forrest Gump.
• I had trouble buying the central plot element in the book, but Moore had more than enough time to sell it to me. In the movie? Not a chance. Even though I can see the clues, I just don’t buy it.
• The movie both pleases and screws the fans of the comic. It replicated iconic scenes and iconic lines, but they just don’t work. Rorschach’s “You quit”, early on, just fell flat for me. Same with a lot of Comedian lines.
• The violence was needlessly increased and glorified, but hey, at least we see some cock in a Hollywood movie. But I guess U.S. audiences couldn’t deal with an uncircumcised Doctor Manhattan.
• The entire element of questioning superheroes is gone. To add insult to injury, the glorification of violence makes a mockery of that whole aspect of the comic. And that’s what made Watchmen so revolutionary compared to other superhero comics at the time: it had human, fallible superheroes, in a real world that didn’t really need them.
• In general, it had the problems of a very long story condensed to three hours. (Bonus meta-joke: Doc Manhattan screaming “Leave me alone!”, immediately followed by a 15 minute intermission.)

Having said all that: It’s about as good as I expected it could be.

Now I can read what Harvey thinks of it.

[You] begin to fast-forward the video at 4x speed, then 8x, then 16x, then 32x – and you realize, with a collective gasp, that that droning sound in the background is not a drone at all but a piece of music played slow to the point of unrecognizability. It’s Beethoven, say, or Jimi Hendrix.

Someone is playing incredibly slow music, like a kind of acoustic glacier, inside the building. It’s avant-garde Muzak.

You go a little crazy upon discovering this, however, and begin to make field recordings all over Manhattan, recording drones. You stand in alleys, beneath trees in Central Park, and inside abandoned warehouses, capturing ambient background sounds on tape. You visit the airport, deliberately seek out traffic jams, and illegally access basements on the Upper East Side.

I love stuff like this. As the blog says: Architectural conjecture, urban speculation, landscape futures.

(Via John August.)

[Long-time Kubrick assistant Tony Frewin] takes me into a large room painted blue and filled with books. “This used to be the cinema,” he says.

“Is it the library now?” I ask.

“Look closer at the books,” says Tony.

I do. “Bloody hell,” I say. “Every book in this room is about Napoleon!”

“Look in the drawers,” says Tony.

I do.

“It’s all about Napoleon, too!” I say. “Everything in here is about Napoleon!”

I feel a little like Shelley Duvall in The Shining, chancing upon her husband’s novel and finding it is comprised entirely of the line “All Work And No Play Makes Jack A Dull Boy” typed over and over again. John Baxter wrote, in his unauthorised biography of Kubrick, “Most people attributed the purchase of Childwick to Kubrick’s passion for privacy, and drew parallels with Jack Torrance in The Shining.”

This room full of Napoleon stuff seems to bear out that comparison. “Somewhere else in this house,” Tony says, “is a cabinet full of 25,000 library cards, three inches by five inches. If you want to know what Napoleon, or Josephine, or anyone within Napoleon’s inner circle was doing on the afternoon of July 23 17-whatever, you go to that card and it’ll tell you.”

(Via Kottke.)

(Please ignore the SHOUTING INTERVIEWER.)

He even has some things to say about games. Nothing mind-blowing, but interesting nevertheless:

ARE YOU INTERESTED IN DESIGNING VIDEO GAMES YOURSELF?
Yes. Last year I did in L.A. They’re doing that now. I went there and
proposed, I say, Listen, I want to make this type of story, are you
interested? They said, Yes, sure. I made two games of, and I am making a
game of the Meta-Baron, then they are doing. I think, “There is a new
artform.” Very interesting.

I don’t think that game ever came out. Pity.

Once Stanton began to visualise his low-tech robot – Pixar’s logo of the bouncing anglepoise lamp, Luxo, was another major inspiration – he decided Wall.E wouldn’t work with conventional dialogue. He wanted his film to hark back to the sense of wonder, the epic vistas and post-apocalyptic melancholy of classic sci-fi. The result is that Wall.E, in a first for Pixar and indeed most modern-day blockbusters, has very little dialogue. The love story between the robots is mostly told visually and with their ‘language’ of whirrs and electronic beeps.

I love the fact that Pixar has enough self-confidence and courage to do something fairly unconventional like this. The pressure of their previous successes, not to mention from their parent Disney, has to be enormous.

Wall.E is first and foremost a love letter to science fiction, though. Its epic, post-apocalypic vision of an uninhabited Earth set hundreds of years into the future, thick with dust and towering stacks of rubbish, looks wonderfully real. “We wanted it to have the feeling that it had actually been filmed,” says Morris. Using subtle details such as barrel distortion and lens flare, gave Wall.E the feel of the 70mm sci-fi films of the Seventies. For the first time Pixar also brought Academy Award-winning cinematographer Roger Deakins and special-effects don Dennis Muren onboard. “We wanted to get the nuance of a live action film, and actually put mistakes in with zooms and framing to give it a more immediate feel.”

Nice, lens flares on steroids.

The article also describes how the ‘voices’ of the robots were made. It’s a good read.

(Via Kottke.)

I am a big GITS fan. I like the comic, the sequel of the comic, the movie, the sequel of the movie, the two TV series, even though they are all quite different. GITS was the first time that I really, really liked a movie adapted from a story that I really, really liked. The comic is cheerfully upbeat about the cruelty and inhumanity of the future, whereas the movie is much more serious and melancholic. Both Ghost In The Shell 2: Man-Machine Interface (the sequel to the comic) and Ghost In The Shell 2: Innocence (the sequel to the movie) are less comprehensible than their predecessors, but both definitely have their charms. Man-Machine Interface is almost dreamlike in its opaqueness (and this is saying something when the original comic has footnotes from the author saying ‘I have no idea what is meant here’). I remember reading Man-Machine Interface for the first time, then having certain memories of the story and its events… then rereading it about a year later and finding a completely different story. It is highly impressive in that it is this close to becoming ridiculous – characters are constantly floating in cyberspace and saying things like ‘Activate defense barriers AX-4E on ports 5, 6 and 19 and seed the attack lines with viruses’ – for hundreds of pages. At least, that is how I currently remember the comic… who knows which story I will find next time I read it? In any case, given that I have enjoyed GITS in so many incarnations, I am not as anxious about a Hollywood adaptation as I might be if some other favorite story were involved. Which reminds me that Ghibli Studio’s Earthsee adaptation apparently went straight to DVD in Austria and Germany… I should have a look at that.

In related news, there was a fascinating interview, again in Variety, with James Cameron about HD and 3-D moviemaking.

Other than that, for digital 3-D, would you rather see energy going into moving from 2K to 4K, or into moving from 24 fps to 48 or 72 fps, and why?

4K is a concept born in fear. When the studios were looking at converting to digital cinemas, they were afraid of change, and searched for reasons not to do it. One reason they hit upon was that if people were buying HD monitors for the home, with 1080×1920 resolution, and that was virtually the same as the 2K standard being proposed, then why would people go to the cinema? Which ignores the fact that the social situation is entirely different, and that the cinema screen is 100 times larger in area. So they somehow hit on 4K, which people should remember is not twice the amount of picture data, it is four times the data. Meaning servers need to be four times the capacity, as does the delivery pipe to the theater, etc.

But 4K doesn’t solve the curse of 24 frames per second. In fact it tends to stand in the way of the solutions to that more fundamental problem. The NBA execs made a bold decision to do the All Star Game 3-D simulcast at 60 frames per second, because they didn’t like the judder. The effect of the high-frame-rate 3-D was visually astonishing, a huge crowdpleaser.

And much more interesting stuf.

(James Cameron interview via Boing Boing.)

Here is Shuna Fish Lydon, in her own inimitable style, telling a story about a day at work, ten years ago, cooking at the French Laundry.

Finally Eric says something that makes us all look up from our minute, detail oriented tasks. “You heard me, get off the line, all of you, I’m going to show you how to cook.”

[...]

“Stand over here, I’m going to show you how to put out this table, I’m going to show you how to cook, how to work like a team, how to put out just one ticket.”

And then he did. He cooked every single course, by himself, with not another soul on the line touching sauce pots or spatulas or garnishes. He jumped this way and that, gracefully, using every part of his body, talking, admonishing, telling, teaching, showing, explaining as he went.

It was the most amazing thing I ever saw in a kitchen.

There’s more. It’s a good read (lol @ “I didn’t know what I was doing, I was drunk when I opened that restaurant”). A meal at the French Laundry looks like this – she’s not talking about frying some schnitzels here.

Does this have anything to do with games? Of course it does. I recognize many things. You may see other ones. If you don’t see any correspondence, you’re not thinking hard enough about what you are doing.

I previously linked to Shuna’s blog here and mentioned Thomas Keller here.

(Via Surfer Girl.)