Films
First look: Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland
Last modified on 2009-07-06 04:48:27 GMT. 0 comments. Top.
If I was going to pick someone I thought might do a good job with a screen version of Lewis Caroll’s classic opium-induced tale, Alice in Wonderland, Tim Burton would definitely be on the shortlist.
I think I’d have preferred to see a Terry Gilliam version, if only because he would have made it darker and less Disney-fied, but Tim comes in a pretty close second. Despite his cunning shit-fetishist anal journey carefully disguised as a Roald Dahl classic, I think he might just be the man for this job. What brave metaphors is he going to thinly veil in this one?
Burton favourites, Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham-Carter play the Mad Hatter and the Red Queen, respectively. They are joined by Anne Hathaway as the White Queen, Stephen Fry as the Queen Cheshire Cat, Alan Rickman as the opium-smoking ring-blowing Caterpillar, and Crispin Glover as the Knave of Hearts. Michael Sheen (who?) plays the White Rabbit.
I’d post more, but I’m late, I’m late, For a very important date…
Here are some shots from the upcoming film (click for full size)…
Review: ‘21′ on Sony Blu-ray
Last modified on 2008-12-05 13:36:37 GMT. 0 comments. Top.
Ben Campbell is a reserved, intelligent math wizard who studies at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology).
He’s applied to be accepted into Harvard University on scholarship because he doesn’t have over a quarter million dollars to blow on the university’s tuition fees.
Ben quickly attracts the attention of his maths teacher, Mickey Rosa, who runs a secret card-counting gang of other bright students. Initially wary of the group, Ben is convinced by sexy love-interest Jill Tailor, to join them.
Before long, the gang are taking extravagant trips to Vegas to work the casinos using Mickey’s card counting method to rake-in the big money.
But how long will they be able to keep it up before they’re caught?
This film is a Hollywood-varnished version of a true story about several MIT students who went to Vegas to count cards and make stacks of cash. While card counting isn’t illegal, the casinos definitely frown on it.
Of course when casino bosses say ‘frown’, they actually mean ‘hit repeatedly until your face has split open like a ripe tomato and you have nothing but shrapnel for teeth!
Australian director, Robert Luketic of Legally Blonde and Win a date with Tad Hamilton notoriety has taken quite a swerve from bland romantic comedy — and it’s definitely for the better.
Using sharp angles, subtle, but effective lighting techniques and a seamless blend of computer graphics, he brings the viewer up close and personal with the action. In this way, he turns a player’s game into a spectator-sport… No mean feat when you’re essentially talking about cards being turned over on a table.
Kevin Spacey (Mickey Rosa), Jim Sturgess (Ben Campbell) and Kate Bosworth (Jill Tailor) carry the show. As for the others? Pretty forgettable support roles. The film is distinctly about the relationship between Mickey, Ben and Jill, and while the others have minor moments, they were essentially props to the main trio.
The only exception to this is Laurence Fishburne, playing jaded casino security boss, Cole Williams who is out to snare one last cheater before he’s replaced by new automated security systems. Fishburne’s menace is palpable, and he does a great job of portraying the older, sagging and disillusioned employee at the end of a long run.
Sony Blu-ray features:
The movie was filmed in high definition digital format, primarily with the new Panavision Genesis HD camera, and the quality of this disc is solid evidence that the future is in digital. With a vibrant colour range, deep blacks and rich warm flesh tones, the visual quality of 21 on Blu-ray is excellent.
The sound format for the title is Dolby TrueHD 5.1 Surround sound, and I was pleased to find I didn’t need to adjust any of the settings on my digitally calibrated surround system.
Vocals were clear, ambient noise and bass tones never interfered with the dialogue and the music was richly presented across all of the speakers without ever becoming overwhelming.
This title uses the new BD-Live technology to allow you to connect to the internet and get new content to watch provided you have a Blue-ray player connected with an ethernet cable.
Bonus Features:
- Filmmaker’s commentary with Director Robert Luketic, and Producers Dana Brunetti and Michael De Luca.
- Virtual Blackjack – This is a Blu-ray exclusive feature that allows you to play Blackjack on your television. Of special interest is the tutorial video and the Classroom Play area, which effectively teach you how to count cards (if you have a good head for numbers!)
- The Advantage Player – This is a short film, presented by the cast that teach the history and origins of blackjack, how advantage charts and ‘basic strategy’ work and how card-counting is made possible. It’s obvious that the featurette has been designed with the ‘extras’ section in mind, as it’s well-presented and high quality.
- Basic Strategy: A complete film journal – This is a really great high definition short film of around 20 minutes that goes behind the scenes and really shows what happens on set and behind the camera. One of the few ‘how we made it’ documentaries that I’ve really enjoyed.
- Money Plays: A tour of the good life – Short featurette with costume designer, Luca Mosca that shows off the wealth and clothing of a Vegas high-roller.
What do we think? Four out of five… Go buy it!
21 on Blu-ray has been released and is in S.A. stores now.
Review titles made available to StalkingVenus.com by SterKinekor Home Entertainment and Sony Pictures. Go to www.bluraydisc.co.za to view the latest Blu-ray news, reviews and competitions featured on SterKinekor Home Entertainment’s newsletter. Sony Pictures can be found on the Web at www.sonypictures.com.
Film (and tech) review: Fly me to the moon
Last modified on 2008-09-15 12:16:36 GMT. 0 comments. Top.
Fly me to the moon is the story is of the Apollo moon landing. The basic premise is that a bunch of flies out looking for adventure stow away aboard the Apollo 11 rocket and travel up to the moon with the astronauts, occasionally helping out or getting into trouble.
I badly want to cut this movie some slack, and I’ll do so by recommending that you go and see it despite what I’m about to say. The 3D animation and effects are simply awesome, and well worth the price of a ticket.
The thing is though, that a review should be about the film itself – the characters, plot and pacing. A good story is backed up by good use of set design, costuming, make-up and so on, but these must always come second to the story.
Sadly, Fly me to the moon was a film in which the plot was dreadful, the dialogue stilted, the character animation about as plastic as you can get and the comedy elements so mistimed and poorly delivered that in some places I actually winced.
There was one scene in particular that had me staring at the screen, aghast. In it, there was an electrical outlet no larger than my hand, which had a sign on it saying “Authorized Personal Only”. Yes, you read that correctly – “personal”, not “personnel”. You’d think that with having to animate and review thousands of frames in the same little section of footage and viewing it over and over hundreds of times, someone that speaks English would have noticed…
But… It is in 3D, and this goes a long way towards making up for the poor film.
Now I’ve seen 3D movies before, back in the eighties, with those flimsy red and green paper and cellophane ‘glasses’ that made your eyes go wonky and gave you a pounding headache. I saw Space Hunter, Jaws 3D and Nightmare on Elm Street 3D.
I’m a fan of the medium, and wished like hell when I was younger that they could somehow perfect the process and make 3D films that didn’t need a post-film recovery period in a dark room with an ice-pack on your head. Enter RealD, the company behind Fly me to the moon, and pioneers of a new 3D process that kicks all kinds of ass.
Briefly, the process uses two cameras (real or animated), a special dual-layer projection screen, and a pair of polarised glasses, that allows each eye to only see the images meant for it (Cool trick: If you have 2 pairs of RealD glasses, put them face to face and then rotate them so you are looking through one lens of both glasses, but at right-angles to each other. As soon as you reach a certain point, the glasses go black and you can no longer see though them. That’s polarisation at work).
The practical upshot is that you get a totally sharp and vivid three dimensional image that makes it look like the screen is actually a box with the action all happening inside it. There are a few niggly places (usually when they’re trying to bring something out of the screen towards you, where I found it hard to focus), but most of it was simply amazing. Go and watch it for the orange juice or confetti scenes alone!
I think that RealD has made incredible headway into bringing 3D into the mainstream, and as far as I’m concerned, this could well be the medium that starts putting bums back in cinema seats. But they had better get the kinks ironed-out soon. Otherwise it will be written-off as a gimmick, like the red/blue 3D films of yesteryear.
That said, perhaps I’m a bit jaded and cynical. The people who came to watch the film with me all said they enjoyed it loads, and would definitely recommend it. The kids in the audience were laughing at the “funny” bits, so from their perspective, I guess it was a hit.
How much do we loves eet? Theeeees much…
Fly me to the moon opens at Nu Metro cinemas on 19 September 2008. Rated PG
Remembering WarGames
Last modified on 2008-07-23 10:07:59 GMT. 0 comments. Top.
There’s a nice nostalgic trip down memory lane over at Wired, for any nerds, geeks and computer nutters out there.
WarGames was the movie that inspired generations of hackers, and more or less brought the concept of hacking into mainstream awareness.
In the movie, David Lightman (played by a very young Matthew Broderick) hacks into a military computer by mistake, thinking he’s just getting access to a game. Instead, he ends up in control of the war center’s thermonuclear war program.
Lightman’s girlfriend, played by Ally Sheedy, is there to hang on his arm and make him look cool. If you watched the movie now, you probably wouldn’t get it, but Sheedy was a major attraction to any young nerd in 1983, when the film was released.
The Wired article talks about the film, the trends that came from it, and does interviews with many of the people involved in the making of it, including several people that formed the basis for some of the characters.
My favourite part is when the interviewer asks Ally Sheedy if she’s been contacted by all sorts of geeks and nerds since the making of the film. Sheedy replies: ” No, I don’t hear so much from hackers. No. No, no, no. I don’t. Thankfully. No.”
To which Wired replies, “Just one ‘no’ would have been fine”.
Source: Wired
Review: Narnia – Prince Caspian
Last modified on 2008-06-19 11:11:49 GMT. 1 comment. Top.
When I was a small child, there was a relatively small handful of author’s names that I knew: Roald Dahl, Alfred Hitchcock, Enid Blyton, A.A. Milne, and of course, C.S. Lewis.
I didn’t read all of the Narnia books, because frankly even at age seven, I found them to be a bit preachy. I was reading Dahl short stories like ‘Bitch’ and ‘The Great Switcheroo’ probably long before I was supposed to, so the bland parables of Lewis left me a bit cold.
Still, I was quite excited when the first Chronicles of Narnia film came out, and I wasn’t too disappointed by it. As far as storyline goes, I wasn’t expecting Lord of the Rings or even Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I was expecting an accurate translation of the book to film: i.e. bland and parabolist, albeit with stunning photography, sets and effects. Q.E.D.
Last week I went to watch Chronicles 2 – Prince Caspian. With a somewhat different result.
The following review may contain spoilers. Consider yourself warned…
I’ve made myself wait a while before writing this review, because I thought it would be best to chill out a bit before letting GenPop have my view… However, a full week later, I still feel the same way about this film and so, with traditional Stalking Venus honesty, I’m going to kick its awful dead carcass around the small screen for a while. Please bear with me.
I went into the movie without much expectation other than that it would be grand and visually pleasing. I was pleasantly surprised to be blown away by the opener. The kids are all in a train station which crumbles away and becomes Narnia. The effects are really excellent and the sense of excitement brought by the scene had me grinning and thinking “way cool!”.
The rest of the movie however, was like a slowly executed but carefully planned power slide into mundanity, starting with this guy —>
Ben Barnes is a relatively unknown British actor with a bit-part in Neil Gaiman’s epic fairytale Stardust. Sadly, in this film he has a starring role as the eponymic character, Caspian. (Out of interest, ‘Caspian’ is Caspian in the same way that ‘McGuyver’ is McGuyver – no first/last name).
I spent the better part of the film wanting to smash this guy in the face. His whiny, sulky good looks may be appealing to a pre-pubescent girl, but it’ll irritate the crap out of everyone else. The producers obviously told the casting agent to “find an Orlando Bloom Legolas type of character”. A good idea in principle, but only if you have the dialogue and direction to match. Barnes is to Bloom, as Pesci is to De Niro.
The Pevensie kids (Ancient Kings and Queens of Narnia) were pretty much as I remembered them from the first film. The acting was carried by the two girls – Georgie Henley and Anna Popplewell – and could have bloomed into something worthwhile with better direction from Andrew Adamson. The character of Edmund, played by Skandar Keynes wasn’t bad at all, and I think if he’s clever, we may end up seeing some good indie-style movies from him. I can easily see him in a role like Donnie Darko.
But what really made this movie fall flat, was that it has no humanity. It’s as if the script was put together by a team of technical experts. The story becomes a blunt way to link grand scenes, rather than integral to the movie experience. The characters are dragged from set piece to set piece with the most incredible and vast backdrops and scenery, but somehow I just couldn’t bring myself to care about them at all.
The final nail in the coffin is the blunt, totally unsubtle religious bludgeoning the audience has to put up with in the latter half of the film. In both the books and the first Chronicles film, the religious references were visible but subtle, which is part of what made Lewis’ works so popular with both adults and children.
However, when that subtlety is reduced to a watery avatar of the Turin Shroud leaping up out of the river and smashing the bad guys like a kid having a tantrum and finishing off by having God eat the main bad guy, it was all I could do to stay seated instead of walking out in disgust.
The one redeeming feature, as small (ahem) as it may be, is the mouse Reepicheep, played by British comedian Eddie Izzard. Director Andrew Adamson is so obviously most comfortable with animated characters and Reepicheep further goes to show that perhaps the director should stick with directing the pixel magicians. Having directed Shrek 2, he has literally lifted Antonio Banderas’ Puss character, stuck it in a mouse body and given this cow’s ear of a movie it’s tiny vestige of humanity.
Verdict: It’s utter crap.
Go see the movie for the mouse or the castle, but otherwise give it a skip.
