You know you can’t resist. Original article here; Spoiler summary below the fold.
Category: Movies and Television
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Movie screenshot game: round VI
I won the previous round, hosted by Mark, so it’s my turn for round 6. Without further ado, guess this movie:
Guess the movie in comments. Winner gets to host the next round 🙂 For those of you wondering what the heck this is and how to play, here are the rules.
UPDATE: Roosta wins! (see comments) Visit his blog for the next round.
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not much more than meets the eye
the basic premise of the Transformers movie in a nutshell: giant f*&king robots from another planet showed up to kick the sh&t out of each other. This is exactly as unbearably awesome as it sounds, even to those who have no history with the classic cartoon. This movie is going to be Exhibit A for why I invented the term, geek service. After all,
It was awesome. It was like a big honking slice of Awesome-toast buttered on both sides with awesome. It was a double serving of Hell F&^king Yeah with a side order of OMFG. If you are pumped for this, if you are ready to embrace this, if you want nothing more than to see mind blowing action unlike anything you have ever witnessed, then you will sh&t your shorts and giggle like a f&^king school girl.
The audience went absolutely apesh&t for this.
That said, there’s is a solid critique of the film that goes beyond “Michael Bay sucks” and gets more to the lost opportunity for genuine epic storytelling. Harry says it very well here:
Now TRANSFORMERS isn’t IRON GIANT. It could have been better than IRON GIANT. It could have been a Boy discovering just how vast the universe was… Bonding with BumbleBee, who introduces him to the hidden world around us… But then, just how terrifying that discovery is when you realize it isn’t just about the benevolent robots, but there’s another point of view. A breed of robots that’s out to destroy not just the boy’s robot… not just Optimus and the others… but all living creatures.
The film needed to escalate, not just with battles, but the ideas behind the battles.
There is indeed a kind of wonder to boy-meets-universe films. My all-time favorite of these is not Iron Giant but rather Explorers, a small-budget flick that starred some pretty big-name future stars, including River Phoenix. That Transformers went more for the nail-balls-to-the-wall than sense-of-awe route is of ocurse a direct result of having Bay as director; still, I have to confess that on a purely primal level, I’d rather see giant robots tear each other apart than talk sympathetically to children. I’ll go rent Explorers later as penance.
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incidentally
David Wong said, of the Matrix trilogy:
But the sequel… I’m pretty sure if you give me Reloaded and Revolutions and a knife, I can cut you a lone, 100-minute Matrix sequel that would flatten your balls.
I’m still waiting.
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Snow Crash: the movie
no, it’s not news. It’s not happening. I wish, you wish, but no way. The closest we are gonna come to it is my post title above. Even if they make it, it will suck. I swear, it’s better that they don’t make it. I mean, if they try, it will end up like Aliens 3 or Hitchhiker’s Guide.
Still,
“Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherf%^&er in the world. If I moved to a martial arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.”
oh, man. A Snow Crash movie would be the baddest motherf$%^ing movie in the history of film.
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Shannara?
Warner Brothers is apparently interested in bringing Terry Brooks’ Sword of Shannara series to film. I remember being less than impressed by this series, it just blends into my memory with the various other Epic Fantasy series like the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant or the Wheel of Time. This description of Shannars doesn’t sound familiar to me, though:
The Shannara series, which blends technology and magic, is set in a world decimated by apocalyptic battles, with mankind splitting into races of trolls, gnomes, dwarves and men, with elves coming out of hiding. Politics and war are waged using magic with a backdrop of the skeletal remains of skyscrapers and subways.
Huh. Was Shannara really a Shadowrun-esque setting? I thought I’d have remembered that. We’ll see if they can actually make this work, but I am skeptical. Then again, I actually enjoyed Eragon, and I hadn’t even read those books. So who knows…
UPDATE: Astro remembers Shannara a lot better than I do.
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I choose HD-DVD
A few days ago, HeadGeek at AICN declared he’d taken sides in the nextgen-DVD format war: he chose HD-DVD. I am inclined to follow his lead. At present I am in no position to purchase a HDTV (without which the choice of DVD format is moot), but I am confident enough in HD-DVD to make the decision well in advance.
There are a number of reasons why HD-DVD makes more sense. The fundamental reason, however, is simple: HD-DVD is backwards-compatible with standard DVD. Couple this with the fact that I will have to buy a new DVD player anyway once I upgrade to HDTV (which will be mandatory as of February 17th, 2009). My aging DVD player doesn’t support progressive scan, so watching DVD movies with my old player on a new HDTV would be masochistic. I anticipate that my TV viewing will be driven more by Blockbuster and BitTorrent than by broadcast, so the choice of DVD player becomes even more important. With a single box that supports upscaling like the Toshiba HD-A2 ($250 at Amazon), I get the full benefits of the HD resolution with my existing DVD library as well as any HD content I might be inclined to rent.
The other primary factor is cost. HD-DVD is simply cheaper, and maintains a healthy price advantage over Blu-Ray even despite recent moves by Sony to reduce the price. The irony here is that while BR players are overpriced now, they are likely to become very cheap in the future, because you can always get one at a subsidized cost by buying a Playstation 3. So there’s even more incentive to wait. The price of any gaming console is guaranteed to drop over time; witness that the PS2 now sells for $129. If at some point I do decide that I want a BR version of Lion King (Disney is exclusively BR), I’ll go and buy a PS3 and get maximum value; I anticipate we will see the PS3 at the $300 price point within a few years, especially as the Wii and XBox continue to clean Sony’s clock.
Much has been made of the fact that Blu-Ray enjoys wider studio support, but if there ever really is a movie truly exclusive to BR that I must have, I still can buy the standard DVD and upconvert on the A2, or I can bittorrent it down and watch on my HDTV (DRM on both formats is irreversibly compromised). But how likely is that anyway? Given that King Kong is out on HD-DVD, I’m not worried about Lord of the Rings following suit; and I’m enough of a purist about Star Wars that if Lucas gets his head out of his arse and gives me the Original, Unedited Trilogy (i.e., Han shoots first, etc) then that’s worth buying a PS3 for. Later. I can wait.
All the debate about which format is winning, based on sales, is essentially bogus anyway. The actual numbers of players sold is so insignificant thus far that any advantage enjoyed by one or the other is illusory and can’t be used to predict the longer-term trend. So I’m not worried about being locked into a “losing” format like BetaMax – again, at a bare minimum I will have backwards, upscaling compatibility with my existing DVDs. As far as I am concerned, the “format war” is just hype.
And anyway, Sony is evil. Some things you just can’t forgive.
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the Joker revealed
A very cool viral marketing campaign by Warner Brothers – in which the Joker hacks Harvey Dent’s campaign website – leads to the first hint of what Heath Ledger’s Joker will look like in the upcoming Dark Knight movie. This is going to be one dark movie. Image copied from AICN below the fold…
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so say we all?
Contra Edward James Olmos’ assertion a few days ago that Galactica would end after finding Earth in season 4, comes this from producer David Eick:
Contrary to comments by Edward James Olmos (Adm. Adama) at the Saturn Awards on May10, no end has been announced for the award-winning show. Battlestar Galactica is preparing to film its fourth season, one that will include 22 episodes, rather than the previously announced 13.
“For those of you who have been paying attention over the years, this is not the first time Eddie has made an announcement about the possibility of the show’s end,” chuckled Eick. “I promise you that when [executive producer] Ron [Moore] and I make a decision about Galactica’s future, we’ll let you know.”
The plot thickens. Note that Ron Moore has not weighed in himself, as yet. Also, I think that it’s significant that Eick didn’t bother to address the fact that they are finding Earth next season. I think we can safely assume that to be the case regardless of whether the powers that be decide that Galactica needs a season 5.
However, given SciFi’s track record on canceling shows, the expensive nature of production for Galactica, and the fact that Galactica almost had no season 3 or a half-season 4, I think Eick is just blowing smoke here.
UPDATE: From a SciFi Q&A with Ron Moore a while back:
I think our show has a definite beginning, middle and end. There’s a story to be told here that moves toward a definite conclusion and I think our biggest mistake would be to just try and continue to churn out episodes for as long as we could get them on the air. Certain stories need an ending, and this is one of them. I’ll miss it more than you can know, but you gotta be true to the tale you’re telling.
I think that pretty much settles it. Incidentally, the rest of that Q&A is worth reading, particularly for this nugget:
Q. Do you already know who the fifth cylon of the final five is? If so, have you already left us some clues?
A. Yes and yes.
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Galactica Season 4: Earth
Galactica will find Earth in season 4. So says Adama himself:iF MAGAZINE: What’s coming up for season four?
EDWARD JAMES OLMOS: It’s fantastic. I think they’re going to discover some very important issues about what the fan base really, really wants to see and what’s to understand about this show. We’re heading into the final season. This is the final season as we speak. All of us are very saddened by that, but we always knew there was going to be a conclusion and we would find Earth, so we will be finding Earth this season.
woah. awesome. I am not saddened by this; far better to go out with a strong finish than drag it out forever. I’ll buy the DVDs as penance for having torrented the series all along, and then move on to the next thing, probably Heroes or Firefly (or both).
UPDATE: Olmos repeats the news in a separate interview:
When asked about the next season of Battlestar, Olmos had this to say, “This will probably be the most extraordinary season of Battlestar, it’s the final season so, it’s definitely going to be the most vicious.”
IESB: Final?
Olmos: You heard it first.
IESB: Are you serious?
Olmos: Very much so.
vicious? I kind of like the sound of that.
