Archive for January, 2009

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Posted 1600 days ago ·  Tagged: , , , · 1 Comment

benjamin_button_poster

I was really looking forward to this movie, even though it received somewhat disappointing reviews, it still got an Academy Award nomination for Best Movie. It’s also the first Fincher/Pitt movie since Fight Club, one of my all-time favorite films. However, I quickly became bored with Benjamin Button and his weird, very non-interesting life experiences. It all reminded me of something I already had seen, just a lot better, and it didn’t take long before I realized I was thinking of Forrest Gump. All this movie was doing to me was making me want to watch Tom Hanks goofing around in the Vietnam jungle. After the movie I mentioned this to my friend, and he said the two movies have the same writer, and then it all made sense. Eric Roth simply looked at the script who earned him an Academy Award, and copied some of the big plot points.

Here be spoilers. Let’s sum of them up, shall we: First of all, both movies are about the lives, and curious experiences, of two weird men. They both work under captains, who teach them something about life, and in their childhood they both meet the love of their life, whom they can’t have until much later. In both cases, these relationship do not have happy endings. Also, the feather in Gump has been replaced with a humming bird in Benjamin Button. I’m not necessarily trying to critize Benjamin Button for its resemblence to Forrest Gump, my point is just that it was done so much better in Gump. Benjamin has lots of other experiences too, they’re just not that interesting, they don’t seem to have that not much effect on Benjamin either. Overall he’s actually a rather boring guy, and the relationship between him and Daisy (Blanchett) never seem that interesting, because their background story is kind of bland and annoying. My friend mentioned something interesting as well, this movie would’ve been marginally different if Benjamin Button was just an ordinary guy. His affliction doesn’t really affect the outcome of most his experiences, until the end. End of spoilers.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button got 13 Academy Award nominations, some of these for Best Directing, Best Script, Best Lead Role Performance and Best Picture. It deserves none of these, I like Brad Pitt but his character in this movie never really shows much emotion, so I guess he was nominated for speaking with an old man’s voice and stumbling around with make up on. The sad thing is that both Se7en and Fight Club are superior movies, and they got one nomination each, for Editing and Sound Effects. One the other hand, Benjamin Button definitely deserves to win for Visual Effects, simply astonishing.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – 5/10.

Tropic Thunder: Special Features

Posted 1601 days ago ·  Tagged: , , , · 0 Comments

Tropic Thunder DVD

I got to watch the Special Features on the Tropic Thunder: Director’s Cut DVD tonight, and it is filled with amazing stuff. There’s cast commentaries from the three main actors, three great featurettes, one focusing on the cast members, deleted and extended scenes, an alternate ending, long videos of the actors improvising, a make-up test with Tom Cruise, the Rain of Madness mockumentary, the fake viral video, which has been available on YouTube forever, and a lot more.

I haven’t seen all of the features yet, but I’ll go over the ones I have. I started by watching Rain of Madness, a 30-minute parody of Heart of Darkness, the documentary about Vietnam War classic Apocalypse Now, mixed with a narrator who has an uncanny resemblence to the famous German documentary director Werner Herzog. It wasn’t as funny as I had expected, but it was nice to see unseen footage with the characters, especially Kirk Lazarus, who has a serious mental breakdown.

Next I watched Full Mags, various videos of the actors improvising while shooting. The scene with Jack Black’s character tied to the tree, was amazing. Black more or less improvises everything, once in a while you can hear Stiller give him pointers off-screen, but it is truly amazing to see Black spew comedic gold nuggets for almost 10 minutes. Next scene was even better, it’s Downey Jr’s and Stiller’s identity talk when the squad tries to save Speedman. Hearing Downey Jr. switch from Lazarus’ dialect to his own is amazing, and he truly deserves his Academy Award nomination.

The make-up test with Tom Cruise shows him coming up with the dance moves, which made Stiller implement them into the movie. The deleted and extended scenes were pretty boring, and the difference to the alternate ending was Speedman’s assistent being captured by the terrorists in the end, and then watching Speedman win his award, on a small TV.

I’m still looking forward to the other featurettes, damn, I wish they put this much work into all DVDs.

Smallville introduces Doomsday, hints at flying

Posted 1613 days ago ·  Tagged: , · 2 Comments

I watched Smallville one and off in the earlier seasons, now the 8th season is airing and Clark Kent is still not flying. Apparently this is because of a rule made by the creators of the show, Miles Millar and Al Gough, stating “no flights, no tights”. However, these guys have been sacked (well, they’re not controlling the storyline anymore), and this seems to have injected some fresh air into the series. I stumbled upon a review of episode 10, in the 8th season, and fricking Doomsday is in it. This guy is the only villain who’s been able to actually kill Superman, and apparently this was a pretty huge event in the comics back in nineties.

The new Executive Producers also mentioned some other changes to the show, in a recent interview:

  • They will not attempt to bring in a character to replace Lex Luthor (Michael Rosenbaum) as the prime antagonist.
  • All of the characters will be moving on to the next phase of their lives.
  • The show will be moving on to the next phase in the Superman mythology.
  • They want to bring Clark closer to the traditional Superman character that we all know.
  • There will be an episode that explores the relationship between Clark and Chloe (Allison Mack), and the underlying sexual tension that’s been brewing there for so long.
  • On the other hand the season will move Clark and Lois (Erica Durance) towards the relationship that is well established in the comics and films.
  • They will highlight the need for Clark to maintain a dual identity and move heavily in that direction.

And concerning flying:

“We have a lot of conversations [about flying and the costume], the only thing that we are saying is that we can absolutely confirm that there is no tights, so that’s pretty much all we can say on that.”

“Saving people in Smallville was one thing — when he had to run to the factory to save Chloe the roads weren’t very crowded, the streets weren’t very crowded. Being alive in Metropolis as Superman is a very different experience and you will find very quickly in this season he discovers it’s not so easy when you’re running through crowded streets or your having to run into a crowded crisis situation.”

This all peaked my interest, so I downloaded the two newest episodes (10 and 11), and the introduction of Doomsday is pretty cool. The 12th episode is airing this thursday.

Old School Editing

Posted 1622 days ago ·  Tagged: , , , , , · 2 Comments

Michael Kahn, editor on most Spielberg movies still edits movies using a Flatbed editor:

And a Moviola:

He edited Munich with this equipment, and won an Oscar for it. Pretty bad ass.