There are no words to describe how awful the BURLESQUE trailer is
Aug 05
Christina Aguilera can yell with the best of them. She can even yell in time to music, and in the right key. This is wonderful news for people who enjoy the sound of yelling. Christina Aguilera can also contort her body with surprising finesse, also in time to music. This, ladies and gentlemen, qualifies her as a singer and a dancer.
What Christina Aguilera cannot do, as is made painfully obvious in the trailer below, is pretend to be somebody else with any semblence of sincerity or believability. Everything she said in this, the first trailer for Burlesque, made me cringe. Ditto Cher’s lines — it made me embarrassed to watch. Even Stanley Tucci can’t walk away from this one looking like anything better than a hack, which is a shame, because I like Stanley Tucci.
The worst bits for me were when I realised this is a beat-for-beat retread of every other “I wanna dance in a bar” movie this side of Coyote Ugly, and that “Alice In Wonderland” joke at the end. There should be a rule against people using more than one of the words “Wonderland,” “Alice,” “rabbit-hole,” or “down-the” in the same movie.
I don’t know or care when Burlesque comes out, but if “Thanksgiving” means something to you, then go with that.
Autumn review round-up: some duds, some gems, and a couple of shrugs
Jun 01
It’s winter again. I can tell because I have a cold, my cats look more woolly than your average sheep, and it’s starting to rain every time I go to put the washing out. That can mean only one thing: the dreary cinematic graveyard season of autumn is finally passing. And what a mixed season it was!
Autumn heralded some of the most (and some of the least) anticipated flicks of the year. We got Iron Man 2, Robin Hood, Prince Of Persia, and Kick-Ass, we got some reboots in the form of A Nightmare On Elm Street and Alice In Wonderland, and we got a slew of new and original flicks, like The Blind Side, She’s Out Of My League, Beneath Hill 60. We also got the usual mix of good and bad flicks, with a few great ones here and there.
Here’s a rundown of the films we reviewed this season, organised from lowest score to highest:
A Nightmare On Elm Street – 02 / 100
Green Zone – 08 / 100
The Prince Of Persia: Sands Of Time – 36 / 100
Alice In Wonderland – 39 / 100
Cop Out – 48 / 100
Hot Tub Time Machine - 53 / 100
Clash Of The Titans – 68 / 100
The Blind Side – 71 / 100
Iron Man 2 – 71 – 100
The Book Of Eli – 71 / 100
Kick-Ass – 73 / 100
She’s Out Of My League – 73 / 100
Beneath Hill 60 – 76 / 100
Crazy Heart – 89 / 100
Robin Hood - 96 / 100
Today marks the six-month anniversary of the day Reel Thinker officially launched; happy anniversary to us! Some small changes are going to be made to the blog over the next couple of weeks, so bear with us and, as always, your comments are welcome and appreciated.
And just in case you missed it, here’s our summer review round-up.
ALICE IN WONDERLAND box office makes Tim Burton a $1billion director
May 27
Disney is jumping for joy and rolling around in large wads of cash as Tim Burton’s CGI-heavy version of Alice in Wonderland just become the sixth film in history to crack the illustrious $1 billion mark at the worldwide box office. To date, Alice has earned over $332 million in the US and almost $670 million in worldwide cinemas. This makes Tim Burton a billion dollar director– just think of the wild and crazy things he can dream-up and shoot now!
With the 3D movement and inflation continue to gently nudge movie ticket prices upwards, certain milestones in film box office takings become easier to obtain. Like Avatar reaching a staggering $2.7 billion, for instance. Technically, more people still saw Gone With The Wind in theatres back in 1939/40, but we let that slide because, unlike the music industry, the Hollywood spotlight is shone on how much money a film earns and not how many people bought a ticket (which is a shame).
As slashfilm reports, Alice in Wonderland now sits with other $1billion earners:
- Avatar ($2.7 billion)
- Titanic ($1.8 billion)
- The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King ($1.1 billion)
- Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest ($1.06 billion)
- The Dark Knight ($1 billion)
Shouldn’t be much longer before the entire Top 10 earners of all time crack $1 billion. Christopher Nolan’s third Batman, perhaps?
This time I agree with Ebert: 3D sucks
Apr 30
I wrote a few months ago about why I thought 3D movies were crap; but that was before Avatar came out, so I was writing with some degree of optimism. Now that Avatar has come and gone I can safely say that I’m still not on board for 3D. A higher degree of immersion doesn’t negate a boring script or lazy world-building.
If you don’t know who Roger Ebert is, then … you’re missing out on a lot. You could call him a film critic, but you could also call him an unmitigated genius, a pioneer in the technique of criticism. His reviews are often insightful and sincere and leave you feeling like a blind child stumbling through the woods of cinema in comparison.
Ebert recently weighed in on video games, and stirred an absolute storm of controversy in gaming circles by declaring that games aren’t, and never will be, art. In that case I disagreed with him, partly because, for all his powers, I know prescience isn’t one of them, and further, he doesn’t ever seem to have played a game younger than Pac-Man or Space Invaders, so what the hell does he know? My opinion of Ebert suffered a little.
Now, however, my faith is restored. With his usual gentle but powerful rhetoric, he’s gone to great lengths to elaborate on the futility and silliness of the current 3D craze in Hollywood. Specifically, he pinpoints a few key niggles I have with the format: Hollywood seems to be using the 3D projectors mostly for kids’ films (Pixar, Dreamworks, Avatar) or ‘event’ films (Alice In Wonderland, Clash Of The Titans, Avatar), with no consideration for, you know, ‘good’ films (he cites Hurt Locker, Precious, Casablanca, you know, the usual artsy fartsy stuff).
Another niggle he pinpoints is in the business side of 3D. Here in Australia 3D movies only cost a dollar or two more than their 2D counterparts (depending on whether or not you already own the glasses), but Ebert points out that in the US, cinemas are charging $5 – $7.50 extra, which seems borderline criminal (especially if the movie’s Clash Of The Titans). How much of Avatar‘s gross was based solely on the cost of 3D tickets? Not enough to knock it down a peg in the coveted ‘Richest Movie Ever’ runnings, but enough to gouge a few percentage points out and dent the mountain of dosh Jim regularly bathes in.
The final niggle Ebert raises that I find particularly accurate is the overbearing eyestrain caused by 3D. It’s bad enough that we’re all in a dark room with our eyes locked onto a single bright screen for two hours; now you want to shove a centimetre of dark plastic between my face and said screen? Ridiculous. Pile on the fact that the brain has to work overtime to tweak muscles into working to get the 3D right, and 3D seems physiologically implausible as a long-term format overhaul.
Ebert goes on to suggest another alternative: 48 frames-per-second film and projectors. Apparently this quadruples the film image and provides a rock-solid, smooth-as-silk, eye-popping picture. I can’t vouch for this as I’ve never experienced it, but I’m rather attached to 24fps traditional film because it’s, like, filmy, you know? Plus 48fps film would double the reel length of a film and provide untold nightmares for the poor old projectionists running the films.
We’re currently knee-deep in a 3D renaissance; many of the big studios have moved behind the new-old format, and even some ‘good’ directors are trying their hands with the fancy new double-cameras. We still need time to evaluate the impact and merit of 3D cinema, but for now, things look doubtful. Check back with me again in 5 years’ time.
Fincher’s THE SOCIAL NETWORK and why digital photography still sucks
Apr 16
News regarding David Fincher’s The Social Network has been getting stranger by the minute. First there was the project itself, about the founding of the Facebook empire, and then there was the director involved, who isn’t usually associated with seemingly trivial stuff like this. Then there was the casting — Justin Timberlake (remember: he was actually pretty good in Black Snake Moan) and Joe Mazzello (Timmy from Jurassic Park — you know, whiney one; now in HBO’s The Pacific) in lead roles. Now the latest in a lengthy list of strange news comes in the form of the film’s shooting format.
Slash received an inside tip that the film would be shot on Red One cameras, which are essentially digital cameras with massive resolutions (but, disappointingly, they are not red). The resolutions are so large, in fact (4,096 × 2,160), that they look almost as good as regular old-fashioned 35mm film … from the 1960s. Remarkable!
Plenty of films have been shot on Reds, such as The Lovely Bones, 21, Knowing, and District 9, so that’s nothing new. What’s new is that big American cinema franchises are rolling out a new compliment of projectors capable of projecting in the new, Red-native format (known as 4K).
Lest we forget, digital photography is shit. It’s all grainy and noisy and low-res and doesn’t handle colours well. As bad as digital photography is, digital projection is even worse. Current digital projectors throw 2K, which is, surprisingly enough, about half the resolution of 4K, and works out roughly to the equivalent of 1080, the current standard resolution of home theatre.
Current Imax cinemas project two 2K images simultaneously (no, that doesn’t double the resolution), and this awfully low resolution may account for some of the colour-banding and motion problems people have had with movies like Avatar, Alice In Wonderland, and The Final Destination.
It could well be that 4K projectors will help assuage these problems, but it’s doubtful. More pixels on the screen will mean more information, sure, but the important stuff like contrast ratios and motion just won’t be as crisp or poppy as they are in film. Bear in mind that true Imax film, the 70mm stuff that Kubrick shot 2001 on, could be scanned to resolutions of around 10,000 x 7,000, which is, you know, massive. And don’t forget, these figures don’t increase linearly: 4K is quadruple the resolution of 2K, which is quadruple the standard US high-definition benchmark of 720, etc.
So as it currently stands, there’s still no substitute for real 35mm film.You see, film does a pretty good job of emulating the way our eyes perceive light, and a strong culture and art has been developed over the past century exploiting this fact (hint: it’s called cinema). Film’s full of little grains of minerals that absord light at different wavelengths, not square pixels arranged in orderly, symmetrical rows and columns.
Our eyes perceive the colours and motion of film better than digital, and digital photography and projection will be inferior to film until such time as digital cameras and projectors can perfectly match the images produced by old-fashioned film reels.
To summarise: the issue with digital isn’t the clarity — 1080 blows up pretty well on a big old Imax screen. The issues are elsewhere in the image, and until they’re all sorted out, digital cinema’s just going to be an affront to cinephiles the world over.
Oh, and I hope The Social Network turns out to be good, regardless.
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