AVATAR: Dances With Wolves, AVATAR 2: Waterworld
Apr 21
This makes perfect sense now. Confirming speculation that Avatar was merely Dances With Wolves in space (and 3D), it seems director James Cameron is including another Kevin Costner backdrop for Avatar 2: Waterworld, baby!
There’s no denying James Cameron’s fascination with the ocean– The Abyss, Titanic, PIRANHA 2, and evidently, the highly-anticipated upcoming Avatar 2 in which it has been revealed the action will ‘dive into the oceans of Pandora’.
Details emerged out of a recent interview with the LA Times where Cameron shared his thoughts on preparing for the big sequel as well as plans to take over the world and fuck your Mother. (Okay, maybe not… but just remember: he could.)
As the sequel will be years away, an extended cut of Avatar will be released to cinemas in August with vision won’t have seen on the DVD/Blu-ray you’re going to buy this week. The profits are going to be mind-blowing, I’m sure. Innocent fanboys are being milked for every dollar.
Here’s an early brief synopsis of Avatar 2 for you:
They didn’t need to crack that big-ass tree down after all– there was unobtainium in the ocean the whole fucking 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.
Would you like to know more?
3D TVs not designed for human consumption
Apr 13
I guess James Cameron’s plans to take over the world will have to wait a little longer. Electronics giant Samsung has released a handful of helpful warnings describing health risks associated with using their shiny new 3D TV products. Demographics warned include:
- - children and teenageers (children under 6 should not watch 3D TV);
- - pregnant women;
- - the elderly;
- - sufferers of serious medical conditions;
- - people deprived of sleep;
- - people under the influence of alcohol.
Samsung also includes some fun tips for 3D viewing, including taking regular breaks, positioning the TV away from stairs and cabinets, and avoiding long periods of 3D TV-watching.
What happens if you don’t follow these guidelines? Well, you might get nausea, dizzyness, eye strain, and “decreased postural stability”. Samsung lists 9 symptoms you should be particularly wary of:
- altered vision;
- lightheadedness;
- dizziness;
- involuntary movements such as eye or muscle twitching;
- confusion [I like how this is buried amongst more trivial afflictions];
- nausea;
- convulsions;
- cramps; and/ or
- disorientation.
But wait, there’s more!
“Viewing 3D television may also cause motion sickness, perceptual after effects, disorientation, eye strain and decreased postural stability. It is recommended that users take frequent breaks to lessen the potential of these effects. If your eyes show signs of fatigue or dryness or if you have any of the above symptoms, immediately discontinue use of this device and do not resume using it for at least thirty minutes after the symptoms have subsided.”
Oh, and don’t watch anything in 3D if you have a pre-existing sensitivity to light or anything. And don’t use 3D TVs during day time, because sunlight can affect the glasses’ functioning. And flourescent lights cause flickering in the image, so turn them off, too.
So who can use 3D TVs? People who are awake into the night — but not too late, so they get enough sleep — to avoid sunlight; people who also never drink while watching movies or TV; these people must be under the age of 65, but over the age of 19; they can’t have any history of motion sickness or epilepsy; and most importantly, they mustn’t mind interrupting a movie every 30 minutes to stretch their legs and exercise their eyeballs.
Right. What’s that, about 5% of the population?
I get motion sickness (technically simulation sickness) from playing video games with narrow fields of view (damn you, Half Life 2, damn you!), as well as watching Paul Greengrass films. Guess that counts me out. Plus I already get itchy eyes from regular 2D-o-vision, so that counts me out twice.
Oh and there’s the little problem of me not really liking Avatar, so that’s three strikes against 3D TV.
So let’s hear it — are you still keen as mustard to spend $20,000 on a spanking new 50-inch LED 3D TV so you can watch Avatar as God James Cameron intended?
Didn’t think so.
Source: Samsung’s website
THE LOSERS trailer is full of yellow things
Apr 07 
I sure hope you like the colour yellow, because The Losers appears to have a lot of it: cars, locations, explosions and even lights fill the screen with colours like gold and custard and mustard and … why do those words rhyme? Because they’re both yellow foods? Huh.
The Losers is about a bunch of special-ops soldier-types who get betrayed by their agencies and decide to take revenge. Pretty dull on paper, but it’s the characters that’ll likely sell you, and the actors portraying those characters. Jeffrey Dean Morgan (from Watchmen) heads up the team, with Idris Elba, Columbus Short and Óscar Janaeda filling out the ranks; meanwhile Chris Evans plays (against type) a curiously bespectacled, bright-coloured-shirt-wearing fellow who appears to be the comic relief. Seeing Evans in flexible, self-deprecating roles like in this and Scott Pilgrim Vs The World will be a nice change of pace until Captain America hits screens, that’s for sure. Then there’s Zoe Saldana, from Star Trek (and that other sci-fi film from 2009), who brings suggestive poses, sexy-time and double-entendres to the proceedings. Oh, and Jason Patric shows up as the bad guy, if you’re wondering.
Besides dripping in yellow, The Losers trailer contains a hint of some inventive action scenes, and a glimpse of the kind of sarcastic wit that will be employed in place of character development. Being a comic-book adaptation, we can’t expect too much from The Losers — or can we? Shouldn’t comic-book movies be just as good as any other movie thrown onto a giant silver screen? Unfortunately the trailer for The Losers is so disjointed and discombobulated that it’s hard to tell how well the action and one-liners work in context, so we’ll just have to wait and see what it’s like when it hits screens in a few weeks’ time.
The Losers comes out in the UK in just two days (crikey!) on the 9th of April, 2010; US release set for the 23rd of April, with Australia again lagging behind with a 20th of May release. Directed by Sylvain White, based on the Vertigo and DC comics.
RESIDENT EVIL: AFTERLIFE trailer prefers glossy tech over coherent plot
Apr 06
I’ll forever be adamant that the Resident Evil films are associated to the classic PlayStation game by name and name alone. In no way did the films ever deliver the same kid of haunting tension, fun, and zombie threat like the game did.
All I’ve ever hoped for is a reboot. Something that remained a little more honest to the Resident Evil game(s)– place the characters (the ACTUAL characters, not new ones created for the film adaptation) in a big old mansion, have zombies and eventually other mutants lurking in the shadows and let us see them escape. The Red Queen, the science fiction, the elaborate scientific lairs– you can keep all that junk.
The latest trailer for the upcoming fourth Resident Evil film, sub-titled Afterlife, goes out of its way to make sure we’re damn well aware they have shot this with state-of-the-art 3D tech in mind, using the same fusion camera system technology made available by James Cameron himself (and Vincent Pace…). They do this by blatantly telling us right off the top with a title card. Any excuse to have Cameron’s name associated– no matter how loosely, eh? Then comes the all-too familiar and unessential metal guitar riffs coupled with glorified action sequences that induced me to yawn rather than gasp. The CGI looks overly smooth and therefore very unrealistic (hey, just like Avatar!) I can already tell it will be ridiculously hard to invest in Resident Evil: Afterlife. Not even Milla Jovovich in ‘real’ 3D as her character Alice will win me over.
Fans of the series (??) seem excited that director Paul W.S. Anderson is returning to the series after directing the first Resident Evil in 2002. Granted, as a mindless film-unto-itself, the original effort may have been passable. But the fact that it was titled Resident Evil took a lot away from it. I really can’t see how the direction of Paul W.S. Anderson could rescue this series. Yet they keep making money. And lots of it.
It’s so depressing that the films went down the path they did when the original game offered so much more potential substance over style. Oh well. I can, at least, still kick back and play the video game whenever my hunger for Resident Evil nostalgia grows large– and whenever I get depressed at the fact that these damn films completely taint what was a perfectly original experience back in 1998. I’m getting old…
Here’s the ridiculously lame and seemingly ultra-expensive trailer for you to watch and ponder. Or laugh at.
If you’re still game (geddit?) you can find Resident Evil: Afterlife on your cinema screens in glorious 3D in September 2010.
In a world ravaged by a virus infection, turning its victims into the Undead, Alice (Milla Jovovich), continues on her journey to find survivors and lead them to safety. Her deadly battle with the Umbrella Corporation reaches new heights, but Alice gets some unexpected help from an old friend. A new lead that promises a safe haven from the Undead takes them to Los Angeles, but when they arrive the city is overrun by thousands of Undead – and Alice and her comrades are about to step into a deadly trap.
OPINIONS COUNT