The End of Summer

Sorry about the lack of posts. It’s just that there’s not a lot to see. The summer movie season is ending “Not with a bang but a whimper” (And I promise you, that will be the first and last time T.S. Eliot is quoted in a blog about mindless movies … until the next time I quote him). Okay, there are some movies we could have seen, and wanted to see, but due to circumstances beyond our control, were unable to see. But the truth is there aren’t that many good movies out anymore. Or more specifically, there are good movies, just none that I want to see.

Let me explain: Studios tend to use the end of August and the beginning of September for two reasons. One is as a dumping grounds. Studios will release the movies that they think will do terribly commercially and critically, but are big enough they can’t just release them on DVD (for whatever reason. Maybe the stars are too big, maybe they wasted too much on marketing before they realised it sucked). Thus, we get movies like Resident Evil: Afterlife or Takers.

Secondly, studios start releasing movies they hope will win awards. Since most studios think people can’t remember more than a few months back, they’ll only give awards to movies they’ve seen recently. Thus, most Oscar hopefuls are released between September and January, when the date cuts off to fit into that years Oscars.

Either way, you won’t be seeing these movies in theatres. You might buy the good ones after they have “Oscar Nominated” stamped on the DVD case in March. I don’t know if you’ll actually watch it, or just give it to that pretentious friend of yours that has Anna Karenina on his or her bookshelf but hasn’t read it yet (fun activity: read the cliff notes on these kinds of books and then ask your pretentious friend about them).

Just for fun, I looked back at last years Oscars to see when the nominatees for best picture were released.

• The Hurt Locker (June)
• Avatar (December)
• The Blind Side (November)
• District 9 (August)
• An Education (October)
• Inglorious Basterds (August)
• Precious: Based on the yada yada yada (November)
• A Serious Man (October)
• Up (May)
• Up in the Air (December)

To be perfectly honest, I’ve only seen two of those movies (guess which ones), but that really shouldn’t surprise any of you, should it? What is surprising is that the winning movie (The Hurt Locker) was released before the middle of the year. Over the past 10 years, the winners have been:

• 2010: The Hurt Locker (June, 2009)
• 2009: Slumdog Millionaire (January, 2009)
• 2008: No Country for Old Men (November, 2007)
• 2007: The Departed (October, 2006)
• 2006: Crash (May, 2005)
• 2005: Million Dollar Baby (January, 2005)
• 2004: Return of the King (December, 2003)
• 2003: Chicago (December, 2002)
• 2002: A Beautiful Mind (December, 2001)
• 2001: Gladiator (May, 2000)

The Hurt Locker is the only real aberration. Crash was an underdog to Brokeback Mountain (December, 2005), and Gladiator was released as a blockbuster to take advantage of summer sales. Who knew the field would be so thin they’d nominate and crown a summer blockbuster with some really boring political intrigue? I mean, did you go for the plodding plot, or Russell Crowe going medieval on people and animals (something he should limit to movies, not real life)?

Anyway, the point is that if you want to make an Oscar Winner, your best bet is to release your movie sometime between September and January (December or January, preferably) and to stick “Million” somewhere in the title. Seriously, what’s with that?

Resident Evil: Afterlife

This movie did not start out well. Mainly it was the previews. I guess we couldn’t really ask for anything else, since it was a Resident Evil movie, after all, but all the trailers we saw were for horror movies. Which neither Evan nor I have any interest in seeing. So not only did the trailers make us each a bit squeamish (Saw 3D, anyone? Please, let it be the last one), but we didn’t even get to add any movies to our list. Not a one will we be going to see.

The movie itself opened up with a slow scene in Japan. Sorry, I should say slow-motion. There were some interesting shots in 3D using rain, but it was pretty much about 7 minutes of slow-motion crowded sidewalk. Whee.

Anyhow, after that it got into a pretty good set piece with Alice (Milla Jovovich) invading Umbrella headquarters in Japan. It was cool, but had some stupid moments. For instance, she takes down a squad in a long battle involving guns and swords. Its pretty awesome, but after it’s done, she’s immediately surrounded by another squad with guns. She levels that one with one flash of telekinesis, which makes me wonder why she didn’t take out the first squad like that. The only reason she didn’t is because fights with guns and swords are cooler, so that’s what Paul W.S. “I have 3D!” Anderson put in there.

After that comes a lot of travelling around the wasteland, and a bit of character development. Alice occasionally narrates into a camcorder, expressing herself and wishes and desires and all that stuff. It doesn’t work. Either Anderson doesn’t understand his audience, or he’s appealing to the critics. Dude, you’re making a Resident Evil movie. It ain’t gonna get good reviews. Deal with it, and bring the zombies.

So he brings the zombies. Alice and someone from the previous movie make it to LA, where they battle zombies with a group of survivors they find there. They also fight this monstrous humanoid … thing ... with an axe that would be right at home in World of Warcraft (seriously, my character wants one. It’d be called the “Serrated Blade of Doom” or “Edge of Falling Darkness” or something similar. Seriously, weapon names in World of Warcraft? Awesome!) Anyway, he always wears a burlap sack over his head (I think it was nailed to his neck) which makes me wonder two things – how did he see, and who was he mourning?

They manage to get to a safe zone, and then it’s one final battle with Umbrella, and then a cliffhanger ending. Which apparently is a standard Resident Evil thing, but it’s been a while since I’ve seen the first two, and I didn’t make it through the third.

The 3D is technically good, but it seems like Anderson is showing it off more than using it to support the movie. It’s like he shoots things specifically to take advantage of the 3D, instead of shooting it normally and just having the 3D there.

The slow-motion is very annoying. He leaves giant chunks of the movie in slow-motion, instead of breaking it up into manageable sections interspersed with normal-time sections. We don’t need 5 minutes of a slow-motion fight, honest. My theory is that if they hadn’t used slow-motion at all, the movie would’ve been shorter than Jonah Hex, so it may have just been padding. Also, a lot of them use falling water, so it’s also possible Anderson really, really wanted to show off his 3D.

There was a scene where Alice was inching up on a door, with something possibly behind it. I don’t know why directors keep putting these kinds of things in movies. Either there’s something in there that bursts out and scares the audience, or there’s nothing in there, the hero(ine) relaxes, and whatever it is pops up behind him/her and scares the audience. Still, people jump, so I guess it works.

All in all, it’s a DVD movie. When I left the movie, I thought it might be a bargain rental, but after a night to ponder it, I think it’s a little better than that. Despite some problems, the action is pretty good, and there’s one spectacular shot that’s almost like a 3D photograph of the instant before a plane crash that’s incredibly well done.

The thing that I really wonder about, though, is what they’re going to call the next movie. They’ve used Apocalypse, Extinction, and Afterlife. They’ve already used up all the stages of human life. What’s next? Evan says Purgatory. Rebirth? The Big Bang? I vote for Resident Evil: Please Give Me Money or My Wife Will Divorce Me.

Multiple Mediums

Media has been around for millennia, ever since (according to evolution) the first animals developed the capability of making sound. Thus, they were able to communicate things like “Food” and “Danger” to any other animals in the area (I’m guessing immature males quickly developed a sound for “fart joke” as well, but that’s just me). Anyway, word-of-mouth was born and hasn’t quite dies yet. Cell phones aid it tremendously, and the popularity of stand-up comedy and jokes are a testament to its longevity.

I’m guessing sometime after we developed opposable thumbs, someone discovered that certain liquids could be applied to various surfaces, and art was born. Of course, art may have also been born when people discovered that certain materials hardened when they got dry. Anyway, both paintings and 3D art (statues, carvings, knick-knacks) have been around for many thousands of years. It’s hard to nail down precisely when, because of a lack of knowledge about the culture back then, as well as the materials made for them. Art could be 200,000 years old, but if it was made on an easily eroded surface, we’d have no trace of it.

Also way back when, music was invented (possibly) when a young caveman beat upon a log and made noise, and was immediately surrounded by groupies. The older cavemen told him to cut out that racket “When I was your age, we were happy with a rock that did NOTHING!” Video games back then would have consisted of Log Hero, until Grand Theft Mammoth came out in time for the Pagan Festival season.

Sometime later, someone brilliant came up with the idea of writing language down, although it pretty much resembled wing-dings. We call it cuneiform, but I’m betting they called it something else, mainly because they didn’t speak English back then (“What?” say all the people raised on Hollywood History. It’s true. Way back then, they spoke French. Oh wait). This led to the invention of literature, for which many graduates of university have both thanks (they can get a degree) and ire (ask them what they can do with their degree).

Things continued much this way for quite a while. I’m sure there are many people who think any other forms of media are rubbish (except for theatre. I completely forgot about theatre … just like everyone else) because they were all invented after electricity was discovered. A few years before America decided they should be their own country, Benjamin Franklin decided to fly a kite in a thunderstorm. Whenever we do it, we’re called stupid. He does it and gets the genius label. Go figure.

Actually, it wasn’t the discovery of electricity that led to an explosion in media, but the discovery it could be generated. Once people could make their own, it was a lot more useful (just like fire). Soon, people were hooking up electricity to everything, just to see if it was better (again, just like fire). But first, around 1860 or so, photography was invented. But when electricity was attached about 20 years later, movies were invented. And the world rejoiced. And promptly turned into a couch potato.

Also around that time, two inventions came about. Thomas Edison found a way to record music (or just took credit for it. He was good at that), and someone discovered that electromagnetic waves could be sent from one point to another without a wire between them. Most underrated discovery ever, in my opinion. Everyone always touts all the other discoveries (Penicillin! Electricity! Long Weekends!) but no one ever thinks twice about the ability to communicate with no direct contact. We no longer have to have a wire to send a message across a continent. We can send it wirelessly. And we discovered it before 1900! This discovery, combined with recorded music, led to radio, and eventually television.

So by then, we had word-of-mouth, art, literature, music, theatre, radio, movies, and TV. And possibly one or two others that slip my mind.

The invention of computers in the fifties led to the inventions of video games (it’s amazing how quick any new invention is turned into a time-waster), and the subsequent video game nerd. Mothers soon bemoaned bespectacled sons who refused to move out of their basements until after middle age. And many jokes were made about the chances of procreation (somewhere between none and zero).

Several years later, the invention on the internet (by Al Gore!) led to either one or many other forms of media. You can say the internet and everything on it is only one form of media, or you can split it up into Blogs, Twitter, Facebook … basically everything that makes up social networks gets broken out into their own specific categories. I dunno. Of course, television and movies can be split into live-action and animation as well, so categories can be as wide or as narrow as you like.

Media is basically any way of disseminating information. It really took off when people started using it for fiction. The thing is, people are greedy. So if something is really popular in one medium, the movers and shakers will try to capitalize on it in another medium. This may be as simple as selling Shakespeare’s plays in book form, to new TV shows based on twitter feeds (“S#*t My Dad Says” coming to CBS this fall. Of course, the got a casting coup in William Shatner himself, playing the dad).

So I figured I’d look at how this impacts movies. Turning things into movies, and turning movies into things. Say there’s a popular video game. It may get made into a movie, with a novelization and a TV show spun off from it. Now instead of a video game, the makers have a franchise. And the broken dreams of all their fanboys.

Momentous Mindless Movie – Avatar

Sorry about the title – I needed to find an M word. It’s not a missed mindless movie, because we saw it in theatres. But it’s not the first time it came through theatres, so it wasn’t just a mindless movie. And I couldn’t think of an M word synonymous with second-chance. I settled on Momentous, because Avatar made the most money in box office history, and that’s momentous.

I’ve seen Avatar before, on my computer. And while I have a nice, large screen (24”), and usually only sit about two feet from it, it wasn’t in 3D, nor did it match the sheer size of a movie theatre.

We got there fairly early, thinking that many people would want to pay more money for a movie most of them had seen before. How foolish. There were maybe 25 people there for the show. The theatre itself didn’t bode well. There were seats missing their bottoms, there weren’t any magazines to read, and the seats weren’t tilted back enough – I felt hunched over for the entire movie.

Nevertheless, the experience was incredible. It was better than I remembered. More jokes, more action, more everything. I particularly liked the sound system that made my oesophagus vibrate. Awesome! The 3D was pretty good. Not great, though. There are still some kinks to work out. Things are blurry wrong. That’s about the best way I can describe it. I think the problem is that if there’s enough distance between what our eyes focus on and either the foreground or the background, whatever we don’t focus on will be doubled. As an experiment, hold up your index finger about a foot in front of your eyes, and focus on the wall behind your finger. You’ll see two (blurry) index fingers. Until they completely solve this problem, 3D will still feel wrong.

There are a few solutions – keep everything in focus, or have the foreground close enough to the background that it only appears a little blurry, but not doubled. Anyhow, they had a lot better 3D in the latter half of the movie, or maybe I just got sucked in/distracted by all the explosions that I didn’t notice as much as I had in the first half.

I paid attention to the music as well, and I may have to buy the score. Except for one specific theme (the “Hey, it’s a tragedy” theme) that annoyed me, it was pretty good. Well, the random pop song at the end was a little surprising, but I think it was their Oscar hopeful. Many films with only a score will have a song at the end by someone famous/almost famous in an attempt to win an Academy Award for best song, since choosing one from the score would be too hard (I guess). And then the score will be nominated for best soundtrack or something. I guess it’s a way to double-dip, as well as another blurb the movie company can put on their DVD. “Oscar Nominated” doesn’t imply which category. It could be sound editing (Here’s looking at you, Transformers), for all we know.

Of course, a lot of the hype for the movie was about its technical advancements. And it was a technical masterpiece. But that’s like saying Dikembe Mutombo should’ve been MVP of the NBA because he blocked the most shots. One aspect does not an Oscar make. The plot is fairly generic, and the message (while good) is simplistic. White People = Bad. Natives = Good. I could go off on a rant about both the correctness and incorrectness of that statement, but let’s just say there’s more to it than the movie conveyed.

Still, the movie is a marvel (hey look, an M word) to behold, especially in 3D, no matter the problems. It’s definitely a theatre movie, so I’m glad I got the chance to see it in the theatre. Not a momentous theatre, but the movie made up for it.