Tag Archives: 3D

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

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I glanced at my reviews of the last couple Pirates movies, and they are a lot more positive than I remember the movies in my head. I wonder which of us is right! My point being, who can say how well you and / or future me can trust this forthcoming review of the fourth poncy Johnny Depp vehicle? Oh well, we’re both here, may as well read it anyway.

So, I have a few disconnected thoughts, and they are presented here in no particular order. On Stranger Tides demonstrates better than I remember the other movies having done that pirates, by and large, are bad people. Not so bad that I wish I hadn’t watched the movie, but I felt slimier than I really wanted to, once or twice. That said, the action set-pieces did a good job of distracting me from that sporadic feeling, much as they distracted me from what were at the time glaring plot holes, most of which I’ve forgotten since, which just goes to show you quite how successful said set-pieces were. The action wasn’t the best in the series or anything, because they’ve always been amazing. But it was absolutely at the same level of quality, minimum.

Two events stood out from the rest, though, and neither are spoilers, so I will tell you them! 1) Impressive use of the Greek literary technique, deus ex mickina. 2) Disturbingly spot-on interpretation of the Japanese dolphin capture / killing bays. (There’s a documentary in the last year or two, if you have no idea what I’m talking about. The descriptions have convinced me I would hate watching it, though.) But anyway, yeah, this was pretty good. Oh, right, some people want an inkling as to the plot, I forget that sometimes. What is is, is they’re looking for the Fountain of Youth.

Thor

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I’ve been reading old Marvel comics for, well, a few years now. And also the Marvel Ultimate reboot series, for about the same number of years. In that time, I’ve gotten through 10 or so years of the newer version and 13 years now of the older version. Over those “years”, I’ve had characters I’ve liked and characters I’ve disliked, as you do. For instance, I will read as little about the Submariner as humanly possible, and I’ll be glad of it. Anyway, my point is this: I’ve seen a great deal about Thor as an ensemble character, and only a very little of him as a main character in his own stories. Everything I’ve seen of the latter (except for a few Loki-centric stories in the Ultimate version) has led me to be bored at the idea of picking them up, even when virtually every other major Marvel character has eventually won me over.

All of this to explain that I had pretty low expectations when I heard that they had a Thor movie in the works as part of the build-up to the Avengers franchise. Often, of course, correctly lowered expectations are the key to enjoying something that you otherwise might have rolled your eyes at or even actively hated. But the thing is, I don’t think that’s the deal here. The opening narration doesn’t give the slightest amount of delay in explaining that these aren’t really Norse gods, they’re just really advanced aliens who happened to choose Earth as a battleground, naturally confusing the natives. (Arthur C. Clarke is referenced so many times you’d think he got royalties.) And once that’s out of the way and we’re caught up to modern times, the story they’re telling is pretty much exactly the story I wanted to hear, without any of Thor’s old-school enemies who bore me so, without more than a smattering of his over the top formality that bores me even more; instead, it’s a sibling squabble between Thor and Loki, of exactly the type that has so enthralled me in all the new Ultimate stories. Except, you know, with cosmic implications and a few interesting earth people involved.

But other than the Loki thing, and I have decided over the past couple of years that in the hands of a capable writer, I could happily read or watch him doing just about anything, the main draw versus the comics that I was so leery of is that they took an overly formal prig with a stick wedged so solidly up his ass that it made Mjollnir look about as unmovable as an empty plastic bag in an independent film about existentialism and turned him into a jovial, likable, and best of all, overly rash hero among men. If someone tries to convince me that the Thor in the (non-Ultimate) comics eventually turns into that guy, I’d probably be willing to pick up his stories. Not until then, mind you, because I just don’t care enough about the backstory. Not this time.

Drive Angry 3D

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Remember that time when Nic Cage gave up the idea of having a serious film career and just started making drive-in flicks? I guess from one direction people might be guessing any year out of the last five, and from the other, people will insist it hasn’t happened. For my part, I definitely hope my memory is correct and would point to the current year as the bearer of that happy event. Mind you, I haven’t seen Season of the Witch yet, but surely I will? And I don’t need to, to realize it is probably even more B-grade than that fantastic Drive Angry, which I have seen.

Thumbnailing it, our Mr. Cage breaks out of Hell to chase down the man who kidnapped his granddaughter, accompanied by muscle car enthusiast Amber Heard (who you won’t quite remember as having one of the six speaking roles in Zombieland) and pursued by accountant William Fichtner (who I bet has been in some movie I reviewed, but right now I only remember him from mid-decade television). But aside from the car chases and explosions and various gunplay, I can describe a single scene which will make it entirely clear what kind of movie this is.

So there’s John Milton[1], having sex with a waitress (as you do), and a sizable group of satanic cultists break into the motel room to kill him. A several minute gunfight and melee ensues, and when the bloodstains and gunsmoke have settled, Milton has at no point exited said waitress. That? That right there is commitment to the moment.

[1] Nic Cage’s character, for some reason.

Saw 3D

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Saw 3D is, they say, the last Saw movie. It is important to note here that lots of horror franchises have made this claim before, and it is almost never true. But I am forced to judge the movie as though it is true, since that has importance in considering not just it for itself but the franchise as a whole. I say that last part because Saw is as far as I’m aware unique among horror series for having maintained a single coherent narrative throughout its run, a feat which has always caused me to give it a goodly amount of respect. There was this guy, and he got cancer. And it made him angry, because he was going to lose his life, while people that he interacted with were so careless with their own lives. So he got the idea to put these people into situations that forced them to make painful, committed choices in order to live. Most such people died, but some survived, and were usually a lot stronger for it.

The last movie is explicitly about that, although Jigsaw’s survivors have always been important to the story as a whole. But in this instance, they have formed support groups, one of them has written a book and gone on tour, it’s really a whole theme. Quite a bit more compelling than last year’s indictment of the American healthcare industry, if only for being so much less hamfisted. So, there’s an interesting narrative. The devices, for a change, did not really impress me that much. They were every bit as squirmily uncomfortable to watch, don’t get me wrong, but they just didn’t feel as inventive as previous such deathtraps have been. But like I said earlier, the most important question is this: did the series as a whole come to a satisfactory conclusion?

Well, that’s a tricky question to answer. If you are looking for some kind of overarching lesson, or a note that neatly closes the theme that was played so heavily for the events of this specific movie and that loomed so large over the series as a whole, the one about being mentally strong enough to choose life? I don’t think it managed that.[1] If you are looking for narrative closure, that I think was achieved, and I’m glad to have seen it done. If you’re looking for a slight crack in the closed door, some light allowing for another sequel after all? Well, of course there was. It’s a horror movie. Duh.

On a technical note, the 3D right at the beginning of the movie had some severe issues, and the fact that they cleared up so fast makes me think this might be a limitation of the format, not the people processing this particular film. The opening scene involves one of the iconic traps, in a glass-enclosed room, in the middle of a public space where passersby can observe what is about to happen. As a result, there are a large amount of reflections as the camera looks in one direction or the other through the glass. And the reflections cast onto the glass really screw up the 3D effect badly. I think it is because the reflections have some amount of depth that they would not have in a real world situation, and then my eyes freak out because it looks so wrong? I’m not sure that’s what it was, only that my eyes were freaking out over whatever cause existed. So, 3D film-makers? Fix that, or avoid the situation. That is all.

[1] More to the point, I don’t think it tried. I wonder if they saw no way to do it, or if it didn’t cross their minds that they should have? Because if that had happened, I would have to be singing some praises right now.

TRON: Legacy

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I saw the Tron sequel (which I know I should be making all caps, yet cannot bring myself to) as a midnight premiere showing, which was… difficult. I can definitely tell I’ve turned some kind of corner, and it makes me sad. Anyway, I definitely liked it, which seems to be a minority opinion on the internet, though I’m not sure why. It is stupidly pretty (although young Jeff Bridges skirts the edge of the uncanny valley when seen in IMAX), it has a lot of coolness, and it has sfnal ideas that, while not very new, are certainly interesting. What’s not to like?

Well… if I had to pick something, it would be that there’s Too Much. I spotted aesthetic elements from The Wizard of Oz and The Empire Strikes Back, story influences from at least three different sources that I’ve since forgotten, and a reach[1] that, just like in the original movie, consistently exceeds its grasp. But I have a hard time grading that harshly, even as I understand why other people might not.

Nutshell: go see it. If you loved the original, this stays true to it while expanding into uncharted vistas, and if you never saw the original[2], this at least gets all of the tech stuff right, which is rare enough in Hollywood to deserve monetary reward.[3] Also, since I spotted a few frames worth of sequel-potential, I’d like to predict that their choice to act on one any time in the next 24 months will result in a terrible outcome. Heed my advice, $Disney_executive!

[1] This again referring to the storyline.
[2] It occurs to me that I’m forced into another one of my footnote plot summaries, since I forgot people might not know much about it, until just now in the editing pass. Both movies contemplate a human-permeable barrier into a computer network called the Grid, in which both full programs and stray lines of code have viable personifications and struggle against stronger programs who have forced them into either servitude or else brutally short lives in a games arena. Whenever a User enters the Grid, plot occurs!
[3] If you think I left out a third possibility, then I am currently glaring at you. For being a bad person.

Piranha 3D

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MV5BMTU3NDg2NTY4Nl5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwMTM0OTE3Mw@@._V1__SX1859_SY847_I hadn’t really thought about it until now, but it has been too long since anyone released a good monster movie.[1] Which is not to say Piranha 3D is itself good, because that word doesn’t really apply in a traditional way to this particular subgenre in nearly the same way that Joe Bob Briggs’ drive-in totals do. Honestly, the title tells you everything you need to know about the plot, which is that a school of hungry piranha are about to crash a co-ed beach party to blood-spattering result. I will say that as a prior resident of San Marcos, Texas, where the original Piranha was filmed, I appreciated the scene in which naked nymphs are filmed making out underwater through a glass-bottomed yacht, as this was clearly a shout-out to the sadly defunct Aquarena Springs mermaids.

As for those drive-in totals[2], there were 11 breasts, 15 bodies, and one full-blown spring break massacre. Multiple propellers to the face. Frying pan to the piscine face. Head rolls. Torso rolls. Legs roll. Penis rolls. Drive-in academy award nominations to Jessica Szohr for vomiting in 3D, to Jerry O’Connell as the sleazy video promoter, to Christopher Lloyd for saying, “They don’t have fully-developed genitalia!” with exactly the delivery you’re imagining, and to Richard Dreyfuss just for showing up. Three and a half stars, and if you do in fact want to check it out, hell, I’d go again.

[1] I mean, besides Sci-Fi SyFy original motion pictures, weekly on Saturday nights.
[2] …that a quick web search [to see if I could compare them with the original count, which likely does not exist due to the movie’s 1978 release date being too early] tells me every reviewer on the planet is referencing this weekend.

Despicable Me

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You know how people describe some kid movies as being funny for adults too? Just to give you an idea of how this played out in Despicable Me, the joke that stands out in my head involves supervillain Gru going to the Bank of Evil to take out a loan to finance his plot to steal the moon, and seeing the notice that the Bank of Evil was “formerly Lehman Bros.” So you see.[1] On the bright side, the kid part of the movie was reasonably okay. Gru, who I already mentioned is a supervillain, is in competition with the rest of the supervillain community to pull off the world’s greatest heist. Along the way, he adopts three girls for use in a cookie-selling scheme, and learns valuable lessons about the importance of placing family above work. And I mean, it really is that facile, but it was occasionally funny in ways that were not directed at adults and it was sweet as well, in the ways you’d expect a kid movie with orphans to be. I liked it well enough to regret neither the time nor money, though certainly not well enough to seek it out again. Whether my like can be correlated to the half of a 40 ounce margarita that I imbibed over the course of the flick can be left as an exercise to the reader.

[1] Dear adult readers of Shards of Delirium, please fill out this simple survey. Do you find the referenced joke a) funny or b) an eye-rollingly insulting and yet simultaneously ultra-apt demonstration of the phrase “funny for adults”? Please do not fill out the survey if you are a child reader of Shards of Delirium.[2]
[2] In the interest of equal time: dear child readers of Shards of Delirium, please fill out this simple survey. Do you love bunnies because they are a) fuzzy or b) fluffy?

Alice in Wonderland (2010)

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Unless you live at the bottom of a very deep hole, you will no doubt have heard that Tim Burton is remaking Alice in Wonderland. Well, was remaking, I should say, as it came out last weekend. And I am here to tell you that it is a gorgeous movie. As usual, modern 3D is good even when it’s not particularly serving any purpose, and IMAX always looks and sounds about as good as you can imagine, but I’m not just talking about that, of course. Burton has a stylized signature art style that suffuses every movie he has made since at least Edward Scissorhands. It is slightly dark, in an almost proto-goth kind of way, even though he has sometimes made it darker than others. It is cartoonish without being cartoony. Basically, every world he creates looks like a fairy tale world; in this case, Wonderland already being a fairy tale world in its own right, Burton has pushed it through a glass darkly. Which, of course, is appropriate.

In addition to being so very pretty[1], the casting was consistently spot on. I mean, obviously the focus will be on Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter, and I kind of thought he alternated between acceptable and annoying. But everyone else was pretty great. Crispin Glover as a gawkily tall bad guy, Alan Rickman as the snide caterpillar, Anne Hathaway as the ethereal White Queen, and then lots more. Perhaps best of all was Alice herself, though; in addition to managing to have girlish innocence despite now being 19 and looking really nice despite unreasonable ongoing damage to her wardrobe, she was a delight throughout the framing story (in which she is blindsided with a marriage proposal from some British lord or other), portraying the uncertainty, the yearning against the bonds the society was placing upon her, and so on. It would not have been Alice in Wonderland by any means, but I think I could have watched an entire movie built from that framing story.

Which is a pity, because the main story? Also was not quite Alice in Wonderland. The March Hare was as mad as… er, he was entirely crazy. And the Cheshire Cat was approximately perfect, plus all the casting I’ve already mentioned above. But the story… after complaining about Depp annoying me, I feel bad to say this, but the story was entirely too sane. It was linear, and standard, and about nothing much more than a hero needing to decide to be heroic. Which in itself is a movie I’ve watched many times before and will watch many times again, but placing characters from Lewis Carroll’s works into a movie does not make the movie suddenly about Wonderland. So I think I was ultimately more disappointed than it deserved, due to the misrepresentation, yes, but also because of how everything that was not the script[2] was so very well done.

[1] I should note that bloodhounds hit the uncanny valley of dogs for me; they looked perfect, but moved all wrong. Still, it’s nice that the technology keeps getting better.
[2] Well, except the dogs. And about 30% of Depp’s performance.

Avatar (2009)

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Avatar has been an interesting phenomenon to me. Because I watch the previews of it, and it of course looks really pretty, plus I know James Cameron makes good sci-fi[1]. But then again, I watch previews of it and it makes me think it will be Dances with Wolves in space.[3] And I didn’t hate that movie the first time, but it grows more awful with each subsequent viewing, and eventually it has retroactively become the moment at which Kevin Costner stopped being a respectable human being actor.

So, after all of that spinning around in my head for a month, I expected it to be pretty, yes, but still mostly terrible. I didn’t see it in the IMAX that the tagline suggests, though it was in 3D. I suppose I’ll get to that before too terribly long, though. Because, IMAX or not, expectations or not, Dances with Wolves and all? It was still really good. (And, yes, very pretty.) And if the message was perhaps bludgeoned in, it is not a message with which I have no sympathy. I guess I should ought to find a hardcore conservative and find out just how much they hated it. But really, even if you are allergic to hippie granola, I think the prettiness of the film will get you past most of the relevantly crunchy scenes.

What impressed me most, though, was the uncanny valley effect. Or, rather, it’s lack. Far short of the giant blue Na’vi people looking just subtly wrong enough to hurt my eye, the time rapidly came when it was the actual actors who started to look slightly wrong, and every scene back among humans had me itching to get back to the part of the movie I cared about. Which, okay, the whole point of Dances with Wolves is to throw off the trappings of the Western World, so it makes sense this movie would want me to be there. But when he can manage it even on a physical CGI level? Kudos, Mr. Cameron. I daresay you deserved the full theater and applause you got on even this third weekend of theatrical release.

[1] Seriously, that’s kind of his Thing, blips on the radar like Titanic[2] notwithstanding.
[2] Hey, now there’s a piece of irony.
[3] And then I watch South Park, and they point out that in fact it will be Dances with Smurfs, and Giovanni Ribisi will be an unobtanium-hungry Gargamel, but really that’s still Dances with Wolves.

Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs

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Rainy days plus dollar movies equals a pretty decent salvage of a date day, if you ask me. Although I guess I never saw the middle one, the original Ice Age was pretty good, so I was perfectly happy to accept the idea of checking out Ice Age 3 when it was presented to me. Dollar movies, for now, means no 3D, so I dunno about that part. But the movie itself was mixed. As a kid movie, it was perfectly fine, sometimes way to kiddy for me like you’d expect, other times with surprisingly naughty dialogue that had me laughing in shock as much as humor. But, y’know, adventure, heart-warmingness, dinosaurs, all the stuff you expect in a kid movie, even if it is served a bit lukewarm to not burn all those metaphorical kid tongues. I mean, it had Denis Leary, and even lukewarm Denis Leary will entertain me pretty well. I may even be a fan.

As an adult movie… I mean, you know it won’t work, right? So when they try, is that a good thing because they want to overcome their limitations, or is it a bad thing because they give you whatever brief moment of unfortunate hopefulness? I honestly can’t decide, either in this case or as a general purpose question for the genre. In this case, the adult theme they inserted was the way that friendships are able to suffer when some friends are married and starting families while other friends are still free-wheeling singles.[1] And I was a little bit interested in seeing where they went with the line of thought, especially since Denis Leary was the main representative of the free-wheeling class, and I thought it might spice up his otherwise kid-friendly performance at least a little. Instead of that actually happening, the sloth character was put into danger via an underground lost dinosaur world, and everyone ended up on a quest to save him, at the end of which they all just decided to stick together and be a big family unit instead of actually resolving any of the underlying fractures that initially raised the question. Which is fine in a kid movie, but I thought, if only for a few moments, that it might be more.

Oh, well. On the bright side, there was a canyon chase on pterodactyls, and a lot of lava. That shit is awesome even in 2D, no matter what else might be going on around it disguised as plot. So there’s that. That, and velociraptors.

[1] It occurs to me, belatedly, that not many free-wheeling singles are going to show up in the seat for this one, so the message might have been skewed more than a bit from the start. But okay.