Tag Archives: 3D

The Final Destination

MV5BOTMwMTMzNDM1N15BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwMjMyNjk3Mg@@._V1__SX1859_SY847_I’ve said it many times before, but it has been true for as long as I’ve known about it. It appears to have been true since Joe Bob Briggs first said it in the early ’80s: if you want to make a good sequel to a horror movie, look at the movie you made in the first place and make your sequel identical to that. As such, I will not have very much to say about The Final Destination. Because it had a dude who has, for no apparent reason, visions of an upcoming tragedy and accidentally helps several people escape said tragedy.[1] After which, Death’s plan has been thwarted, and thusly these several “lucky” near-victims start to die in unlikely ways to bring things back on track, while vision-dude continues to have new visions and tries to prevent all their deaths and his own, despite the inevitability.[1]

I mean, let’s be clear. There is no point to this movie except to see people die in gruesomely inexplicable ways. But you have to give some credit to whoever came up with a concept that allowed them to film death after grisly death while avoiding all semblance of a plot, and then has gone on to do it three more times.

Also, it’s in 3D if you like that sort of thing.

[1] Matching the original film as well as both previous sequels? Check.[2]
[2] I believe that the vision-dude in Final Destination 2 may well have been a chick.

Up (2009)

Yesterday, I learned that my occasional free AMC tickets even count for the 3D movies. That right there is pretty awesome, what with the extra charge they carry. Yay! I also learned that with a little bit of ingenuity and an unreasonable amount of helium, anyone can get a second chance. (Well, anyone who isn’t an obsessed bad guy that’s probably older than God.)

Up tells the story of a couple’s dreams of adventure at Paradise Falls in South America, and of a lonely old man’s quest to fulfill those dreams on his wife’s behalf after a protracted, ten minute long sucker punch delivered as the film’s prologue. Along for the ride are a floating house, a cub scout, a pack of talking dogs, a pretty hilarious giant bird, and the aforementioned bad guy. That’s pretty much all I want to say, because, well, it’s yours to watch now. I’m pretty sure this is the best Pixar movie, and yeah, you should really ought to go see it.

Coraline

You would think that I’d have already read the long-published book Coraline, by Neil Gaiman. I mean, he’s awesome, right? But by the time I got my hands on a copy, I already knew there’d be a movie coming out, so I’ve put it off. Of course, I kept not seeing the movie, too, which really threw the whole thing out of whack, but Wednesday rendered itself convenient, and now I can at least put the book on my shelf.

Coraline is one of those cautionary fairy tales about the dangers of skipping out on the hard parents who have your best interests, in favor of the easy ones who probably have a catch. Unfortunately, the movie failed this test by making Coraline’s parents all too unlikeable, with only a hint of the tough-but-fair paradigm I think (or at least hope) they were trying to portray. Coraline Jones and those parents have just moved into the ground floor of a rental house out in the country, where they can pursue their dreams of writing gardening books, dreams which are made ridiculously implausible by their shared dislike of dirt. Of course, the larger issue is that they’re stressed out by their lack of success and resultantly treat Coraline more like an unwanted distraction than a beloved daughter. All of which would turn into a distressingly heart-rending After-School Special except that there’s a tiny, walled-over door in the rental house’s parlor which leads to a mirror world, through a glass brightly, if you will, where Coraline’s parents dote on her and are excellent cooks, and every tenant and local are present solely to entertain Coraline in a variety of kid-friendly ways, with just the correct hint of faux-danger. In short, every child’s dream come true, much less any child living under the whiff of neglect, and possibly a bit more than a whiff, that Coraline is.

Here’s the good news. Although the cautionary portion of the tale is undercut by her parents actually being kind of harsh, instead of merely not the picture-perfect givers that self-involved kids inevitably want, the fairy tale sense of mounting dread and rich climactic action are spot on. Plus, y’know, 3D, which never seems to suck. Because, of course Coraline’s button-eyed Other Mother is different from how she initially seems. (I distinctly remember mentioning, y’know, fairy tale.) Additionally, the cat is just delightfully… cattish. I can’t say what comparison there is between book and movie, though I understand from Fresh Air that one character was created entirely for the flick. But that cat has all the right notes that makes me certain Neil wrote him first. He just understands cats like nobody’s business.

My Bloody Valentine (2009)

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MV5BMTkzMDk4MDU0NF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwODM5MjUxMg@@._V1__SX1859_SY893_You know, I learned something about myself while watching the remake of My Bloody Valentine, presented in 3D and starring that one guy from Supernatural. (No, the other one.) Anyhow, what I learned is that if you create a movie in which a pickaxe goes through someone’s skull and his eyeball shoots halfway into the theater instead of just sitting flatly on the screen, that is pretty much everything I need that movie to do. If it chooses to also include a naked lady running around in anger and/or terror for a solid five minutes of screen time, well, that just goes to show that they understand what 3D is for.[1][2]

Now, would it be nice if they had also included solid dialogue, decent acting from anyone outside of the two male leads, and sufficient direction to get the actually good acting I’ve seen both of them perform in the past? Would it be nice if they had included a little bit more murder variation than the ubiquitous “pierced by pickaxe”? Obviously, yes; but I want to point out, again: eyeball halfway out into the audience. That is some awesome shit. Plus, y’know, completely gratuitous midget. I wonder if there is any full-on midgetsploitation in the horror genre? That could be worth seeing.

[1] That said, 3D porn I think might be a little scary.
[2] I will be the first to admit that I completely lose at feminism when it comes to horror movies. That part of my brain was hardwired long before I realized that there was even a question about gender equality, much less the second or three later when I came down on the side of yes, let’s do that equality thing. So, when I see a naked lady holding a gun on a scuzzy truck driver, or running away from a maniacal pickaxe killer, even though these things are objectively horribly exploitative and would basically never happen to a dude in a horror movie, I don’t care, because that’s what horror movies are, and while I’m probably wrong, I love them for it. I point this all out not so much in my own defense[3] as to give context to the end of the scene, when the naked lady is under an old, crappy motel bed, and the mattress is ripped off, leaving her to fend off the pickaxe killer with only a rusted mattress frame that basically made it look like she was naked and terrified in a chicken-wire cage.[4] It turns out that this is where I draw the line between “Awesome, horror movie nudity!” and “Dude, that’s kind of creepy and uncool.” Now you know!
[3] Because, it’s a really terrible defense. “No, your honor, it’s not that I’m okay with killing people. It’s just, in the context of me not liking this particular person, he pretty much had to be killed by me. Oh? Still guilty? Huh.”
[4] Which is the problem with the movie in a nutshell. It couldn’t decide whether to be campy, or a creepy torture-fetish thing, or psychological, or a mystery, or what. You can turn any of those into a pretty awesome horror movie, but you cannot turn all four of them at once into one. You’d be hard-pressed to pick two and succeed.[5]
[5] And now I’m including actual review material in the footnotes? That’s not cool.

Beowulf (2007)

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MV5BMTUzMjM0MTc3MF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwNzU0ODMyMw@@._V1__SX1537_SY747_Things which I did not like about Beowulf: the way that either the 3D glasses directly or my regular glasses compressed beneath them were pushing against my sinuses so hard that occasional tears would stream down my face, and also the way that this gave me a nearly blinding headache by the end of the movie. I also wasn’t a giant fan of the times when coins or rocks or other small objects would fly out of the screen at me; the closer they got, the more out of focus and obviously fake they looked.

Things which I did like about Beowulf: practically everything else. I expected it to be gorgeous and awesome, and it pretty well was, what with the strides in depth of field they’ve made over the past few years. The screen really does look like it’s there in front of you spread out with the same depth as though you were in the front row at Beowulf: The Play, with the added bonus that the larger objects sometimes stick out over the audience instead of staying on the stage. The people looked… well, pretty fake at first, but mostly not too fake towards the end, as though my brain just took an hour or so to accept them. (Oddly, Grendel never looked the least bit fake.) The acting was often over the top, but look at the source material! And it had a good bit of subtlety and skill in it when needed.

So, a long time ago, like in the 4 digits range of years ago, someone wrote down a poem. In it, a warrior called Beowulf came to Denmark to kill a monster that was bothering everyone there. Later, he killed its mother, because of how she was unhappy about her son having been killed. Much later still as a king, he killed a dragon, but died doing so. That’s basically the entire story, as far as it goes. The only things particularly notable about it are that the stories are padded out to extreme length, partly with battle details but mostly with braggadocio on the behalf of the protagonist, and that it is the first piece of literature written in English. (Where first equals oldest in existence, at least that we’ve found yet. But since English doesn’t greatly predate the poem, it’s a fairly easy claim to make.) All of which adds up to a story with eye candy that has clearly been leveraged to great effect, but not much else going for it, right? Right.

Except, wrong! 10th century pre-British people understood spectacle[1], make no mistake. But they did not particularly understand story structure, probably because mostly what people wanted out of their story-telling was to be amused or excited, and you don’t really need themes or foreshadowing or alliteration (well, it was a performed piece; probably alliteration was fine, but they for sure frowned on fucking foreshadowing) to accomplish these goals. With our rather more sophisticated modern tastes[1], we of course hope for a little bit more to tie everything together. And with Neil Gaiman in the script credits, I can’t really act surprised that we got it. My point is, there was a lot more movie there than I expected from the trailers. Comedy[2], pathos, consequence and regret, all in addition to completely acceptable spectacle. I can dig it.

I did say I liked practically everything else. In the interests of full disclosure, one more thing bugged me. Late in the film, there’s a damsel-in-distress scene. I’m not automatically opposed to these on principle, but it simultaneously served no plot function and required no masculine intervention to solve, and yet I immediately knew that they were going to need the big strong man to come save them and had to roll my eyes. To those who will complain that modern feminism postdates the story of Beowulf, and thus making a point of the girls saving themselves would have been a little bit grating and out of place: I agree completely! The scene served no purpose at all and should have been removed entirely, is all I’m saying.

[1] By which I mean, check out the rack on Grendel’s mom!
[2] Clever scripting, sure, but also pretty decent physical comedy. Beowulf runs around naked, but the goods are always artfully concealed by random candlesticks or severed arms or things. Which is only a little funny by itself and has been done before, except that the 3D thing makes it seem as though if you crane your neck just right, stupid Wiglaf will no longer be blocking your view. (Trust me, the girl in the seat next to me was trying.)

Creature from the Black Lagoon

And herein lies the beauty of the double feature. Two movies in a row. The thing is, I really, really enjoy the cinematic experience. It’s like a double-header to baseball fanatics. (Although I’m not one, I certainly like those too.) Unless baseball people think that double-headers are somehow impure? Well, if they do: whatev. It’s just, there I’ll be, watching the credits go by, when suddenly I don’t have to leave and go home, because, another movie! It’s possible I’ve explained this sufficiently, though.

Creature from the Black Lagoon is about this, well, this creature, right? It lives along the Amazon, at a place that the natives call the Black Lagoon, for reasons that are not entirely clear to me. Black and white film makes some things non-obvious, water color among them. But I don’t remember any of the characters discussing anything being all that black. Anyhow, this so-called creature is kind of an amphibious fishman, who is among other things a perfect segue for the whole evolution discussion. It is amusing to me that the film so casually asserts that God created everything via evolution, yet it is so hard fifty years later to find people willing to take a look at that compromise position.

Besides evolution, though, this movie was about a lot of things. Underwater photography, for one. If you removed the underwater shots that served no other purpose than as a tech demo? Movie over in under an hour. It’s like Star Trek: the Motion Picture without the 45 minutes of “look at the cool new Enterprise model”. For another… well, it wasn’t about this, but it was certainly a permeating undercurrent to the whole thing. Natives? Completely irrelevant. The important thing is to work that paleontology and retrieve the creature-skeleton (and later, of course, the live specimen instead) in order to prove that it existed and make us all rich and/or famous. I mean, until the white people are in danger. Then it’s time to stop this tomfoolery and save ourselves. I know it was a different time, but I really am amazed/amused that nobody on the writing staff seemed to notice how blatantly dismissive of the natives they were being. Oh, and the paleontology? Maybe they were this careless back then, but I doubt it. The techniques were completely laughable, and I am very much an amateur on this topic.

But what it was really about was the relationship between the creature and the girl. The completely hot, thank you for going swimming and I wish you weren’t in your 80s right now girl, I’d like to add. She was thoroughly yum, and even moreso in her explorer shorts than in the bathing suit, if you can believe it. Which would be beside the point, really, except for the part where the creature is a stand-in for every teenage boy in America. Two goals: 1) get the girl, and then take her back to your aquatic underground lair where you’ll, well, okay, you don’t exactly know what it is you want to do, but boy do you ever want to do it, and 2) kill anyone that gets in the way of goal one, because that testosterone is on the upsurge just now, if you know what I mean.

I guess my point is, once the underwater scenes got old, it was the inferior of the two films due to being not quite as deep of theme. But then again, a good slice of cheesecake goes a long way. Also: multiple gratuitous spear gun shots, off the screen and right into your face! Yay, 3-D.

It Came from Outer Space

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Just nearly a week ago, I made a run down to Austin to catch a, well, a science fiction double feature. No, really. And in 3-D! It had been a while since I’d watched red-blue 3-D, as opposed to the stuff they have at IMAX these days with the cross-stitched goggle lenses. It reminds me of nothing so much as those dioramas that you’ll get at some natural history museums, with all kinds of animals and rocks in the foreground, and a painted background. But mostly, it was eye-poppingly 3-D, which was pretty cool. I speculate that it works a lot better in black and white than it does in color, although I’d need something recent to compare with know for sure.

My point is, good or bad, I’ve already gotten my money’s worth out of these movies. I bet this is how it was in the early days of 3-D at the real-life cinema, too. Conveniently, It Came from Outer Space is a pretty good film in its own right. Everyone will talk about Cold War paranoia, and maybe there’s something to it, but I think that’s entirely too narrow of a reading. The fact is, the outsider has always terrified us as a species, and it probably always will. Sure, we’re thinking of Muslim extremists these days instead of Russian commies, but it’s all the same thing, and it will be in another fifty years too. Although, perhaps with literal aliens.

So, there’s this meteor, right? Well, no, it’s really a spaceship, but try convincing anyone else in town of that when you’re just an amateur astronomer that hasn’t a lick of credibility. Then, before you know it, some Vorlon-looking aliens have started kidnapping people and then posing as them and buying up all kinds of metals and electronic parts. And now that you finally have enough evidence to convince the sheriff, oops, they’ve got your girlfriend. Now that otherwise highly useful posse he is itching to use, it’ll just get your girlfriend killed. (And quite possibly the Professor, for that matter, whose name turns out to be George.) But it’s okay, because they only want to go home and don’t mean us any harm, it’s just they’re scared that we’ll lash out and kill them for the crime of being different. …or is it all a trick, and they mean to wipe us off the face of the galaxy?

On the one hand, I get a little bit annoyed at sci-fi film after film in the ’50s and ’60s telling me that humans are paranoid freaks who’ll destroy anything they don’t understand or fear that they can’t control. Even though they’ve developed space travel, surely there must be some aliens out there who are paranoid freaks in their own rights rather than benevolent overlords who just want to teach us a lesson and then be on their way. But on the other hand, the scene where the sheriff crushes the (obviously fake, not even minimally frightening) spider under his foot in demonstration of what he’d do to those aliens just for the sin of alienness? It touches me, man, deep in my soul. So, y’know, maybe no aliens for me.

Magnificent Desolation: Walking on the Moon 3D

Today was supposed to be disc golf day, but then Eric’s kid was sick and the weather was drizzly. Not to worry, we found a kid-watcher and the weather turned into a downright beautiful 60s extravaganza, so that part worked out okay, except for where I played really badly. But that’s not the point. The point is how, in the meantime, we headed off to the IMAX to see the Tom Hanks produced Magnificent Desolation, which is all about taking a bunch of astronaut quotes and voicing them with famous actors (including, obviously, Morgan Freeman) while Tom Hanks narrates and the astronauts keep kicking moon dust right in your face!!!

No, seriously, it’s pretty cool. Lots of magnificent, if desolate, scenery to gaze upon. Plenty of 3D, even if a lot of it was screen with data superimposed over the moonscape. A sidebar on how the landings themselves were faked. An examination of how they might have dealt with an emergency situation if they had one. (They did not; everything was pretty much blowjobs and funnel cakes.) Glimpses of the future. But mostly, people walking around on the moon in 3D. Let’s face it. If you go for that at all, the visuals with a completely silent soundtrack would have been sufficient to cover the price of admission.