...more recent posts
Check out my sketches based on the movie Blade 2 here. Caution: not for the squeamish. Also, a capsule review.
frontline: the monster that ate hollywood
AI Nailed
Justine Elias, in the Village Voice's 2001 Films in Review:
This is the image in A.I. that to me sums up the team of Spielberg and Kubrick: The fugitive mechas escape to Smut Island or whatever it's called, which looks like the Food Court at a 1970s shopping mall, and Gigolo Joe, the Kubrick figure, is happily pointing out the sights—"Here's where I ply my sleazily robotic trade!"—which would be totally perverted if the sex talk weren't sailing right over the head of little RoboBoy, Steven, who's going, "My mommy told me to look for the Blue Fairy! I love my mommy!"
Entertainment Industry Goober of the Month: John Wells
From an article in Slate about the use of letterboxing by mainstream TV shows:
ER producer John Wells, looking for ways to bring buzz back to his medical drama, [adopted a] 16:9 [screen ratio] at the start of the 2000-2001 season. As Wells explained it to the Akron Beacon Journal: "We noticed that a large number of commercials were being broadcast in letterbox form. We called the advertising department and asked why ... and they said, 'Well, because it looks classier.' Well, we've got a classy project. And I think that, increasingly, you want to be able to distinguish your show in an ever more cluttered marketplace as something that stands out."
Just added to my post on Dave Kehr's New York Times article on Rintaro's Metropolis (currently playing in area movie theatres):
"Kehr finds the attempt in Metropolis to integrate hand-drawn figures with artificial-looking, Tron-like computer graphics to be awkward--and he's right, it looks terrible--but then says more conventional anime has the same clumsy disconnect between foreground and background, which just isn't true. Hand-drawn figures and hand-painted backgrounds work well together, it's only when the animators cut into the frame to show off all the cool wireframe stuff they can do that problems crop up. Computers may be useful for generating continuity drawings in conventional-looking animation, but whenever the programming calls attention to itself, as it does in Metropolis or even a smaller-scale project like Richard Linklater's insufferable Waking Life, it's distracting."