From Hamilton to Toronto to 2006 and Back
Jan. 2nd, 2006 01:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nfotxnI spent New Years in Toronto hanging with various friends both local, formerly local and visiting. David and Mark's New Years Eve party was had all the right proportions of intimacy and drunk stupidity that I dig when cutting loose.
Woke up and went to The Green Room for extra-late New Years Day lunch with the usual suspects as well as Scott and Kris whom were visiting for the holidays. It was super nice to see them and as with all the good people I know living in other places wish they lived here so we could bore each other and not call on weekends. After a late hipster lunch in an alley we then proceeded to zombie march through the city and slush accomplishing very little before settling on a movie. Being a holiday the other option of urban entertainment, shopping, was in short supply.
Unfortunately the movie we settled on was King Kong. In which director Peter Jackson starts off wonderfully then lands on an island primarily designed as a show case for an endless parade of beautifully executed and rendered special effects. And I do mean endless. A bladder busting, plot crucifying big huge everything island. Like an exhibit from the Creationism Museum where apes fight dinosaurs and human sized bugs attack not once but three times. We also have giant blood sucking bats which, in a pinch, can be used to hitch a ride on and descend from similarly giant cliffs.
Have I got jaded about special effects? Definitely. We've all just seen too many to really ever be incredibly impressed again. What I crave is effective drama, characters and story. Basically I should have seen Brokeback Mountain or something.
Thing is King Kong is a good movie. The characters are all generally well acted and written, with the exception of my personal inability to take anything Jack Black says with even a shred of sincerity. I absolutely love the magically real 1930s New York City. The story is a rather good interpretation of the original except for this plateaux on The Island of Boring Special Effects. Which if edited carefully could reduce the movie from a butt-numbing 187 minutes and still hit all the high points. For instance the Kong vs. T. Rex scene was so desperately boring and obviously auxiliary to any important story development. I found myself thinking about my laundry and how much I hated Jurassic Park for similar reasons.
So that was this evening. Back tracking briefly was OMG Bear Mary Night at O'Grady's, which was hopping despite the suddenly unsavoury turn of weather. I met various other Livejournalers whom I will not attempt to name check for fear of making a mistake or omission despite probably being able to get it right.
Woke up and went to The Green Room for extra-late New Years Day lunch with the usual suspects as well as Scott and Kris whom were visiting for the holidays. It was super nice to see them and as with all the good people I know living in other places wish they lived here so we could bore each other and not call on weekends. After a late hipster lunch in an alley we then proceeded to zombie march through the city and slush accomplishing very little before settling on a movie. Being a holiday the other option of urban entertainment, shopping, was in short supply.
Unfortunately the movie we settled on was King Kong. In which director Peter Jackson starts off wonderfully then lands on an island primarily designed as a show case for an endless parade of beautifully executed and rendered special effects. And I do mean endless. A bladder busting, plot crucifying big huge everything island. Like an exhibit from the Creationism Museum where apes fight dinosaurs and human sized bugs attack not once but three times. We also have giant blood sucking bats which, in a pinch, can be used to hitch a ride on and descend from similarly giant cliffs.
Have I got jaded about special effects? Definitely. We've all just seen too many to really ever be incredibly impressed again. What I crave is effective drama, characters and story. Basically I should have seen Brokeback Mountain or something.
Thing is King Kong is a good movie. The characters are all generally well acted and written, with the exception of my personal inability to take anything Jack Black says with even a shred of sincerity. I absolutely love the magically real 1930s New York City. The story is a rather good interpretation of the original except for this plateaux on The Island of Boring Special Effects. Which if edited carefully could reduce the movie from a butt-numbing 187 minutes and still hit all the high points. For instance the Kong vs. T. Rex scene was so desperately boring and obviously auxiliary to any important story development. I found myself thinking about my laundry and how much I hated Jurassic Park for similar reasons.
So that was this evening. Back tracking briefly was OMG Bear Mary Night at O'Grady's, which was hopping despite the suddenly unsavoury turn of weather. I met various other Livejournalers whom I will not attempt to name check for fear of making a mistake or omission despite probably being able to get it right.
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no subject
Date: 2006-01-02 07:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-02 07:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-02 07:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-02 08:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-02 10:35 pm (UTC)I love how there's SO MUCH detail on stuff you couldn't care less about, and then, NO EXPLANATION as to how they got Kong on the ship, especially when they were dumping furniture to make the boat lighter so they could get home (*without* the gorilla).
Hmmm
Date: 2006-01-03 04:14 pm (UTC)Haven't seen it yet.
Date: 2006-01-03 04:13 pm (UTC)As for Jurassic Park, I still think it (and T2) are the last movies to make CG effects feel *real*. I still remembering that Holy Shit feeling I got when I first saw the first dinosaur of the movie. That upward panning shot of the brachiosaur rearing onto it's hind legs to chew some leaves. While JP was flawed in that the chase scenes of the movie were just too damn long, you can't fault the realism. I think the fact was that they used more conventional, traditional camera techniques and animation approaches (using stop-motion animators to do the gross animations and letting the computer geeks do the modelling and detail work).
Every CG movie since then has made it feel like watching a cartoon. Only the first Matrix broke the mold, and that was accomplished through the use of live, human models and heavy camera tricking rather than full CG puppets. Star Wars was the movie that set a new landmark - the first CG-driven movie to feel like a cartoon even though half the characters were played by humans.