Another levitation? Oh boy!

Tuesday, August 23, 2005

No, I don't have the Aliun video...

Monday, August 22, 2005

Only a million bucks? WOTW WOW!

Hollywood production budgets make me want to yack. No, I'm not jealous; I simply don't believe that Steven Spielberg needed 128 million to make War of the Worlds screenworthy... and here's David Latt with a measly million dollars to prove it. His version of WOTW was actually enjoyable, well-acted and had pretty nifty CG effects too. But what was most amazing was that he did it all for a tiny percentage of what Tom Cruise alone took home for the Spielberg blockbuster.

Does anyone need that much money to make a decent movie? No way, unless they're extremely sloppy, have overpaid actors, no imagination and way-too-complicated CG development equipment and staff. But we're talking Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Paramount Pictures here! They're no dummies at this art, right? Let's take a look.

1. Sets. David Latt did a wonderful job of scouting locations. For example: if you need a ruined building that looks like some Martian war-machines just blew it to shiznit, you can build one for lots of money, do a CG green-screen-scene or do like Latt did: go find a demolition site and get permission to film. It looks great and authentic as hell because that's exactly what it would look like!

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow had no sets at all! The entire thing was green-screened. Total cost? 70 million. Mere peanuts... hahaha!

2. Matte Shots. When one does need a set that doesn't exist, one uses a matte shot in which an imaginary artwork background is blended with a real foreground which contains the actors. It isn't rocket science and it doesn't require a lot of expensive equipment. From what I saw in the background of Latt's studio, it looked like they had a couple of laptops. I wouldn't doubt it.

3. CG Graphics. Keep them to the minimum necessary to maintain suspense but when they do appear, let the audience get a good look at them in action. The Asylum version doesn't try to fight the "tripods can't walk" problem: the Martian machines are given six legs. Problem solved. Do they look like giant bugs? Yes, but scary 60-foot-tall bugs with heat rays. They show up just enough to keep everyone screaming and in one scene, very unexpectedly. It worked for me.

The heat ray victims die the best deaths of any of the four versions extant including Spielberg's who simply vaporized them (but not their clothes... huh?) In Latt's version, the victims are burned to skeletons which crash to the ground as they are running. Hines used skeletons too but his skeletons flopped around writhing on the ground. Skeletons don't flop and writhe so the Pendragon version just looked silly.

The acting was great. The story rewrite was well-done (except that there is no explanation of why the creatures all died; you're expected to know the story.) Finally, this DVD actually had outtakes and deleted scenes! That means that Latt did some editing. There's a trick that Timothy Hines should have learned.

posted by C. J.  # 11:20 AM

Monday, August 01, 2005

Pendragon's "War of the Worst"

I was really excited to see Timothy Hines's entry in the "war of The Wars of the Worlds" as I'm one of those guys who cheers the underdog. I thought it was wonderful to see a producer with a 20-million dollar budget take on Steven Spielberg and his 128-million dollar steamroller and was further enticed by the cover blurb:

Now for the first time ever, the true adaptation of the classic novel hits the screen with devastating effect!

How devastating was soon to be apparent.

Granted, I made only one mistake. No, buying it wasn't a mistake; you have to own a DVD to view it. Nor was watching it a mistake; you have to watch a movie to comment on it. My mistake was inviting my wife and my brother-in-law to watch it with me. I realized this two hours into its three-hour running time as I was gnashing my teeth and rending my garments when my wife's head spontaneously combusted and my brother-in-law gouged out his eyes with a prune-spoon. Devastation was all around us.

To say that we were disappointed would be like saying that the Great Chicago Fire was "annoying." The actors attempted to outdo one another in a scenery-chewing competition, the eventual winner being John Kaufman as "The Curate" who chewed not only scenery but endless quantities of bread, all the while screaming that he was starving while washing it down with bottle after bottle of wine. I can hear Timothy Hines patiently explaining that "he is a clergyman...bread...wine...it's symbolic...get it?" Yes, I got it after the first mouthful. An hour later, when Kaufman was stuffed with more bread than a Butterball Turkey and still craving more, even with the protagonist punching him unmercifully and screaming "You've had enough bread!" I was considering swearing off the stuff for life.

But the special effects? Let's be kind and only tiptoe through that mess. Back in the 1930's and '40's, rear-projection screens were all the rage for moving vehicle scenes and, if you think back, they actually worked when the perspective of the foreground motion was calculated to the correct ratio of the background motion. Hines had none of that: he used green screen shots in which the actors were matted in against the moving background, leaving wide black outlines around their faces and making the entire shot look oh-so-phony. As for motion ratio, sometimes the background was moving as fast as the carriage and sometimes not at all! Hines just didn't care.

The Martian Tripods? Oh, they were tripods all right. I waited to see how correct the "walking" appeared but Hines foxed us there as well. Motion pictures today are shot at 24 frames per second to account for the advent of sound, but visual retention is such that the old 18 fps silent movies still looked pretty good. When adding CG graphics to a 24 fps movie, you want to render 24 frames per second...unless you're on a tight budget like Hines. Then you start cheaping out by cutting down on the fps count. Hines mixed 18 fps, 12 fps and a bunch of scenes that I swear were 4 fps together so that the Martian Tripods literally galloped across the screen in two strides. Forget leg motion; you barely had time to realize they were there at all! Even the classic "probe scene" that George Pal and Steven Spielberg did so well was a herky-jerky mess that reeked of amateurism and bogusness.

This will be a wonderful addition to my collection of "drunken Halloween party" movies, right up there with Leslie Nielsen in "The Creature Wasn't Nice." It's long enough to allow for the consumption of inordinate amounts of alcohol, bad enough to bring wisecracks, ad-libs and jeers from the audience and inspiring in its "Boy, I wish that I had been in the editing room" potential for improvement. I'd have started by cutting an hour-and-a-half from the running time. Unfortunately, I wasn't there.

posted by C. J.  # 12:40 PM