This is extremely brilliant. Live sketch comedy? Who knew? I think it could be a hit.
In other news, I went to see Beowulf in 3D at the imax tonight. Sure, it was $14, but it was pretty dang stunning. It pulled no punches (actually, it pulled Angelina Jolie’s cgi nipples. Wait, “pulled [her] nipples” makes it sound like they actually pulled on…I mean, her nipples weren’t in the movie.), and it was honestly good to see something that was stylistically similar to Shrek have some extremely overt sexual overtones.
What follows is a discussion on “suspension of disbelief” in film.
I’m not entirely sure if the “motion capture” cgi accomplished anything in terms of adding to the film, except for the idea that entire landscapes can be facsimilated more easily than they could in live action. But, if Lord of the Rings has taught us anything, it’s that enormous live action fantasy epics are possible. The thing about film is that suspension of disbelief is not nearly as required as it is on stage, or in graphic media, or even the written word. On film, what you see is what you get, and since your mind does not need to fill things in (thereby, since the origin of the image comes from within the beholder, the beholder is more likely to believe it), what appears on film needs to be believable. Now, this can be circumvented in animated film by having something realistic (a princess, for instance) next to something fantastic, yet stylistically congruent (a dragon). This all changed with Jurassic Park putting live action on screen with cgi dinosaurs. The use of dinosaurs as the subject of the cgi made the process much easier to digest, since they weren’t human. CGI humans are still not perfect, and therefore somewhat distracting. In The Matrix: Reloaded you could tell in the fight between Neo and the 100 Agent Smiths when it stopped being Keanu and started being cgi Keanu. And it was distracting. And with Beowulf, where all of the characters are cgi, it’s hard to not think about that. I feel that a film like A Scanner Darkly utilized “rotoscoping” to make the trippy drug-addled hallucinations more believable, and it worked well. I’m just having trouble trying to figure out why Robert Zemeckis made the decision.
I haven’t had a ciggy in a week.
Way to not smoke! Almost all my co-workers are smokers, and it’s gross. And then they try to cover it up with French hor’s baths, and that’s gross too.