Reviews of District 9, Ponyo and Inglorious Basterds.

Mega movie weekend for me.

District 9

I didn’t hear about Niel Blompkamp until Peter Jackson had presented him as his choice to direct the now likely dead Halo movie. Shortly after hearing that I watched a couple of his self produced shorts. The one that struck me was “Tempbot”. It was a small low busget short that had a simple premise. What if an a everyday office was given a very capable robot as a temp. Even on his minor budget back then the SFX we terrific. The short itself is a touching, funnny and sad film that made me instantly excited to see what him and Peter Jackson could do with the Halo license.

Sadly Universal refused to front 100 mil upfront for a picture helmed by a first time full length feature director. Two weeks ago Universal learned their lesson. District 9 is one of the finest pure sci-fi movies I’ve ever seen. For the sake of your first viewing I have to say I will not divulge the plot or story details because the marketing was actually perfect for once. All you need to know is that in the world of the movie aliens do exist and they have landed in Johannesburg, South Africa. That’s it. The trailer shows you some amazing FX work with an incredible mother ship hovering over the city. One other slight spoiler that may help some of you is that the movie starts off as a documentary about a “incident” related to the current situation with the aliens. gradually the film shifts in to a third person omniscient perspective as a normal narrative driven film. For some it was a shocking chnage and deterred them but for me it was natural and teh confusion lasted seconds.

Since I’m not spoiling any plot points I will say what to expect. Expect an amazing lead performance from an actor we’ve never seen before and special effects that are jaw dropping nearly impossible to spot and just completely immersive. The budget of this movie was 30 million dollars. For 30 mil dollars it looks as good as a 200 mil. dollar picture. Just a terrific movie and a spectacular way to start Blompkamp’s film career. 5 doctored alien sex pictures out of 5

Ponyo

Ponyo is master film maker Hayao Miyazaki’s latest film. It centers on a young Goldfish named “Broomhilda.” Broomhilda is the eldest of a whole school of goldfish fathered by a formerly human wizard and the goddess of the sea. At the start of the film “broomhilda” runs away from her father to see more of the sea. After she has a run in with a fishing trawler she is found by a young boy named Saske. Saske names her Ponyo and a friendship is instantly born.

Ponyo is  film in which Miyazaki makes a a signature fairytale in today’s modern world. Set in a small Japanese town which is dominated by the sea trade Saske is the son of a senior care giver and a captain of a coastal guard ship. After he meets Ponyo she is forever changed and falls in love with Saske and the human world in general. Of course Ponyo’s father does not approve(he also generally hates Humans even though he used to be one).

The story is simple but filled with the touching interactions between Saske and Ponyo. This in tune with almost entirely 2d animation that drops your jaw and touches your heart and brings another masterpiece.

If there was a flaw to find I’d say it was the voice casting of the youngest Efron brother as the voice of Saske. Saske is the main lead and he is the one who has the most lines. He provides most of the needed dialogue and frankly the voice used seems terribly forced and blatantly read off a page. Disney’s lone stipulation for bring Miyazaki films to the US is that the theatrical runs use English voice work done by Disney. in the past they have been remarkably good and even rivaled the Miyazaki overseen Japanese dubs. Miyazaki has even commented that Jean Reno’s voicework made the English dubbing of Porco Russo a better movie. What’s sad about the poor voicework of Saske is that once again Disney delivers a very solid voice cast other wise. Tina Fey was so touching and enjoyable as Saske’s mother that I actually got a crush on her as the movie progressed. Liam Neeson also delivers solid work as Ponyo’s father giving some great levity, seriousness and some awkward scientist like tendencies. I await the blu-ray to hear the japanese dub and see how that plays out.

Any Miyazaki fan must see Ponyo. 4 pieces of ham out of 5

Inglorious Basterds

Inglorious Basterds is a hell of a film. I mean that in a good and bad way. Tarantino had been working on this movie for years and years. During his 7 year break from film making Tarantino spent 3 years writing Kill Bill and all 7 writing Inglorious Basterds. What he delivered was a very large and complicated meal that is very filling and indeed a signature piece. The film starts off with a small french family living under German rule during the Nazi occupation. A lone family man is running a milk farm with his 3 daughters. Very soon a regiment of Nazi SS troops arrive along with a Captian Landa. Landa is the movies main antagonist, other than Hitler. Landa is this film’s “Bill” and in a simple way of describing him, imagine Columbo if he lived in 1942 and was working for Hitler and was in charge of finding all the jews in France. We get several scenes throughout the movie of Landa smelling out our character’s true intentions all while providing the most charming but false veneer that only Columbo fans could spot.

Landa isn’t the main focus of the film though, in fact Tarantino focuses on several storylines only a couple of them actually dealing with the famed Basterds. Watching the movie is like watching the climax of Resivour dogs several times over. the majority of the action in Inglorious Basterds is quick brutal and dirty the build up however is long slow and very methodical. You see how every factor of the violence builds and builds until you actually understand how everything that happens in the 10 seconds of gunfire actually came to pass.

The film is very much another homage to exploitation movies and constantly switches up styles of music, editing and perspective. Tarantino actually utilizes a lot of the style choices from Kill bill to achieve a quasi 70′s style to a strangely realistic recreation of 1942 France.

My problem with the film are that Tarantino did seem to officially enjoy his dialogue a bit too much. Again I loved every scene but the oppressive tension  became really exhausting as the f ilm progressed. As I said the film uses the slow build to quick action many times and the tension seems to multiply as it goes but we so rarely got a reprieve from it. Towards the end of the film Landa interrogates a charecter and we know the jig is up we know Landa has that person in his sights and there seems to be no saving her. Tthe scene still takes it’s time to actually deliver that satisfaction of knowing what’s going to happen. This may have been intentional on Tarantino’s part to really make us feel indoctrinated and overruled by the Germans but it became very daunting to continue in this very long film. BTW Jackie Brown is my favorite Tarantino movie and it’s among his longest movies. I do in fact think this was intentional since Tarantino utilized the Chapter layout that he used in the Kill bill films. Sort of like each chapter is a separate novella and they all work together.

My problems with pacing a greatly over shadowed by Tarantino’s signature dialogue and wit. Each scene has lines and words so memorable and awesome that they are immediately etched into your brain. Violence is a hallmark of Tarantino’s vision, this movie doesn’t disappoint. There’s only a few scattered moments of florish on the violent scene’s this time which makes them all more brutal.

4 Nazi scars out of 5.

I’ve come back and I have stories!

Long hiatus, I know, but really nothing much was going on. Lots of magic being played but writing it up was never as fun as doing it. I’ll likely still do a warp up of bigger events like pre-releases and such but nothing all that big to report of the CCG front.

What I did do this weekend is finally shoot “Chronofluffle”. I originally conceived it 6 months ago and all in all it only took 2.5 hours to shoot. This was my first fully concieved project that I’ve taken on since high school and even then it was for class and I alreadyh had a pasic set of available equipment and shooting locations.

For this project I needed a script, shooting location, cameras props and actors. That last bit was the more mysterious thing to me. Since I’ve usually just directed myself in my music videos. The main point of project was to dive headfirst into making films and doing productions since being knowledgable about real world film making would help me when I started attending Columbia.

So the script didn’t take a very long time to write. I had the premise but was sketchy on the ending for a week or so. The bulk of the script was written on a Saturday night. My friend Anthony at my side making suggestions and being available for me to bounce ideas off of. I’m not great at writing regular stories and dialogue can be even harder for me. What i needed for the script was a a argument that was funny and over the top. The idea being that it would be humorous until the sci-fi stuff shows up later.

After the script I needed to line up a shooting location. My Aunt offered up her house but ultimately my aunt has a really nice modern house with lots of personal flourishes. I really like the house but the story took place ins a small house/apartment with two guys eating breakfast. It just wouldn’t look right in any location in my Aunt’s house. So ultimately I went with my friend Steve’s house. Which is much more fitting to the story.

Next was equipment, I own a Canon camcorder, it’s decent for a low end consumer camera but not that great to shoot with. Luckily a new acquaintance I met through Anthony owned a pro-level canon- camera. So that problem solved itself relatively easily though arranging a good time to pick up the camera proved tricky.

Actors, are people I respect. I’ve acted in the past and finding people to be actors who aren’t can be tough. If you don’t have the will to act then doing a production of any kind can be really stressful and annoying. Originally my two cast members were Anthony and Chris. Two good friends, but the truth was as much as they wanted to do it no one was getting paid so I knew I was at their mercy. Both Chris and Anthony signed on early but as time wnet on I heard less and less from Anthony do to things going on in both our lives. After I set the date of August 15th as our shooting day. I told both Chris and Anthony at the same time. Both reported that it should be fine. Though I heard Anthony’s confirmation via Chris. I actually didn’t speak to Anthony(despite trying to contact him periodically throughout the weeks) til a week and a half ago when he apologetically informed me that he hadn’t checked his schedule til then and would be out of town on the 15th. I had kept that as a possiblity luckily and was able to get teh location owner Steve as a replacement. Stevie is also a good friend and he seemed keen on helping me out.

So last week, Steve, Chris and I met up and did a rehearsal. Rehearsing a movie is indeed necessary for most productions. It usually occurs months ahead of a movie. It helps the actors learn their characters and also learn how to work off of their co-stars. A director can also learn how well stars will work together and even start working on how to frame shots and block scenes. Rehearsing made sense for me since neither of my actors had acted much and frankly I needed to know how well my dialogue worked. I wasn’t disappointed with either my script or my actors work on their read throughs. Both Steve and Chris were able to evoke their characters quite well. However I learned that the size of Steve’s kitchen would prove hard to do proper two-shots. Ultimatley I found a way via putting the camera on Steve’s stove.

The actual shooting day was overall smooth. I woke up at 7 am thinking we were starting to shoot at 8. Though I quickly found out thanks to a wake up call I made to chris that we were starting at 9. I pick up Chris at 8:55 and he says Anthony wants to hang out and shoot “DVD extras”. I figured an extra set of hands would help. So we picked him up and arrived at steve’s at 10:05. The shoot only took 2.5 hours. Neitehr Chris or Steve really knew their lines but again I didn’t really expect it of them so we just shot around it and I made sure they had some freedom on how the lines were read. plus the majority fo my shots were solo shots so they could switch off on script reading.

Now I have to edit it and then record teh Radio background noises(which are very key to the story). As well as a bit of music for the end.

Overall smooth production so far. Look for teh finished short soon.

I’m on twitter now….

I hate myself for it but hey at least now I know what Jon Lovitz is up to. Oh yeah my username is logicalnoise.