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District 9 (review)

August 31, 09 //
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District 9

There’s a scene in Dis­trict 9 when the main char­ac­ter, after endur­ing a lot of pain and humil­i­a­tion, has to make the choice of either run­ning into bat­tle guns ablaze or retreat. He chooses the lat­ter know­ing full well that his actions are dri­ven by fear and selfishness.

Dis­trict 9 or “D9” is many things all rolled up into a hard to describe pack­age. Among them it’s a sci-fi adven­ture with all the ele­ments you’d expect like blaster guns and an enor­mous space­ship. It’s also an unre­lent­ing social com­men­tary and an action-packed romp that refuses to let down its guard.

The effects and cin­e­matog­ra­phy com­pli­ment each other quite well and at times it’s hard to dis­tin­guish between the two. That said, they are not of the slick vari­ety that other films con­vey, but the grimy tex­ture is beau­ti­ful and per­fect for the por­trayal of a enslaved race of aliens liv­ing in South African slums.

It’s an unfor­giv­ing, rav­ished and self­ish envi­ron­ment, leav­ing barely any room for sur­vival. It’s a film that is best expe­ri­enced with­out dig­ging for holes in the plot (of which they are a few) or mak­ing assump­tions deal­ing with the char­ac­ter por­trayal or progression.

I enjoyed it because it didn’t reveal too much of itself and yet what it did expose was raw (human and alien) emo­tion, flaws in the human fab­ric and a detached feel­ing of human­ity, or at least I felt detached at times.

★★★★★

Howard the Duck

July 8, 09 //
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Howard the DuckGeorge Lucas has cre­ated some won­der­ful movies and is unde­ni­ably a vision­ary film­maker, story-teller and influ­ence in the film indus­try. Recently, evi­dence of this has sur­faced in the form of a PDF out­lin­ing the “Raiders” story con­fer­ence.

He’s also respon­si­ble for some real stinkers. Movie stink that could quickly foul a room full of under­de­vel­oped daisies and sel­dom come up in con­ver­sa­tion for fear of one being exiled or worse, thrown to a bunch of rav­en­ous movie crit­ics. Now I’m begin­ning to feel nos­tal­gic for the car­toon, The Critic, but anyways…

Howard the Duck is per­haps the worst movie on George’s resume (yes, fouler than even Clone Wars), failed mis­er­ably at the box office and yet it retains a charm all its own. There are even days when the movie strangely hov­ers around in my thoughts from time to time.

If this were VH1’s Behind the Music, this is the part when the guy would say.. “And now, the story behind the story.”

It all started with some comics

From Wikipedia:

[Howard the Duck] first appeared in Adven­ture into Fear #19 (Dec. 1973) and sev­eral sub­se­quent series have chron­i­cled the mis­ad­ven­tures of the ill-tempered, anthro­po­mor­phic, “funny ani­mal” trapped on human-dominated Earth. Howard’s adven­tures are gen­er­ally social satires, and also often par­o­dies of genre fic­tion with a meta-fictional aware­ness of the medium. [Wikipedia]

If you were to pick up a Howard comic dur­ing this time you’d notice very lit­tle dif­fer­ence between him and Don­ald Duck. This was inten­tional on the part of its cre­ators but for obvi­ous rea­sons wasn’t car­ried over in the movie.

Quack, Quack!

The movie adap­ta­tion, released in 1986, retained some of the traits from the comic in the form of its star, Howard, who was still ill-tempered and anthro­po­mor­phic. Instead of doing an ani­mated fea­ture, which would’ve been an ideal pre­sen­ta­tion, the film was instead live-action and the duck would be part ani­ma­tronic pup­pet, part diminu­tive actor.

It starred a very young Lea Thomp­son and Tim Rob­bins. Tim Rob­bins, up until this point (with Top Gun’s release loom­ing) had been known for bit roles in TV and film. Lea Thomp­son was (and will prob­a­bly always be) known as the Marty McFly’s mother Lor­raine in Back to the Future.

Together, they were sup­port­ing play­ers to their feath­ered star and despite the sub par script and kooky spe­cial effects, man­aged to give some­what con­vinc­ing per­for­mances. How­ever, there is some­thing to be said about the human/duck rela­tion­ship that is, to this day, uncom­fort­able to watch. I don’t think I was ever fully up to speed on the “birds, ducks and bees.”, but I digress.

Above all us, Howard the Duck, like The Dark Crys­tal, was a child­hood favorite of mine because it was some­thing I enjoyed watch­ing with my family.

It was a fan­tas­tic, awful, bewil­der­ing and grossly under­rated cult classic.

The Trailer

Addi­tional Reading:

The Mythology of Heroes

December 6, 06 //
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Heroes [stillframe]If you haven’t seen NBC’s Heroes, I’d sug­gest either Tivo’ing it or watch­ing it every Mon­day (9PM/EST). Next to Lost, it’s been one of the only shows in recent years that I’ve been so involved with — includ­ing hav­ing side con­ver­sa­tions with friends and fam­ily — and that’s due to a few fac­tors that make the show so engrossing.

Apart from the great act­ing, the writ­ing con­tin­ues to amaze me because the story is chock full of inter­est­ing twists, turns and free falls.

There are so many lay­ers and angles the writ­ers have cho­sen to explore and the story itself is rich in char­ac­ter explo­ration and inter­ac­tion. At it’s sur­face it seems like just a show about peo­ple with var­i­ous tal­ents and pow­ers, but if you look fur­ther you begin to unravel the puz­zle and mythol­ogy that is Heroes, which tran­scends the small screen in the form of an online comic and web blog.

Over the course of the first sea­son I’ve made some men­tal notes (mostly spoiler-free) and I’d like to share some of those with you. In turn, I invite you to share your own, as I know we all have our own thoughts and the­o­ries on where the story arch might lead and where it’ll con­tinue to go.

The­o­ries on Heroes

  • Bib­li­cal names used for some of the main char­ac­ters; Gabriel (arch angel), Mica, Eden and Peter.
  • Over­all story arch (so far) has a delib­er­ate sense of urgency and fore­shad­ow­ing: some plot points uncov­ered, ques­tions both answered and unanswered
  • Reminds me a bit of Steven King’s The Stand in that a group of peo­ple, who pre­vi­ously had no con­tact with each other, have come together for a greater purpose
  • The writ­ing is multi-faceted and intrigu­ing, much like Lost, and while it’s inten­tion­ally seri­al­ized it does seem more self-contained than Lost.
  • The char­ac­ters them­selves and their sto­ries are intrigu­ing because of the emo­tional state they share; urgency and for the most part a deep rooted nonac­cep­tance of their tal­ents, almost a resilient self-doubt.
  • Hiro (named appro­pri­ately) comes across as the glue hold­ing every­thing together. He seems to be the favorite for most view­ers and that’s because of his per­son­al­ity and will­ing­ness to work within the lim­i­ta­tions of his power.
  • Mr. Ben­nett (Claire’s father and code­named: HRG for Horned Rim Glasses) seems almost as if his align­ment is neu­tral. He’ll pro­tect those he cares for, but also obeys his supe­ri­ors’ wishes. The writ­ers have men­tioned that he is a but a cog in the big­ger wheel that is his employer and at the moment their true inten­tions and/or motives are still unclear
  • The Hait­ian, while mys­te­ri­ous and obey­ing of HRG’s com­mands, seems like he has his own motives beyond the scope of his employer


Now, what about your the­o­ries? If you have some, please share by com­ment­ing or send­ing me an email at erik(at)kartooner.com.

Budgeting Special Effects

November 28, 06 //
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Iron Man posterKCRW’s The Busi­ness hosted by Claude Brodesser-Akner is both a radio show and pod­cast deal­ing with the inner work­ings of the busi­ness of Hollywood.

Claude’s inter­views with direc­tors, screen­writ­ers, adver­tis­ing exec­u­tives and actors/actresses are often fas­ci­nat­ing, if not enlight­en­ing, espe­cially if you share an inter­est in how films are cre­ated like I do.

In his inter­view with actor/director Jon Favreau enti­tled “No Spe­cial Effects, It’s Really Direc­tor Jon Favreau”, Jon reveals his love/hate rela­tion­ship with CGI effects and why home brewed effects are still rel­e­vant and use­ful. His phi­los­o­phy is that while com­puter gen­er­ated imagery has its place (namely a tool­box of end­less pos­si­bil­ity) it can also cloud the visual aes­thetic of a movie.

While CGI has improved over the years, pro­vid­ing the back­bone for things like sci-fi vis­tas and mytho­log­i­cal crea­tures as well upping the ante on dis­as­ter sequences it’s also — in most cases — imme­di­ately rec­og­niz­able if it doesn’t blend in with live action.

Recently Favreau was cho­sen to direct the film adap­ta­tion of Iron Man, a task not to be taken lightly and even though the film itself has a much big­ger bud­get than his other films, he’s also made the deci­sion to bud­get the spe­cial effects. His rea­son­ing is two-fold; that the film’s bud­get is tar­geted at a spe­cific amount and to effec­tively blend CGI with live action with­out going overboard.

In all hon­esty, this is some­thing that I wish more direc­tors (includ­ing George Lucas) would come to terms with. Audi­ences are typ­i­cally over­whelmed with joy when a superb CGI sequence is pulled off but to echo Favreau’s thoughts, in most cases it’s eas­ily noticed and can take you out of the movie, detach­ing you from the film’s oth­er­wise engross­ing atmos­phere and aesthetic.

Yet, to play devil’s advo­cate I sup­pose it’s a tricky thing to avoid and I’d imag­ine why most direc­tors and pro­duc­ers go out on a limb blind­folded, hop­ing that what­ever is put together by their mas­ters of illu­sion comes across suc­cess­fully not only in a visual man­ner but also allow­ing var­i­ous CG ele­ments to inter­act with live action in a real­is­tic way.

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