Day 55 of the Power 90 is now complete. I did the Circuit III-IV tape today. It was a little more tough than normal since I’m a little low on sleep from last night. We went to the drive in and watched Bourne Legacy and Ted in a double feature. It was fun, but we got home pretty late since movie did not start til dusk (think it started around 9 PM). Pretty good movies. Pretty predictable, but not-too-bad.
Tekla and I went to see the Third Twilight movie, Eclipse, last night. It was a pretty predictable movie.
Actually, the whole Twilight series is that way, but that’s to be expected since the target audience is a bunch of teenage girls for the most part. The fight scenes were not overly exciting. The “vampire army” was made to sound like they had a lot of strength and power, but really the army was defeated in no time flat by the Cullins and the Wolf pack.
The army was really only a small handful of vampires – maybe 10-20 or so, if I remember correctly. The “army” only injured Jacob by breaking his ribs when one of the neophyte vampires in the army squeezed him. I have not read the book, so don’t know how closely they kept this true to the story, but based on what I’ve read on wikipedia, it sounds like it was fairly close. That is one problem I have with all of the twilight movies so far – the action, when there is action, is fairly calm. Sure, they are throwing one another around, and biting off limbs, but it’s all not very scary, dramatic, or meant for a movie in my opinion.
The main battle in this movie takes place in the middle of the open field in one of the earlier movies. It’s a nice sunny day in the meadow. The environment just does not lend itself well to a gory, bloody fight scene. It also is not really remnescent of the foggy, cloudy days environment that is typical of the area in real life where the movie suppossedly takes place. I guess the reason for that is because the target audience is a bunch of teenage girls that they don’t want to gross out or something?… I want to see more drastic color in a movie about vampires and werewolves…
There is hints of red here and there, but not a lot of bloody, gory stuff that is typical of vampire and werewolf movies. The horror just seems to not be there really – even when Victoria’s head is ripped off, and her boyfriend’s arms are ripped out, the gore is not there and the limbs just look like stone statues…making this more like an anime movie, or teenage soap opera then a real movie about vampires and werewolves.
I mean, sure it’s a love story, but it’s also suppossed to be a horror movie, right? Where’s the shakey camera shots? Where’s the foggy night scenes? There is a chase scene or two through the forest in some places of the movie, but it’s never really “scary” – more like an anime movie or something. When the vampires do go “hunting” for their animal blood, it’s never on scene… The sunny meadow is very cheery. The gory scenes of the army in Seattle are dark-ish, but even those are not really gross me out or scare me out of my wits horror like they should be in my opinion. We should be afraid that this big scary army is coming to the Cullins land and as an audience should be feeling some empathy. It didn’t seem like anyone in the audience had that empathy level because the movie is just too silly… We have a bunch of people jumping around like they belong on Dragon Ball Z more then a vampire or werewolf movie. We see bright sunny skies (ok, it’s suppossed to be overcast, and that’s why we don’t see the sparkles in the vampres – but many of those scenes look way to bright on gamma to be too cloudy to me – or maybe they just dulled it out too much so it looks a lot brighter then it really is or something)… Yes, the movie was ok plotwise, but as I mentioned, somewhat predictable.
The focus on the live triangle is important, but they could have at least put a little gore in there, or done some of the camera angles up closer to hone in on the battle scenes more from a first person perspective instead of leaving it all in third person from a distance in a very passive manner. There should have been a lot more drastic colors and things.
Sure, they have mountains scenes that look like they are shot from a helicoptor (probably a 3d camera view from a 3d mountian) but they could have done so much more. Mountains have gigantic 5:00 shadows all over the place. We could have seen lots more doom and gloom. More dramatic flair… More brightly contrasting color schemes to pull the audience attention in on certain things. No, they should not turn it in to a Kill Bill type of blood fest with blood spurting out everywhere, but they could have done something heading a little bit in that direction a lot more then they have done… As it is, the werewolves seem like newborn puppies, even when they are at the most savage scenes in the movie. The vampires just seem like normal people that don’t get a tan. Even though Jacob’s ribs are supposedly broken, we don’t see any camera angles focus in on a closeup of his chest at all during that time of the movie, even though during the rest of the movie he’s running around bare-chested all day long… Aw well, it was worth seeing, but it’s not really worth the money to see it in a movie theater. If I were you, I might wait til it’s out on DVD.
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Yes, Chris, and anyone else who cares to read this. I did post this and the last few posts. This is NOT a robot. I usually bookmark this sort of stuff with del.icio.us but since I don’t have the toolbar for that installed on this computer, I’m just posting it the stuff here…
Believe it or not (yes, you probably do believe since I”m a bit nutty sometimes), I had a jogging suit with pom poms sewed on way back 6 or so years ago when I wanted to get in to this d-sculptor, imodeler, and greenscreen junk. However, way back then the computers I was using were way too slow to do much… Aura 1 used to be in Newtek’s ftp site for free. Not sure if it still is. Newtek is the company that makes Lightwave 3d… There was some sort of a pixel tracking thing in aura that could be exported to lightwave… so you could record motion and create paths for it in 3d. Now that I’m starting to get back in to 3d and stuff mentally, a lot of this old knowledge is starting to flood back in to my brain… interesting stuff.
I have a couple of 1000 watt spotlights that are typically used for construction jobs in my basement. I was going to use them to make a homebrew photo studio, or greenscreen studio a few years back. Not sure if I will do that or not… never used the lights yet since I’m not sure how safe they are (warning label on the side of the box talks about lead)…
I might use them to set up as cheap homebrew strobes to shoot my portfolio in the basement someday.
Need to clean out the basement someday before all of that can ever happen though, or before I can convert the basement in to a descent painting studio like I envision it to eventually be… (assuming I can find some way to ventilate it).
It’s still got quite a few things in it that is a bit unorganized from last year, when mother-in-law moved and father-in-law passed away, and we inherited quite a bunch of odds and ends that are now in storage in the basment…
The search for Tim Burton took us to four Hollywood studio archives, five independent production company collections, and four private lenders, exposing us to an interesting variety of archival situations. Studio archives are traditionally housed on the lots where their films and television programs are shot, or, if their collections are large enough and the […] http://bit.ly/c3vwHP
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Tim Burton Items on Amazon
PRESS RELEASE
Brühl, Germany, March1st, 2010: One of the most prestigious competitions for creative film makers and with a top Hollywood jury, is hotting up. The invaZion 3-D Short Film Challenge (www.invazion.org ) is taking place for a second time…
http://bit.ly/bR9jlh
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3d Short Film Items on Amazon
These notes accompany the Eisenstein Double Bill program, which screens on March 3, 4, and 5 in Theater 3.
(1898–1948) is a special case in many ways. He was undeniably one of the geniuses of the early cinema. As a theoretician, he wrote voluminously, positing his theory of montage (editing), derived from the work of D. […] http://bit.ly/cEKozG
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Check out Einstein: His Life and Universe
The festival attracted more than 25,000 people. http://bit.ly/bk4VY4
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Like Independent Films, Click Here!
Items tagged with the tag Fellow Artists are going to be dedicated to some of my fellow artist friends and their websites. Here, I plan to link to websites, blogs, and other interesting online projects that some of my fellow art friends have created, run, or maintain. I’ll try to keep the list narrowed down to artists that I personally know, or have some affiliation with. A copy of these postings will also be added to the Fellow Artists Page in my blog.
The other day my wife and I went to see the 3d version of movie Avatar. Actually, we did not know it was 3d when we bought the tickets until the guy that took the tickets handed us the 3d glasses.
The graphics in the 3d version of this movie are spectacular. However, the plot is flat & characters are sort of one dimensional and cliche.
**************SPOILER ALERT**************
The basic plot is that a crippled guy goes in to weird alien forest world with his dead twin brother’s avatar with the goal of getting the aliens to leave so that his superiors can drill up the area where the aliens reside. While there, he meets an alien girl and falls in love with her, learns the ways of her people, decides that its best to help the aliens instead of his superiors, and ultimately ends up dead, but he lives on in the form of his avatar because the aliens use a weird “tree of life” to move his soul from his human body in to his alien body. There’s a few plot twists, but that’s the main storyline. It’s a fairly typical sort of Romeo and Juliet in a sci-fi setting almost. The only real difference is that Juliet doesn’t really die – her big tree house just gets crushed, and Romeo doesn’t die – he just becomes an alien.
One of the main themes in the movie is the idea that the entire planet and the Avatar Race are tied to one another with electrical pulses. I think in one scene they even say that there’s “more connections” between the environment and the people than there are neural pathways in the human brain. There is a blatent new age “Gaia” type of “green” theme to all of it… although they don’t call it Gaia – They call their earth goddess diety on this strange world Eawa, or something similar sounding to that…
There might be a possibility that Ehwa is really something similar to Yahweh spelled backwards, and that’s done to represent the “Great Goddess” idea vs the old Human Christian and Western ideas of conquest and spreading our ways to others all over the world that has lead us on Earth to where we are today with a world filled with Green House Gas, etc…?!?… especially with the “tree of life” being connected to the entire world idea – which is sort of similar to a few New Age and old Kabbalah sort of ideas… Of course that might be going way too deep in to the metaphors and looking at symbols and stuff, lol.. Maybe they just like the Ewoks from Star Wars and wanted to make a diety that sounded like that sort of sound. 😉
In one of the longest sililoquies in the movie, the main character says something like “They (Humans from Earth) have killed their planet” implying that humans destroyed earth and now they are trying to destroy this planet with their techological ways, drilling up the earth, etc.
There’s an ongoing techonolgy vs native primitive way of life struggle throughout the entire movie as well as a lot of other ideas and themes. The basic underlying idea I got about it is that the movie is not really about aliens at all – it’s about us in the “Civilized Western World” and how we keep kicking natives out of their natural settings – and keep destroying our entire world in the process… in Africa, in Central America, in Australia… even here in the US since we kicked the original indidan population out of the places there had come to call home.
Riding a Dragon type of creature as a sign of “coming of age” is one of the subplots in the story, as are few various ideas about what is real, and a few other things, but I don’t want to give away the whole story and completely ruin the movie for you (even though I may already have with the two paragraphs above)… I could probably go on and on about a lot of symbols, metaphors, and the technological issues regarding how the movie was made, but I’ll save some that for another day when I have more time to post…
However… there is one topic I will discuss along these lines…
There’s that whole side issue about cloning going on in the movie that could lead to discussions about if/why a clone would not have an identity and soul of it’s own instead of just being a humanoid robot ready to take commands from whoever it was cloned from – but that’s not really the main part of the story… Actually that little idea sort of goes against the whole basis of the plot and themes in the movie since the Avatars are really clones created with technology and therefore represent everything un-natural, and also represents a sort of invasion on the soul of the being that is the Avatar… However that whole idea is a non-issue because it’s just “assumed” that the Avatar has no self identity in the world presented in the movie… (which is part of the reason why I think Ewa is to evoke a sort of new age, magical, mystical, occult, kabbala type of idea and theme in the movie – as the “Avatars” are really somewhat similar to the old idea of a Golem – a souless body that’s used by spellcasters, etc… except instead of using magic, they use the “technology” of cloning and the little coffin like boxes that the humans that are using the avatars have to go in to make the Gollum-like Avatars become alive… ok… all you Baptists and other religious nuts out there, are you ready to ban this movie like you banned Harry Potter and Mickey Mouse, lol… You know, doing that just brings more media attention to movies like this and causes more people to watch them since everyone wants to see for themselves what all the controversy is about! Actually, you could turn all the symbols around and make the resuruction of the Avatar in to a resuruction of the Body after death idea since it’s sort of a “going back to an Eden-like Heaven” to live with the other alien angel like creatures on that strange primitive world… 🙂 😉 )
Overall, I give the movie about a 7 out of 10 rating because the plot is pretty predictable and almost all of the characters other than the main two are very flat and one dimensional psychologically, and even they are fairly predictable most of the time. It was nice to see a “save our earth by going green and supporting primitive cultures in the rainforests” type of message in a movie like this, but the repitition of that idea over and over and over goes a little overboard in my opinion…
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