May Contain Nuts

So as those following me on Twitter already know, I went to see Avatar yesterday. Overall I was very impressed, and while I can see the similarities, I think the “Avatar = Pocahantas” meme is reaching a bit. You could similarly argue that The Lion King = Hamlet; despite their common theme, both films have unique plots, characters, and details. I also get the criticism of it as an environmentalist film, because it is yet another “seriously, live responsibly and respect native peoples” film but really, you could do much worse with the preachiness (think Fern Gully). Considering that you can make an attack on pretty much any film’s message for being political or offensive or whatnot (like Wall-E’s “jesus people, stop throwing away so much shit and acting like fat-ass slobs” message), I think protesting Avatar on those grounds is kind of silly. After all, science fiction is largely allegorical in nature, and in growing up as a genre it’s also tackling much more complex themes like war, terrorism, leadership, and environmental stewardship.

Anyway, on to the main point of this ramble.

I’ve spent the better part of an hour today trying to work out why exactly Pandora’s atmosphere is so deadly to humans. I first wondered what the composition of the atmosphere was like, and whether it could differ substantially from Earth’s considering that it seems to have a similar ambient temperature, pressure, green plant-life (and thus chlorophyll, photosynthesis, and oxygen), and isn’t immediately fatal except when inhaled (since walking around in a t-shirt is fine). It also looks similar to Earth’s (in that it’s blue during the day and shows no additional signs of coloration), and chemical reactions like fire are similar to those on Earth as well in terms of color and behavior.

Based on this information, I rejected the notion that the air had to be composed of substantially different compounds and instead went looking for something that could occur naturally in relatively small quantities, not change the appearance or behavior of the atmosphere, and cause serious respiratory problems in human beings without being damaging to the rest of the body.

My first thought, after Googling for “deadly gases” (I am so going on a terrorist watch list one of these days) was that it could be phosgene, since the Wikipedia description only referenced respiratory symptoms, Other websites such as the CDC, though, indicate that it can also cause burns and legions on the skin, in addition to blurry vision. Phosgene could be produced in significant quantities on Pandora by combining a chloride byproduct of some biological process with the naturally abundant oxygen and bombarding it with UV light, which would be plentiful in such close proximity to a gas giant planet’s radiation belts (and the gas giant itself seems to be nearer to Earth’s orbit than Jupiter or Saturn’s, increasing the amount of solar UV radiation as well). Despite the plausibility of this process, the additional physical side effects of phosgene make it seem like an unlikely candidate, as human characters are often seen walking around without protective clothing on, just breathing masks.

Other possibilities include relatively more common gases such as sulfur dioxide, which can cause respiratory problems in humans at concentrations as low as 8 ppm. Given the likelihood of tidal stresses on Pandora due to its parent planet’s gravitational influence, it’s possible that a chain of active volcanoes exist somewhere on the moon which outgas significant quantities of SO2. I’m not sure how likely this is as a scenario, given that SO2 is water-soluble and produces acid rain, and the choking smell of sulfur isn’t mentioned at any time in the film by either the humans, the human Na’vi avatars, or the Na’vi themselves, but it’s another possibility.

Also, in addition to the atmosphere question, one of the friends I saw the film with brought up another interesting biology point. Terrestrial creatures such as mammals and lizards generally as a rule have 5 appendages (2 arms, 2 legs, and a tail, or 4 legs and a tail) and a head. While humans don’t have tails due to evolutionary changes, we do still at least have a vestigial tailbone. On Pandora, lizards and mammals seem to have, as a rule, 7 appendages (4 arms, 2 legs, and a tail, or 6 legs and a tail), yet the Na’vi have the more familiar (to us) count of 5. I’m not sure why evolution would have given rise to the kind of 6-legged creatures we saw in the movie to begin with (I’m willing to just go with that), but it seems odd that the Na’vi would have evolved away from such a common and seemingly important appendage as an extra set of arms the way humans have grown out of their tails. I’m not saying it’s impossible, it just seems unlikely, especially since even the relatively closely-related lemur things have 4 arms and 2 legs.

I could be shooting blindly here, since trying to predict natural evolution is always going to be a shot in the dark, but it’s something that struck me as somewhat odd and perplexing, like someone at Weta decided the alien fauna needed to look more alien-ish, and stuck an extra set of limbs on without focusing on the implications it would have for the Na’vi, evolutionarily speaking. However, given how well the entire biosphere seems to work together in the film (implying a considerable amount of thought went into it), I somehow doubt that such a simplistic decision could have passed muster during the design process. It could also just be a case of there being a directorial commandment that the Na’vi only have 5 limbs instead of 7 to make them more relatable, in which case I give a big wet raspberry to James Cameron for that decision.

So yeah, I’m a HUGE nerd. Anyone have any other insights for me to mull over on these or other topics?

Before I get started here, I want to admit that I kind of suck at reviewing things, and my memory is short-circuited enough that I’m not terribly good at recalling every detail of a movie I’ve only seen once, but I wanted to pass along my thoughts for those who may be contemplating seeing either of these movies.  I’ve tried very hard not to spoil the plot of either film, but if you don’t want to know anything about them before seeing them, you may want to skip this post.

That said, in my opinion these were both well worth seeing in the theater.  I used to watch Get Smart with my parents when it was in syndication on Nick at Nite, and have recently re-watched several episodes of season 1 as part of my effort to expose Ash to all of the stuff she missed out on as a kid.  The TV show was always great fun, and the movie is very much a spiritual successor to the show.  The original creators (one of whom was Mel Brooks) were listed front and center on the end credits as being consultants for the movie, and evidently the original Agent 99 (as well as Mel Brooks) signed off on the casting of Anne Hathaway… I can only imagine that similar approval was given for Steve Carell as Max Smart.  All in all, it’s obvious that great pains were taken to make sure that the movie fit in with the TV show, and the effort is obvious in the script and characters.

The movie is set in present day, in the sort of odd ret-conning that every old TV show-turned-movie seems to undergo to be relevant while retaining the original characters, but it’s never a jarring move.  At the beginning of the movie, Max is an analyst, not an agent, and is extremely good at his job while also being something of a klutz.  The Chief – masterfully played by Alan Arkin – only reluctantly promotes him after there is a breach of security exposing all existing agents’ identities.  There’s occasional commentary on the current administration and the War on Terror, with Max intelligently stating that even though our enemies are bad guys, they’re still human beings, and if we’re ever going to defeat them, we first have to understand this fact.  The President also seems to have Bush’s incomprehensible inability to pronounce the word “nuclear” correctly, which the Chief tries to correct at one point (evoking a cheer from the audience).

The theme from the show comes out in spades with a great twist during Carell’s trip down the famous multi-doored corridor to CONTROL headquarters, and has a number of remixes for the high-action sequences as the film reaches its climax.  All of the old running gags from the show – “Would you believe…”, “Missed it by that much”, “Sorry about that Chief”, “Ah, the old [fill in the blank] trick” – and many of the old props – the shoephone, the Cone of Silence, and Max’s old car – are trotted out, but they’re never overdone, and fit into the flow of the show very well.  Overall, the comedy is very intelligent, relying a lot on the interaction between Carell and Hathaway, which is just fantastic.  That’s not to say there isn’t some more low-brow humor, but it’s spaced out pretty widely throughout the show.  The new characters, like Agent 23 (played by The Rock) are also well-written and well acted (contrary to what The Scorpion King might indicate, The Rock actually can act pretty well, and he has pretty good comedic timing).

All in all, I suspect you’d probably need to be a fan of the original show to get the most bang for your buck out of this movie, but it’s worth seeing if only for Steve Carell, who is a dead ringer for Don Adams, the original Agent 86, Maxwell Smart.

Shifting gears (oy, no pun intended, I swear), I’d also like to voice my opinion on WALL•E (but first, I’d like to thank Apple for making it so easy to type the bullet character… Option+8 = •).

GO SEE THIS MOVIE RIGHT NOW.  GET UP!  MOVE IT!  I’ll wait for you to get back.

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Are you back?  Good, let’s continue then.

Much could (and probably has been) said about the superficial resemblance of WALL•E to everybody’s favorite malfunctioning robot: Johnny 5 from Short Circuit.  They both have the articulate eyes/eyebrows, they’ve both developed quirky, inquisitive, naïve personalities, and they both have a thing for girls.  That’s pretty much where the similarities end, though; WALL•E doesn’t have much of a vocabulary beyond what he picks up from his crush, EVE, instead speaking in R2-D2-like exclamations (which is hardly surprising, since his sound designer was also the sound designer for R2).  WALL•E’s job is also very different from Johnny 5’s original purpose.  While Johnny 5 was a weapon of war, WALL•E is essentially a trash compactor on wheels, built as one of a fleet of such robots to clean up the mess left by humans while they abandoned Earth to live on a massive luxury-liner starship called the Axiom.

For those who don’t like movies with messages in them, be warned that WALL•E might put you off with its unsurprisingly pro-environment message.  By the time WALL•E was originally built, the planet was almost entirely covered in the trash created by humans, and even space is cluttered with a halo of junked satellites.  There’s a bit of humorous commentary on the super-conglomerations of today getting even more out of hand with the obscenely cleverly-named “Buy N Large” super store, whose CEO is somehow also president of the planet.

Oddly, this latest outing from Pixar actually has live-action sequences integrated into it: BNL’s CEO is played on-camera by Fred Willard, whom many may recognize as being Vala’s dad in Stargate SG-1.  All of the commercial footage detailing humanity’s plan to evacuate Earth while the fleet of WALL•E ‘bots cleaned the place up features real people interacting with Pixar’s beautiful CG backgrounds, with the help of Pixar’s former parent company, Industrial Light & Magic.  I suspect that this odd decision was made to create a really distinct visual delineation between humans of yesteryear and their bloated, pampered, low-bone-mass, hoverchair-lounging descendants we see in the movie, and while it’s a tad jarring initially, it does work for me.  I think there was also a bit of influence on this decision due to the fact that WALL•E has an old tape of Hello Dolly that he watches through an ancient 5G iPod screen, and Pixar probably didn’t want to try re-doing Hello Dolly in CG.

Visually, WALL•E is an absolutely mind-blowing tour-de-force of the Pixar team’s inimitable talent.  The first 5 minutes of the film blow away even the most visually stunning sequences in Ratatouille, and it only goes uphill from there.  The sequences on the trash-covered, dust-caked Earth are probably some of the most intense because of all the particle effects, but the clinical futuristic look of the Axiom and its army of robotic helpers is just as impressive because it still looks real, not like some plastic-y product of crummy CG work.  There are a lot of elements that seem pulled straight from Apple’s product line, the most notable being EVE herself, who was co-designed by Apple’s chief engineer, Jonathan Ive.  WALL•E, despite being 700 years old and obviously less “cool” than the fleet of futuristic ‘bots inhabiting the Axiom, also possesses a certain Apple touch: when his solar battery is completely charged, he plays the classic Mac boot-up noise (something that surprised Ash so much that she didn’t stop laughing for a straight 3 minutes afterward).

Overall, the dialogue in this movie is pretty sparse.  Since the main characters are EVE and WALL•E, and their conversations are usually restricted to them saying each other’s names, there isn’t much room for additional dialogue.  However, there are a few other more talkative characters, including the Axiom’s captain and his robotic auto-pilot, Auto (the cleverness… when will it end?).  Pixar’s lucky charm John Ratzenberger once again makes an appearance, playing a passenger on the Axiom (who is also named John).

Even the end credits get some fabulous treatment thanks to a wonderful new song from Peter Gabriel called “Down to Earth” (which sounds like it could be a missing track from Ovo), accompanied by intricate 2D animation sequences similar to the ones that Pixar used in Ratatouille, and followed up by some downright cute pixel-art versions of the characters in the movie silently re-enacting the plot over the remaining music.

Ultimately, despite the somewhat obvious commentary on our treatment of Earth, our increasing tendency towards laziness and virtual interaction, and our reliance on robots for increasingly basic activities (all of which I tend to agree with, so it dodn’t really bug me), WALL•E is a beautiful film with surprisingly emotive main characters (none of the robots even have mouths, and except for Auto – who sounds like an evil version of Stephen Hawking’s voice synthesizer – none of them really even have a vocabulary beyond a few basic words), tons of visual spectacle, and a gorgeous soundscape and soundtrack.

GO SEE IT!

I wonder: what sort of technological, marketplace, or other financial innovations would make it possible for “cult” franchises like Firefly and Uru to be more financially viable in the future? Both have large fan bases, and both have seen, as far as I can tell, remarkably marginal returns in the market despite the rabidness with which their constituents adhere to them. These products contain content that is by no means inexpensive to produce. In the case of Firefly/Serenity, there’s actors (not quite big-time ones like Harrison Ford, but certainly able to command sizable salaries), writers, camera crews, set builders, support staff, marketing, effects shops full of their own staffs… that’s a metric ton of money to be throwing at something like this. In Uru’s case, you’ve got artists, animators, programmers, designers, concept artists, story writers, marketing, customer service staff… again, loads and loads of money that needs to be spent for this sort of content. The sort of money that, when not made back quickly, makes investors or other financial buoys (like publishers) nervous.

Niche markets are getting harder and harder to tap, it seems, despite the increasing interconnectedness of experiences that one would think would make it easier to reach those niches, and the amount of money required to create high-quality entertainment capable of not only attracting but retaining the people who make up that target market is ever-increasing. You can’t make a Firefly or Uru with $50,000 in the bank (which by itself is a rather substantial chunk of change), and you certainly can’t sustain it that way. These are multi-million-dollar products, and you need to find a market for them quickly, and be able to hold onto that market, or you’re screwed, no matter how many loyal fans you have who will follow you to Hell and back if you promise them a fruit cup.

It’s incredibly frustrating to see quality franchises suffer at the hands of the Almighty Dollar just because not enough people are interested in it to make it financially viable. Not only is it frustrating, it’s also rather scary, speaking as someone who wants to do this sort of thing for a living before I die. Especially in the case of video games that don’t find their market fast enough, it’s ridiculously frustrating, because video games are themselves still a niche market (I think the biggest reason games cost $40-$60 a pop is because of their limited market… though as it expands and the prices fail to drop, the industry has managed to overtake motion pictures in revenue… go figure). A product like Myst or Uru that has the ability to break out of the traditionally-held limitations of the gaming industry’s demographics should be able to (and did, once) make substantially more in sales than products like Call of Duty, or even Halo, which has of course proven to be more popular than God. And yet, such products languish in obscurity, attracting only a niche group of an already niche market dominated by a demographic more inclined towards faster-paced, more aggressive gameplay, and failing to reach those who decry video games as nothing but murder and “virtual orgasmic rape” simulators (not so much NSFW as just incredibly, horribly frustrating).

There’s something about this whole situation that makes me wish that there were some way of more cheaply developing quality entertainment products that only manage to appeal to a narrow cross-section of the market (or that only manage to reach a narrow cross-section of the market that you know would find it appealing). Whether it’s through something ridiculously socialist like subsidies from whatever governmental organization could be seen as supporting this sort of thing (or, ideally, just making Blizzard share some of the billions of dollars in revenue that WoW generates… no, I’m not bitter, shut up), or through some other innovation in the market itself that makes these sorts of products available to anyone at reasonable prices with the majority of the revenue going to the developers and not the distributors, I feel that something needs to happen, especially in the video game industry, whose generally-accepted concept of innovation seems to be “Mario64, but in space”, “Like Halo 3, but with chainsaws”, “WoW 2″, and “System Shock 2: Underwater” (shocking). I may be watching a bit too much Zero Punctuation…

It could be (and certainly has been) said that as far as something like Uru goes, there was more in play than just lack of audience, and I think I’ve got a whole post full of things to say about what I’ve learned from Uru as a developer, but despite its numerous setbacks, cancellations, and stutters, it’s still a unique approach to interactive entertainment, and I wish there were more people willing to throw copious amounts of cash at it to make it what it really could be. And maybe that’s the solution to this whole thing in the end: finding people with plenty of money to spend funding crazy-awesome ideas that may not be the most wildly successful product in history, and hooking them up with people who have crazy-awesome ideas for niche products in need of said cash.

Now how the hell do we do that?

Ash and I saw Beowulf on Saturday. As I mentioned to SR388 afterwards, Robert Zimeckis seems to have a summer home in the Uncanny Valley. Being sufficiently distant from my high school reading of the original poem, I was (and largely still am) unable to speak to the film’s accuracy in that regard. However, it seems that the studio which Zimeckis has again wrangled into working on his CG flight of fancy has been constrained once more by his 100% faith in the ability of motion capture to eliminate the need for animators. Needless to say, there’s a lot of REALLY bad animation in the movie, and characters are often so unexpressive it hurts. They also seem to have been unable to overcome the “creepy-mouth-itis” plaguing the black girl from Polar Express, because there’s a few characters with this tragic affliction in this movie. Most obvious is Grendel’s mother, played by Digitalina Jolie (see what I did there?). I’m honestly somewhat baffled that they’d go through all the effort to recreate Angelina Jolie’s face in CG and then totally fail to make that face move like its real-life counterpart. As with the black girl in Polar Express, her lips slide up her face when she talks, and god damn it’s creepy as all hell (not to mention painfully obvious to anyone who has ever seen Angelina Jolie speak). John Malkovich’s character (whose name I can’t remember because they were all Norse, and poorly enunciated to boot) had a similar problem, only his mouth just tended to alter its size depending on the scene it was in… sometimes it was very tight-lipped, and other times it was absurdly wide. Other characters (even Beowulf, who was actually the worst offender) had the opposite problem: their mouths sagged when they talked, so they looked like they were perpetually frowning through their lines, even when frowning isn’t really physically possible (like when shouting at the top of one’s lungs). I can only assume that it was some vague attempt to get the characters to actually look like they were emoting, but it just made them look even worse.

I think the thing that best illustrated the mo-cap handicap was all of the animation that obviously wasn’t mo-capped… like Grendel, the dragon, and the other non-equine animals (the horses were as wooden as their human riders, which tells me they probably mo-capped a horse at some point). The hand-keyed stuff was fantastic, and just made the mo-cap look that much worse because of it. As with Polar Express, there’s really no reason why this film needed to be completely CG in the first place… in fact, there’s even less of a reason here, because the stylized realism of Polar Express was replaced with regular old realism for Beowulf. I think this film would have been far more engaging (and far less creepy in general) if the CG had been left to where it was actually needed: monsters, dragons, epic stunts, and bloody dismemberment. This technique works to spectacular effect 99 times out of 100 in Lord of the Rings… why re-invent the wheel for this one? Why put all that added work into creating CG characters when you’re just going to make them look like their voice actors? It’s really no wonder that Pixar actually put a graphic at the end of the credits for Ratatoullie stating that no motion capture or “other production shortcuts” were used in the creation of their film… the extra work always pays off, and I can’t blame them for wanting people to recognize that, given the competition.

On a side note, the most amusing thing to me was the fact that the Beowulf logo in the film uses the same font as the in-film logo for Lord of the Rings (the gold one on the black background, not the one on the box cover). Also, Crispin Glover can’t seem to get away from creepy roles, even in CG… he was Grendel. Perhaps even creepier is that Grendel does actually look a bit like Crispin Glover…

Also, to move on to something completely different for a second, I just want to quickly mention that I think the level of paranoia around application signing is kind of absurd, especially as it pertains to the iPhone’s forthcoming SDK. Apple has application signatures built into Leopard as a way to ensure that the application is what it says it is, and that it hasn’t been modified by an external source (like a virus). I don’t see how, as Erica Sadun suggests, the signing of iPhone apps is a way to make sure that they’re “vetted by Apple” (and thus, to propagate FUD, be limited to only those apps which Apple approves of having on the phone). They’d be vetted by the developer, if anything, since unless I’ve completely misunderstood how signatures work, they’re the ones who’d be creating the signature for the app in the first place; it’s just an MD5 hash of the app’s contents. Apple’s just making signed apps a requirement on the iPhone, which is a move I can hardly argue with.

I am so totally going to offend everybody from New York City and everyone who knew someone on the planes hijacked on 9/11 with this, but oh well…

So… am I the only one who finds the United 93 (formerly Flight 93) trailer annoying on an historical accuracy level? Not that they got anything really wrong about the events themselves, just that they seem to have decided that terrorists hijacking a plane with box cutters (aka razor blades) made the passengers on the plane look way too cowardly.

So instead, the hijackers are wearing explosives.

Seriously, how is that supposed to improve the audience’s perception of the airline industry if two men can walk onto a cross-country flight wearing large explosive devices? I mean, yeah, security before 9/11 was lax, but Jesus H. Christ on a pogo stick… nobody’s gonna let a freaking explosive though when someone’s wearing it.

I’m sorry, but it’s just one of those things that gets to me. Yes, what happened that day was terrible, inexcusable, and the people on United flight 93 are to be commended for their bravery, but when 3 planes are hijacked and smashed into buildings by people wielding box cutters? Dude, that’s just kinda sad. Not that turning the box cutters into explosives is any better of a scenario, because that just means the security people were complete dumbasses. Really, there is no good way of depicting the events of what transpired on those planes without making someone look stupid, because either 40+ passengers were intimidated by 2-4 people with razor blades, or airline security let 16 people in different airports slip through with bombs around their waists. I just don’t think a really rousing film about courage in the face of terror can be made about the flights themselves. Certainly there were a huge number of courageous acts performed in the aftermath, but when you get right down to it, fear enabled those hijackers to do their job, and dressing the hijackers up in explosives doesn’t help make the people on the planes look better, it just makes the folks on the ground look worse.

Tomorrow should prove to be a thoroughly exhausting and horrible day at work, and I believe I am completely within my rights to blame it all on Universal Studios and their handling of the release of King Kong. Bear with me a moment while I explain this.

King Kong is, according to the information I’ve seen, a 3 hour and 20 minute long film. Add trailers and it begins to approach 4 hours in length without even blinking. This is a movie which opens everywhere Wednesday, December 14, but which will have midnight screenings the night before in many markets, including Cincinnati. I happen to be working at a theatre which will be running just such a midnight screening.

Now, allow me to briefly wax self-important for a moment. You may think that an audience’s enjoyment of the film rests entirely upon the crew that actually created it. In this, you’re rather mistaken, for there’s a final link in the chain from script to screen: the projectionist. In fact, the film industry is quite possibly unique in how much the final impact of a product relies on the actions of someone not even remotely related to the product’s development. You’d really never know that my job is so important given how appallingly little I get paid to do it, but there you go. Anyway, it is the responsibility of myself and everyone else working in the projection booth to ensure that the people who show up to the midnight premiere of King Kong get their $9.50’s worth (the money they blow in concession is no concern of mine, that’s all up to the concessionists). In order to do this, it is customary and pretty much a required practice that the films we show are tech-screened before being shown to the public. In this way, we can identify problems and replace damaged film as quickly as possible. In the case of the midnight show, this enables us to put the best of all prints on screen for our patrons, as replacement parts don’t come the same day we need them.

Now, here’s the important part. The midnight show is at midnight (obviously) at the close of business Tuesday night. That’s tomorrow. This means that we have to have the film ready to run for the public at that time, tech-screened or not (and obviously, we prefer it to be tech screened). This means that we have to have at least 4 hours of lead time to get the film tech-screened. Typically, when a film has a midnight premiere, we get the films a day before that (in this case, Monday) to allow us enough time to assemble them, screen them, and verify their quality. Unfortunately, Universal Studios doesn’t seem to understand this fact.

In fact, Universal Studios seems to be going out of their way to be as much of a pain in the ass as humanly possible. Because of their paranoia about potential theft of the prints, they decided not to send us our five prints Monday. We get them tomorrow, the day of the midnight screening. As if that’s not asinine enough, they did decide to send us one reel of the film Monday… reel 8 (the movie, being 3:20 in length, is at least 10 reels long). A reel we can’t possibly do anything with. If it were the first reel we could have attached it to the trailers. If it were the last reel we could have added lighting cues to the credits. But no. We get reel 8. Bastards.

Now, I must admit, I can sympathize with Universal’s paranoia about film theft (even though I really don’t understand it… it’s not like your average Joe is going to have the assembly tools, the $10,000 35mm projector, and the digital sound processor needed to actually watch the film anyway), but their approach really is just beyond asinine. If they wanted to protect the film from theft (or even piracy), just ship it with one reel missing, like the last reel, and then send it separately. It’s what they’re doing now anyway, just in an order that actually makes some degree of sense. But instead of being intelligent, they’ve decided to totally screw the projectionists over by holding onto the film until the last possible moment, which could potentially have a negative impact on the viewing experience of thousands if not tens of thousands of movie-goers nation-wide. And for as much as I try not to sometimes, I really do give a damn about the experience people have at the movies, because I watch movies too, and it drives me insane when there are problems with the presentation.

So thank you, Universal Studios, for shitting all over the people who actually make it worth people’s time to come see the products that you release. But then, you don’t care, because you’re getting the film rental money regardless of how many refunds we hand out at the theatre for crappy presentation, so really it’s only the theatres that will feel the ill effects of your crappy-ass anti-piracy maneuver. Though I imagine that, for the end-consumer, this really isn’t much different from the boat-load of technical problems software anti-piracy tools have begun instigating, so in this regard the film industry really isn’t all that unique.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, and I think it’s finally time I started putting these thoughts down in a more permanent form. I’ve been trying to figure out what makes certain games and CG movies visually appealing, while others come off as either flat (Unreal), full of super-creepy zombie people (Polar Express), or just lacking in effort (Madagascar).

I think the ultimate problem is that people are pushing too hard for photo-realism, and because the technology isn’t there (and it probably won’t ever be), the people who shoot for it in its entirety end up making something that looks uninspired and boring at best, and incredibly creepy (in the unintentional “it’s not supposed to be creepy!” kind of way) at worst. The reason for this being that we live in a photorealistic world, and we know what it’s supposed to look like. So, when a game (or even a CG film) comes along and tries to pass itself off as being completely photorealistic, we pounce on any little thing that could possibly be wrong with it, especially when it comes to human characters. It’s not that we do it intentionally (often times we don’t even realize we’re doing it), it’s just an innate behavior for whatever reason. Another part of the problem is that if you *do* manage to attain a close enough semblance of photo-reality that you overcome the gut instinct that something’s not quite right, your scenes often come across as visually quite dull. A bland cityscape with a boring blue sky and unremarkable clouds and flowerboxes isn’t going to get you very far in the “interesting” category. While such things have their application – especially as effects shots in live-action films – I don’t think games are the best place to apply them.

So, the question now becomes, if we can’t do photorealism (or at least, if we want to be high-detail without falling into the uncanny valley trap), what can we do? Well, the first solution would be to take it to the other end of the spectrum and create highly-stylized scenes and characters, which is what I think Dreamworks tried to do with Madagascar. However, lack of effort, decent story, acting, and a complete inability to rig a character decently (seriously, I could probably rig the characters just as well as they did, if not better… I just suck at thumbs) really damaged the film’s appearance. I’ve got more to bring up on why Madagascar in particular is a disaster of a style choice, but I’ll get to that later.

If you don’t want to stylize things and you still want to retain the same level of high detail and texture that you find in the real world, the last option, I think, is to create a sort of “optimized reality”. It’s a sort of expansion on the concept of surrealism introduced in Myst, where things often looked, sounded, and felt more realistic than they actually were. It’s an incredibly fine line to ride, but interestingly enough, there’s a considerable amount of play in what you can get away with under that style. What it boils down to is this: take reality, and cut away everything but its essence. You’re not translating an object into a game or film, you’re translating the Platonic ideal of that object into a game or film. You don’t just build a “house”, you build a “House”… the ideal of a house that may not even be quite as detailed, ornate, or intricate as an actual house, but which carries a vibrance of shape and color you’d never want to see on a house in the real world, but which surprisingly enough happens to work better than a plain old house when used in a game or all-CG film.

It’s a long-standing principle of animation that you don’t draw the totality of a person or object, you simply draw the necessary elements of that person or object needed to get across to the viewer that what they’re looking at is the person or object in question. I think this concept still very much applies to CG films and computer games, as they exist outside of the mold of live-action composites, which by definition have to fit the very realistic appearance of the actors and other real set pieces in the shot. Interestingly enough, Myst is one of the few series I’ve encountered that actually pulls off live-action compositing with “optimized reality” scenery, because real actors tend to stand out against scenery that doesn’t look as real as they do. Riven, obviously, is in a class of its own in terms of photo-realism, but even Riven had an optimization to the reality of the scenes that gave it a sort of elevated sense of design and order. The real world lacks such design and order, but without it in a game or film, the scene fails to convey any emotion or generate any connection with the viewer. It’s odd. Anyway, back to my point. “Optimized reality” very rarely lends itself to photo-realism when it comes to interactive environments. In that particular instance, there’s a lot less you can still get away with, because interacting with an optimized reality betrays the lack of complexity that actual reality has, at which point the illusion falls down like a house of cards. It’s for this reason that I think Edanna (and even haven to some extent) failed for me as a concept. it’s a great concept, but it relies on utilizing systems that are far beyond the ability of computers to replicate, and interacting with their optimized forms creates a very mechanical-feeling experience, which you definitely don’t want from a nature-based puzzle.

I think Cyan and Pixar are leaders in their fields when it comes to creating believable “optimized realities”. Their products have always portrayed reality not as it actually is, but in a very visceral form. What you get from Myst, Uru, End of Ages, Finding Nemo, and The Incredibles is a lightly stylized view of nature, with colors, forms, shapes, and scenery that couldn’t exist in reality, but which balances stylization, realistic surfaces and sounds, and a dash of artistic know-how in just the right quantities that you’re left with a vision of a world in its most pure form; a form which, when you think back on it, your mind fills in the blanks for, but which, when actually analyzing it, fails to stand up to the rigors of actual reality. The trick, then, is to look beyond the modeling simplicities, the simplified forms, the over-vibrant colors, and let the world soak into you, so that when you revisit it in your mind, you don’t remember the polygon count on a sphere, but rather what was on the sphere and the room it was sitting in. Obviously, this artistic style doesn’t work for everyone, but it definitely works for me, and it’s the sort of thing I strive to do in my own work.
And having gotten to the end of my point, I realize I never did go back into how Madagascar is a fiasco of a film from numerous aspects, so I guess I’ll save my rant against the Dreamworks Feature Animation department for another time.

I was granted the opportunity to screen The Island, Michael Bay’s new “intelligent” summer blockbuster (in all fairness, it does rank as more intelligent than Pearl Harbor, Bad Boyz, and Armageddon combined, though that’s still saying very little…). While it is a bit on the long side (2:20 plus trailers), it doesn’t really drag at any point, and it’s a lot better than I expected it to be (which seems to be the catch-phrase of this summer’s line-up). There were a couple of niggling “unintelligent” concepts presented in the film towards the end that weren’t entirely necessary, nor even satisfactorily explained, but ultimately, it wasn’t bad at all. And damnit, for once I’d like to see Sean Bean show up on screen and NOT know he’s going to be the bad guy within 10 seconds.

The thing that really annoyed me, though, was the horrifically gratuitous product placement. I mean, drinking Pepsi or going to McDonald’s I could completely go along with. This movie, however, was almost a moving billboard for every product it included (and I would not be far from the mark to call it blatant advertising). MSN Search, Maxim, Cosmo, American Express, Aquafina, Calvin Cline, Johnny Rocket’s, and Michelob all come to mind within 30 seconds. The Michelob one was particularly crass… it was a 3-second shot of the bottle (and ONLY the bottle) prior to the character opening it up and taking a drink. It would only have been more of a commercial if there had been an announcer guy (or if Ewan had said “mmm, this Michelob really hits the spot.”). MSN Search’s logo being plastered across the side of a glass “information directory” (aka “futuristic phone booth) was pretty tacky too, I thought. But then, Microsoft did do the whole butterfly sticker advertising campaign in NYC’s subway system, so that may not actually be too far off the mark.

I propose we make a drinking game (or at the very least, a challenge for the keen of eye) based around this extreme amount of advertising in-movie… for those playing at home with the shot glass, shoot one every time you see a placed product. For those either not of legal drinking age or those intending to go out later this week, I suggest staying off the booze and just keep a running total. Substitute with soda or eggnog or something if you prefer.

And is it just me, or does Apple have computer deals with every production studio except the set where they film Stargate? It seems like every movie character these days is using an Apple… except for the team on Atlantis… dude, they got a Dell.

It occurs to me that one could cut Will Ferrel’s character completely out of Wedding Crashers and the movie would have not only made just as much sense without him, it would have been better. Bringing in Will Ferrel at the end of the movie was a bit like eating expired ice cream… it leaves a bad taste in your mouth after what had, up until then, been a perfectly decent meal. I’m not saying Wedding Crashers was groundbreaking cinema or anything, but it really wasn’t necessary to bring Ferrel into it, especially since he’s given the only role he was ever particularly “good” (and I use that word liberally) at: an over-hammed jackass. I say he’s good at it because every time he plays an over-hammed jackass, it’s more irritating and smack-you-upside-the-head stupid than the last time he did it. There really isn’t even any point to introducing his character in person (especially not 20 minutes before the end of the movie). Everything revolving around him is re-iterated in following scenes. You could completely cut out his exposition at the beginning of reel 7 and just leave him with a cameo at the end of the finale wedding, and nobody would even notice.

In other movie news, everyone must go see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as soon as they possibly can. I’m serious.

I’m nowhere even close to being packed for Mysterium yet… I should do that. I haven’t even bought a shirt. I should do that too. I’ll probably be packed Wednesday… or knowing my luck, Friday morning right before I leave. Blah. I’m looking forward to this year, largely to see what sort of spirits I can expect the rest of them to be in once Cyan moves on to something else entirely. I’m pretty certain that from now on, these things are going to be pretty small in size, with the lure of new product demonstrations not dragging people in by the plane-full. If the focus has, in recent years, drifted away from simply meeting up with your online friends, as many claim it has, after this year, either things will swing back to the way they were in 2000 and 2001 (and 2002, for that matter… nobody knew Cyan would be presenting at ‘01 or ‘02), or it’ll just all fall apart. Personally, I’m hoping for the former.

And now, a Mac aside. I’ve noticed that right-clicks don’t register on the Dashboard… did someone at Apple forget that two-button mice can be used with the OS and not program event handlers for it?

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It interests me that the movie industry is in such a tizzy about this year’s box office slump… it’s presently the second-longest in the past 20 yeas, and if Batman Begins doesn’t save it, it’ll be tied for first. There is of course the cautionary note that last year The Passion of the Christ managed to blow the entire year completely out of proportion and so it can’t really be counted as a fair comparison – factoring it out, the industry is up compared to last year. However, I do think the movie industry is in a bit of a slump, and it’s not something a few well-placed summer blockbusters are going to be able to change. The problem is that, while the movie industry is now a 54-week-a-year business, with new films opening *every week*, the vast majority of them are absolute unadulterated crap, and people know that. This year’s line-up seems to be particularly bad compared to previous years, and that, combined with yet another nation-wide increase in ticket prices by several theatre chains, has undoubtedly reduced the attendance this year. When are movie execs going to learn that crappy movies can’t bolster a flagging industry when they stop being used as stop-gaps in an empty release schedule and start becoming a weekly thing? And when are theatre execs going to learn that the more you charge for tickets, the fewer people actually come buy them?