Why I’m Not Excited About the Final Harry Potter Movie

I need to get this off my chest:  I’m not excited about the final Harry Potter movie, and the Deathly Hallows: Part II.  I’m just not.

District 9 and the Documentary Style

I finally got around to watching District 9, and for the most part I enjoyed it.  So often movies with premises that center around social issues have problems maintaining profluence (see A Day Without A Mexican), but District 9 managed to shoehorn in an extensive criticism of humanity while keeping the story moving.

My biggest problem with D-9 was the point of view.  The movie starts off as a faux documentary and then transitions into a more traditional omniscient camera POV, an unusual choice.  Most faux-docs maintain the documentary POV for the sake of realism, and leaving it behind felt jarring.

Roger Ebert Stars in Blow-hard: With a Vengeance (UPDATED)

Ebert and I go way back.  First I disagreed with him, then he agreed with me…

Good times.

And I would never have referred to Ebert as a blow-hard until today.  Today I read this.

The pomposity and smugness of his supremely backhanded retraction, as well as the many, many semantic arguments it will inspire, I shall leave to others to address.  Instead, I’m going to talk about Clive Barker.

Logline

“A gentle man must fight to return to the woman he loves when he’s caught up in an interplanetary corporate war.”

I dunno…would you read that script?

Take That, Roger Ebert!

Ten days ago I challenged Ebert a wee bit over his article, “Video Games Can Never Be Art.”

Four days ago, I wrote a post about my…let’s call it, “distaste,” for 3D.

Yesterday, Roger Ebert decided to agree wholeheartedly with my opinion on 3D.  He did so in a reasonable, logical, and fully explicated way.

Now, the best response I’ve read to Ebert’s article on video games came from Jerry Holkins of Penny Arcade fame.  In his response, Holkins says of Ebert’s article, “[Ebert's] arguing 1. in bad faith, 2. in an internally contradictory way, 3. with nebulously defined terms, so there’s nothing here to discuss.”

Ebert’s article on 3D, however, has a number of clearly developed points, and a number of conclusions he and I arrived at separately.  Movies are a media we have each engaged with and learned to appreciate in a number of ways.  I’d like to suggest that perhaps, had Ebert ever bothered to make the attempt to engage with video games in a similar way, he would be able to offer a well defined and good faith argument about their validity as art.

And maybe he would even agree with me.  After all, we clearly see blue-lens to red-lens.

Depth Perception – An Unnecessary Evil

I can’t for the life of me see how 3D can be made a necessary part of a movie.

I understand special effects – allowing a film maker to make manifest impossible things is important.  From the models of Blade Runner and puppetry of Alien to the CG of Jurassic Park or The Matrix, the special effects are part of the storytelling process.  Without special effects would be no future city, no fearsome alien, no pissed of dinosaurs, and no…well, no Matrix.

But 3D, so far, doesn’t impact the ability to tell a story at all.  Does it matter if that one plant really seems closer to you than that other plant?  Or that shrapnel looks like it just flew over your head?  The mere fact that the recent spate of 3D movies have all also been shown in 2D clearly indicates that the 3D is a bonus, an extra – the characters, the story, plot, themes, tension, and emotion, none of these things are created by a special camera and a pair of funny glasses.

Would you have cared more about Guido in Life is Beautiful if he’d ridden that bike right at you before crashing into Dora?  Would the opening scene of Inglorius Basterds have been any more tense had that glass of milk been popping out of the screen?

There Is Something About a Man Who Can Lick His Own Back

Do I have something to say that’s worth hearing?  Maybe.  Probably not.  But as I was driving down this information highway I spotted the gleaming edifice known as the blogodome and thought I’d drop in.  Now I’m trapped in here with all of you professionals, and I guess what I’d like to do is throw a party.  A mind party.

If I call myself Pauly, will you be my Steven?