Girl Meets Geekdom

The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that director Brett Ratner just does not like the X-Men. Why else would he take a perfectly healthy franchise, so brilliantly conceived by his predecessor, Bryan Singer, and completely and utterly destroy it?

X-Men 3: The Last Stand has the largest ever Memorial Day weekend opening. In the trailer, we see glimpses of Angel, Beast, a mutant “cure”, and above all, the return of Jean Grey as the “Dark Phoenix.” The fact is, it was too good to be true. Everything in X3 seems artificial. For those familiar with the X-Men series, the film’s story makes reference to the Dark Phoenix and Apocalypse plotlines, strung together by overly computer-graphics dependent action sequences, and emotional character development artificially charged through repeated death and losing-of-purpose-in-life.

In the end, this really wasn’t a film, it was a spectacle for the fans. With Bryan Singer, you walk away with a sense of the characters, the weights they carry, and all the beauty and subtly of who the characters are. X3 is all about the money. They inserted all the X-Men things that Bryan Singer missed to trick fans into going to see the film. I’m sorry to say, Angel and Dark Phoenix were complete cop-outs. In fact, remember that fire we saw in Jean Grey’s eyes in X2 foreshadowing Phoenix? Well…they forgot the fire. Instead they decided to make her really ugly and wear a poofy dress. And that Sentinal they promised? You only get to see a head.

I’ve also never seen such a bad use of visual effects. Seriously, the film felt more like a Siggraph technical demo rather than a movie. It really was 100 minutes of particle effects. I felt like I was being punished for screwing up the particle effects on the final project for my graphics class. It was like, every scene of the movie, something had to be incinerated, or floating around or something out of the ordinary. If they cut out some of the effects, maybe they could’ve paid someone to actually think of something cooler for Phoenix to do…or say.

X2 set up such a promising sequel. This was just upsetting.

D Movie
B- Action
C+ Visual Effects
F Character Development
D Story

In this article I named my three guesses for the animations that will be nominated for Best Animated Feature this year. I got two out of three. The nominees are Wallace and Gromit, Corpse Bride, and Howl’s Moving Castle (I guess Madagascar instead, but I’m glad it did not get nominated). Unfortunately no CG animations this year, but still a good selection. My guess for winner? Wallace and Gromit…but I still have yet to see Howl’s Moving Castle, so we’ll have to see.

Now with Pixar’s Ed Catmull and John Lasseter running the show at Disney, one must wonder what will happen to the future of Disney? Pixar is a studio attempting to hit a one-film a year production rate. Disney makes a lot more movies…some of questionable merit. Rumor has it that production on Toy Story 3 has already halted. What about Rapunzel Unbraided, Pinocchio 2000, and that Snow White remake? What will happen to those films? I heard Ed Catmull give a talk on the production crisis of Toy Story 2. They were not happy with the story, production halted, and they did a frantic rewrite. Frankly, every Pixar film has gone through a similar crisis, or so I hear. Can they impose that on the 3 production Disney has in the works? After all, Pixar has something like 3 or 4 shows either in development or production as we speak. Will they start to neglect their own productions? Will Disney become the studio that produces the crappier secondary features made to compete with PDI Dreamwork’s winter features? One thing’s for sure, Dreamwork just lost their edge with numbers. In the future, I’m sure we will see as many Disney/Pixar films as PDI Dreamworks.

Yes, yes, after months of rumors, it is finally official: Disney has bought Pixar. The price tag on Pixar ultimately closed at $7.4 billion. This is probably the most surprising piece of news since the Autodesk/Alias buyout. A few weeks ago I would’ve put money on the deal falling through. Pixar just seemed so independent, so we-don’t-need-Disney. It wasn’t just a Steve Jobs farce to raise the value, I heard it two years ago from Ed Catmull in a lecture he gave at my school. I guess they really had me convinced that Pixar really was going out on their own. Granted the deal is greatly in Pixar’s favor…and now Ed Catmull is the president of both company’s animation studios, so he really has nothing to complain about. Jobs is the biggest Disney shareholder and is probably the biggest winner of all. Interestingly enough, years back he actually tried to sell of Pixar to Microsoft and HP. Good thing for him, neither of them went for it.

Well what can I say? All the computer graphics businesses are assimilating.

I’ve been reading the blogs of various screenwriters lately, primarily John August, and David Anaxagoras and it’s becoming really clear why they’re just so plain interesting to read: they have a voice. Maybe it’s just them, but there’s something about witty geekish humor that just draws me in. I swear I can hear their voices when I read. (Not that I really hear their voices or even that I have the faintest idea what they sound like, but their character comes through) No matter what they write, it turns out funny and generally fun to read…even if it doesn’t sound like a fun topic at all. Don’t believe me? Try reading John August’s post on BunnySlipperz.

So why are they so good at this witty humor with a voice thing? One theory: every once in a while they have a very short sentence. Seriously.

Sometimes, it’s its own paragraph.

This makes me wish I had a voice in my writing, and was altogether a lot more interesting to read. People have told me that on AIM I sound the way I talk — they can hear my voice in the words I type. I took that as a great compliment. Somehow, that translates rather poorly to blogging. Why? Well, I’m not exactly the most eloquent of people in real life…maybe that’s why I sound unique on AIM. I have a rather suspicious vocabulary, populated with random sounds (erm, durrrr, ugh, pfffft), Canadian spelling (colour), and blatant misuse of words from foreign languages (ano). Somehow, that just doesn’t work in sentence form.