Sep 28 2009 'A Christmas Carol' Trailer 2: If Nothing Else, They Owe Ferrell Chest Royalties
This new trailer for Robert Zemeckis's stylelessly-animated A Christmas Carol has a cameo by someone who appears to be a CGI, Christmas-themed version of Terrence Maddox, Will Ferrell's nude male model of SNL fame. Logically, this makes it marginally better than the Christmas Carol trailer that came out two weeks ago.*
*It's possible that trailer included this guy too. I can't pay attention to everything all the time, OK?
Sep 14 2009 'Disney's A Christmas Carol' Trailer: Back to the Uncanny Valley
Proving that nearly-realistic, Christmas-themed computer animation can be made slightly creepier than Polar Express when the subject is a deformed old man, here's the new trailer for Robert Zemeckis's adaptation of the well-worn tale of Ebenezer Scrooge.
If you loved the floating feather dancing in the air in Forrest Gump, you'll love the floating snowflake dancing in the air in this trailer. What is Bobby Z's obsession with following delicate, white objects drifting gently to the ground?
Continue Reading " 'Disney's A Christmas Carol' Trailer: Back to the Uncanny Valley "
Aug 20 2009 'Yellow Submarine' Resurfacing to Become a Lurid 'Beowulf'
With Beatles music and likenesses coming to RockBands everywhere next month, allowing me and other talentless idiots to scream into a microphone and pretend we're playing some of the most popular and enduring songs ever written, whoever it is that now has control of the band's rights have decided they might as well dilute the Beatles brand a bit further. Disney and Robert Zemeckis are working out a deal that would allow the motion-capture-loving director to direct a remake of the psychedelic animated classic Yellow Submarine. From Variety:
The studio has been quietly brokering a complicated rights deal that would give Zemeckis access to 16 original Beatles songs for a movie he will direct in the performance-capture 3-D digital production format he employed for “A Christmas Carol.” Disney opens that film November 6, with Jim Carrey playing Scrooge as well as the three ghosts who haunt him in the Charles Dickens tale.The hope is to have "Yellow Submarine" ready to premiere around the 2012 Summer Olympics, which begins July 27 in London.
I can't wait to see how Zemeckis will take these already creepy character designs and make them even more creepy by adding another dimension, lifeless eyes and spotty skin textures.
But I guess this is a good way to show kids in today's drug culture what the previous generation's drug culture was like. It hasn't always been glowsticks, kids: there was a time when the colors themselves were ridiculously bright!
May 19 2009 'A Christmas Carol' Still Pointless and Slightly Repulsive
Disney has released a new image and short clip from Robert Zemeckis's A Christmas Carol, confirming that, yes, the computer-animated rehashing of the Dickens classic still appears to be superfluous and moderately unsettling to look at, and Jim Carrey's wacky, fluctuating voice is not helping:
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Apr 30 2009 Who Framed Roger Rabbit This Second Time He's Being Framed?
Now that we have digital tools and performance capture, the power to re-create the effects of a 20-year-old movie is at our fingertips. Time to make another sequel to a decades-old film. From MTV:
[W]hen MTV News caught up with director Robert Zemeckis recently, he dropped a news bomb that had our eyes popping cartoon-style out of our sockets. “I’ll tell you what is buzzing around in my head now that we have the ability—the digital tools, performance capture—I’m starting to think about ‘Roger Rabbit,’” he told us.
I have no idea what performance capture would have to do with animating a madcap, intentionally cartoonish, animated rabbit. It sounds like you're planning to ruin things, Robert Zemeckis. Please don't motion capture Tom Hanks to animate Roger Rabbit.
Besides, clearly HD TVs and Blu-ray are the more impressive technologies when talking about a Roger Rabbit sequel. It's going to look so good when I meticulously, frame-by-frame, step through the movie looking for any possible Jessica Rabbit upskirts.
Jan 8 2009 Jim Carrey, as Animated Scrooge, Wearing a Translucent Baggy as a Sleeping Cap
Filmz.ru has posted the first look at Jim Carrey as Scrooge in Robert Zemeckis's A Christmas Carol. Like Zemeckis's last project, this film is entirely motion-capture animation, taking the creepy, empty faces of Beowulf and combining them with the creepy, awful faces of the elderly. I'm probably going to throw up during the trailer.
Oct 9 2007 More Terrifying, Not-Quite-Real 'Beowulf' Images
I can't wait until directors tire of this realistic CGI craze (as seen in Polar Express, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, and now Beowulf), because it's getting really disturbing to look at these soulless, not-quite-real effigies moving all-too-fluidly around the screen. Case-in-point, this new image of Grendel from Beowulf, though essentially a computer's rendering of an adult Pig-Pen, will haunt me for days.
New Beowulf Images [Empire]
Jul 26 2007 Beowulf Trailer Makes Me Feel Old
The light emanating from my crotch is both intense and celestial. Bask in it, Angelina. BASK FOR ALL YOU'RE WORTH!
As you may have already inferred from the title of this post or your clairvoyant turtle, the trailer for Beowulf is now online.
I know Zemeckis totally has a boner for this live actiony animation stuff, probably because he's getting too lazy to properly film shit in his old age, but much as I try to keep an open mind, I hate it. It's not real enough to make me think I'm looking at real people, and it's not stylized enough to look cool as animation. Why the hell do I want to watch something drawn by people who aren't good enough to draw it freehand? "Hey, look what I drew on this tracing paper!" "Good job, that looks almost exactly like Garfield, and you managed not to eat the crayon this time."
It just looks like one of those stupid computer games where your little character walks around town and you start killing everybody because they're not real and watching them die is the only thing that's interesting. But then you can't make it to the next level because the object of the game was to make their crops grow and instead you brutally slaughtered them. I think Mao had the same problem.
