io9 
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San Francisco, 5:16 PM
Wed Dec 9
28 posts in the last 24 hours
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12:15 PM
uhhh... money?
12:10 PM
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12:03 PM
By making this demon into an Errol Flynn villain you have demonstrated to the world that you either: (a) can't let other people succeed without trying to participate yourself and/or (b) you missed the point entirely.
Either way, good luck Scott. I hope you don't fail nearly as hard as I think you will.
12:41 PM
If he fails wouldn't that end with what was a rich in flavor film to a bland tasteless peace of crap?
12:48 PM
And look at Batman Forever and Batman & Robin. They didn't affect much more than their own reputation.
If this project fails, it will go down alone. Correction, it will go down along with the staff that thought it up.
01:32 PM
"AVP 1 & 2 both sucked sucked sucked and they had no effect on the awesomeness that is the Alien franchise." - Yeah it did... you can pretty much rule out anything else in either series being made for some time now
"And look at Batman Forever and Batman & Robin. They didn't affect much more than their own reputation." - Wrong! Because of those two horrid movies, it took a lot of time and quite the effort to get WB to even contemplate the idea of another Batman movie.
Studios don't consider the fact that the movies they released were garbage. They just see that it tanked and conclude that no one is interested in the subject matter.
05:02 PM
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08:22 AM
i found the special edition 'updated' star wars to be horrific, and i felt strongly that ep 1-3 should have been filmed using only technology that was available in the late 70s, to preserve the look and feel. and that means models. they just look better.
08:31 AM
As far as the new trilogy goes, I was fine with them using modern technology. As a huge Star Wars nerd, I was pretty estatic to see lightsaber fights that actually looked like they were being fought by Jedi.
The CGI was way overused in those films, too, though. An even balance (CGI lightsabers and forcelightning, puppet Yoda and Gungans, etc) would have been much better.
10:16 AM
we can't even get non-vhs/laserdisk editions of the unaltered trilogy. It's a crime.
10:48 AM
One of my favorite, nostalgic scenes of the original trilogy is the very end of Return of the Jedi, where the Ewoks and Rebels are partying on Endor. The song the Ewoks play and sing is awesome. In the new version, however, that scene has been done over with a montage of scenes from around the Empire - which is actually a really awesome montage, don't get me wrong. The problem is, they took out the freaking song! They put in some other song over it, so now when I watch Return of the Jedi, I don't get my "aww, I remember this from when I was 10" moment, and that makes me a sad Star Wars nerd.
11:11 AM
One of the dvd sets touts having the "Original unaltered exactly as in theaters" regular editions of the films in special features.
Which is a lie, because they are skewed low quality laser disc rips.
I would pay quite a bit for blu ray unaltered editions of the original trilogy. And DVD versions.
06:37 AM
if the tiny innacuracies or inconsistancies are what you like about films and pop-music then i suggest you catch some live theater or a concert.
06:53 AM
But I think all that is necessary to fully understand the new technology and find a proper place for it amongst all the other tools that artists have available to them. If you don't go kinda overboard with it then you can't really find where the limits are or what works and what doesn't.
People will get tired of style-over-substance CGI extravaganzas eventually, and when filmmakers realize they can't rest an entire movie's success on CGI special effects alone it will become just another filmmaking tool.
06:55 AM
A new shiny tool can often put the user in a mode of "look at all the neat things I can do" rather than what they SHOULD do (I'd even point to the "special editions" of E.T. and Star Wars as examples of that). A lot of directors have been guilty of that with CG, which is probably, in part, what Graeme's push back is about.
That said, Cameron has generally used his shiny new toys to good effect so I'm betting that's the case with Avatar as well.
03:08 AM
It's also what allows to see who can sing and who can't. Hearing to a ton of marketing before you actually hear the artist in question helps.
01:54 AM
06:14 AM
I don't like watching a movie and thinking, "There's the CGI" like all through Phantom Menace or I am legend.
09:43 AM
12:34 AM
My point is simply that CGI is nothing new in cinema, in the sense that cinema has always been about incorporating the latest and greatest technology in the service of wowing the audience. CGI is another step in that evolution -- but the key word here is "evolution." When you say, "it will always lack the element of chaos, the potential for mistakes, that makes it something we can believe (and lose ourselves) in," I suspect that's one of those quotes someone will dig up in 10 or 15 years, when movies with photorealistic CG actors are the norm, to illustrate how wrongheaded some critics were, back in the 00's.
I think you make wrong assumptions about what filmmakers who use CGI are trying to do. They aren't striving for the kind of sterile perfection described in your Wolk quote. They are fully aware that the "element of chaos" you mention is the gap (or uncanny valley, if you will) between the current state of the art and true realism. They are closing that gap a little more every year.
CGI is still a topic of discussion because we're presently still in that uncanny valley where true realism has yet to be achieved. But I think it's also because we as viewers -- at least the older of us -- haven't yet become fully acclimated to what CGI brings us. What I mean is, when you and I see some fantastic, eye-popping CGI sequence, we automatically disbelieve it, not because the effects aren't realistic, but, I would argue, because they are. When I'm watching fifteen kajilion orcs rampaging across a battlefield the size of Kansas, part of me is taken out of the movie. Not because the effects look fake, but because they don't -- the scene looks pretty real to me, and that in itself disrupts my suspension of disbelief, because I know it's not real. In a weird way, in some of these movies I'd actually be more comfortable with unrealistic old school effects, because that's a world I understand. CGI, with its ability to create visions and worlds that would be impossible or impractical to realistically portray without computers, can, in my opinion, actually disrupt the normal functioning of the human imagination. But if that's true, it's not CGI's fault, just the fact that we haven't yet grown into the technology.
Just to make this comment a bit more longwinded, I haven't seen any mention here about Firefly or Battlestar Galactica. I think the CGI in these series is worth mentioning, because they're groovy examples of deliberately inserting imperfections (shaky cam, blurring, lens flares, etc.) into visual effects in order to enhance realism. I do wonder though if that's the future of CGI realism or just a stopgap. As we continue our voyage into a world where consumer video cameras have motion stabilization and all kinds of image enhancing gizmos, maybe the sterile perfection we detest is actually on its way to becoming the new normal. Future generations will have no idea of what we mean by the "chaos" of real life. Do you think that Wolk rant will mean anything to the average teenager of 2025?
12/08/09
In recent years (many, many years), I've been so disillusioned by the crappy quality of hollywood sci-fi that all I really want now is just a really good story.
When I think of movies such as Close Encounters, ET, Terminators 1 and 2, the original Star Wars trilogy, the Back to the Future trilogy, 2010, The Abyss, even Minority Report, and Contact, all of which are favorites of mine, the common reason why I like them all is that they have really well-constructed stories.
Of course, there have been exceptions to the recent trend of bad-writing. Spider-Man 2, Iron Man, and Batman: The Dark Knight are obvious examples, but these are exceptions, not the norm.
Special effects are great and enhance the quality of a movie, but only if there is quality to be enhanced to begin with.
I'm somewhat excited by the prospect of Avatar, because Cameron is known to deliver good stories, but I'm also concerned that there is so much emphasis on the special effects and how revolutionary they're being promoted to be that the movie might end up being a flop, story-wise, despite the box-office success that I'm sure it's going to be.
So, to reiterate my answer to your question, I want to see really well-written original stories. It doesn't matter what about, where, or when.
03:40 AM
05:21 AM
12/08/09
Now as for out-of-focus scenes, that's a different story and it seems to be cropping up a lot from the movies lately *cough* star trek! *cough*
12/08/09
Although the rules for effects used to be 1) use the most appropriate tool available for each shot and 2) never use the same technique so often that the audience can detect the 'trick'.
Too often producers insist that CG be used because it is the most technically contemporary tool. They aren't effects artists so they are often unaware of better and sometimes cheaper tools that will more convincingly sell the shot. Peter Jackson is one of the few who is aware and he uses EVERYTHING.