Live action filmatists, pick up the fuckin pace, please. I didn’t want to review TOY STORY 3. It is a cartoon about children’s toys. We all know by now that this Pixar company is the best at what they do. I already admitted that WALL-E touched me inappropriately in the heart, that UP made me cry like a bitch and that CARS made me wonder how talking cars make love. So it’s no surprise that I keep enjoying these Pixar movies. Everybody does. But nobody wants to hear what the guy who wrote the book about Steven Seagal thinks about Buzz Lightyear or whatever. It’s just not something I should have to do. There are plenty of movies starring ex-wrestlers or karate champions that I haven’t written about yet. But you live action directors are fuckin up this summer. You’re backing me into a corner. (more…)
Archive for the ‘Cartoons and Shit’ Category
notes on Toy Story 3
Friday, June 25th, 2010Rob Zombie Presents The Haunted World of El Superbeasto
Thursday, January 14th, 2010
As I’ve chronicled over the last few years, I have mixed feelings about Hollywood filmatist R. Zombie. On one hand I really like some things in all his movies (especially DEVIL’S REJECTS), on the other I hate things in most of them too (especially HALLOWEEN). On one hand I think he has a unique eye and a distinct vision, on the other hand he’s too undisciplined to know when his Kiss t-shirts and kitschy cartoon white trash aesthetic is fucking up the other things he’s trying to do. One minute he’ll win me back on the team (HALLOWEEN II) and the next he’ll get in my face and dare me to change my mind (HALLOWEEN II unrated director’s cut).
So I decided fine, you want to test my loyalty? Then I’ll watch your cartoon. We’ll se where that gets us. And I rented his DTV cartoon presentation ROB ZOMBIE PRESENTS THE HAUNTED WORLD OF EL SUPERBEASTO, allegedly directed by Rob Zombie (although the cartoonists might disagree, I’m not sure). (more…)
Up
Sunday, May 31st, 2009
Welcome to another episode of Vern’s Soft Side. In this episode, Vern cries at a fuckin cartoon.
Okay, short version first: just go see the fuckin thing. This review is gonna have spoilers in the sense that I’m gonna talk it up, you’re gonna go in expecting this or that based on what I said, it’s gonna get to your analytical mind and might fuck everything up. So don’t read this. Also disregard what I said above about crying, I would never cry, come on man let’s be serious here.
UP is the latest Pixar and somehow tops everything they’ve done before. For all the mediocrity and horribleness going on in our world today, we are lucky to live in the golden age of Pixar. Who knows how long their streak could last, but watching their movies now feels like watching PINOCCHIO and BAMBI and all those coming from the same group of people in a row. It’s just incredible, nobody else can match what they’re doing. (more…)
WALL-E
Sunday, July 13th, 2008By now you’ve heard of WALL-E. Lovable robot, etc.
I’m no cartoon fetishist, but I’m not blind. Pixar is America’s most consistently great studio, and on first glance this is probaly the best they’ve done so far. You never thought you’d see something like WALT DISNEY’S 2001 A SPACE ODYSSEY, but that’s what the first act of this feels like. This movie is deep. There is a poetically tragic beauty to it that has never been captured in any cartoon all the way from PINOCCHIO to BARBIE’S FAIRY MERMAID CASTLE 2 or even (arguably) OSMOSIS JONES.
Here is this godforsaken shitpile of a planet, literally covered in garbage, the sky brown with garbage dust, a ring of space litter surrounding the atmosphere. Humans left this place behind 700 years ago, and the only things still moving around are one cockroach and the one remaining robot that was left behind to clean up the garbage.
So there WALL-E is picking up garbage, crushing it into cubes, and building structures out of them. I’m not sure whether this is what he was programmed to do, or whether he is using his crushing/stacking job to create art, but either one is interesting. He’s been doing this for 700 years and had to cannibalize all the other dead WALL-E’s to survive, so either he’s Will Smith in I AM LEGEND, finding his way in an abandoned world, or he’s the robot at the end of A.I., missing his mommy thousands of years after humans have gone extinct. Cleaning up garbage is what he was built for, so maybe he doesn’t know that nobody needs him to do it anymore. (more…)
Beowulf
Friday, November 16th, 2007THE BEOWULF 3-D IMAX EXPERIENCE
BEOWULF is the new “motion capture” weirdly computerized sword and sandal 3-D movie from Robert Zemeckis. He’s using the same technology and directational style as POLAR EXPRESS but it will go over better because that one was for kids, this one has a bunch of stabbings and monsters and a part where Virtual Angelina Jolie gives a handjob to a sword, so that means it’s more sophisticated and adult.
Ray iWinstone voices the blonde he-man of the title. Anthony Hopkins 2.0 plays the old king, Robin Wright Penn’s likeness plays the princess from the fuckin Shrek movies, and John Pac-Mankovich does his usual distractingly weird performance as some asshole who is pissed off about something or other. Also you got Crispin Glover inhabiting the monster Grendel and a very good computerized duplicate of Angelina Jolie’s head as Grendel’s hot mom.
I guess they ran out of comic books and ’70s horror movies to remake, so this one is based on an epic poem from 700 AD. All I knew was a dude named Beowulf fights a monster named Grendel, so it was a fresh new story for me. But some 1300 year olds might say it’s raping their childhood, because apparently co-screenwriters British-guy and Pulp-Fiction-guy-besides-Tarantino throw in a pretty big reinterpretation. In this one the king fucked Grendel’s mom (take that Grendel!) and in fact is Grendel’s dad. And Beowulf fucked Grendel’s mom too (ooh, snap!) and the dragon he fights at the end is his son. Ha ha, your son is a dragon! (more…)
Cars
Tuesday, June 27th, 2006As you know I’m not one for the cartoons but somehow I ended up seeing this new one called CARS. What CARS is about is cars. However they are not any ordinary type of car like you’ve ever seen before, they are living cars. And when I say that I am not even talking about a Knight Rider or Herbie the Love Bug type of scenario here, I am talking about an entire society devoid of human life, but dominated by living, feeling cars with weird eyeballs on their windshields. They can make gestures and they can use their tires sort of like hands, and they have jobs, etc. Even the insects of this world are cars, but there are regular non-car plants.
These cars have not only created a civilization, but their civilization has been around long enough that the good old days are gone. The story is about Lightning McQueen, who is apparently not named after Steve McQueen despite his brave service to the cause of cars in LE MANS and BULLITT. Thanks alot, assholes. Lightning is a hotshot race car, basically a NASCAR star without a driver. Because he’s a stubborn egotistical asswipe of a car he fucks up and blows his huge lead making the big race a three way tie. One of the other racers is played by Michael Keaton but he looks like the Burt Reynolds of cars. Anyway Lightning has to go to California for another race and because he’s a celebrity he doesn’t even bother to drive there himself, he goes inside his friend, a Mack truck played by Cliff from Cheers. Basically, he is inside his friend’s ass, but you can’t completely blame him because the inside of his friend’s ass looks like some kind of luxury apartment.
But then Lightning gets lost and ends up stranded in a small town along Route 66 where he learns valuable car lessons and helps revive a dying way of car life, etc.
This movie maybe isn’t quite as effective as the other movies by these TOY STORY people, but it does work. And part of the appeal is the incredible attention to detail, even in the filmatism. For the parts about car races they take on the frinetic tics of sports broadcasting, with flashy camera moves and onscreen graphics and with car commentators and corporate sponsors. There is an entire audience of thousands of cars. Then when it gets out on the road it slows down and there is actual atmosphere. Somehow they really capture the feel of driving out on the highway at night. And when they get to the town, I think it’s called Radiator Springs, there are these quiet establishing shots with a yellow traffic light slightly buzzing as it blinks on and off. Even the sound effects are perfect. They had to figure out the sound of tires rolling around as cars “walk” along having a conversation. (more…)
A Scanner Darkly
Sunday, June 18th, 2006A SCANNER DARKLY, Richard (BAD NEWS BEARS) Linklater’s new adaptation of the Philip K. Dick novel, is a visionary and boldly stylized look at the tragedies of the drug culture and the growing police state. Its psychedelic style of wobbly, traced-over animation creates a fluid, disconnected reality that perfectly captures–
Ah fuck, who am I fooling. This movie put me to fuckin sleep.
Maybe it’s over my head, I won’t rule that out. And I don’t want to say it’s necessarily a terrible movie (like WAKING LIFE – I hate that god damn movie). I haven’t read the book, and maybe people who did will enjoy it. Who knows. I think I admire what the movie is going for but that doesn’t change the fact that, to me anyway, it’s a meandering bore with barely any characters, humor or even plot to latch onto.
Keanu Reeves plays a narc who goes undercover with a bunch of hippies using a drug called “Substance D.” But he truly is addicted to the drug so also is undercover among the cops. Because it’s 7 years in the future he wears a “scramble suit” to hide his identity when talking to other cops. This is a suit that causes every part of his face and clothes to constantly morph into different identities (Michael Jackson’s “Black Or White” video on acid) and is probaly the most clever use of the animation (even if the gimmick gets old fast). The movie takes place in a surveillance-obsessed future where everything everybody does gets holographically recorded and then his job as a “scanner” is to go through the footage on fast forward. (It is not related to SCANNERS or SCANNER COP.) Because his drug use causes damage to his brain he begins to spy on himself without realizing that it’s himself (or at least that’s what I gather after reading up on the book afterwards.) (more…)
Robots
Friday, March 11th, 2005What this one is about is robots. It’s a movie about robots, so they called it ROBOTS. You see how that works? Movie is about robots = title is ROBOTS. That is the level of imagination and innovation we are working with here in America circa 2005. Ain’t life beautiful.
Before I go on, I gotta warn everybody, just because a movie is in IMAX doesn’t mean it’s in 3-D. I saw GHOSTS OF THE ABYSS and POLAR EXPRESS there and the 3-D made those worthwhile, and I swear on THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST: RENAILED that is the one and only reason why I went to see this ROBOTS. Now obviously I would prefer if a 3-D movie was a horror or a part 3, something where either a shark or an eyeball is gonna pop out of the screen at some time. But I have accepted that now 3-D is for kids movies only so a man’s gotta settle. I didn’t mind payin my ten bucks but then when I walked into the theater and there was no goggles, I realized that I was finally suffering the consequences of my ignorance about Imax. I knew this day would come. ROBOTS is not in 3-D. Sheeit.
ROBOTS is a computer animated one about a world where everybody is robots. They have dreams, goals, etc., and you could see where it would go from there.
I mean seriously, every single god damned thing that happens in this movie, you would already figure would happen in this movie. Except maybe the character who has a giant ass who farts all the time, I didn’t see that one coming. Farting robots in this one.
A cartoon rabbit’s mom once said if you can’t say something nice, shut the fuck up you thumpery little piece of shit cartoon rabbit (paraphrased) so I will start by saying two nice things. Number one, the designers of this movie are very clever and creative, building an entire world and population out of junk parts. Number two, there is about three or four mildly amusing jokes spaced out throughout this movie. One detail I liked, the villain listens to Kenny G in one part. Somebody should steal that for real live action, that’s a good one. (more…)
Waking Life
Saturday, January 1st, 2005It took me a while to get to this one because 1) cartoons are only for children and 2) it wasn’t nominated for the best animated feature oscar so it must not have been any good. so I watched Jimmy Neutron instead.
Actually that is all bullshit. I know this movie was beloved by critics and people alike. I even talked to one dude who hates all Richard Linklaters other movies but liked this one. As you probaly already know this is a movie that Linklater shot on digital video, then had computer animators paint over the video in their computer programs and turn it into surreal computer art type business. What the plot is about is this kid is dreaming, but he can’t wake up, and everywhere he goes people talk to him about free will or lucid dreaming or show off that they have some wacky quirk like they pretend their car is a boat.
Now let me tell you something. This is a completely original idea for an animated feature and I respect that. The animation style itself is also original and sometimes even looks good. Because of the software tracing over handheld video camera footage the backgrounds end up bouncing around like the whole city is built on the surface of a giant water bed, and everywhere you walk the trees and the buildings and the signs wobble around. Some of these shots, especially walking around on city streets, look stunningly beautiful and are a good totally phoney way of portraying a dream life. (I mean seriously, have you ever had a dream that was anything like this animation in any remote way? Of course not.)
There are also some interesting ideas to ponder in this movie. And some of the acting is good, like the one scene with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. A few of these actors know how to deliver this dialogue and make it sound like they’re actually talking and not just spewing memorized lines. Also some of the scenes obviously are real professors talking about the type of shit that they, unfortunately for us, like to talk about. (more…)
Heavy Metal 2000
Saturday, January 1st, 2005Let’s face it, only nerds watch cartoons.
Okay so I know the above statement will rile up alot of male individuals of the internet. I know it is an overgeneralizational type deal especially since I have been known to like the cartoons. Such as the Miyazaki fellow hailing from the island of Japan. That is one individual who knows how to make a fucking CARTOON.
But jesus. I mean, Heavy Metal 2000. Need I say more? Probaly not. But I will.
Let me frame this with a little anecdote. I went to the video store and checked out some new releases with a gay individual. You know how a gay guy often likes movies such as Bedrooms and Hallways, Edge of Seventeen, Queer As Folk and etc.? These are apparently some of the higher quality new releases from the gay Cinema. However there are many other titles out there of a lower quality. There is one called Vadim’s Story, which is not about Roger Vadim, it’s about naked boys riding around on horses in Siberia. But most of them are about a bunch of gay guys in the city who are waiters or whatever and how they all have a bunch of friends and relationships and what not, and how it’s all funny that they are gay and everything. There’s one called West Hollywood Stories and on the back, I swear to fucking christ, it says “These are the gays of our lives.”
So my gay buddy is reading these boxes talking about how great these movies are and suddenly he just turns to me disgusted and says, “Gay people are so stupid.” (more…)
