One of the offshoots of the previous post on 2001 was remembering the experimental
nature of some of the footage. Specifically, I’m thinking of the sequence where
the astronaut, played by Keir Dullea, is flying toward the “surface” of
Jupiter, and he begins to encounter a really outré light show. A whole long
series of merging light objects move and speed and flow until we and the
character are all dizzy and disoriented. I read where Kubrick was looking for a
new effect for this sequence, and some techie guy showed him this and he was
sold.
That made me think of the first Tron, a Disney product that was long on effects and short on
script. It was praised for its use of new effects, and I have long thought that
efforts like this are bold and useful, if not completely successful as works of
art themselves. The more successful uses of the technology usually come along
later. I can’t think of any successful uses of the Tron effects, but then I don’t
have a lot of exposure to movies.
That brings me to Mars
Needs Moms. Pretty ridiculous, right? The whole thing was shot using an
experimental process, shooting actors in 3-D motion-capture suits. The mom even
looks like Joan Cusack. I don’t know where
this process is going, if anywhere, but Mars
Needs Moms shares qualities with other experimental movies: the effects are
the only reason to watch or think about them.
Okay, one last thought which on sort of the same subject. I
read where in the early days of making The
Incredibles, Brad Bird said they made the faces of the characters so
realistic that they began to look fake. Talk about irony. So they had to make
them more caricature-ish so that audiences would be more accepting. So, can we
stump for the making of the next Incredibles?
Please?
Two things:
ReplyDelete1) In the Trey Parker/Matt Stone puppet film, "Team America", they said the animitronic faces of the marionettes looked way too real, so they purposely made the faces look dull when they spoke. They did it to comic effect, and because they said before, when it was realistic, it was creepy looking.
2) While it's easy to focus on the shortcomings of Tron, how about we point out the rare thing they did do: as a sci-fi film, they correctly predicted the future.
Besides foreshadowing the coming of computer aided graphics, one of the film's central ideas is that the computer is a world in which a piece of you survives, independent of the real world you.
A facsimile of you can live on in the cyber-verse.
Facebook and World of Warcraft are just two examples of the various kinds of ways that came true.
Okay, these points seem a little stretched to me, but they DID stretch me out a little, too. So, turnabout is cool.
ReplyDeleteI think Tron is really all gimmick, and Tron II actually a little better, even if it's totally dependent on the original. Big props to Jeff B. for hanging around long enough to make it.