Ray Harryhausen 1920-2013

The innovative puppet animator Ray harryhausen dies this week, it's a huge loss to classic film effects fans and marks the end of an era of physical effects artists that started with Willis O'Brien in the silent film era. 

On personal level, Mr. Harryhausen was a hero of my childhood. While other kids wanted to be fireman and later astronauts... I wanted to work in a small room alone animating puppets to life for films. Films like "The beast from 20 000 Fathoms" are still in my list of top ten films to watch over and over for not just entertainment, but inspiration. 

Right up until his death, this pioneer was still working on new projects. These varied from new puppet animations based on Poe's works to colourizing his earlier films for a new audience.. something I normally would abject to but after meeting him a couple years ago and hearing his reasons for doing, I was convinced he was doing the right thing. They were, after his films to decide what was best for their continued enjoyment by fans. 

Ray never wanted to go the computer route with animation, he liked the physical models and the not so real quality of mixing them with real actors and sets. He did develop techniques used by others, including a way to move the models while clicking the shutter each frame to give them a motion blur.. making them look hyper real. He never used this in any of his films, however, thinking it would take away from the fantasy look. 

No one ever made films like him... and likely never will. he was a genre of film making unto himself. Luckily his monster films, Sinbad series and others are still around to remind us of his greatness and still give that spark of creativity to future artists. 

“Affanculo, dahling!” PHOTOSHOPPED - but hadta

The Wolfman

I recently got the time to see the film that was "going to bring the classic monsters back to the big screen", the new version the the Wolfman. As is evident by now, the revival never happened and this movie could easily be the reason. 

The good:

The retro Universal studios logo

The sets and locations

The cinematography 

The werewolf makeup

So far it looks like like a classic reborn, the look feel and colour palette are great and the werewolf makeup which the film should live or die by is a great updating of the Lon Chaney jr version. 

The bad:

The acting - totally phoned in by everyone

The violence is over the top and unnecessary

The cgi isn't terrible but it's obvious 

The story

With so much going right the stuff that went wrong is more a shame. The story is basically the same as the failed first Incredible Hulk movie (seriously) and wasted the chance for us to be watching and Creature from the Black Lagoon etc by now and it can't be stated enough how violently repulsive the gore is in this flick. No chance to show dismemberment and intestines on the ground is wasted. This is not classic horror, but it is horrible. 

The Fairy Official Trailer #1 - La fée Movie (2012) HD

I've been watching the films of the trio of Fiona Gordon, Dominique Abel, and Bruno Romy. Trippy, Funny. Cartoonish. Kind-Hearted. and Goofy. I wish I knew more about them - they seem to come from dance.

June Wilkinson Comic Book Ad

...strange that My Little Margie Comics would be featuring an ad with a a star (June Wilkinson)who, at this point, would be famous for being professionally naked. She mentions being in the Continental Twist with Louis Prima, and in the clip below one can see that the Wate-on that kept her going seems to have worked. Then again it was Charlton comics who were the cheapo brand.

Koch

The film "Koch" has been released.. Coincidentally on the day he died. I worked on the restoration and retouching of photos throughout the film. It's been a tough couple years, I only hope I get more good work like this soon!

The Whisperer in the Darkness

This is the latest film from the people who brought back the silent film to bring us "The Call of Cthulu". Unlike the earlier film this one is more modern in look and feel... but not by much. It recalls the style of the Universal horror classics and does a damn good job of it. 

This is company that knows it has limited resources and makes the most of them. While some of the film is slow (there is a good 15 minutes that could easily had been cut out and no one would have noticed) the intention and spirit of Lovecraft is respected and certainly present. There is one scene in particular that is fairly gruesome and disturbing. Other scenes use animation maybe not possible with the 30's tech this film imitates faithfully in most places, but even those effects seem in place for this project. 

Trying to explain a Lovecraft story is difficult at best and filming one, even harder. Changes must be made and visual choices to show what is indescribable can go either way with viewers but these guys get 100 points for effort and for actually getting it done when much more monied studios can't even get past the planning stages for putting Lovecraftian chills on the screen. 

The "New" tech of the Hobbit

If you want a review of the film, not the tech, check out the excellent review on "The Movie Wrench". 

With the release of the Hobbit came a slew of new, not so new and fairly old technology that's all been heralded at some time or another as the "future of cinema". While the future is not easy to predict, it's not too early to pass some judgement on these advances... if in fact they are. 

3D

This has been the future since the 50's and I have to say that watching The Creature from the Black Lagoon in three dimensions is much more entertaining than any of the films released recently. It is headache producing, eyes straining and lends itself to excessively obvious shots of things pointed directly at your face with no reason to do so. 

IMAX screen

Again, not so new an idea as bigger and bigger screens were quite the thing on and off in movie theatres since they began. On the positive side, these new screens are not just bigger but clearer, have much more depth and the sound is amazing. This really does give you the larger than life feeling we want from a night at at the movies. The set back to this is the price... paying a lot more for what should maybe be standard if you want to compete with 80 inch TVs which let you watch for free and in your own home. 

High Frame Rate

While still not totally new (Douglas Trumbull - a god of cinema effects and tech) has been trying to get up to 70 frames per second (FPS) in our local movie houses for decades. Unfortunately in the Hobbit, this aspect of the film is hard to separate from the 3D. The images are 48FPS not 70 but even that might look either "hyper real" or "fake and video like" depending on each person's tolerance for the technique. The colour and sharpness is beautiful however when the images are up to the technology. People's faces can look odd at first and some action sequences look like they have been animated with puppets one frame at a time since there is almost zero blur. It makes any kind of special effect that much harder to pull off realistically, at least for now. 

Overall

The future could easily be comprised of IMAX and high frame rates but 3D is still something that time has never arrived and likely never will come to pass as something many people will want to see beyond the gimmick. 

The Lathe of Heaven

To let understanding stop at what cannot be understood is a high attainment. Those who cannot do it will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven.

Chuang Tzu

Based on the 1971 novel by Ursula Le Guin, this first direct to TV production by PBS in 1980 tells the story of George Orr, a young man who goes to forced therapy after trying to kill himself with pills that suppress his dreams. He believes he has dreams that can change reality so that nothing that came before the dream happened, so only he remembers it. It doesn't take the therapist, Dr. William Haber who in short order, realizes that George can in fact "effective dream" and change reality. 

This production is, in a word excellent. That's not to say it's not aged over time. The electronic music is a little tiring, but only a little and the minuscule 250,000$ budget shows... but barely. There was a more recent, and much less successful adaption that didn't come close to capturing the feeling and philosophy of the book. The acting is well done and the story and characters cover a lot of strange ground in a way that keeps mysterious and yet is still easy enough to follow as the plot unfolds. 

Haber, after discovering George is telling the truth about his powers to change things, makes every attempt to use him, not in an evil way, but in a very well intentioned attempt to "fix" the world's problems.. starting with the the nonstop years of rain in the futuristic world of 2002 Portland and then onward to bigger and more ambitious things. Dreams being dreams, nothing quite turns out as cleanly as he would like. As things go for bad to worse, Haber embarks on a plan to cure George and transfer the abilities to someone more worthy and stable... himself, of course. What he doesn't realize is that the entire scenario, including George's ability to effectively dream up reality was the result of something terrible... it was in a sense, George's dying wish, so taking away the power from him just unleashes, once more, the horrible event that put things in motion to start with. 

PBS jumped into original films with a truly original film. It passes on the best ideas in sci-fi minus the current trend of high end effects and leaves many thing open ended enough to interpretation to make this film fit in the same sort of genre of Nicolas Roeg's "The Man Who Fell to Earth" in many respects. Did I mention the voice of the aliens is the same voice as the HAL 9000? 

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