Nov 12, 2009 02:42
GodDAMN this cat is all up in my grill and sleeping in my lap. Usually he couldn't care less about me, but my mom gave him his flea medicine today (the gooey crap you spread on the back of their head) so she's a persona non gratis, and as a result I get the overflow cat-love. This would be sweeter if the fuzzy little kitty head that's rubbing all over me wasn't covered in stanking ass flea medicine, but hey, you take what you can get in life.
I just finished watching Coraline. Oddly, considering how amazingly amped I was on it when I first saw footage and trailers for it, my enthusiasm wasn't enough to actually propel me into a theater to see it. Hell, lately NOTHING has been enough to get me to actually sit through a movie at home, let alone going out to a theater. There have been a lot of movies that I await expectantly, only to not see them until 14 months after their release. Hell, I saw Wall-E for the first time about 4 months ago.
It was a really cool movie, though most of my friends were warm to lukewarm about it. Vanessa accused the movie of operating on videogame logic, which I agree with, to an extent. The whole scavenger hunt part with the three eyes to find was totally videogame-inspired, though it worked in that it gave her a reason to explore the dream universe as it falls apart- in videogames a scavenger hunt is usually just used to fill time. A few of the character concepts really looked like stuff from Psychonauts, and if you told me they shared staff artists I wouldn't be surprised, though a lot of those designs also look like Corpse Bride, and Nightmare Before Christmas, and any number of other things where people are parodied artistically but not necessarily favorably. My only real complaint was that everything seemed pretty oddly paced. The general curve of action is intact and nothing kills the momentum, but there's a lot of short mini-climaxes that stack up near the end. The first act is a little dull (but it's the setup, so it should be), the second act starts to really pick up as things start happening, and then the third act is a conflagration of stuff all at once. Even once the main climax has passed, there are easily two more mini-climaxes, and then an ending wrap-up scene that introduces a new character and is just long enough to feel like something else is coming next. Even with that little meh I was still 100% satisfied with it. The story was equal parts fun, inspiring, and actiony, and the stop-motion is incredible. Some of the scenes where people are walking from a distance really do look like they filmed a person walking and just screwed with it in photoshop to make it look a little more stop-motiony.
Stop-motion and really high end computer animation (pixar stuff) do have a sort of problem that I've noticed over time. I imagine this is also the case in regular drawn animation too, but I'd imagine to much less an extent. These sort of films REALLY need an editor with icewater for blood and an iron heart. Honestly, the ending bits of the movie could have probably stood to lose a few scenes (or at least parts of them) to make a more satisfying full ending, but in a stop-motion movie where even 15 seconds that could be cut represent a month of filming, the tendency is to use the whole buffalo and keep in as much as possible. This can make a movie bloated and plodding, and even a concerted effort to change direction can be difficult. The deleted scenes in Wall-E are a perfect example- there was one massive change to a few major scenes in the third act, and even though it was decided when the animation was still not far along, it represented a HUGE hassle. Pixar is pretty good about being willing to work for a good finished product, but not everybody has that kind of money to spend on every step of the process.
Anyway, the cat calls me to bed now. Also having to work and not wanting to stay up all night does that too. We officially start wearing our holiday shirts tomorrow, and the christmas trees are up. Bleh.
The whole holiday season insanity has struck me as extremely arbitrary lately. Probably mostly because as a non-religious person, the season really IS all about just buying crap for people I know. Despite never actually going outside to enjoy it, I really like the summer. Hell, you'd have to be one seriously screwy person to find something to hate about summer in southern california in comparison to the other seasons. It's warm and sunny for 80% of the year, but not as hot or as cold as the extremes in the rest of the nation. I guess that's why we're all still here despite the pollution, the state being bankrupt, housing prices being overinflated by millions even after being "deflated" by the housing crisis, and the ricockulous cost of living.