Labels: film

Sure, you could spend your hard earned seconds adding your signature any number of causes, but if there's only ONE Spacey Award nomination you spend your valuable activism time on, make sure it's to ensure that Todd McGuinness wins the 2008 Spacey Award for the Best Debut Performance by a Canadian Actor in a Supporting Role in a No-Budget, English-Language, Feature-Length Movie by a First Time Director Whose Name Rhymes With 'King-Pin' (Oh, and He Has a Ponytail, Too, The Actor We Mean, Not The Director). Don't take MY word for it though. See what TMcG himself has to say here.



If you've never seen his performance in "Killing Schrodinger's Cats" you can get a sample from the trailer from the KSC website. You won't be disappointed.

"But I haven't seen the whole movie, wouldn't it be wrong to add my name?", you ask...

Maybe, but remember these other very important factors. The director's name is King-Pin, and that's his REAL name, not some made up "I WANT to be cool" name. It's what he was born as. And Todd, well his last name is McGUINNESS. Guinness is the best damned beer in the world.

Until next time...

Labels: film, fun stuff, video

Or darkly?

I'd say the former, in his adaptation of A Scanner Darkly. Clear as day. I don't intend on doing a movie review here, so I'll leave it at that.

If you want to get a sense of what the movie is like, you can watch the first 24 minutes for free online.

While waiting for some renders to finish out, I figured I'd check out a few reviews. Rotten Tomatoes is a good review aggregator, and oddly enough, the first two negative reviews I read held as part of their reasoning "the movie is too faithful to the book", then chastize Linklater for not making the theme of an increasingly authoritarian police state too blatantly a fable for the current political climate in the U.S... WTF?

That has got to be the LAMEST excuse for a negative review.

Now, I agree with the sentiment regarding increased loss of civil rights, and all that double plus nongood stuff, but Phillip K. Dick's books were never such blunt instruments, so WHY should Linklater need to hit the viewers over the head with such sentiments?

I guess the long and short of this is, if you're a PKD fan, then you can take these negative reviews as positive.

Going off on a bit of a tangent here, but before seeing the movie, I had googled for a review, and came across the best site for movie ratings ever, and Scanner rates a healthy 7.6.8.

What does that mean exactly? On a scale of 1-10, it rates a 7 for Sex and Nudity (right on, painted over boobies), a disappointing 6 for violence and gore (sigh - but then again PKD isn't about that), and an amazing 8 for profanity!

Here's the evaluation of why the film got an 8 for the latter...

PROFANITY 8 - 31 F-words and its derivatives, 7 sexual references, 1 obscene hand gesture, 20 scatological terms, 2 anatomical terms, 13 mild obscenities, name-calling (loser), 10 religious exclamations.

The capper had to be the "name-calling (loser)".

They also end their review with an explanation of "the message" of the film. Some of them are brilliant ('brilliant' in it's ironic post-post modern hipster form, in other words 'bad').

Pick some of your favourite movies, and see what they have to say. As a lark, I put Pulp Fiction in the search, and it rates a whopping 9.10.10!

But I digress...

I liked the movie. A lot more than this square. I say "square" because only a square would feel the need to both portray a piece of talking cheese, and also indicate it to the viewer through the dialogue of the cipher.

Strange doesn't neccesarily equal random.

Nuff said.

Labels: film

Well, it's official, my good buddy King Pin has finalized the trailer for his first feature length film. You can pop over to his blog to view the trailer. Although I'm definitely biased, since I helped with the graphics, and was there for at least part of the shoot, where I had to put up with these guys.

I gotta say kudos. And yeah, I know this post has MORE than it's share of hyperlinks per word.

Labels: film, video

The original release date for Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly is finally coming out! A second trailer for the film has been posted on Apple's site for anyone to check out, based on head-trippin' Philip K. Dick's story. If you don't know Dick, well, you don't know dick.

Being a fan of Linklater, PKD and digital animation, this is definitely on my list of must see movies.

This article about the post production process is interesting, and mentions the reasons for the lockout of the animators....

But behind closed doors, it was clear something had to change. Sabiston, who was falling behind schedule, allegedly asked for more time, more money, and more staff. Tensions mounted, and one Friday in February 2005, four months after the animation process began, Sabiston and his four-person core team went to a local café to discuss strategy. Pallotta took action. A security guard was posted at the door, the locks were changed, and their workstations were seized. Pallotta replaced Sabiston with two local artists, Jason Archer and Paul Beck, whom he felt would bring a more practical, commercial attitude to the production. "There were a lot of comments about 'ruining the art,'" says a source close to the situation. "But we weren't trying to ruin it, we just wanted it better than they wanted it done." The studio bumped the budget to $8.7 million and gave Linklater another six months to finish the movie.

Pallotta recast the operation as a more traditional, Disney­esque animation project - complete with a style manual, a strict deadline schedule, and a policy of breaking the film into even smaller segments. For example, one animator was assigned to work primarily on Winona Ryder's character. The thinking was that the character would then look the same throughout the entire film. The style manual standardized the movie's visuals and indoctrinated the new artists. It dictated a drawing method for everything from male characters ("an emphasis on tendons in the neck adds masculinity") to Reeves' beard ("retain the patchy quality by inking large, separate chunks that can be unified by color"). This approach, used successfully by larger animation houses, eliminates the personal interpretation that can sabotage a director's unified vision.

That sounds like the way it should have been handled from the get go. Then again, Linklater's earlier Waking Life, using the same rotoscoping techniques, didn't need such a tight constraint, given the lattitude individual artists were given for their vignettes.

Just don't follow the link to Wired's Top 10 Reasons Keanu Reeves Rules... I'm not even gonna hot link it.

Damn... too late.

A Scanner Darkly open July 7th, 2006.

Labels: film

Just a link...

Paul is a longtime friend, and runs his own domain. He's currently gathered a crew together for the 48 hr Film Challenge in Toronto, which is a cool experiment in it's own right.

I'd be part of the crew, but he's informed me that the slots are all filled up. I'd like to believe him, but I suspect the real reason I'm not part of it is because I suck, and am VERY thin skinned. If anyone ever told me the truth about my suckage, I'd probably curl up into a ball and cry for days. After shaking off the funk, I'd probably end up on a bender to end all benders.

Really, if you can believe that.

Anyways, here's his site...

The Paul Laroquod Experiment

Labels: film