theglobalarts.com » 3D

Avatar trailer opens Pandora’s box wider

admin — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 16:27:29 +0000

It looks like James Cameron is going for the tight-lipped PR approach for Avatar, and the Todd Solondz school of misanthropy might be supplying one of its finest graduates for the next Spider-Man villain

I’m a sucker for getting caught up in the hype for big blockbuster sci-fi movies that know exactly how to market themselves in order to look like the coolest thing since Ripley took out the xenomorph queen in Aliens. But so far the online publicity for Avatar, James Cameron’s forthcoming 3D megalith, hasn’t quite got under my skin. Far more exciting was the 15 minutes or so of actual footage that I saw earlier this year at the IMAX Waterloo in London. OK, so Cameron’s creation, the planet Pandora, did have a certain new-age whiff to it, with all those elfin, blue Thundercat types running around, but it was lurid, visceral and vivid enough to make you want to reach for the Peter Gabriel albums (and I’m a Peter Gabriel fan).

So far Avatar’s online hype machine has been limited to an OK teaser trailer and a pretty crappy website for supposed human recruits to travel to Pandora (which has admittedly improved somewhat since I first wrote about it last month).

The first full-length trailer is due to hit the web tomorrow, but an “international” version with unidentifiable subtitles is already available online, and reports are that it’s virtually indistinguishable from the English-language equivalent that’s about to drop. In the film, Jake (Sam Worthington), a disabled former marine given the chance to walk again via an alien body, or Avatar, which he can control with his mind, is charged with infiltrating the indigenous population of Pandora, the Na’avi, in order to help some evil military-industrial complex types plunder the priceless local mineral deposits. This new version appears to confirm a rather obvious story twist: it looks like Jake goes a little native and turns on his former employers.

There’s also a new featurette, which is mostly just Cameron waxing lyrical about what a genius Cameron is, while various other members of the cast and crew also make with the vapid hero worship, though it does contain a few shots we’ve not yet seen of Pandora.

For all the admittedly impressive motion capture involved, the technology, the ambition and the excellent cast, which includes the likes of Sigourney Weaver, Giovanni Ribisi and Zoe Saldana, Avatar’s success will ultimately be predicated on its storyline, which right now looks like a pretty generic one that we’ve seen before in countless movies. Let’s hope Cameron includes a few further twists in the tale to shake things up a little.

Elsewhere this week, more rumours are leaking out about Spider-Man 4, Sam Raimi’s forthcoming return to the world of everyone’s favourite wall-crawling superhero type. This time the Evil Dead director is up against it after the critics turned on the series’ last outing, Spider-Man 3, due to its confused plot and multiple villains. The suggestion is that only one bad guy will feature this time, with Dylan Baker, always good value in unusual roles in movies such as Todd Solondz’s Happiness, looking likely to get the nod in the form of Spidey’s old enemy, The Lizard.

Baker already appears in the series as Peter Parker’s sometime tutor and mentor Dr Curt Connors, who in the original comic books is transformed into the reptilian supervillain, so the move makes plenty of sense. And while the New York-born actor doesn’t immediately come across as having the charisma of a Willem Dafoe or an Alfred Molina, who played the villains in the series’ celebrated first two instalments, he’s a class act who more than deserves the shot at a headline role.

What are your thoughts on this week’s stories? Are you getting excited about Avatar yet? And can Raimi turn round Spider-Man, which incidentally also looks set to be shot in 3D? Is Baker the right man to play the series’ next villain, or should a better-known actor be brought on board?

Ben Child

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Up still soaring, as Michael Jackson’s shadow falls over UK box office

admin — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 12:43:34 +0000

The moving 3D adventure turns into one of Pixar’s strongest performers, the Saw series shows its first dip, and fans line up for small-hours premieres of This Is It

The winner
Pixar’s Up remains super-buoyant at the top of the box office, with yet another slim decline – 26% – and cumulative takings of £19.68m. After 17 days on release, the animation is well ahead of Pixar’s previous release WALL-E at the same stage of its run last summer (£13.56m) and modestly ahead of Ratatouille (£17.29m). However, Ratatouille’s 17-day figure included the whole October half-term holiday from 2007, whereas that has only just begun for Up. The film should have an especially rich period between now and Sunday.

Up has already overtaken the lifetime total of Pixar’s worst-performing UK title, Cars (£16.5m), and should soon shoot past Toy Story (£22.3m), WALL-E (£22.9m) and Ratatouille (£24.8m). But it still has a long way to go to challenge Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs’ position as 2009′s biggest animation: that film, from rival studio Twentieth Century Fox, has been pushed back into cinemas for half-term and has now grossed £34.87m.

The rival animation
Offering an alternative to the computer-generated 3D sheen of Up is Wes Anderson’s determinedly lo-fi stop-motion animation Fantastic Mr Fox. Debut takings of £1.52m will be seen as not exactly stellar for a family film based on a recognised property (Roald Dahl’s 1970 story) – but taking all the factors into account, it’s an OK start. In the first place, Anderson has never been mega-box office, and has been on a declining revenue curve since his third movie, 2001′s The Royal Tenenbaums: that film, Life Aquatic and Darjeeling Limited opened with £700,000, £455,000 and £435,000, respectively. Secondly, takings for animations outside Disney/Pixar, DreamWorks and Fox’s Ice Age stables are hit and miss. Coraline debuted with £2.43m in May; Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs with £1.58m last month; and Tale of Despereaux with £561,000 last December. The first two titles on that list, unlike Fantastic Mr Fox, benefited from the higher ticket prices of 3D. Take your pick as to which is an appropriate comparison.

A hit franchise stumbles
“If it’s Halloween, it must be Saw” is the message Lionsgate has been successfully pumping out for five years. And in the UK, since peaking with a £2.52m opening for Saw III in 2006, debut grosses for the ingenious torture franchise have been impressively consistent: Saw IV began its life with £2.48m, and Saw V with £2.44m. Now, at last, Saw takes a stumble: the latest installment has opened with £1.74m. The result echoes a similar underperformance in the US, which had been attributed mostly to competition from low-budget horror phenomenon Paranormal Activity. That film doesn’t open until 27 November in the UK, so Saw VI’s dip here presumably reflects market saturation after pictures on five consecutive Octobers. Saw VII is set to be in 3D; if only Lionsgate had managed to present Saw VI in the popular format, it might have been a whole different story.

Arthouse goes AWOL
Last October, foreign-language releases Gomorrah and I’ve Loved You So Long both played to packed arthouses, while crossover title The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas appealed widely to upscale audiences. Fast forward to October 2009, and there’s a dearth of arthouse hits, unless you count The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus or smart comedy Zombieland, which we don’t. Top arthouse release is eco-documentary The Cove, which, despite lots of press and favorable reviews, opened at the weekened with a blah £18,000 from 27 screens, for a £665 average. The result goes to show how hard it is these days to get audiences to watch environment-themed documentaries in the cinema, even one that promises thrills and spills. The release this Friday of An Education can’t come soon enough for the nation’s independent cinemas.

The future
Michael Jackson’s This Is It is being unveiled to the world at the same time on Tuesday, which is fine if you live in LA (6pm) or New York (9pm), but not so great if you are in London (1am Wednesday morning), Paris (2am) and destinations east. Still, it’s all part of the hoopla Sony is building on the concert-rehearsal movie, and Michael Jackson fans should propel it to a stellar debut, especially since Wednesday and Thursday takings will be added in, giving a five-day opening “weekend” result. Advance ticket sales are said to be exceptionally high. After that, it’s more about how word of mouth can spread interest beyond the core fanbase.

UK top 10
1. Up, 549 sites, £3,807,003. Total: £19,683,204
2. Saw VI, 375 sites, £1,736,287 (New)
3. Fantastic Mr Fox, 481 sites, £1,517,312 (New)
4. Couples Retreat, 379 sites, £932,171. Total: £3,588,820
5. Cirque Du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant, 385 sites, £798,641 (New)
6. The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus, 268 sites, £616,719. Total: £2,068,715
7. The Invention of Lying, 307 sites, £362,760. Total: £5,538,932
8. Zombieland, 279 sites, £323,815. Total: £3,001,207
9. Fame, 373 sites, £218,110. Total: £8,311,403
10. Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, 369 sites, £142,011. Total: £5,881,661

How the other openers did
The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard, 100 screens, £36,360
The Cove, 27 screens, £17,956
Johnny Mad Dog, 2 screens, £6,439 + £3,279 previews
Made in Jamaica, 2 screens, £2,345
Coffin Rock, 2 screens, £184
Colin, 3 screens, no figures available

Charles Gant

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Up still soaring, as Michael Jackson’s shadow falls over UK box office

admin — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 12:43:34 +0000

The moving 3D adventure turns into one of Pixar’s strongest performers, the Saw series shows its first dip, and fans line up for small-hours premieres of This Is It

Charles Gant

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Can Star Wars fight another blockbuster battle?

admin — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 16:16:38 +0000

I don’t buy US reports of a new trilogy for George Lucas’s space opera, but with Star Trek having been successfully rebooted, could Star Wars ever return to former glories?

Like millions of others, I grew up on the Star Wars movies. I remember being taken by my dad to see The Empire Strikes Back at the cinema when I was about seven years old and falling into rapture as I witnessed the spectacularly vivid, hugely ambitious vision on the big screen. As a child, it had far more verity for me than my own everyday surroundings, which seemed pretty humdrum when compared to all those epic battles across the vast distances of space.

There have been some great movies on a similar tip over the past 10 years or so which have sent the hairs on the back of my neck pointing outwards in much the way Empire did, but the most recent Star Wars films were not among them. Right up until the end, I held out a little hope that some of the magic of the earlier trilogy might be rediscovered by George Lucas and his team as they ploughed their way through a second triptych in workmanlike fashion. But around six months after Revenge of the Sith had been released, I finally had to admit to myself that the three later films should never have been made.

Since then, matters have spiralled into even more of a fug at Lucasfilm, with the most recent Star Wars big-screen venture, a teaser for the new animated series, meeting with critical and commercial apathy. This from a series which stands as one of the highest-grossing of all time, behind only Harry Potter and James Bond. A live-action TV show is also on the way, anticipation for which is not exactly at fever pitch. Meanwhile, Star Trek, always Star Wars’s nerdier, cheaper sibling, has emerged with a new fire in its belly following JJ Abrams’s enormously successful reboot.

It therefore strikes me that right now might not be quite the apposite moment to start planning an all-new trilogy of Star Wars films. But that is exactly what the Marketsaw blog says is happening at Lucas HQ.

“I have been hearing rumblings … extremely quiet at first, but now heating up significantly and from a trusted source – that George Lucas is preparing to unleash another Star Wars trilogy upon us, this time in stereoscopic 3D,” squeals the site’s editor. “This is not the TV series, these are brand spankin’ new 3D Star Wars movies.”

Marketsaw goes on to suggest that the films might be directed by such Hollywood luminaries as Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola rather than Lucas. It also contends that the existence of the new movies depends almost entirely on the success of James Cameron’s forthcoming Avatar, the science fiction 3D megalith that arrives in December.

Now if this story is true, it would be the scoop of Marketsaw’s young life. Naturally, then, many of the other more established US movie blogs have spent a fair bit of time doing their best to pooh-pooh it. Ain’t It Cool News went so far as to contact Lucasfilm, which predictably said that it is not considering future Star Wars live-action films.

That statement does not preclude the possibility, however slight, that the story is true. Lucas has already shown that he is more than happy to pillage his own past successes in the name of future profit, time and time again. Ultimately, he has a business to run, employees to pay, and Star Wars is by far his greatest asset. Put it this way, if you were Lucas’s bank manager, you’d probably be fairly astounded at the idea that there might not be future Star Wars movies.

Putting aside the matter of the Marketsaw report’s truthfulness (and I accept that’s a pretty big ask), the interesting question here is how Star Wars might be made great again. If a new series was filmed, should it take the form of a remake, or a completely new trilogy of stories, perhaps based in a different era of the saga’s invented history? The latter seems to me to be the best course of action: there is simply no way to better the earlier films, and even Lucas would surely not be fool enough to attempt such a feat.

It goes without saying that the series creator would really be better off waiting at least a decade or two before embarking on any new big-screen venture, but if Star Wars must come back now, it’s vital that younger directors with fresh ideas be appointed. Though no spring chicken these days, I’d pay good money to see a Peter Jackson-directed trilogy. Ditto one by Abrams, or even Joss Whedon, who did a great job on the similarly themed Serenity. The Dark Knight’s Christopher Nolan is interested in science fiction – his forthcoming film Inception is set to venture into the genre, and he knows how to craft a series that’s classy and meaningful, without losing the blockbuster clout.

But Coppola? This surely has to be a joke? The 70-year-old director has regularly describes himself as being on a belated journey into art-house territory, the sort of films he apparently wanted to make before The Godfather.

Most importantly, for a new Star Wars series to be successful, Lucas would have to let go of it altogether from a creative standpoint. Yes George, we know it’s your baby, but you really have done your utmost to kill off everything that was ever special about it. So if you must insist on bringing it back, you might want to consider taking a nice long holiday somewhere that doesn’t have a telephone or internet access while someone else gets on with the job. Because that, to my mind, is the only way that anybody might risk setting foot in a cinema showing a new Star Wars film, again.

Ben Child

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Why kids and 3D films don’t mix

admin — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 09:54:56 +0000

3D films might be a technological marvel, but why didn’t they think to make the glasses fit younger children?

I’d love to see Up, the new Pixar film. And so would my kids. But it’s not going to happen because we can’t do 3D; not after Ice Age 3D.

Fifteen minutes in I knew the jig was up: my three year old was lying on his back, feet in the air while the six year old had taken his shoe off and was whispering into it.

“Where are your glasses!” I hissed.

“They fell off . . . ” said the oldest.

“Glasses?” said the youngest.

“Yes . . . the ones that mean you can see the film.”

“Look,” said the oldest, putting them on. One arm sprang off his ear. I pressed it back. They slid down his nose.

“Tip your head back,” I told him, because I had just paid an enormous West End premium in order to embrace this fantastic new technology (and I also really wanted to see if the squirrel thing gets the acorn in the end).

The specs weren’t even close to fitting the youngest. I held them on with a hand on either ear. After a minute or so I realised I was holding a pair of glasses in mid-air because he had slipped to the floor to eat discarded popcorn.

I contemplated the glasses: I could see the film studios had invested millions in developing this wonderful technology. I could also see that to market it they had realised they needed to get kids on board. But then they just churned out a billion pairs of adult-sized glasses that don’t fit anyone under eight. Nice going, guys.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Why kids and 3D films don’t mix

admin — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 23:05:20 +0000

3D films might be a technological marvel, but why didn’t they think to make the glasses fit younger children?

I’d love to see Up, the new Pixar film. And so would my kids. But it’s not going to happen because we can’t do 3D; not after Ice Age 3D.

Fifteen minutes in I knew the jig was up: my three year old was lying on his back, feet in the air while the six year old had taken his shoe off and was whispering into it.

“Where are your glasses!” I hissed.

“They fell off . . . ” said the oldest.

“Glasses?” said the youngest.

“Yes . . . the ones that mean you can see the film.”

“Look,” said the oldest, putting them on. One arm sprang off his ear. I pressed it back. They slid down his nose.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Andy Walker

admin — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 19:18:19 +0000

Artist Statement

For as long as Andy can remember he has been obsessed with portraying invisible worlds, hidden symbolism and universal truths through art laced with meaning. To the outsider his paintings and drawings often appear dark and disturbing, often vulgar or needlessly sexual. However the merest scratching of the metaphorical surface reveals spiritual ideas and old philosophies, the portrayal of which has been forgotten by most due to the rise of modernism and what it did to the collective conscience of the human race.

Primarily inspired by contemporary art from Asia and Japan along with comic and surreal art in the west. Jumping between traditional materials and digital painting methods Andy creates a wide variety of work in differing styles.

Studying life in great detail, he takes the tiniest stimulus and explores it through meditation until whatever hidden world it has created is captured as accurately as he can manage. Andy seldom shares the meaning behind his art, believing art to be a very personal thing, only those closest to him ever get any idea of what he’s thinking. He also likes to poke fun at aspects of art he does not like, often in a very subtle way within his work.

Exhibitions

2009- FATE Exhibition Glenrothes fife- (5 pieces exhibited and for sale)
2009- Transition Extreme Skate Park (large wall painting)
2008- No Tears magazine (7 pieces published)
2008- Holburn Gallery Aberdeen (10 pieces exhibited)
2008- Milton of Crathes Banchory (5 prints on sale)
2004- Garioch Artists Exhibition (2 pieces exhibited)
2003- Garioch Artists Exhibition (2 pieces exhibited)

theglobalarts.com » 3D

Avatar trailer opens Pandora’s box wider

Up still soaring, as Michael Jackson’s shadow falls over UK box office

Up still soaring, as Michael Jackson’s shadow falls over UK box office

Can Star Wars fight another blockbuster battle?

Why kids and 3D films don’t mix

Why kids and 3D films don’t mix

Andy Walker

Artist Statement

Exhibitions

Education and Work History

Andy’s Website

Andy’s Gallery