Theatrical Reviews: As Above, So Below

I’ve had enough of these found footage films. The Blair Witch project came out a decade and a half ago, and it doesn’t really hold up. So why are we still riding the trend it started? I’m not a horror fan, so correct me if I don’t understand the horror community, but I can’t imagine that they are still excited about this genre.

That last Paranormal Activity was the most underwhelming in the series, and recent movies like The Conjuring and The Purge, which are decidedly not found footage, have become some of the most popular horror movies of all time. When are filmmakers going to get it through their skulls that people don’t buy the shtick anymore?

As Above so Below is a fairly cookie cutter entry in the genre, and I honestly don’t know what there is to say about it. It is exactly, almost shot for shot, the movie you think it’s going to be. It does nothing interesting, and all the best parts are in the trailers.

To be fair, the weird lore that they create to set up the film is actually pretty interesting. This would have worked much better as a lame Indiana Jones rip-off then a lame Blair Witch rip-off. the first two thirds of the thing are basically fueled by a mystical mcguffin, jut like every Indiana Jones movie ever.

As Above so Below doesn’t scare, it barely even entertains. I got through this picture the way I get through every boring horror picture: by pretending that I’m actually watching a sequel to The Cabin in the Woods, and that some villainous office workers are actually behind everything I’m watching.

Like I’ve already said, I’m not a horror buff. In order for a horror movie to impress me it has to do something that’s exceptionally different from other movies in its genre. But if you really like movies like this were a bunch of young people go into a supernatural thing, and die, then you’ll probably like this fine. It’s just not for me.

Also, be warned; the ending rips off Kung-Foo Panda. I’m not kidding.

Behind The Effects: Inception Anti-Gravity Tricks

 

Welcome to Behind the Effects, the once stop shop for all your behind the scenes needs.  Today’s article will be about everyone’s favorite mind-blowing science fiction flick, Inception!

Many people praised Inception upon its release for it’s fast paced, mind bending plot; but I for one was never blown away by what was going on during the story (I’ve seen characters going through peoples dreams on Cartoon Network many-a-time.)  The special effects however, blew my mind.  How the heck did they pull off scenes like the one seen below?  (The best part starts about a minute and a half in to the video.)

This instantly memorable sequence is so amazing that it’s actually kind of hard to describe it in words.  How did they accomplish the astounding effect?  The answer looks something like this. . . 

 

And here's another picture of the thing next to a human being so you can get a feel for the size of it.

Those pictures you just looked at are of a giant series of rings that can be rotated or locked into place at will. built specifically for Inception, this ginormous build had to be very carefully designed;  every ring in the structure had to be perfectly round in order for anything to function correctly.  Later in production a replica of the Inception dream hotel-hallway was placed dead in the center, as seen in a third picture below.  The actors were placed inside here while the contraption was set to rotate, creating the illusion that gravity was playing all sorts of crazy tricks on them.

Many shots used a standard camera crew or a crane, but for the gravity shifting action sequence the camera was bolted to the floor of the Hallway, making it so that, as far as the audience was concerned, the ceiling was always up and the floor was always down.  Obviously this was not the case; they spun the heck out of that thing while the two actors inside had to pretend they were fighting.  It took many takes in order to get everything right;  It turns out its pretty difficult to perform a choreographed fight sequence when the floor is literally spinning out from under you.

Later in the movie, as you may remember, the hotel goes into full on zero gravity mode (due to a van falling off a bridge.)  The effects required for these more outer-space style sequences were significantly different from their wall climbing counterparts.  

For instance: In order to make it appear as if actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt was floating through space they made a second replica of the hotel hallway, but this time it was straight up and down, vertical and way up in the air.

The actors didn’t float so much as they had to slowly descend straight down the vertical hallway on wires, miming their limbs in such away that they appeared weightless.  making it look like they were floating instead of falling was grueling work for the actors, the physical toll was exceptional.

Most of the other zero-g shots were achieved through intense wire work, most of which was extensively more complex then the wire work done in other movies of this sort, but  also just like every other movie; the wires were edited out digitally in post production.  Check out the picture below to get an idea of how crazy this stuff was.

That concludes a quick, but proficient, overview of the anti-gravity special effects used in Inception.  As mind-blowing as the labyrinthine plot for the Christopher Nolan epic is, I think that the ingenious engineering that it took to make it happen is even more so!  The combination of the tricks listed here create one of the coolest looking special effect sequences in modern cinema.  Take that CGI!

Thanks for reading!  if you want to meet up for some dream sharing you can always email me at www.atchleyosaurus@gmail.com, and to follow my blog to get more cool movie facts and reviews follow Atchley-O-Saurus on Twitter or like us on Facebook.  Check back this weekend for reviews of movies both newer and older!

2014 Summer Retrospective: The Amazing Spider-man 2

I was pretty ticked off at the first Amazing Spider-man movie for recycling most of the plot from Sam Raimi’s first Spider-Man, but That movie's great in comparison to its sequel. I should have been thankful for what I had.

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is a bad movie. It’s not all bad, but most of the things that are good about it are just things that were already in the first Amazing Spider-Man. What’s new here is a bizarre tone, some incredibly shoddy screenwriting and an ending that ruins the core message of the movie, rendering the whole thing totally pointless.

I wish people would stop saying that these new Spider-Man movies are better then the other ones. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 exhibits most of the exact same problems people have with the first set of movies. There are too many villains, the romance between our leads is constantly being put into contention for stupid arbitrary reasons and the movie can’t decide weather it’s supposed to be campy and fun, or dark and serious.

Seriously, this is so much worse then Spider-Man 3. Sam Raimi’s great talent has always been mixing goofy and dark in a weird way that works, that’s what he did in the Evil Dead movies, and he accomplished it to a lesser effect in spider-Man. In The Amazing Spider-Man the movies bits of silliness and seriousness just sort of cause whiplash in the viewer. We jump cut between spastic silly moments, like anytime Jaime Fox is on screen to darker brooding moments like Spider-Man being haunted by a dead man’s memory without any kind of melding crossover at all.

Then there’s the ending, which is terrible. The movies entire plot is about Parker and Gwen Stacy trying to save their relationship, and the main message is really about love, and how it’s worth going out of your way for. That is the one thing audiences were supposed to take away, but they messed that up. (Spoilers) at the end of the movie Gwen Stacy dies and we see a short montage of Spidey getting over her death; This changes the message of the movie from, “Love is worth going out of your way to fight for,” into, “Love is doomed, but you’ll get over it pretty quickly.” And no, I don’t care if Stacy dies in the comics; her death totally ruins one of the big good aspects of the movie. I don’t mind it if movies have sad endings, but only if they further the movies message or tone. This sad ending only serves to make everything worse.

Not even the Villains work. Not a single one of the three main villains does anything other then suck. Electro is silly, his origin makes no sense, and neither does his motivation; and Green Goblin’s motivations don’t make sense either. He seems to only do things that are obviously self-destructive. Rhino is perhaps the most entertaining of the films villains, just because he’s so over the top that it’s laughable, but he’s hardly in the movie. The movie never takes the time to develop it’s villains, I actually wonder if everything would’ve been better as just a love story between Parker and Stacy because that’s the only conflict in it that makes any freaking sense.

There are good aspects of this movie. Garfield makes a good Spidey and Stone makes a good strong female lead and the two have a lot of chemistry. There’s also the action, which is pretty fun, as are the effects. But all those good things are also in the first Amazing Spider-Man, which is the far superior movie. I would only go see this one if you’re a hardcore Spidey fan, or if you can watch a two and a half hour film with your brain firmly in the off position. It's the worst Spider-Man movie that has ever been released.

Thanks for reading!  This retrospective is a slightly edited version of a review I posted on Filmcrave.com at the beginning of the summer.  If you like reading movie reviews from every day schmucks like me, then it's a great place to go.  If you want to get updates on Atchley-O-Saurus or you want to communicate your own opinion you can like Atchley-O-Saurus on Facebook, follow Atchley-O-Saurus on Twitter or email me at atchleyosaurus@gmail.com.  Check back in the following weeks for more great reviews and articles!

Behind the Effects: Indiana Jones Snakes

WARNING!  The following Behind the Effects is all about snakes, lots of snakes.  If you have a phobia of our slithery scaly friends it is recommended that you don't read this. . . . Unless of course, you really want to.
 
Back in the 1980’s they didn’t have all of the CGI technology that is used and abused today, so often they had to be a little bit more creative with how they created their various effects.  Many classic movies used old magician’s tricks in order to create illusions that were completely convincing on screen.

This leads one to wonder how they did the effects in movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark.  In that film Indiana Jones, one of the best known movie heroes of all time, comes face to face with a room filled with a mind numbing number of snakes.  You can watch the scene bellow.

So, allow me to pose the following question.

Question:  What kind of "magicians trick" did they use to make it look like there were thousands of snakes on that film set?

Answer:  There was no trick.  They went and got two-thousand snakes and put them on that film set.

If a reasonable person was shooting this scene they would have used mirrors, fake snakes or CGI.  But instead they just grabbed a couple thousand snakes and spread them out over the floor, as seen in the below picture.  They had to talk to many snake breeders in order to get the desired numbers.

The snakes, as one might imagine, were mostly of the harmless variety. None of them were “Asps,” nor were they “very dangerous.”  The worst that happened on set, as far as I can tell, were python bites, which are non-lethal.

Unfortunately though, There was a problem that arose when they actually tried to shoot (with a camera, not a gun) the snakes.  It turned out that the aforementioned two-thousand snakes weren’t enough to fill the entire set.  Director Steven Spielberg complained that he couldn’t do any wide-shots or long-shots simply because the room he was shooting in was not actually filled with snakes.  It would require more then four times the number of snakes originally used to fill the room for real.  So I must pose another question.

Question:  how did they make that room look like it was filled with snakes when it wasn't?

Answer:  They went and got an additional seven-thousand snakes and threw them around with the rest.  This created a grand total of nine-thousand living, breathing and biting snakes all in one place.  In the below pictures you can see them pulling glass snakes out of giant trashcans by the handful and laying them on to the "Raiders" set.  Gruesome stuff.

Also as it turns out snakes like fire.  In the script Indy is supposed to use his torches to keep the snakes from getting near him and Merriam, But in reality Snakes are cold blooded and often attracted to fire. the heat that emanates from it keeps snakes warm and comfy. The handlers had one heck of a job keeping all of the snakes away from the fire that snakes are supposedly afraid of.

Finally;  Remember when I mentioned that the snakes used were “mostly of the harmless variety?” the keyword here is “Mostly.”  They did need an actual straight-up venomous cobra for the sequence seen in the picture right under this paragraph.

So how did they keep poor Harison Ford safe?  They accomplished this effect by setting up a glass wall between Harrison Ford and said deadly cobra. Even though it seems like Indy and the cobra are right up next to each other when you watch the scene; in reality Ford was quite safe and happy.  The cobra, on the other hand, was reportedly not happy at all, so It spat deadly poison over the glass. 

There was surprisingly little danger of harm when handling the nine-thousand snakes that were seen in most parts of the movie, but cobras can kill.

So today's Behind the effects is less about trickery then it is about not bothering to use trickery due to stupidity or urgency.  I still think this a fun story.  There's almost always something cool to learn when you look "Behind the Effects."

Thanks for reading! Don't forget to like Atchley-O-Saurus Movies on Facebook or follow us on Twitter (@atchleyosaurus.)  You can also shoot me an email at atchleyosaurus@gmail.com.  Be sure to check back in the following weeks for more cool movie facts and reviews!

Theatrical Reviews: Sin City: A Dame to Kill For

Sin City: A Dame to Kill For is a wonderment of silly; A Grand Canyon of silliness if you will.  How can a movie that’s tone is so serious be so deeply dumb?  I laughed more during this flick then I did at some comedies I saw this year.

Not that I’m complaining, not really.  I think the silliness is less a fault and more a feature.  Michael Rodriguez, one of the directors, has often tried to recapture the ridiculous fun of classic Hollywood b-movies, often with mixed results, and I think that is exactly what he was trying to do here.  Believe it or not, he kind of succeeds with this comic book sequel.  It was a lot of fun to watch.

The visual style, while arguably indulgent, is an example of what computer generated effects can do when they’re used creatively.  Just like the original Sin City, watching “Sin City 2” makes you feel just like your watching a real life comic book minus the text bubbles.

Within the runtime we get to see femme fatales who use their sexuality as weaponry, strippers with hearts of gold and corrupt politicians.  Black and white cigarette smoke is everywhere, as are black in white faces covered in bright red blood.  “Sin City 2” is a giant pile of film noir clichés garnished with over stylized sex and violence.  It’s a chocolate covered marshmallow of entertainment; there’s plenty to enjoy, but beware the calories.

If this was a bunch of over stylized clichés from a movie genre that was currently popular then I would hate the heck out of it.  But Sin city: A Dame to Kill For is a bunch of clichés from a genre that reached it’s commercial peek sixty or seventy years ago, making it feel less like a lame-sauce rip-off and more like a loving tribute. 

I don’t really have much tolerance for the terrible string of action-nostalgia movies spawned by Michael Bay’s Transformers; but people seem to enjoy those movies despite themselves, and I guess that’s how I feel about “Sin City 2.”  It is not a good movie by any standard, but I’m not sure it wants to be.  I think it’s just trying to be a unique fun experience.  It replaces its brain with machine guns and it’s heart with an alcahollized liver, all in order to entertain.  I think it  may be the perfect guilty pleasure.

Thank you for reading! If you wan't to get 1940's style revenge (or if you just want to get updates on my blog,) you can follow me on Twitter at @atchleyosaurus, or like me on Facebook.  You may also email me at atchleyosaurus@gmail.com!

2014 Summer Retrospective: The Other Woman

 The Other Woman may be the worst movie I’ve seen all year.  Its characters are nonsensical, it’s humor humorless and its plot deranged and aggravating.  This is the kind of movie that give Girls Night Out flicks such a terrible reputation.  It’s difficult to find a movie as poorly crafted, stupid and lacking in fun as this one.

The plot revolves around three women, all of which who are the mistresses and/or wives of the same guy, and their attempt to get vengeance on said mutual lover.  This is an intriguing premise to say the least, especially from a comedic standpoint, but unfortunately any potential the premise has is wasted on its terrifyingly underwritten script. 

The plot of the movie, a revenge plot, doesn’t even get started until the movies already half way over.  The first fifty minutes or so of the thing meander around plot points in what seems to be the slowest manner possible.  It feels like it should be getting ready to end before we even meet Kate Upton’s character, but at that point it’s only just beginning.  How long could it take to establish a grand total of five main characters?  The first act of a movie is usually the shortest of the three act structure, but In the case of The Other Woman it takes up nearly an hour of the hundred minute run time.

A little bit of functional humor and likable characters can go along way to make an audience ignore bad plot structure, the recent Guardians of the Galaxy is a good example of this.  But the Other Woman has neither Humor nor likable characters.  It’s just not very funny or interesting.  I never at once laughed at the situation the three women were in, nor did I believe that, given each of the characters individual character traits, that they would ever become friends with each other in the first place.  The three of them are either despicable, annoying or both, and It is not a particularly pleasant experience to see them interact on screen.

Then there’s the villain, at least he’s supposed to be the villain.  Despite the fact that his adultery is what brings the three leads together,  he is surprisingly absent from any important plot points until near the end of the picture, when they discover that he’s got some kind of money laundering scheme or something going on.  In the final scenes the women actually get revenge on him, by revealing to the world his maniacal schemes.  It bizarre to me that the filmmakers found it necessary to make the main antagonist of their movie not only a lying cheating twerp, but an international criminal as well.  He is one of the most unrepentantly evil characters in cinema since Dr. Evil from the Austin Powers movies.  This one dimensional nothing-villain is the final nail in the coffin that, with any luck, all of the blu-ray copies of The Other woman are being buried in.

If you watched only the ending of The Other Woman you would think that the whole movie builds up to the destruction of one villainous human being, but that is simply not the case.  The movie is really about three unlikable characters being unlikable around each other; and then at the end they decide to get revenge as an afterthought.  This movies script is worse then bad, it’s incompetent.   It’s not good drama, it’s not good comedy, and it’s not even so bad it’s good.  The Other Woman is just bad, almost entirely bad.  I agree that there need to be more movies marketed towards women in Hollywood, but there is no excuse for this.

Thank you all for reading!  If like what you read you can follow Atchley-O-Saurus on Twitter at @atchleyosaurus or on facebook.  If you don't like what you read, feel free to email me a piece of your mind  at atchleyosaurus@gmail.com.  Be sure to check back later this weekend for my Sin City 2 review!

Behind the Effects: Star Wars Spaceships

Welcome to Behind the Effects, a running series exploring and explaining classic movie effects.  This first entry is all about Star Wars, I hope you enjoy!

The original 1970’s Star Wars was, and still is, one of the most important and influential movies of all time.  And its contributions to the realm of special effects may be the most influential of all.  Even today, when movie special effects rule the earth, people are still impressed by the fantastic visuals that were created for the film, especially the spaceships.

In this very first Behind the Effect, we will be looking behind the scenes to find out exactly how these special effects pioneers created convincing spaceships, fighters and space stations for this 1970’s popcorn classic.

The easy part of the spaceship sequences was a blue screen and a small scale model, but you probably guessed that.  What you probably didn’t know is that the ships usually never moved in front of said blue screen.  It was only the illusion of movement.

Below you can see a picture of two effects specialist rotating between two different kinds of Tie-Fighters on a fixed stand.  The illusion of flight would be created by filming the ships on a camera that would focus in on, or rotate around, the still model.  Once the blue screen was digitally replaced by the endless blackness of the universe, it would create the illusion of the Tie Fighters moving through space.
                 

For shots where more than one ship was seen at the same time they would use a special camera that could be programmed to make the exact same precise movements repeatedly.  They would film one ship, say an X-Wing, with the special camera; Then they would repeat the exact same movements, but with a Tie-Fighter on the stand instead of the X-Wing.  In post production they could simply put the two shots together to create the illusion that one of the ships was chasing the other, and that the two occupied the same space.

When a spaceship had to make more specific articulate movements, the effects artist would simply rotate them on an axis.  In the bellow shot the Millennium Falcon is being rotated on a special blue stand, this will become the sequence where Han Solo, Luke Skywalker and the gang land in the hanger bay of the Death Star.
                                    

Finally when the models were no longer needed, they would be blown up.  In the final action sequence of the original Star Wars there are many space ships sacrificed when the Rebels attack the Death Star.  So the effects artists filmed many shots of various spaceships exploding in order to accomplish the required carnage.  The ships were simply rigged with small explosives, which were detonated whilst the fancy memory camera was rolling.  They even hung the ships from wires instead of the normal stands so that, when the ships burst apart, they would fly apart like there wasn’t any gravity.

There were many techniques other than the motion control camera used to create movement.  The ship below, from Empire Strikes Back, was strung on a wire and rigged with explosives.  This way it would look like it was exploding when it impacted the ground.

There were many other techniques used, I’ve only scratched the surface.  Needless to say;  Exploring the history and making of Star Wars is definitely a rewarding and educational experience.

Thanks for reading!  If you have any questions, comments or smart remarks you can email me at atchleyosaurus@gmail.com or follow me on Twitter at @atchleyosaurus.  Look for more reviews and more Behind the Effects in the coming days!

2014 Summer Retrospective: Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Since I am starting this blog at the end of what I would call a very interesting summer movie season I have decided to post a review of every movie that has had a #1 box office weekend over the summer.  This series will be called 2014 Summer Retrospective, and will begin with the following review of Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

Captain America’s first movie, Captain America: The First Avenger, was a mediocre entry in the so called “Marvel Cinematic Universe.”  While its world war setting helped to set it apart from other movies in the Avengers cannon, it didn’t really have much else going for it.  It just wasn’t particularly interesting.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier, I’m glad to say, is a much stronger genre movie.  The original Captain America focused on establishing “Caps” origin story, resulting in an uninspired movie with surprisingly little punch, But Captain America 2 explores the character to a much further extent.

This may be, objectively speaking, the best Marvel film yet.  It explores Captain America’s difficulty with the modern world, in a brilliant extension of the characters arc.  And brings some fast paced interesting action sequences, villains and twists to the table.  I’m not going to so far as to say it’s a perfect movie, but it’s a pretty good one.

One of the most important things a movie has to get right in order to work is its characters, and Captain America 2 has plenty of them.  We get to learn more about characters we’ve seen in recent Marvel flicks as well as a few new faces that stand out.  Nick Fury, Black Widow and Captain America finally get the interesting arcs that they didn’t get in their other movies, and Robert Redford’s villain and his Assassin, The Winter Soldier, are some of most interesting Marvel movie villains yet. 

And it’s not just the characters that set this movie apart,  the surprising thought provoking message also plays apart.  It portrays a message that was touched on, in a much less subtle way, in Iron Man 2:  a battle of freewill, and the line between government protection and government oppression.  When you finish watching Captain America 2, you may not only find your brain a-buzz with adrenaline, but with philosophical questions as well.

Most of the problems I have with “Cap 2” are problems I have with the Marvel series as a whole.  The visual style is uninspired, and the tone overly cheesy.  You could show me a random screen shot from this movie, and I would likely not be able to differentiate it from any of the other Marvel Studios productions.  I walk out of every Marvel flick feeling like I’ve seen it before, because they’re all basically the same.  Captain America is less predictable and same-y feeling then the other movies in it’s extensive series, but that’s not saying much.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier is not the best blockbuster that came out in the summer of 2014, but it’s definitely up there.  It’s a worthy choice for movie geeks and comic geeks alike.  My personal vendetta against Marvel and it’s vile mind control over the movie-going public aside, Captain America 2 was a fun experience.  I’ll bet people who actually like Marvel will like this new adventure even more then I did.

Thanks for reading.  If you have any comments, questions or commentaries feel free to comment, or email me at atchleyosaurus@gmail.com!  Check back for my reviews of The Other Woman later this week and my review of Sin City 2 this weekend!