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Having done absolutely nothing last weekend except a bit of spackling and painting – plans for a baseball game and barbecue were canceled due to a death in a friend’s family – it was nice to go out last night and raise the have-a-life quotient ever so slightly. Jamie, Carrie and I went to see the short film The Story of the Tortoise and the Hare at the Egyption as part of the Seattle International Film Festival. It was the latest short by Ray Harryhausen, and then he himself then was interviewed live for over an hour. It was a very cool talk. Harryhausen is not quite as high in my pantheon as Stan Lee as I don’t recall ever sitting down and watching one of his monster movies all the way through as a kid. But those sequences such as the skeleton battles from Jason and the Argonauts do seem to be part of that consciousness shared by all geeks, even more so by us visual effects types. And as far as lives led, he’s had a fascinating one. He talked about his inspiration at the age of thirteen watching King Kong, then mentioned his early work with people like Ray Bradbury, Frank Capra, and Dr. Seuss, and moved from there to a couple of points about each of the major movies in his canon.

A funny moment: they showed one of those 50′s style studio promotion clips for The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad. After the point was driven home (“DYNAMATION! It’s.. DYNAMATION! Done by.. DYNAMATION! Amazing.. DYNAMATION!”) the narrator breathlessly described a special effect: “The amazing shrinking effect on Princess Parisa was done by keeping Kathryn Grant tied to a stake, ensuring that she didn’t move her arm.. and then moving the camera back 40 feet.” Special effects were somehow much cooler in those days. Harryhausen pointed out that Dynamation was just a gimmick term invented after someone drove around in a Buick and saw the word Dynaflow inside it. After Sinbad, the studio realised they needed to make it appear the technological barriers kept going up, so they touted “Super Dynamation” for the next movie, followed by “Electrolytic Dynamation”. Yeah, some things don’t change either.

He seemed mildly disdainful of CGI (“cold”, he put it); said something amusing about the violent content of today’s movies shocking the devil himself (after mentioning how the skeleton sequences were censored); mentioned that although he liked the recent work in Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach it was “puppet work”, and not the kind of stop motion he did. He then said something very interesting: that he was drawn to the type of stop motion work he did because of the dream-like quality of it – that the viewer would watch the effect, know immediately that it wasn’t real, but not know quite how it was done. He especially decried the recent trend to talk about how effects are done even before the movie comes out and how the best sequences are shown in the commercials and trailers beforehand.

These last few points resonated with me. Compared to that tangible feeling you get from working in stop motion, CGI does seem a little cold by comparison, and it’s sad that it seems to be wiping these other styles of visual effects into the history books. Terminator 2 is an interesting case in point. The second disk of that DVD set is fascinating not only because it shows off old-school effects work ats its finest, but it also marks the beginning of the rise of CGI dominance. If you watch the amount of work put into the miniatures for the nuclear explosion sequence or the truck explosions, and then compare that with the T-1000 liquid metal effects on the computer monitor, there’s no question in my mind as to which I would have preferred to work on.

Sorry Mimi, but having taped and fastforwarded through it at high speed, I’m compelled to disagree: Prospero’s Books is just a nauseatingly bad movie.

Just to balance the negative comment: Cathy Rogers interviewed on slashdot today – she’s such a (intelligent! insightful! quintessentially British!) babe. Her show Full Metal Challenge rocks too.

Lagging a couple of days here between event and journal. Jamie and Neal hosted an Italian dinner party on Saturday. As usual, the food and wine were excellent – everyone outdid themselves preparing really good grub. Although next time, I will know better and not show up early; pitching in on the hosts’ elaborate food preparation (running late), I soon found myself preparing one of Mario Batali’s ridiculously complicated asparagus recipes. So now I know what zabaglione is – and what it probably shouldn’t look or taste like.

For my own contribution, I had managed to weasel away the task of making tiramisu from Jason (since I knew full well that it was within my abilities). I went for a fairly standard recipe – this one, somewhat modified by jacking up the brandy (perhaps a little too much) and mixing in two tablespoons of instant coffee into the cream. That turned out well – highly recommended recipe for a good impression/minimal effort ratio.

SGI is in terrible shape, any bets on when they’ll finally go the way of webvan? (they died this week). It’s sad, really. At my first job, back in 1995 at the NRC in Ottawa, my desktop machine was a bright purple R4K Indigo, and it opened my sheltered little mind to the world of computer graphics and UNIX. IRIX just worked, from either a programming or a user’s point of view. Yet it didn’t have to be an arcane machine to master – if needed, system administration could be done graphically with the Indigo Magic Desktop. What a concept. You can’t say any of that about Linux then, and you still can’t really say that now. (GL via the GLX extension? Get real!) Combine that with the fact that they had the best 3D graphics hardware anywhere, and SGI had absolutely no reason to lose.

Fast forward 6 years: they have $120 million in the bank, yet they lost $80 million in the last quarter. NVIDIA is completely wiping them (and everyone else) out in graphics hardware, and just where the hell is MIPS nowadays? (MIPS was the subsidiary of SGI which made the CPUs driving SGI workstations. It’s also the only chip that I could at one point actually write passable assembler for. They’ve apparently since been spun off.)

All I can think of is how they better not take Alias|Wavefront down with them when they tank, because we (the entire high end computer graphics industry) would be screwed.

They showed Final Fantasy at Pixar today. Square used RenderMan and the RenderMan Artist Tools to render the film, and so over the last two and a half years some technical support issues from them have crossed my desk. Being the only other all CG movie done mostly with RenderMan (besides Pixar’s movies) of course I have been eagerly anticipating its release. So how was it? As expected, the graphics were just incredible. Everything else was just disappointingly abysmal. The plot was pretty thin – I suppose it was exactly like the video game series, some of which I’ve played. The pacing was awkward and stilted. And the dialogue – oh man, did they have to recycle every single action movie cliché they could find?

But the graphics were just.. incredible.

With Josie and the Pussycats now in theatres, I was thinking again about live action movie adaptations of comic strips and with the help of IMDB, came up with a list of ones that I’ve either seen, or have read the original comic. Forthwith:

• Batman: the first two were good, the rest were just evil.
• Blade: never saw the comic book, but I liked the movie. Then again, I just like vampires.
• Captain America: I liked Cap as a kid. I don’t know why though, because I now realize any dude who dresses in a flag must have serious, serious issues. Apparently the movie is abysmal.
• Dick Tracy: I think I liked the movie. I can’t remember much about it.
• Flash Gordon: I saw this when I was 7 or so, during summer school. I’m pretty sure I liked it then. Nowadays the entire cultural significance of Flash, including nerdacious references to the Planet Mongo, is completely lost on me.
• Judge Dredd: I utterly loathe Sylvester. ‘Nuff said.
• Punisher: I liked the comic book. And Dolph just RULES. (Yes, I did see Masters of the Universe. What’s your point?) I still want to see this one no matter how much it might suck.
• Spawn: Okay, I did like this movie. Your derision, and that of my fellow coworkers who sneer at bad CGI effects, is duly noted.
• Superman: I only remember details of the first (I’m sure I’ve seen 2 and 3) and I guess I’m rather ambivalent. Supes was never a favorite character – the strip always reeked of jingoism, and I never did understand why the country (Americans! C’mon!) was so complacent with the entire alien-among-us thing. Despite this I guess some parts of the movie were tolerable (those without Margot Kidder).
• Supergirl: I sat through half of this and gave up. Despite Helen Slater’s legs.
• Steel: Ok, the fact that I used to have a comic book with this guy in it (for the curious: he came along after Superman “died” [yes, I bought into that hype, if only to see whether Superman would stay buried]) brands me a total geek. I won’t watch the movie though.
• Swamp Thing: See previous sentiment. I had 8 pages of one comic book – “Marvel Comics Presents #1″ – devoted to Swamp Thing. I still have no idea who or what he was, except that he was one ugly fella.
• Tank Girl: After six years I still haven’t forgiven Manh Ha for this. Ice-T in a kangaroo suit? OMIGOD.
• X-Men: I liked this one, although I think their staffing of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants was kinda weak. And where the hell was Beast?

I don’t have any intention of seeing Josie (nope, I won’t ever admit to opening an Archie Comic). However, tantalizing bits of the upcoming Spiderman movie did cross my desk a few months ago. Given the mixed track record above, I can only hope this movie turns out well. Marvel, before X-Men, has fared far worse than DC with movie adaptations, and I find this unfortunate. As a kid, Marvel was always my preferred choice. DC was too refined for my tastes, plus the aforementioned disliking of Superman factored heavily.

Next Month – Stay Tuned As We Breathlessly Examine Movies Based On Video Games: Can Tomb Raider Make The Cut?! Until Then – Make Mine Marvel!

God, did I really just type that?

I am Batman.

Tom asserted at work today if you took the sound snippet from the Batman movie where Michael Keaton says “I am Batman”, and played it backwards, it sounds just like – “I am Batman”. An audio palindrome, if you will. Naturally we were skeptical, and so work stopped for the afternoon as we searched the net for the sound clip, then for the software to play it backwards.

Consensus was that it does sound amazingly like “I am Batman” when played backwards. Where the heck does the B come from? Maybe it sounds more like “I am Matman” now that I think about it, but it’s still close. Judge for yourself.

It’s extremely alarming how the universe works at times.

Long weekend shot to hell doing not much besides finishing up Chrono Trigger, and watching scifi movies. Tom (Duff) was astounded that I’d never seen Forbidden Planet and proclaimed it to be the best scifi movie ever. Having watched it today I’m not sure that I agree, but it was pretty good.

Also rented Planet of the Apes for viewing tomorrow. Tom does have a point in that my knowledge of “culturally essential movies” is next to nil. I figure that if I catch up on every movie ever referenced by the Simpsons – The Birds, Rear Window, Omega Man, and Deliverance come to mind – I’ll be in much better shape. I think.