Contact me - marensdasein@gmail.com
So, I haven't updated my blog in a while. What gives? I have a reason... It's a lame one, but it's still a reason. My phone is dead. I usually at least draft out, if not write the HTML for my blog on my phone as I go about my day, but I can't do that anymore, and it screwed my workflow. I still don't have my phone by the way. No idea when I'll get it back. What happened to it? Well, I may as well update my voracious reader.
Wednesday night, I went to see a restoration of Hellraiser. Naturally, as is my habit, I turned off my phone. Upon the movie's summation, I discovered my phone was displaying a boot error. Upon returning home I Googled about and found none of the recovery options worked. They just displayed the same boot error. Google, naturally, directed me to their own repair information as I have a Google phone. They recommended i take it to a reasonably local licensed repair shop. I dropped it off on my lunch break the next day and haven't seen of it since. The device, though I got it used, is new enough to be still under warranty so at worst I should be able to at least get it replaced.
So phone troubles aside, what else needs updating. Well I have some interesting physical media aquisitions along with a mildly amusing story: Saturday afternoon I deceded to check with the repair place to see if there was any news on my phone (there wasn't) but to make the trip more worthwhile I also planned on dropping by a Half-Price Books in the area. Oh and also as I was leaving my rommates requested I pick up some cat litter as well. It was around 4:00 PM I set on my merry mission. After getting no news from the repair shop I then went to HPB to browse. Now, I spend way too much time browsing at used book stores when I know what time it is. Now, imagine, then, what I might be like not knowing what time it is. I had some sense that I had been in there a while, but I was quite surprised to find the time was about 6:30 when I got back to my car having found the unrated cut of Beowulf (2007), and Kong: Skull Island on 4k. Still needed to get the cat litter. Lucky for me there was a walmart next door. They only had the massive boxes that I couldn't trust myself to safely lift, but I just had to check out their blu-ray shelves. There I found not 1, not 2, but 3 4k blu-ray releases I wanted: Drag Me to Hell (steelbook), Krampus: the Naughty Cut (steelbook), and The Wild Robot. I restrained myself to only picking up Krampus and The Wild Robot, and finally moved on to Kroger near my apartment for the litter. What really should have been a 1.5 to 2hr trip wound up being closer to 3 hrs. That was a fun adventure... if a little embarrassing for me and unfair to my roommates who expected me home for dinner.
So yeah new physical media releases were Beowulf (2007), Kong: Skull Island (4k), The Wild Robot (4k), and Krampus: The Naughty Cut (4k). What makes those interesting? Well Krampus: The Naughty Cut is kind of an odd duck. Its subtitle implies it's an unrated version, and it is, but it's not what a lot of people expected that to be. Krampus is a christmas horror movie that released with a PG-13 rating. PG-13 is a controversial rating amongst horror fans, because in the '90s and early '00 it was not an uncommon practise for R rated movies, and horror especailly to get significantly cut down for their theatrical release to a PG-13 to maximize its potential audience, and then get an unrated release on home video that would be the "real" movies. This isn't the case for Krampus. Krampus is less Evil Dead and more Gremlins in terms of horror. It's a comedy not a bloodbath. So why do an unrated cut at all? Well, it seems to me to be more of a director's cut. Michael Dougherty, in the Naughty Cut, restored only a few minutes of character development, and added a single alternate take to add profanity where there was none. Thats literally it. Presumably the cut character development overstepped the studio's runtime limit, and the the profanity was cut cause it pushed what was supposed to be a PG-13 movie to an R. The naughty cut is the perfect name for it. It's not unrated like Drag Me to Hell's unrated cut with extended sequences of exaggerated gore. It's just an alternet cut with some more naughty language.
Beowulf (2007) unrated is, however, more similar to Drag Me to Hell's unrated cut; not in that it has much in the way of extended violent scenes, but rather it adds more CG blood. As a gore hound myself I appreciate the addition, but it's not like it needed it. Despite being a PG-13 the theatrical cut of Beowulf still felt like an R. It has got enough blood and near nudity to surpass a movie like Terminator 2, but it's animation. The MPAA is a lot more leniant on animation especially with violence. I first noticed this with Ralph Bakshi's The Lord of the Rings (1977). While there is no nudity to speak of (a rare example of restraint from Bakshi) it got away with being far bloodier than Jackson's adaptations of the same two books (Jackson's third got bloodier, but we never got to see Bakshi's version of those events). That's not all Baskshi's Lord of the Rings and Zemeckis's Beowulf had in common. Both also employed very similar animation techniques. This may seem an absurd claim to make about 2 movies made 30 years apart; one cel animated the other computer animated. However, that's a bit of a reductive way to look at animation. Beowulf employed cutting edge motion capture technology and pioneered new techniques in that field, and The Lord of the Rings, while less cutting edge did much the same with rotoscoping. Rotoscoping, for those not aware, is a technique that involves tracing over filmed live actors to form the basis of character animation. Both of the techniques, motion capture, and rotoscoping achieve the same goal of capturing the details of an actor's performance in animation. The only difference is who or what is doing the capturing. Regardless, both techniques shing the brightest with human animators in the driver's seat tweaking the motion as needed to make the final project look its best.
As for The Wild Robot, there isn't much to say. It's a damn good movie that looks incredible. Easily a shoe-in for best animated at the Oscars. If Flow, Memoire of a Snail, and Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl weren't also in the running. Of course none of those movies are actually going to win. There's a half decent Pixar movie contending. The only time Pixar or Disney lose is when they have a bonefide stinker on their hands, and Inside Out 2 was pretty good. Still, The Wild Robot feels very much like an older Pixar movie from when they were at their best. In fact it most resembles what might be Pixar's best film: Wall-e. Even in that comparison The Wild Robot Shines. Wall-e's main theme, per the director, of love conquering programming is so much more clearly and impactfuly communicated through The Wild Robot's evocative painterly visuals, and more organic characters, than Wall-e's high fidelity sheen, and predominantly robot cast. Where Wall-e gets lost in the weeds with its ancillary environmentalist messaging (surprisingly not the focus of the film according to its director) The Wild robot incorperates its environmentalism with grace and subtlety. It leastds its audience through its ideas as opposed to feeding them to us. If it sounds like I think The Wild Robot is Wall-e but better thats because I do. Hopfully that will be enough for it to conquer Disney at the awards. The House of Mouse desperately needs to fail for the film industry, especially animation, to evolve and thrive.
So that's what I've been holding back for the past 5 days. Other than that and Hellraiser continuing to be one of my absolute favorite movies, situation normal. Taking life one day at a time and hoping I'll survive the next 4 years.
Contact me - marensdasein@gmail.com