Interesting musing from Den of Geek website--Has CG seen its best days?

McLaughlin doesn't make clear which he thinks is the key to a good movie: old fashioned story -- or "that jaw-dropping moment" when a special effect kicks in that you haven't seen before. Because he just saw a series of movies whose stories didn't engage him and whose special effects were standard issue, he decides to whine - but if you read the article carefully, it's not at all clear what he's whining about. Perhaps because he has to write as a self-proclaimed Geek he is too embarrassed to follow his reasoning all the way through to the obvious (and grown-up, non-Geek) conclusion that it's never special effects alone that make a worthwhile movie but always the degree to which they serve the story.

It would be very easy to rewrite his essay to be about the film biz of twenty or forty years ago, simply by substituting the appropriate bad film titles and unimaginatively-used special effects technologies of those days.

In any case, there's no way that computer-generated special effects have hit a dead end. They will continue to get more sophisticated until civilization comes to a halt, which is probably at least a few hundred years away, if not longer (God willing). "State of the art" does not mean "end of the art" - it means "this will look crude indeed in about five years."
 
James Cameron will wow people this year with his CG. Movies will remain great for the same reason that made them great since the beginning: Good story telling.

CG is simply a tool to do that.
 
I think that one point he tries to make is apt, that CG is no longer the same spectacle that it was once before. Good visual effects through CG are no longer stunning, but expected, because they are commonplace. No, I don't love Jurassic Park because of the scene with the big dinosaur, but the CG was new then, and it was marvelous to see.

Now they are a part of the storytelling repertoire. Do we need a new revolution in visuals? Frankly, the visuals are not the problem I have with a lot of movies. Instead, it's the boring plots, the stock characters, and the juvenile humor. The movies with the best CGI (like Jurassic Park) had lots of other things going for it. A visual revolution would be nice, but I don't think it's essential.
 
It's moved beyond its "gee whiz" infancy and that's a good thing. Count me among those who view CGI as a great tool when it's used in the service of good movie making. Its day is hardly done.
 
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The robot aliens of "Transformers" are burning rubber at the box office, selling a hefty $152.5 million in tickets at American theaters since that film’s debut last Monday. The receipts over the holiday week were strong enough to break a handful of records and establish “Transformers” as a potential franchise for its co-producers, DreamWorks and Paramount. With international ticket sales included, “Transformers” drew $246.1 million, easily recouping its production and marketing costs.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/09/movies/09box.html
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[Harry Smith interviewing Transformer's star, Megan Fox] admitted [he] didn't understand [Transformers] all and wondered if that was the case for everyone in the audience.

"I'm in the movie and I read the script and I watched the movie and I still didn't know what was happening," Fox joked. "So I think if you haven't read the script and you go and you see it and you understand it, you may be a genius. It's a movie for geniuses."

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/06/30/earlyshow/leisure/celebspot/main5125337.shtml
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the effects served the movie, rather than the other way around. I'm still waiting for a movie that demands to be seen in 3D -- perhaps Cameron is making it.
 
One reviewer tries to make sense of the plot. It may be unfair to the film (which I haven't seen), but it is funny. Warning: some language is not family-friendly, and the entire plot is apparently spoiled. (Courtesy of Chris Orr at The New Republic.)

Or maybe the movie is a hit because "cinema, as an artform, has all been leading up to this."
 
A) Those reviews were pretty funny. Especially the second one.

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2) You said the first review contained spoilers and I wondered how a movie without a plot could be spoiled but then - OH NO .... (spoiler in hidden text):
> Sam Dies!?! Almost, I guess. Now I'm really spoiled!
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  • Why is the movie grossing so high if it's really this bad?

IV - I think the 'little boys' I used to work with at the state psychiatric facility would have loved it. Especially if it had farting in it since fake farting at some one was one of their favorite things to do as an insult.


PS - I'll probably go see it.


:-)
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