Well we saw “Finding Nemo” over the weekend and “X-2″ yesterday. I might as well talk about a movie I helped make first.
“Finding Nemo” turned out to be quite an enjoyable movie. One of the typical Pixar movies where when it is over you wished you could see more. The movie started out with a short called “Knick-Knack”. This film was premiered at SIGGRAPH 1989 in Boston. It was 3D (ie: you wore the polarized glasses and various gags popped out of the screen at you). I can’t believe I am old enough to remember the awe that it inspired at the SIGGRAPH electronic theater. This version had a significant change however, and one for the worse in my opinion. Lets just say that the reduction surgery on the female knick-knack was a wee bit extreme.
Then came “Finding Nemo”. Many folks will make a reference to “Bambi” simply because of the first few minutes of the film. SPOILER ALERT The mom and dad fish move into this great place with a view of the open ocean when along comes a barracuda eats the mom and all the babies but one. I felt this movie was edited a little roughly. They cut to lengthy black segments not once but twice! The second blank screen works better given it is part of a sight gag, but a little long for my taste. Of course it made me feel uncomfortable to stare at a perfectly black screen and maybe that was what the director was trying to illicit.
The look of the film is simply amazing. Pixar somehow manages to create even more color saturation than all previous films, and I thought we had already squeezed as much saturation as we could out of the digital color gamut. The animation is simply amazing, especially on the turtles and the pelicans. The only downside is that the movie just doesn’t seem to have the same emotional pull that previous movies have had. I talked to one person who thought it did, but of course he is a new dad and maybe that had something to do with it.
Now on to “X-2″ the sequel to the first “X-men” movie. This movie had a better story the the previous one in my opinion, and the effects were top notch. The night-crawler teleportation sequences were simply genius. The story has some nice plot twists but it is dumbed down just enough to where you can figure them all out well in advance. Most of the characters are fairly boring though. With the exception of night-crawler and Jean Gray (aka Phoenix) the characters just don’t seem to be that exciting. I won’t give away any spoilers on this one, since knowing the story before hand could reduce one’s enjoyment dramatically.
I’ve included a couple of pics from the Nemo wrap party below. The party was way too crowded, but for those that stuck it out until late at night it improved somewhat.
