UP: Adventure is Out There!

What is it exactly about Pixar movies that can leave me crying like a baby?

I’m no stranger to tears in the cinema.  It would be more prudent to count the movies that I haven’t cried in, rather than the other way around.  I cry in sad movies.  I cry during happy endings.  I’m a big fat sap with over-active tear ducts.

Pixar’s UP starts with a young bespectacled boy who wants nothing more from life than to emulate his greatest hero: Charles Muntz, adventurer extraordinaire!  Playing in the street one day, he stumbles across Ellie, the robust extrovert girl of his dreams.

Cue tear-jerking montage of Carl and Ellie pursing all of their dreams save their greatest: to follow in the footsteps of their mutual hero, and visit South America.

It is the way of things that although they planned to make it one day, life kept getting in the way; and in the end, Ellie passes away and leaves Carl, alone and unfulfilled.

I’ll leave you to discover what happened to Carl after he hooks his house to a mass of helium-filled balloons, and takes off on his greatest adventure.

I saw UP in 3D, and I have to say that I’m incredibly impressed by the quality of 3D nowadays.  Thanks to Pixar’s spectacular graphics, the inherent 3D-ness of the characters is already excellent, and the actual 3D effects are applied sparingly, and are all the better for it.

The 3D does not POP out of the screen at you every second of the movie, and I think that – in comparison the a movie such as Bolt – it’s a better way to go about it.  Maybe it was just the novelty (Bolt is, I think, the first 3D feature film I’d seen), but the 3D was a little distracting when it was going on all the time.  In hindsight, Coraline is the same: 3D used to great and sparing effect.

If the image is already “in” 3D (either stop-motion animation like Coraline, or excellent animation like everything Pixar does), then the use of depth is not necessary in every moment of every scene.

All up, the story is amazing.  Fun, moving, squirrel!

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and visually stunning.  The colours are vibrant, and the story artfully crafted.  I don’t think I could recommend this movie highly enough.

I’d like to finish with a word on Partly Cloudy, the short animation before the movie started.  While I love Pixar Animation Studios to itty bitty little bits, the shorts at the start of each movie just endear them to me even more, if that were possible.  My personal favourite is Lifted (from Ratatouille – which I am amazed to say, I can spell on the first attempt without assistance!), closely followed by For the Birds (from Monsters, Inc.), which I think was the “original” Pixar short, and introduced us to Pixar shorts, won many awards, and it single-handedly responsible for their being a category for short animations in the Oscars.  But, I digress, as usual.

Partly Cloudy – a somewhat unfortunate choice in respect to the fact that the previews featured a 3D trailer for Sony Productions Partly Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs – is the story of the “clouds” that produce babies, which the storks then carry away in their familiar white bundles to mothers and fathers of all species.

Yeah.  I cried during the short.  The movie hadn’t even started yet!  I couldn’t help it!  I just felt so bad for the poor cloud relegated to producing the babies of the “less desireable” creatures of the world.

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— I confess I’ve somewhat soured on Wall-E after a rather unpleasant discussion with a friend, but UP could certainly give that a run for its money. 6 stars, without a doubt.

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A Confession: I’m afraid. I’m a huge fan of Pixar movies. From the utterly huggable Sulley of Monster’s, Inc to the deeply moving UP, I have never failed to be impressed, moved, and overjoyed by Pixar movies.  The amazing combination of story, animation, attention to detail, and sheer LOVE crafted into every single movie is jaw-droppingly amazing. I fear the day that the last Pixar movie does not improve on the last.  I never want that day to come.

Simplification

Okay, I haven’t blogged for a while, but seriously, if you’re suffering withdrawal that bad, just follow me on twitter.  I mean, that’ll cure you right fast!

Normally, if I have something to say about the creative process, I do that over on Deviant Art, so I highly suggest that you keep an eye on my profile over there.  I say interesting stuff about writing my novel!  I do!  Or, you know, follow me on Twitter, cause then you’d already know when I was blogging on DA.

But enough about Twitter.

No, wait, I still have one more thing to say about it: not everything fits in a tweet.  So, here I am, making what I suppose could be considered an “extended tweet”.

Now I’m done.

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Last night, I pondered on whether or not it would be possible to finish my novel in just six weeks.  That means I would be free and clear in time for NaNoWriMo, and not have to worry about coming back to Broken Wings after NaNo was over.  I’m not sure I can do it, but I think that maybe I should try.

That being said, several hours ago I sat down and opened up yWriter to start work.  Do you know what I’ve accomplished today? NOTHING.

Well, let’s assume that we want to be a little generous.  I have accomplished things, just not much, especially considering how many hours I’ve squandered away.

One of the features of yWriter is specialised fields to enter the day and time that a scene occurs, and how long that scene lasts for.  Without any great amount of finesse, I had guesstimated the timeline for the first three chapters, then promptly forgot about it.

Later in the novel, having some awareness of the passage of time becomes, if not important, at the very least it becomes the “professional thing to do”.  I mean, down in chapter twenty-something when I refer to a specific space of time, it’s more useful to have a timeline, rather than make an educated guess as to how long it’s been.

That is how I found myself today with a long list of chapters and scenes, the calendar I designed for the setting, and an MSExcel spreadsheet, mapping out the timeline.

At first it was easy, things happened fairly consistantly, just about every day was accounted for in the novel.  Then, the novel started taking a direction where – due to the monotony of the characters doing the same thing every damn day – only certain days are made mention of.  At this point, I needed to start “finessing” the time gaps.

Fortunately, due to the phases of the moon, I was able to pin certain parts of the novel to specific dates, and it was just a matter of tidily spacing things between each new moon.  Then, things started to get complicated.   Oh, it’s straight-forward enough when you only had to fit one or two activities into each month, but towards the end, a lot more was happening.

To make it easier to determine how I wanted things to be laid out, I would take an activity that occured between two defined points, label one of the clear demarcations in my writing as day “x”, and the days around it “x+1″, “x+2″, “x-1″, etc.  Once I knew how many days that activity took, I’d look at the “visual calendar” I’d mocked up in MSExcel, and see where that block of time would fit most neatly into the amount of time I had.  Easy as pie!

Without spoiling anything, I wanted to share with you the most uber-complicated “timeline function” in Broken Wings.

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Chapter 28, Scene 10 — day n+(x+2)+y+(z+a)+b+3+4+4+3+c+d+e

Yes.  I realise that I could add together (n+3+4+4+3), but those numbers refer to specific points in time, so I wanted to leave that unsimplified for the moment.

So, what does it all mean???

n = a fixed number, I know what day “n” represents.
x = the number of days Razakiel spent travelling a certain distance.
y = the number of days Razakiel spent travelling a (different) certain distance.
z+a = the number of days Razakiel spent travelling yet another certain distance, but is split into two values as something happens during that time.
b = yep, more travelling. A lot of that happens in this novel.
c, d, e = even more travelling!

The deal is that some of those values will be defined when I “calculate” the details for (x+1)+(z+4)+(a+b+3) for an earlier chapter/scene, and I’ll just be able to plug the numbers straight into this function.  Some of those values are undefined, and I’ll need to establish “how long would it reasonably take a person under [set of circumstances] to travel [this distance]“.

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Oh, well.  I’m off to start working out how far and how long those distances are.  Wish me luck!

Wolverine Threesome Addendum

I probably should have written this into my original post, but then it wouldn’t have been anywhere near as amusing!

Sensationalism aside, I didn’t personally read the intepretation Wolverine + girl + more girls = threesome! into what Mr Jackman said.  But who knows, maybe I’m not reading between the lines enough.

Maybe I’m just jealous and want Wolvie all to myself ;)

All that being said, when cutting a comic book story arc down to fit into a 2-and-a-half-hour movie, it will likely be the extraneous love interests who feel the axe first. All in all, maybe it’s time for me to hunt down some relevant source material and have a loot for myself.

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“Getting into comics” is kinda like deciding that you want to see every piece of coral on the ocean floor. Where do you start? How far back should I go? Which issues/continuities should I avoid? How the hell am I going to fund this endeavour?!

If you have any recommendations, comment below.

Wolverine Threesome

There! That got your attention, didn’t it?

Hugh Jackman’s been talking to MTV about the upcoming sequel to the Origins/Wolverine movie, and there have been hints that there just might be a threesome involved – and I don’t mean the kind where we have to suffer through the lousy last installment of a trilogy!

In the original Origins movie, Hugh got naked. Not Terminator-style, waggling in the breeze naked, but naked enough. But the movie itself was, sadly, subpar.

I remember that, upon reading that the sequel was go, I commented: “If Hugh was naked in the first movie, how are they going to top that to make me want to head to a cinema to watch the sequel??” Fool me once, shame on you; but if I pay good money to watch your sequel and you stuff it up like last time, shame on me.  Look at the X-Files movie.  It was so bad that I not only completely shunned the new movie, but I stopped watching the TV series too!

I have to confess, however, that this is not what I had in mind when I asked: what’s better than Wolverine/Hugh Jackman naked* –

There’s some female companionship—and not just one—for Wolverine. … My wife might have an issue with it, but I think the fans will like it.

Now, intellectually, I understand the appeal of the MFF threesome. I don’t “get” it per se, but in the sense that there are some very wonderful things I could happy watch two men doing together, the male-female-female scenario makes sense to me. Besides, I’m fairly certain that there are more than a few ladies out there who find the idea of getting it on with Wolverine and her BFF to be pretty freaking hot. I’m just not one of them.

So, how about you do us a deal, Mr Jackman? You get Taylor Kitsch a vocal coach AND you get him shirtless, and I’ll pay the price of a cinema ticket.

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* Hugh Jackman, naked, IN MY BED, of course, but let’s all assume that’s not an option.

District 9

Take one ugly political situation, add a dash of humor, a pinch of gore, a dollop of action, sprinkle liberally with shaky cameras; bake for 2 hours and what will you get? One epic mockumentary that is at times funny, at times moving, and at times downright frightening.

What happens when approximately 2 million aliens, starving and stranded, appear over South Africa? We try to do the right thing: District 9 is an internment camp for what appear to be a ship of alien refugees, from places unknown, for reasons untold. The “prawns”, as they are called, were evacuated from the mothership and located in a tent city that was supposed to be a temporary home for them.

It’s now 20 years later, the tent city has become a massive slum.

The aliens still have no rights. They have to be licensed to bear their children, and “unauthorised” eggs are aborted by flame thrower while officials celebrate the sound of alien eggs popping in the heat. Their technologies are seized, or traded to Nigerian crime lords for cheap cuts of pork or cans of cat food.

District 9 starts off as a light hearted documentary about the arrival of aliens over Johannesburg. The slum and anti-alien sentiment has started to get out of hand, and the MNU is about to step in to relocate the aliens to a larger facitity further away from the city.

Things start to turn dark. Interviews with family and friends – one now a convicted felon – suggest that something bad is going to happen to the main character, the dorky seemingly innocent Wikus. The MNU plunge into the slum of dumps and corrogated iron, escorted by armed infantry, and begin banging on doors, advising the aliens that they are being served an evicition notice, and they have to sign to confirm that they are aware of this.

It’s legal bullshit, covering their own asses.

As they continue, they uncover caches of weapons, a hut of alien eggs, chop shops. As the director of MNU states after the incident – far too many alien lives were lost that day. You would almost think that someone cares. But not all is well at MNU.

I’ll leave it to you to discover the dark and twisted turns that the rest of this movie takes. At times, the documentary angle is stretched a little far out of it’s definition, but if you pretend that some scenes are labelled “dramatic reenactment”, you can follow the story fine perfectly well. The action in the final stages of the story could be ripped straight out of an action/horror worthy of Ridley Scott, and combined with the headache-inducing hand-held-camera style of shooting, it is a graphic nightmare of exploding bodies and alien weaponry.

Do go along to see this, but keep in mind that this is more than a wild ride of vicious aliens and amazing technology. This is political commentary, and the things it has to say are DARK.