I saw Disney/Pixar’s latest film Up tonight at a private screening for ESPN employees.  A few notes:

Pixar once again proved what a powerhouse they are in film making.  Not only does Up prove their superior animation and technical abilities, Up proves again their superior (and more important) story-telling abilities.  Watching these characters, you can’t help but feel their emotional struggles throughout the film.  The story is one of humor, sadness, joyousness, and overall feelgood-ness.  I never thought I would root for a crotchety old man.  Like past Pixar films, Up appeals to both little kids and big kids.  No matter your age, you will be touched by this film.

This weekend, I watched Disney/Pixar’s latest film WALL•E for the first time.  What a phenomenal film. Pixar proves once again what a powerhouse they are.

First, the visuals.  Absolutely breathtaking.  Several shots in the film were hard to separate as 3D-generated—they looked incredibly realistic.  The lighting, the shading and textures of the models, the reflections, the depths of field, and more all combined to create this incredibly realistic fictional world.  What a talented group of visual artists Pixar has working for them.  One particular shot I remember being so amazingly realistic-looking is an extreme close up of the top, front of WALL•E’s unresponsive eyes as EVE leaned in toward him.  Outstanding work.  I can’t use enough adjectives to describe the visual work on this film.

A significant portion of the film and its characters are voiceless (well at least without a human voice). Not having characters with speaking voices could prove to be tragic if special care were not taken to ensure proper communication cues were present as replacements, cues such as animation conveying excitement, sadness, etc.  We could tell what kind of mood EVE was in by the shape of her eyes.  But complementing and perhaps surpassing the visual cues were the auditory ones.  The sounds each robot made, from short beeps and blips to more emotion-filled sounds of longing and excitement, gave the audience a method to connect with the characters through personification. Ben Burtt, the veteran Hollywood sound designer, gave voices to the robots and made their world just a little more believable.

So much of the film was magical.  From EVE and WALL•E’s dance in space to WALL•E showing EVE the bubble wrap to the loyal band of “broken” robots who had uses for their malfunctions after all to the little lunch box WALL•E transports his keepsakes in.

But, like in any film, the key component to a magical film is the story, and WALL•E had a fantastic story, one of hope and love.  The hope lies in the state Earth is in, a state thanks to humanity’s carefree laziness, consumerism, materialism, and ignorance of self- and communal-health.  What today may be a cool new thing will be the downfall of us and everyone around us tomorrow.  Even after we wander past what is reasonable, healthy, and judicious, there is still a little green hope waiting to bring us back.  The lesson here for us real humans, though, isn’t that we should wait for our wasteful ways to one day be rectified by something outside of our doing, but instead for us to alter our self-made path to destruction now while we still have the chance.  Hope, then, is something we can find in ourselves.

What else we can find in ourselves in love.  Love for ourselves, love for someone else, and love for each other.  I don’t think I’m giving anything away here by saying the romantic component of WALL•E revolves around the relationship between WALL•E and EVE.  The love and longing WALL•E feels toward EVE reflects the most basic of human feelings—the need to love and be loved; the need for a companion.  Once we find that perfect love, we will stop at nothing to pursue (clasping onto the spaceship), help (with EVE’s directive), and protect (from the rain and elements) said love.

These two themes of hope and love allow us to connect with the characters and reflect on our own lives through the characters.  Even the quirks of the robots give us the ability to see bits of ourselves (who doesn’t love popping bubble wrap or collecting little trinkets?).

Finally, I, along with every other Mac geek around, gleefully smiled when WALL•E made his reboot sound—the sound of a powering-up Apple computer.

WALL•E is an exceedingly outstanding film, from the visual and aural presentation, to the basic building blocks of a solid, successful story.  While the film is comprised of artificial beings in an artificial world, the characters’ passions and emotions are those humans encounter every day, and they invite us to reflect in our own realistic world of hope and love.

I saw the latest Jason Bourne James Bond film this weekend.  Although not as much as Casino Royale, I thoroughly enjoyed Quantum of Solace, and I will be seeing it again.  What follows are some lengthy thoughts and reactions.

Since any cinematic experience for me heavily involves the music, I’ll begin there.  The title song, “Another Way to Die,” was written by Jack White and performed by White and Alicia Keys.  While hailed as the first duet in Bond music history, the song is terrible.  When I first heard the song several weeks ago, my first listen left me cringing and shuttering in disbelief.  The song has grown on me significantly, though, and I actually enjoy listening to it.  As a Bond song, however, it’s only slightly better than Madonna’s atrocious “Die Another Day.”  White’s and Keys’s voices during the song don’t mesh well, and because they cover about the same vocal range with slightly different timbres, they seem to almost clash with dissonant cacophony.  Instead of singing the chorus, they shout it; the orchestrations throughout are barren, and in the full version of the song, the intro meanders almost incoherently while stealing the same notes from “You Know My Name,” the title song from Casino Royale.  Aspects of the song are catchy, hence my continual listening to it, but overall it fails.

Performance aside, though, the most damning aspect of the song is the lack of a usable, discernible melody to use with the film’s score.  The best Bond title songs are those which can be weaved into and interpolated throughout the score proper.  When this extended use happens, the song becomes more than a seemingly-disjointed, tacked-on prefix to the film; instead, it becomes a more intricately developed musical identity to the film.  Composer David Arnold returns to write his fifth Bond score, his first being Tomorrow Never Dies in 1997.  Throughout his tenure, he has had (at no fault of his own) mixed success with song melody utilization.  For Tomorrow Never Dies, he wrote a classic Bond song titled “Surrender” (performed by k.d. lang) that was skillfully and successfully woven into the score.  The song’s melody served as a propulsive base to several action cues throughout the score.  The song, though, was replaced at the last minute by a sub-par song, titled “Tomorrow Never Dies” and performed by Sheryl Crow; “Surrender” survived, though, to appear during the end credits.

For The World Is Not Enough, Arnold wrote a song performed by Garbage.  This song remained in the title sequence and, although not as often as “Surrender,” appears during the score.

Die Another Day was a musical amalgam of awfulness.  Arnold had nothing to do with the song; instead, Madonna wrote and “performed” the song, which was nothing more than a cesspool of techno filth (and the words “die another day” were spoken a sure-to-make-anyone-say-enough-already sixteen times).  Arnold, slowly descending into techno madness from his brilliantly modern-yet-classic-Bond score for Tomorrow Never Dies to his not-as-good-but-still-enjoyable score for The World Is Not Enough to his disappointing score for Die Another Day, seemed to attempt to out perform the song’s techno nonsense.  Because of the overly techno feel and the absence of a strong melody, other than the “James Bond Theme,” to focus on, the score suffered immensely.

But for what Die Another Day lacked musically, Casino Royale more than made up.  Arnold collaborated with Chris Cornell to write “You Know My Name.”  The song was a fitting answer to the “re-invented” Bond, giving him a modern, harder edge song to fit his new rougher, edgier persona.  Several melodies found themselves masterfully sprinkled in the score numerous times, and the way the song melodies intertwined with the classic four-note Bond chord progression made their appearance in the score better than the appearances from “Surrender” in the Tomorrow Never Dies score.  The song served as more than just a song to accompany a beautiful title sequence; it served as a musical identity to the rest of the score and therefore the film as a whole.

The score for Quantum of Solace shares much of the same musical identity with Casino Royale except for a strong melodic line to create a cohesive whole.  The action pieces, the reflective pieces, and the sleuthy pieces all are strong and enjoyable, but the score could have been stronger and more enjoyable with a unifying melody.  While two cues on the soundtrack quote a “melody” from “Another Way to Die,” the quotation is relegated to a softer, sleuthy rendition, far from the outstanding usage of song melody in Tomorrow Never Dies and Casino Royale.

What I find most interesting about my reaction to the Quantum of Solace score is regardless of how much I love the theme, I don’t miss an outright, bombastic performance of the “James Bond Theme.”  A statement of the theme like its abundant usage in Tomorrow Never Dies just doesn’t seem to fit with this new Bond.  Is that good or bad, though.  If you consider the Bond theme to be overused, then I suppose its absence, save for the several skillful additions of the Bond chord progression and the famous guitar line rendered for strings, is welcome and allows for other musical ideas to take shape and precedence.  Like Casino Royale, though, the end credits feature a rousing rendition of the theme.

The title song, if not a part of the score, is, of course, the underpinning of the Bond title sequence.  Since GoldenEye in 1995, Daniel Kleinman has created the stylized and themed title sequences.  I was shocked to learn he had been replaced for Quantum of Solace but was cautiously optimistic that MK12, who designed the wonderful end title sequence and in-film motion graphics pieces for Stranger Than Fiction, was designing the sequence.  Unfortunately, though, the Quantum of Solace title sequence was underwhelming.  The sand and desert theme is an appropriate and obvious tie-in to the film’s climax location, and the women emerging from the sand was an interesting effect.  Unlike previous title sequences, the names of the cast and crew didn’t just fade on, they had a cool animation to bring them on screen, and the best name animation was for Dame Judi Dench (her name appeared from circles animated identically to those of the gun barrel sequence).  But the sequence as a whole meandered and wandered through its desert-like setting.  The latter half seemed to throw a non-congruent slew of swiftly animating elements, from silhouettes of naked women to lines in the shape of a globe amongst some stars.  Unlike the Kleinman sequences, this sequence seemed at a loss for a driving purpose and focus.

In addition to the title sequence, MK12 designed the in-film motion graphics associated with the Microsoft Surface touchscreen and the satellite-phone-call/villain-database-search wall in M’s office.  These animations were superb and inspiring.

But enough with the music and the design.  What about the rest of the film?  Overall, the film was good, but not on the same level as Casino Royale.  In Quantum of Solace, the film seemed like a never-ending chase sequence; there was a car chase, a foot chase, a boat chase, and an airplane chase.  All this action is great, but there could have been some more exposition and character development (especially since the film shockingly came in under two hours).  A few scenes (the ending comes to mind) could have benefited from a couple more minutes to explain the unanswered questions that arose from them.  The action sequences, though, were great, and the stunts performed were top-notch.  Several times I cringed at the intense physicality Daniel Craig put himself through for the role.

Although the scene didn’t involve intense action, one of the highlights of the film was the Tosca opera scene.  Bond is doing some actual spying, trying to discover what he can about the mysterious group who wear “Q” lapel pins (fashioned in the same font as the film’s title).  After Bond finds out what he needs to, he encounters the bad guy and the sound drops from the film.  Instead of bullet firings, shouts, and destruction, we only hear the music from the opera sung over the scene of Bond fleeing resulting in an unexpected and incredible scene.

The main Bond girl Camille, played by Olga Kurylenko, was an interesting psychological counter to Bond.  Both are seeking revenge, but what Bond learns from Camille helps shape him into the more familiar Bond character.  Mathieu Amalric as Dominic Greene played a non-typical Bond villain.  Instead of the supervillain intent on seeking world domination, Greene was a philanthropist-posing, dastardly-scheming corporate boss, and he played his character well.  But for me, other than Craig as Bond, the best performance came from Dame Judi.  She, apparently being the only authority figure in Bond’s life, was crisp, forceful, and yet funny.  One of her best lines (and I’m paraphrasing, as I don’t remember the exact quotes): she, through her aide on the phone with Bond, asks about someone Bond was to investigate; he responds the guy was a “dead end”; M, in an outburst of surprise and fury, says, “that means he killed him!”  The delivery of this line and several others made me laugh.  When producers decided to reboot the series with Casino Royale, I’m very pleased they kept Dame Judi as M.

Also with the rebooted Bond came a more Jason-Bourne-like persona.  While I’m sure this persona will get mixed reactions, it doesn’t bother me.  Like Bond, Bourne is a spy; and now like Bourne, Bond deals in a more realistic, edgier world than the old Bond did.  No invisible cars here.  Thankfully.

Couple other notes: as with Casino Royale, I fail to comprehend why one of M’s aides couldn’t have been Moneypenny instead; I hope we see more of Felix Leiter in forthcoming films; the Goldfinger reference with Fields was outstanding; Mathis and the dumpster was disturbing; the gun barrel seemed tacked-on and lacked the sophistication of Kleinman’s Brosnan gun barrel sequences; and Universal Exports makes a Bond-geek-pleasing return.

And, as customary, the credits end with “James Bond Will Return.”  I’ll be eagerly waiting.  I just hope that Q, Moneypenny, Daniel Kleinman, and David Arnold as title song composer return, too.

When does a comic book movie become too comic-book-y? When does the incessant cheese in a film start attracting rats? Both good questions, but not better than this one: what happened to Spider-Man 3?

The first film set the stage and introduced us to the world of Peter Parker, although this film had plenty of cheese as well. The second film gave us a serious character drama wrapped up into an exciting comic book movie. The third film gives us a series of blockbuster special effects sequences and one dance number strung together by a lackluster, trying-too-hard story in the effort of passing all this off as a “film.” Sorry, Mr. Raimi, it just didn’t work.

I was turned off from the film right from the opening title sequences. They were cool, but uninspiring and all-too-familiar—like we’ve seen them before in the previous two films. In fact, the beginning portion of the credits listing the main stars was, more or less, a fusion of the titles for the first two films. Nifty effects, but dripping of been-there-done-that. About half-way into the sequence, we shift pace, and we see a bunch of black ooze, the stuff that we know will turn Spidey into evil Spidey. It just kind of crawls around—not inspiring at all.

These visuals are backed up by the only sound on the screen—the music. Danny Elfman, the composer for the first two Spider-Man films, wrote fantastic music for the title sequence and the rest of the films. He and director Sam Raimi had a fued over music in Spider-Man 2, so Elfman left the series after that film. Enter Christopher Young, someone who is NO Danny Elfman. Young trying to work with Elfman’s music is like a a hot dog trying to taste like a lobster. It just doesn’t work. Elfman’s title sequence music channeled through Young sounds as uninspired as the black ooze sequence looks. The instrumentation is lacking, and the excitement and driving percussion apparently left with Elfman. The first and third portions of the music in the title sequence are interpolated Elfman themes; the second portion is Young’s work. Fine on its own, but it holds no water compared to Elfman’s original music. Young’s themes are too simplistic in comparison to Elfman’s more complex musical endeavors. Furthermore, the music in linear form is at best a holed, beat-up patchwork of mush—painfully obvious where Elfman ends and where Young begins.

So enough about the music, yes? Well for a film music fan, this is what we listen for. Music, for me, makes or breaks a film. The music in the rest of the film didn’t necessarily break the film, but it sure didn’t save it from the numerous faults (although there was a really cool rendition of the Spider-Man theme done with a dark male choir during the church scene). As mentioned earlier, the story was not much of a story. I fear that Raimi is going the way of George Lucas and concentrating too much effort on special effects rather than fleshing out the meat of the film in storytelling and character development. The new characters we’re introduced to in this film were far too underdeveloped, and Peter and M.J. seemed out of character and, frankly, unlikable in several scenes.

The special effects were ok in some places, and obviously fake in others. The fake-ness was most obvious at the end when we see the Sandman dissolve one last time (don’t worry, I’m not giving anything away). The effects were off in this film, too easy to tell real from computer-generated.

Two final thoughts: apparently no one on the writing staff could think of anything better to do in fight sequences than drop people off buildings. One or two people don’t fall; try four or five. Think of something else to do! And finally, a dance number should never EVER be in a Spider-Man film. Period.

Yes, this film was a comic book movie. But looking at films such as Spider-Man 2 and Batman Begins, there are comic book movies that are serious enough to make a great film. This film just took itself too seriously and ended up being seriously bad.