To The Wonder

Terrence Malicks new film. Beautiful visuals and sound design, but the rest of it does not have nearly the appeal I found in Tree Of Life.
The characters in The Tree Of Life are shown minimalistically, we see only glimpses of their lives, but they do feel like living, breathing people that we follow through moments, and I could connect to the main story of family, brothers, and the religion aspects.
Here there are not really even characters, basically. You don't really know the first thing about them. They don't say much of anything, they don't do much of anything. Where Tree Of Life showed characters in life both old and young, and where you could get atleast a sense of where they fit in to the world of the film, here we just spend time with characters with unknown backstory, unknown work descriptions, unknown friends, unknown interests, unknown everything. Tree Of Life showed us moments through life of the characters doing things or being exposed to situations and choices. To The Wonder feels flat and one-dimensional, characters frozen in time. The film ponders what love is, but we hardly see anything resembling love in the film, other than people kissing or running through windswept fields.

To sum up, if you really love the look of beautiful cinematography shot masterfully on film (I could spend the entire film just looking at the color, highlight saturation and shadow detail in it), see it. If you thought the Tree Of Life was unrewarding storywise, this is far more abstract and almost non-dimensional.

The Call

Thriller in the vein of "Cellular". Small movie with a surprisingly engaging plot and solid performances which ultimately is completely let down by having a 13 year old, who has watched nothing but teen slashers, write the ending.

Since "The Sting" is the next movie, here's Bill Hader in a sketch about it. If anyone works with audio alot or enjoy sound design/ADR, this is comedy gold.

That sounds alot more interesting than CG tigers and shit flying at the screen.

After recent Shyamalan films it will take alot of good feedback from others for me to see it. Reading in scientology stuff might be appropriate, but I can see this being confirmation bias and something that can be done on alot of other movies with no scientology connection. Unless the script writer confirms that the intentions were to draw from scientology for the themes (and the themes being specific enough, I mean, conquering fear is a pretty general theme and you could read any number of religious or non-religious origins into that).

Though I read a recent interview with the Smiths about multidimensional math and some of their views sound pretty far out of the sphere of reality.

Yep, I recognize that. I tend to love trailers that have as little dialogue as possible, because then I can just look away and not mind hearing tons of explosions etc. Saves me from having to plug my ears and look like an idiot in the cinema.

As for Zimmer (@Squiggly), I like Inception for the most part, atleast in the context of the movie where it is superb IMO. My problem lately has been that as standalone listening, his slow repetitive approach with stiff, drawnout themes and little to no detail to make it interesting, his scores can be just so boring on their own. Pirates 3 was the last score from him I really enjoyed at all times, because there is detail inserted everywhere, alot of diversity in the instruments that are used, and the score overall was actually agile (ie he hit alot of points of accentuation and importance throughout). The Batman scores and other stuff just feel like he composed everything ahead of time, and without detailed reference to the scenes. If that is the case he also cannot really allow himself to actually make the score interesting, since he cannot accidentally signal to the audience that something is emotionally or otherwise changing if this isn't reflected in the movie. He's forced to making 2-3 minute underscore pieces that only serve to bring across the most basic of emotions the scene is supposed to convey.

For reference (and because why not post good Zimmer music at any point), this is the ending of Pirates 3 with the fight as the ships circle the drain of the maelstrom in the storm. There is so much detail and twists and turns here that are matched beautifully to the film. and there is actually some different melodies played off the strings and brass at times instead of the entire orchestra just playing the same stuff at the same time.

http://youtu.be/B5IlxIzL8mw?t=4m54s

I hope he actually puts effort into diversifying the music and adding the smaller nuances that John Williams does so well. There is a way to get Zimmers more powerful approach but also keeping the detail and nuance of other composers. Frankly the nuance and detail is what keeps me coming back to a score. If I can hear a new little layer on the 10th listen of a score, that is the mark of something great for me personally. You listen to the Batman scores and there is absolutely no depth, it's just one layer of brass, string and percussion.

I am excited. Tried to avoid alot of things, but the mood that I've gotten from the trailers has been promising.

What I look forward to:

1. Amir Mokri - Cinematographer who has worked on alot of glitzy stuff prior, including Transformers movies and other things for Bay. With the proper intentions this could be a gorgeous looking movie, which the trailers seem to indicate.

2. Shot on film, with anamorphic lenses. Not to diss digital cameras but the more I get into the minutia of photography and the look of film, this movie is probably going to be pure eyeporn.

3. Zimmer is scoring. I know whta he is capable of so I always have hopes that he will make something more than the repetetive stuff of recent years.

Saw it, really liked it. My one complaint was that this installment in the series took itself a bit seriously from a character POV. They should be big and dumb and fun, but here the pace is sometimes dropped for prolonged periods of time for serious character interactions and deep emotional connections. I think they should be there, but when 2 characters have been talking for 10 minutes (what feels like...), I started wishing they had either cut it down or atleast picked up the pace a bit in the scene.

I haven't seen many other of the movies in the series so maybe I lack that extra involvement in the characters. But this is why I absolutely love the 5th movie. You don't need to have seen any of the other movies. It's The Italian Job on crack.

"We need to get the... thing."
"OK".
"That guy doesn't want us to get the thing."
"Well... he's mean, so fuck him." *VROOOOM* *CRASH* *Rattattattatta*

...And scene.

As far as action pieces, this one is on par with the 5th one (though I don't think anything will beat the distilled purity of 2 muscle cars dragging a huge vault through a city and using it as a wrecking ball... ever).
I just wish the rest of the package would have been a bit more trim and taken itself a bit less seriously. This series is the one exception where I feel like they should just design it like 5 15 -minute action setpieces, with 5 minutes of plotting inbetween. Because when the action and carnage is as well staged and well shot as it is here, I really cannot get enough of cars smashing into things. There is something primal there that I can't really get enough of.

Also Gina Carano is in it. Didn't know that. Didn't mind it at all.

Thread resurrection:

Just saw "The Fall" from 2006. Liked the story, loved the visuals and cinematography. Shot in over 20 countries in 4 years, there is some spectacular attention to detail in design and execution here.

1. A sequence of dancers beautifully shot, and the transition from the bad guys face to the desert is pretty mindblowing if it is practical, not to mention the one long shot that goes from static landscape to moving in on the actors, not sure how they moved that camera.

http://youtu.be/SbzNrThw_gA?t=1h10m27s

2. This sequence is mindblowingly good, everything about this, the individual things and the way they are edited together is just superb, it flashes to various aspects of the plot discussed earlier in the movie, in contaxt it is quite powerful but just from the camerawork, lighting and editing aspect it is excellent and riveting.

http://youtu.be/SbzNrThw_gA?t=1h23m39s

3. The intro sequence. It won't make much sense, but it is pretty.

http://youtu.be/SbzNrThw_gA?t=10s

EDIT: Also some bonus stuff:

Fast Five. The best action scenes I've seen in years, not necessarily mindblowing, but classy and oh so well edited and choreographed. Whatever CGI there is they hid well.
Just the end of a great sequence:

Train Rescue: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCh-HA6p … 89959357B6

Also this one EVERYONE has seen, but the intro to Dark Knight Rises (like The Dark Knight equivalent with the Jokers bank robbery) needs to be here. I can't really stand too much of Hans Zimmers music as it is composed for the Batman movies, but the Bane theme and chant for this sequence is awesome.
Also the sound design here is pretty spectacular great, the planes in particular. The IMAX cameras and shooting on film also gives this sequence a unique aspect.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNUSDu-Tehg

Hey Trey. I am deeply ignorant in the subject so excuse any obvious factual flaws and thanks for clarifying. As far as I know even if all polar ice melted  and flowed into the oceans the water level would not rise nearly as much as in A.I. (or Waterworld for that matter, though it doesn't take much for it to become a huge disaster). I figured if the movie went with water implausibly high, as it does, it might also have gone for some disastrous event a la DAT causing a more flashfreeze scenario.

Something I thought of though, during normal ice age > heating > ice age cycles the ice tends to expand from the poles during ice ages, as you mention, and then contract back as the planet heats, causing a percentile change in the volume of ice around the poles. However if ALL ice melted from the poles, as we might presume is necessary for the sea levels to rise nearly as high as they do in the film, might it be correct to think that the poles wouldn't be able to accumulate nearly as much mass as normal once they freeze over again, leaving sea levels higher than normal as in the film?

It would seem to make sense if we consider that. with all ice melted, the poles no longer have a large stockpiled ice mass protruding from the surrounding sea, keeping the sea levels low.
Since the now liquid water will pool in equal levels across the planet, forming a roughly equally levelled surface, if the poles freeze over again during a new ice age, that should mean that the water currently at the poles is converted to ice, but it not being nearly as high or massive as before, and also expanding in volume as it freezes, which will actually further raise the sea levels slightly since the water at the poles gain volume when frozen, giving less room for the rest of it around the planet.

Not expecting an answer unless we have some climatologists on the board, just idle thoughts.

As for the movie, I like it, but I think watching it once is enough. So many scenes in the film seem to have been filmed with a very low pace, when they could have been concentrated and distilled to something more efficient. It's like they filmed the scenes and really liked them individually, but then got to the edit bay and realized that they couldn't cut down or around alot of the longer shots or scenes. They could really have cut a few scenes, or done a few more montage scenes since they already have a voice over element. As it is now the film really feels like slow motion alot of the time. You just wish characters would move a bit faster, get to the point a bit sooner, or the editors cutting around long movements or slow expository scenes.

Well, when it comes to products, if you suddenly feel a craving for a "blahblah bar" at the supermarket, you obviously know that you didn't come up with the idea or concept, since it exists and is already sold as a product. So the conclusion is that you heard of it somewhere else, ie it's not an original idea of yours. You may not remember exactly where you first heard of it, but you can infer that you indeed had to have heard of it before.