What a busy weekend.
First, Friday night Ethan and I went to (finally) see A Scanner Darkly. What a(n expected) mind bender. Truly wanted to read it prior to seeing the movie, but hey, who has the time??? 🙁 When I first saw the preview it looked more like the movie faded in and out of the ‘Rotoscope’ effect, but <<possible spoiler>> it does not. It stays in the heavily animated look for the entire movie. But ya know, it really works for the content of the movie. And yes, Winona is still beautiful animated. 🙂
Robert Downey Jr. is freakin amazing in this film. I was thinking afterward, and I ran the question by Ethan as well; I wonder, given the subject matter, if this movie was hard for him to make, or it was cleansing in a way. We both agreed in the hopes that it was cleansing. Keanu was really good as well, he fit the character quite well. People give him a hard time, but ya know, (with the exception of his performance in Dracula) I find myself really enjoying the work of his I see. There were a few trailers for small release films I definitely need to see. One was about this little asian kid growing up in a motel. To me it looked like a cross between Lost in Translation and Napoleon Dynamite, if that makes any sense. I’ll have to ask Ethan if he remembers this name of the film. The line that cracked me up was this; <setting: the older ‘role model’ guy is talking to the kid in the movie> “You know, the First Noble Truth of Buddhism is: Life sucks!!” HAHAHAA I was rolling!
Then there was Saturday… COMIC-CON!!!! 🙂 Always a blast. Even got to see a bit of rough footage from Spider-Man 3 with Mr. Sam Raimi himself! That was frigin AWESOME. One of my other favorite parts of the day was seeing ILM’s Visual Effects Supervisor John Knoll give a talk about the graphic effects done for Pirates2. (All from the comfort of his lovely mac of course) Though Dawn rolled her eyes at my enjoyment in ILM’s naming of their special motion capture technique developed for this film, I loved it. iMocap!!! Dood, what’s not to love!!!
After all’s said and done, one preview I just can’t get out of my mind is for this movie I hadn’t even heard of until the showed the trailer. Renaissance. It’s done in this very extreme black and white, which I can see will be a problem for some people, but, to me it’s very unique. I’ll be looking forward to that.
Today all in all was a great day too. I got to spend a lot of time with my little man, he even gave Venerable Miao Hsi a big hug when he saw her. So wonderful.