Professor Layton Movie

The Professor Layton movie is something I’d anticipated for a while, so it’s nice to know it will be available in the UK in September.

I noticed a link on IGN to a review of the movie, and with great trepidation clicked. I was surprised to see that there were only two real gripes with the film, and one of those is a little unrealistic in my mind. Basically, the review suggests that the only two downsides to the film are an overreliance on CGI, and that the production values aren’t as good as Miyazaki and that sort.

I really didn’t expect the film to be as good as a Miyazaki, so that isn’t a problem for me, though the CGI gripe is something that could really bother me, to be honest. I really can’t stand the modern cartoon industry’s overuse of poor CGI, not when there’s such good CGI out there as well as really great traditional animation. If Pixar has shown us anything, it’s that CGI can be fantastic. The new Ironman cartoon, however, shows us that CGI can be really, really crap.

Apparently there’s even puzzles during the film, and the art style is most of the time very faithful to the series. I have to say, after thoroughly enjoying both of the Layton games that I’ve played on the DS, I’m really looking forward to picking up a copy of the film.

There’s something so… nostalgic and quietly humorous about the series that I think could lend itself to film, if done well, but I do think suits the gaming medium more. The sense of exploration, and being the director of that exploration, is a large part of the fun in these games, so I’m not sure how well that would be done in a film by comparison.

Still, the closing comments state that it’ll put a smile on your face, and really, for a fan of the game and someone who’s aware of how terribly game to film crossovers are, that’s a nice assurance.

Hobbits on screen

Some time ago I found out that Guillermo del Toro was to direct the upcoming Hobbit films, and I wasn’t too happy about it…

At first I was completely and utterly against this, I mean, del Toro has done some good films, Pan’s Labyrinth for instance was great, but movies like Hellboy and Blade 2 were less than great, less than good in the case of Blade 2, so I really felt like the wrong director had been chosen. del Toro is also famous for his off-beat horror/thriller films, all of which I found extremely unappealing after reading the synopsis of each film. He seems to have a bent towards the depressing, too many of his main characters end up dead at the end of the film for my liking. When I wrote my last entry on this, del Tor had been talking about how he intended to bring out the scariness of the Hobbit… I really didn’t like the sound of this… but anyway, that was all covered in that post.

Now, I don’t know how I got onto it today, but I was looking over The Hobbit film wiki page, and was rather pleasantly surprised by what I found there. It seems that the actors for Gandalf, Gollum, and Bilbo (at least in voice) will be appearing in the two films, which have now been altered so that both films will contain the narrative from The Hobbit, rather than one film being The Hobbit, and one film being a bridge between the events in The Hobbit and the events in The Lord of the Rings. I think this is a good thing, as the bridging film sounded rather… odd and unappealing.

On that Wiki page, I read of the work being done by del Toro and Peter Jackson, who have been working together to write the film, apparently reaching twelve-hour work days quite regularly; now that’s dedication! From what was written in that page, my ideas on this film have been turned around, and I am really looking forward to more Hobbits on screen!

Match made in Purgatory

I found out that not only is there going to be a World of Warcraft movie, but that it is going to be directed by none other than Sam Raimi, the director of the three Spiderman films, and a bunch of mediocre horror films, including Drag me to Hell, which was released earlier this year.

To me, there is little less appealing than a film about a really crappy game by a director who has done films that I have disliked. I haven’t played more than five minutes of WoW, and here’s why. I got into the game, a game which lacked all semblance of a storyline, a game that has graphics woefully inadequate by today’s standards, and a game that has the biggest player-base of morons that I have ever heard of, one of which I ran into in the starting area, by the name of ‘Oldfartdude’. Now, not only did Oldfartdude have a really, really, crap name, he was jumping around repeatedly in the same little area. The stupidity displayed by the name and the action could only remind me one of those mechanical monkeys clapping symbols together, but this was a cheap knock-off version so only one of the arms moved and his symbols never clapped, but that one arm was still clapping away to the silence of his own stupidity.

After seeing that particular little Petri dish of the gaming world, I felt the need to run, run away and delete the trial version of the game off my computer. Now onto the other half of this oh-so-unappealing combination is the directing of Sam Raimi. Now, I’m not here to say that the guy can’t do a good job, I’m just trying to say that the films he has done have been, to me, highly meh. The Spiderman films were so utterly uninteresting, and I felt that they really could have been. Spidey’s not the greatest Super Hero, but nor is he the lamest, but these films… they were just so… uninspiring. Raimi’s other films have largely been in the horror genre, and whilst I like thriller movies, horror is generally very poor viewing for me. I don’t like to see the rampant indulgence in other people’s pain, and the gore associated with said pain, that tends to be in these films. Raimi was one of the directors rumoured to have been considered for the upcoming Hobbit movie, and I am so very, very, glad that it was Guillermo del Toro, but I plan to talk more about the Hobbit movie in my next entry, so I’ll leave that one be.

Back to the topic at hand, the marriage of these two forces leaves me so uninterested… I really can’t see a storyline worthy of film coming out of WoW, but hey, I bet it’s still going to get huge ticket sales, just because it’s WoW.

Live-action and all it’s problems

After my last post where I wrote of the live-action film of Avatar: The Last Airbender, I have had more thoughts on both that movie and live-action remakes in general.

Okay, first off, as for Avatar… I have to say, I am actually leaning more towards racebending.com’s perception of things. I mean, Katara and Sokka and their people are based on the Inuit… and the casting call for them stated ‘Caucasian or any other ethnicity’. Doesn’t that seem odd? The two actors picked to play these characters are pretty damn Anglo-Saxon looking, and I find that just a little bit sad. It would have been really exciting to see some up and coming actors who at least remotely looked Inuit. So, whilst I will not boycott the movie, I can clearly see that there is some stuff going on there that I would rather wasn’t.

Now, on to what I wanted to say about live-action remakes in general. When you see an actor cast in the role of a character that has only been either cartoon or an image in your imagination – as with characters from books – it is so very highly unlikely that the actor will look exactly like you imagined them that it is sort of ridiculous to try. What has to be attained is the right ‘feel’. Not everyone was perfectly happy with casting choices from The Lord of the Rings, but no one can doubt that the cast really ‘owned’ their characters. They managed to embody them, even if they weren’t the spitting image.

Now, that’s not to say that it doesn’t matter at all what the actors look like, I mean, I care about the Avatar actors so there’s proof to that. But I am also extremely leery of who is going to be cast in The Song of Ice and Fire series that HBO is going to make. I really hope this series will be good, and the actors cast good, but not overly known ones. I think that would work best, I mean, that’s what worked so well for the Harry Potter movies.

On the flip side to that, the Cowboy Bebop film is going to be starring Keanu Reeves as Spike, but I honestly think that could work. Either way, with all these things, people care. People love Cowboy Bebop, they love Song of Ice and Fire, so what they don’t want to see is crappy remakes of them.

Analogy just right

Sometimes, sometimes someone else says something just right. They say it so perfectly that really nothing else needs to be said. Except that then I wouldn’t be able to write about it… because I am going to anyway.

What has tickled my funny-bone today is seeing this Penny Arcade. Up until seeing this I hadn’t really paid much attention to the fact that there is going to be an Avatar: The Last Airbender film, but because of this I actually went and had a look at the trailer. Which looks like a heck of a lot of fun, actually.

There is currently a – rather stupid, if you ask me – furore about the casting choices in the film. A controversy highlighted by Gabe’s declaration of not caring about the facts , just being angry for the sake of being angry. That is kind of what it seems like, to me. I checked out the casting choices, and it seems pretty alright to me. No live action film can be entirely spot on for the casting of cartoon characters, and it seems a heck of a lot better than Dragon Ball Evolution!

A website has gone up about this issue, racebending.com, and it’s really very odd to see people really angered about the casting choices. It seems as though they believe that the casting of the leads is inappropriate because the characters are supposed to be Asian, but all the actors are white. I feel like I can see both sides to this argument, on the one hand, the characters are obviously diverging from their original cartoon counterparts. On the other, it is clear that Paramount has kept in mind the fact that they are selling to a particular demographic, America.

Whilst the website does contain information that is thought provoking, I think all this talk of boycotting the film is somewhat of an overreaction.