luis is a co-founder and social software architect at Infinite.ly. he likes building small web toys a whole lot. More ...
I’m not really in the habit of uploading comics anymore these days, but when I stumbled across this bit of illustrated dementia by Shintaro Kago, I just had to share it with everyone. I’ve compiled the 16-page short into a single PDF, downloadable here. Word of warning: there’s nudity, gore and violence galore here, so try not to view it with your boss around.
(Spotted at Same Hat! Same Hat!)
Transformers
After a string of summer movie disappointments (Spider-man 3, Pirates 3 and Shrek 3), I went into Transformers on the morning of June 28th with more than a little anxiety. This was the cartoon of my childhood, after all, and all of the pre-release hype had really started to worry me. (Optimus Prime with lips? Bumblebee as a Camaro? Megatron isn’t a gun? No friggin’ way!) That, and the fact that Michael Bay — whose recent films had left a really bad taste in my mouth — had been tapped to helm the project.
Of course, this was all reduced to a quibble as soon as Peter Cullen’s voice began to rumble onscreen. About 20 minutes into the movie, when Prime first appears in his truck form, the audience began to cheer hysterically, and I think I cried a little.
When I say that this movie features some of the best visual effects ever committed to celluloid, I’m not exaggerating: the robots are so intricately rendered that it’s hard to visually process all of the various parts when they’re moving about onscreen. (Scott Farrar of ILM mentioned in an interview that the Optimus Prime model had 10,108 moving parts, all chained together and operating in unison.)
Another surprise was that the parts of the story involving the humans generally worked well. Shia Labeouf is as fantastic in this movie as Megan Fox is hot, and the bits involving Shia’s family are the funniest sequences in the film. The squad of military goons led by Josh Duhamel and Tyrese Gibson are also pretty decent throughout, as are the top-secret government sector reps headed by John Turturro. The only non-robot characters in this movie that I felt were unnecessary were the hackers (Rachael Taylor and Anthony Anderson). Neither of them did a particularly bad job, but both characters I felt should have been jettisonned from the early drafts.
One other thing I didn’t like was how the final battle gets wrapped up, but I suppose this is arguable. I felt that it was a copout and should’ve been a lot more intense than it was. (It doesn’t hold a candle to say, the final struggle in Terminator 2, which is still the greatest robot fight ever choreographed.)
Overall though, this is the most fun movie to come out this summer so far, and will be for quite sometime. There’s a very delicate balance between modernizing a classic concept while still treating the source material with the respect that it deserves, and this movie walks that line with impressive aplomb. 4.5 out of 5 stars.
1408 is an interesting Stephen King story about a writer played by John Cusack who goes around visiting various haunted locales and compiling his experiences into moderate-selling paperbacks. From his ambivalent, nigh bored, expression, we gather that he hasn’t really seen anything particularly scary in all his travels. That is, until he learns about the Dolphin Hotel’s room 1408, whose numbers rather ominously add up to "13." Cusack decides to use this room as the final chapter in his new book and goes about making the necessary arrangements. Of course, when he arrives, the hotel management vehemently discourages him from checking in. "56 people have died in that room since the hotel’s inception," says an uncharacteristically reserved Samuel L. Jackson. For the most part, Cusack scoffs at Jackson’s pleading, but in the back of his mind, he’s thinking, "Have I finally found the real thing?"
It’s the unsettling atmosphere that is slowly built up over the movie’s first half that I really, really enjoyed about 1408. Cusack pretty much propels this movie forward through sheer force of will — once the door closes behind him, the movie’s concept is essentially reduced to "a guy in a room." Nothing happens at first, then slowly, he begins to believe that 1408 truly might be — as Jackson describes it early on — "an evil fucking room." Director Mikael Hafstrom does a great job of turning up the heat until you’re about ready to explode; not bad for his first Hollywood feature. Honestly I thought it was extremely refreshing. The past years have brought us such juvenile gore flicks as Saw, Hostel and Turistas, and I honestly thought that filmmakers had forgotten that you could scare audiences without grossing them out.
I suppose my biggest issue with 1408 is that the second half doesn’t quite match up to the anticipation built up by the first (although, honestly, I can’t imagine what possibly could), and once the movie begins to resort to special effects for its thrills, the experience began to go downhill for me. Still, this was an exceedingly enjoyable little horror film, and very well-worth the time it takes you to view it. 4 out of 5 stars.
Based on Philip K. Dick’s The Golden Man, Next stars Nicolas Cage as a man who can see two minutes into the future. It’s a cute concept, and there are some very novel ways that this movie goes about exploiting his ability. Lee Tamahori, who directed my favorite Pierce Brosnan 007 movie, does a good job keeping things moving, and there is nary a dull moment throughout Next’s 90-minute running time. Jessica Biel is Cage’s love interest, and Julianne Moore is the self-serving FBI agent who is convinced that Cage’s ability can help them prevent a nuclear attack. There are a bunch of largely interchangeable European terrorists that the movie attempts to introduce us to, but they’re all reduced to the level of lackeys towards the end of the movie, so there’s not much point.
Entertaining movie with some interesting conversation topics for post-movie analysis. 3 out of 5 stars.