Rob’s Finds
There’s a theme for today’s installment of “Rob’s Finds”: The Good, the Bad, and the Vampire. First the good. And at present in the film world, there is nobody ‘gooder’ than Pixar. The Guardian graces us with this article in high praise of the Prixar Priests of Peerless Parables:
Not that this should be confused with playing it safe. On the contrary, Pixar appears to pride itself on spinning conceptual straw into cinematic gold. While Toy Story 3 is, by the studio’s own standards, a safe bet at the box office, the more commercially secure Pixar has become, the more it has used its bankability as a springboard for innovation and experimentation. Aside from Toy Story 3 and the forthcoming Cars 2 (a sequel to the only film on its CV that dipped noticeably below the normally stratospheric standards), nothing else in its recent output adheres to received wisdom about what makes a hit.
Take the sumptuous 2007 comedy Ratatouille, in which a rodent chef prepares nouvelle cuisine dishes in a Parisian restaurant. The picture’s theme was the provenance of great art — hardly box-office bait — while the title was feared so offputting that a phonetic spelling was added to the poster. Or WALL-E, an attack on consumerism; not only was this remarkable work soul-achingly bleak for its first, dialogue-free 40 minutes, but it featured, as the critic Jonathan Romney observed, a metal box for a hero and a steering-wheel for a villain.
Financial commentators in the US rashly predicted that the studio’s fortunes would decline with the release of Up, because of the uncommercial decision to have a 78-year-old widower as its hero. But the film made nearly $300m (on a $175m budget) during its US theatrical release alone. Future projects — including Newt, about an attempt to mate the last remaining newts on earth, who unfortunately despise one another — indicate a continuing aversion to formula.
That audiences have come to cherish Pixar, eccentricities and all, is testament to the level of trust and goodwill the studio has generated. “That’s part of what Steve Jobs said early on,” recalled Dylan Brown, a supervising animator at Pixar, when I spoke to him in 2007. “He said he wanted to build Pixar into a brand so that when people go see a Pixar film, there’s a certain level of integrity they can trust, even without seeing anything in advance about the film. As artists working on a film, it’s a big part of how we can go home and feel good about what we’ve done. I don’t want to put four years of my life into something that doesn’t have integrity, or a personal message.”
In the Bad category, Rob was thinking more bad ass as he scoured through the io9 vaults to locate this: 13 of Science-Fiction’s Baddest Convicts. Are you thinking who I’m thinking? Here’s just a few:
ZOD, URSA, AND NON
IMPRISONED FOR: Treason
Terrence Stamp, Sarah Douglas, Jack O’Halloran in Superman II
Banished to the Phantom Zone for trying to take over Krypton, this terrible threesome got sprung by a rogue asteroid and found themselves on Earth, ready to do battle with the last son of Krypton. Plus, they had impeccably trimmed facial hair and nifty shiny uniforms.
THOMAS ZAREK
IMPRISONED FOR: Terrorism
Richard Hatch on Battlestar Galactica
Who knew that when the Cylon Apocalypse came, one of the few ships to survive the attacks and join Adama and Roslin’s rag-tag fleet would be a prison ship? And who knew that biding his time on that ship would be a philosophically brawny malcontent who was willing to kill to get what he wanted?
NUMBER 6 (The Prisoner)
IMPRISONED FOR: Quitting his job
Patrick McGoohan in The Prisoner
Okay, yes, he was an agent of sorts for Her Majesty’s Secret Service, so he probably knew things that said secret service wouldn’t want lolling about in the world. But just because a fella wants a mid-career change isn’t cause to lock him away in a mysterious Village he can’t escape from, lest he get pounced by a giant ball.
You want to see Snake Plissken, hit the link.
And the Ugly… er, Vampire? Why, that could only be… well… you know… a certain movie franchise which rhymes with the word “highlight”? Again from io9:
Watching Twilight: Eclipse in the theater is like going to a sporting event. There are teams; there is cheering. But one team is always doomed to lose. What fantasy is being fed by this strange competition?
I will confess up front: I am Team Jacob, all the way. Have been since the first movie, when Jake was a skinny kid from the wrong side of the treeline. Though Twilight and New Moon showed main character Bella torn between vampy Edward and wolfy Jacob, Eclipse is all about how and why she rejects Jacob for the last time. When evil vamp Victoria raises an army of newborn vamps to slaughter Bella, the local wolf pack has to work with the vampire Cullen family to drive the menace out of Forks. And that drives Bella toward Jacob in a way she’s never been before.
The reasons why she rejects him are key to understanding what Eclipse is really about.
The reasons?
Team You Are Not Allowed To Have An Interracial Relationship
Team You Must Be Controlled By An Older Man Who Hates Sex
Team Don’t Date The Guy Who Wants Sex As Much As You Do
Team Choose Not To Choose
Wait. The movie franchise that rhymes with “highlight” is about… sex?
Now I get it!
Thanks, Rob, for this week’s installment of “Rob’s Finds.”