Category: Personal Favorites

1930-31 – Ann Harding

Holiday

Ann Harding’s performance in Holiday was good, but maybe not as good as I wanted it to be.  But I think the fault may have been in some of the writing, and not in the actress.  Unfortunately, like it or not, the quality of the script has an effect on the category.  The best actress in the world is never going to be nominated for a terribly written part, and conversely, a poor actress might be nominated for a brilliantly written character.

And while this isn’t the worst example of a lackluster character, it suffers from an absence of an arch or development.  Harding played a woman who is like the black sheep of a wealthy family, simply because her ultimate happiness doesn’t revolve around money and the finer things in life.  So she starts off as depressed and remains depressed for most of the movie.  She falls in love with her sister’s unlikely fiancée despite the fact that he is low-born.  She plays the part of a long suffering girl in love who, nevertheless, desires her sister’s happiness rather than her own.  And that one trait remained with the character throughout the entire film.  There was no arch, and that wasn’t Harding’s fault.

In the end, meaning in the last 5 minutes of the movie, when she learns that her sister doesn’t love the man, she does a quick turn-around, and runs off to be with him, knowing full well that it might mean a life without the money she’s been accustomed to all her life.  It just drives home the main point of the film, which is that love is more important than money, and if you think otherwise, you are a materialistic snob.  Ok, maybe I’m exaggerating a bit… but not much.

But all that isn’t to say her performance of the poorly written character was perfect.  I’m not entirely sure I liked the way she delivered all her dialogue.  It was like she was trying too hard to put both the aristocratic airs and affectations, and the character’s constant depression into her voice.  The result was almost sing-song-ish, and melodramatic.  There were times when it felt forced and false.  It didn’t sound natural.  Not all the time, mind you, but enough that it caught my attention.  Strangely enough, though, I actually enjoyed watching the movie.

1930-31 – Marlene Dietrich

Morocco

Marlene Dietrich is one of those classic icons of old Hollywood that had a style all her own.  I’ve seen several of her films, and am always impressed by the way she carried herself.  She was like a beautiful synthesis of feminine and masculine sensibilities, both in the way she dressed, and in the way she behaved.  She was gorgeous and she knew it.  She had a definite air of superiority about her that was unmistakable, like she knew she was more attractive, more skilled as an actress, and more confident in her own skin than everyone around her.

She had a presence on the screen that was captivating, an attitude like she couldn’t have cared less about what she was doing, and a sparkle in her eyes that hinted at concealed secrets.  And yet, she know exactly what she was doing.  She had the elusive IT, and she knew how to use it.  And when you watch her on the screen, you can not only sense her arrogance, but you can forgive her for it because that kind of confidence can be so alluring.

In Morocco, she played a singer at a nightclub that falls in love with a handsome Legionnaire, played by Gary Cooper.  She falls for him so hard that at the end of the movie, she leaves a wealthy man who wants to marry her, to follow her lover and his company of soldiers, barefoot, into the bleak desert.  It was a strange ending, but Dietrich pulled it off.

In the film’s iconic scene, the nightclub scene, she must have really shocked the audiences of the 1930s.  She comes out on stage dressed in a man’s tuxedo with a top hat, and wearing pants!  As if that wasn’t outrageous enough, at one point, she kisses another woman on the mouth.  And believe me, there was nothing platonic or sisterly about it.  There was a definite sensuality, a sexuality, in the kiss that surprised even me.  And her audience applauded her when she did it!  But I guess I shouldn’t have been so surprised.  In the documentary that was included on the DVD, the actress was described as having a gender fluidic sexuality.  She was bisexual, which, in itself, was a shocking thing to be open about in the 1930s.  I think her Oscar nomination was well-deserved.

Love and Monsters – 2020/21

Well, this certainly has been a difficult year.  The Pandemic has affected nearly every aspect of life, and the film industry has been no exception.  But I would say that the quality of the movies we did get this past year have been just as good as ever.  The modern trend of visually flashy CGI effects is still going strong, and Love and Monsters certainly has plenty of them.

Of course, we all came to see the monsters, and in this they did not disappoint.  The concept was that nuclear fallout and radiation turned the various creatures that inhabit the planet into mutated, giant versions of the originals, and there was a pretty good variety of species shown in the film.  There were insects, amphibians, crustaceans, and others that menaced our heroes, and looked great on the screen. 

These completely CGI effects might have been just run-of-the-mill, except they had one interesting thing going for them: the lighting.  One of the things I’ve noticed in many of the movies that I’ve reviewed for the Best Visual Effects category is that the scenes in which they appear are dark, or at least dimly lit.  This has the benefit of hiding flaws.  It also requires a smaller amount of minute detail from the digital artists.  But in this movie, most of the monsters are seen in bright daylight, which is, in itself, a difficult light for filmmakers to work with.

All that means is that the CGI renderers have to put an insane amount of detail into their digital creations.  Nowhere in the film was this more evident than in the climactic scene where a crab as big as a house attacks people in broad daylight on a beach.  Because of the lighting, you could see every little bump on its crusty, seaweed-laden shell.  You could see its mutated maw with all its monster teeth.  And you could see its awesome alien eyes.  Of course, being able to see its eyes was a plot point, so I suppose they had to have given them a bit of extra attention.  But this hyper-detailed rendering made them look as real as anything.

I also liked the snail that Joel encounters in the forest.  It was supposed to be a gentle giant, and they did a great job of bringing that across.  The monster frog was properly menacing, and the Queen Sand-Gobbler, which was the giant mutation of a centipede, was pretty scary.  The fantastic realism of the impossible creatures could have been right at home in an old Ray Harryhousen movie, or even a modern horror film, though the scariness of the visual effects were softened by a light-hearted story.  The movie meshed the action/horror genre with that of a mild romance.  So maybe the scary monsters weren’t as horrifying as they could have been, but that wasn’t because of the VFX team.  That was just the way the script was written.  The movie was fairly successful, so who knows?  Maybe we’ll see a sequel someday.

Mad Max Fury Road – 2015

On the surface, this movie looks like it has a ton of digital effects.  It would be understandable.  There is a strong element of fantasy in this post-apocalyptic action/adventure movie.  There were a lot of stunts, explosions, guns, an eyeless mutant playing a heavy-metal guitar that shot flames from its neck, and a hellish tornado and lightning riddled dust-storm.  But for all those fantastic elements, director George Miller has stated that over 90% of the effects were practical effects. 

Now, I have to remind myself that practical effects are still visual effects, even in this modern age of filmmaking, as are the stunts.  In fact, there were reportedly over 150 stunt people involved in the production, some of whom were Olympic athletes and Cirque du Soleil performers.  Nowhere was this more evident than the scene in which men standing on the ends of long bending poles anchored to moving vehicles, were swinging back and forth, raining destruction on the good guys, and even snatching a woman out of a truck.  And to make it even more impressive, all this action took place while the vehicles appeared to be speeding along at 80 or 90 miles per hour.  In fact, I could totally see this acrobatic technique being used in an actual Cirque du Soleil show.

As the digital effects in the movie go, one of my favorites was the dust storm.  The scene was so intensely chaotic!  It was just visually stunning.  The constant lightning, the tornadoes, and the flying debris were other-worldly.  Speeding cars were lifted off the ground and screaming men were thrown to their deaths like rag-dolls.  But it was such a small segment of the movie, and there were other CGI effects that are just as impressive, though not as flashy.  Like Imperator Furiosa’s missing arm, for example.  Obviously, they didn’t amputate Charlize Theron’s arm, but they did have her were a green sleeve which was digitally removed in post.

As I’ve said before, some of the best visual effects are the ones you don’t notice as visual effects.  For example, there were terrain or sky replacements, which all looked as natural as reality.  They also did some very effective day-for-night shooting, where they shot in the daytime, over-exposed the film, and added color alteration effects to make it appear to be night-time, even though you could clearly see everything taking place on the screen. 

But really, what is it about the Mad Max franchise that fans have always enjoyed?  It’s the fast cars and motorcycles, and the big explosions, and this movie had those things in spades. Apparently, about 150 cars were built for this movie, and by the time filming was done, only about 88 had survived.  But here, the biggest and most impressive vehicle had to be the good guys’ semi-truck, called the War Rig.  It was a monstrosity that was fast, powerful, and darn-near indestructible.  The climactic scene in which it is finally taken down was so exciting to watch!  The first time I watched this movie, I wasn’t a fan, but this second time around, the incredible visuals really went a long way to boost my enjoyment of the film.  Just incredible!

Transformers – 2007

This was one of the dumbest movies I have seen in a long time. Thank goodness the special effects were fantastic… well, mostly.  Just keep in mind that this movie was directed by Michael Bay, the man with a reputation for making things blow up.  And he certainly remained true to form here.  There were explosions left and right, whether we needed them or not.

But you see, the biggest problem I had with the movie’s visual effects wasn’t all the big fireballs.  It was the way in which the director cut the action together.  Again, as it typical for Bay’s style, the action was fast and chaotic.  There was so much happening so quickly, that I didn’t get a chance to absorb any of it.  At times, it was just confusing.  I couldn’t even tell what was happening to who.  All I could see is that things were flying across the screen at break-neck speed, and smashing into other things, sending debris flying in every direction.  It was too much to follow, and too much to allow me to appreciate the effects themselves.  I understand how those kinds of visuals create an intended chaotic feel for the action, but it does very little to help tell a story, or even show a clear sequence of events. And the constant hand-held shaky-cam that added to the chaos didn’t help matters in that regard. 

But aside from that, the effects were actually alright.  The real reason we all came to see this movie was to see the live-action, photo-realistic Transformers change from vehicles like cars, trucks, tanks, and fighter jets, into giant robots, and for that, they made it look kind-of cool.  But even though the effects were fine for a fantasy movie, my logical mind had a few issues with some of the details.  For example, these things are made of metal, but when they spoke, their metal mouths were nearly as flexible as human lips.  Or when the man’s cell phone was changed into an evil robot, where did the extra mass come from for it to be firing bullets without depleting its own size, or was it magically replicating matter?  And why did the bullets vanish as soon as they hit the safety-glass walls of the cage?  But when the vending machine came to life it shot soda cans instead of bullets, because it was supposed to be funny, I guess.  Little things like that bothered me.

When I was a child, I had several Transformer toys, and I loved how the clever transformations were accomplished, how the front fenders of a car popped out and became arms, how the hood folded down to become a chest, how a hidden head flipped up from the car’s engine compartment.  But in the movie, most of the changes happened so fast, you couldn’t clearly tell what parts of the vehicles were becoming what parts of the robots.  Oh well.  It still looked cool.

And there were plenty of high-speed chases and stunts and the like, most of which defied logic and the laws of physics.  The giant mechanical scorpion in the desert was pretty awesome.  And lots of building were destroyed in spectacular fashion.  Action, action, and more action!  That was really the name of the game.  Just don’t expect a smart, well-written story with clever dialogue, because if that’s what you are looking for, you are watching the wrong movie.

The Lord of the Rings – The Fellowship of the Ring – 2001 (WINNER)

The special effects for this mega-blockbuster of a film were beyond incredible.  The Lord of the Rings trilogy of books were only ever before adapted as animated features because it was thought that the special effects inherent in the story would never be able to be believably portrayed in a live action film.  But it seems that technology had finally progressed enough that the attempt was made, and the results were spectacular.  There is no doubt that this movie deserved its win.  But all that being said, the special effects were not without their flaws.

Still, in order to find those flaws, I have to be incredibly nit-picky.  So, I’ll spend only a moment to briefly mention the two scenes in which the effects didn’t quite work so seamlessly.  First is a single shot during the Council of Elrond scene, where Frodo walks forward, saying he will take the Ring to Mordor, his image looks shaky, like he doesn’t belong in the image.  Second is another isolated shot in Moria, when Frodo and Aragorn are on the collapsing staircase.  As it topples forward, the two characters look very green-screened.  And that was it.

Everything else was pretty-much perfect.  The effects in this movie was so many and so varied, that it would be impossible to mention them all, but two types of effects that catch my attention the most, every time I watch the movie, is the beautifully detailed environments, usually displayed best when they are shown in wide shots, and the fantasy creature effects.

Now, I’ll admit that many of the wonderful scenery and environment shots are more than just the results of the visual effects artists.  The cinematography, the production design, the set design, and others play huge parts in the success of these images.  But the special effects team is mostly in charge of the miniature models and the digital environments, and they really created the most wonderfully memorable designs that are on hundred-percent photo-realistic.  The house of Elrond, the Mines of Moria, and the home of Galadriel in Lothlorien, were phenomenal!  These effects couldn’t have been done any better.

And the creatures like the Ring Wraiths, the cave troll, and the orcs and goblins, were incredible.  And who can forget the terrifying flaming demon, the Balrog?  But one of the most impressive things in the film were the main characters and their heights.  Humans, elves, dwarves, and hobbits all have different heights, even though the actors were roughly the same size.  Carefully choreographed scenes made use of forced perspective and other techniques to always make the actors appear height-appropriate, which was fundamentally impressive, especially when objects were handed from a hobbit to a human, but remained the same size.  The effects in this film, and its sequels are just pure eye-candy, and a delight to watch, each and every time!

A.I. Artificial Intelligence

I’ll start this off by saying that this is one of my favorite movies of all time, definitely within the top twenty.  With that in mind, I will try to keep this review unbiased and a little more objective.  One of the reasons I like this movie so much is the special effects, which were phenomenal.  When you see a film by Steven Spielberg, you know you are in good hands.  The techniques used in this film had never been accomplished in such a perfected way before.  For example, right in the opening scene, a live-action actress’s face suddenly opens up to reveal that she is a mechanical robot.  It was incredible.  And when her face closed, the CGI seamlessly turned back into the live actress.  The transitions were perfect.

But that was just the first scene.  The entire movie was filled with incredible images that were varied and imaginative.  There were actors with half of their faces burned off to reveal mechanical structures underneath.  There was the Flesh Fair, in which robots with human faces were destroyed in various vulgar ways.  There were three dimensional holograms, flying vehicles, and the New York City skyline rising up out of a risen ocean.

And then there was the main character, David, so incredibly played by Haley-Joel Osment.  Though he acted the part of a human being, there were scenes in which he had to be opened up to reveal his mechanical insides.  We saw him sitting under water without drowning, and we saw his mecha-siblings in various stages of construction.  Watching him decapitate an image of himself was pretty meta.

And there were two specific environments in the film that I still find impressive, every time I watch the movie.  There was Rouge City, which was like a hyper-sexualized and futuristic version of Las Vegas, and there was the submerged, and later frozen, depiction of New York.  Rouge City was made up of dozens of different images which combined live action and CGI effects.  In these shots, there were sensors on the ceiling of a blue-screened set that connected the environment to the camera movements, allowing Spielberg to see accurate three-dimensional visualizations of a composited scene while the actors were being filmed.

The only real visual effects disappointment in the movie were the advanced mecha-robots of the far-future sequence.  Their look, while very alien, to be sure, was good enough, but it was their movements that gave them away as fake images.  Maybe their stilted movements were an intentional affectation, but I don’t think so.  They reminded me of early CGI characters that had a kind of unnatural way of moving that was too smooth, and yet too jerky, to be realistic.  If David and Joe could move naturally in the present, why did their advanced counterparts of two thousand years in the future move like animated Poser figures?  That made no sense.  But I think that if that was the films only real flaw, we’re doing just fine.

Gladiator – 2000 (WINNER)

This movie had two kinds of special effects, ones that you can easily see, and ones that you don’t necessarily notice.  Both categories were handled expertly.  There were both practical effects and a fully stocked cadre of digital effects.  All of them were combined in creative and innovative ways to create a picture of the Roman Empire at the height of its power.  Director Ridley Scott gave audiences visuals that had never before been attempted on such a grand scale.

The ones you can see were pretty spectacular.  The film opens with a great battle sequence in a field in Germania, where the true might of the Roman War Machine was brilliantly displayed as never before.  All the fights in the gladiatorial arena were thrilling to watch, especially the one with the tigers.  The Battle of Carthage sequence was also fantastic in its realistic violence and gore.

But it was the visual effects that you might not notice that really made Gladiator stand out as being truly deserving of the Oscar it took home.  The sequence where Maximus first enters the great Colosseum of Rome was fantastic!  There was an amazing shot where the camera circles the gladiators in a twenty-eight second, five hundred forty-degree panorama. Then there was the crowd and the Colosseum, itself.  The Colosseum was only partially constructed with only one end of the arena, and only one story.  The full structure teeming with the cheering spectators was filmed in sections, then duplicated and pieced together in a computer.  Motion capture was used to film and place individual people all over the digital image. The actual Colosseum in Rome was photographed, and the real patina and stucco was projected onto the digital structure.  The realistic result was flawless!  It looks like they really built the whole building and filled it with a horde of extras.  There were also a few shots in the film of the Colosseum from the outside which were really awesome.  I’ve been to the real thing, and this reconstruction is amazing.

Another effect that you might not know was in there is the character of Proximo.  Oliver Reed, the actor that played the former gladiator, died during the filming of the movie.  In order to save the movie, a stand-in actor was used to finish filming his scenes.  In the wide shots, Reed’s face, taken from extra footage of him, was digitally placed onto the body-double’s neck.  In the close-up shots, more previous images were used and digitally manipulated to fit the remaining scenes.  I would never have known if I hadn’t done my research.  It was very convincing and so important to the film. 

This was a movie that took home a total of five Oscars, all of which were deserved, but the one for Visual Effects was particularly well-earned. But with his incredible track record of bringing us movies with awesome visuals, like Alien, Blade Runner, and Legend, we should expect no loss of Ridley Scott.  Well done!

The Lost World: Jurassic Park – 1997

This movie wasn’t perfect, but its special effects weren’t too bad.  They were consistent and interesting.  The problems I had with the movie were in the script and not in the visuals.  So, we’ve all seen Jurassic Park and marveled at the super-realistic dinosaurs.  Well, here in the second installment of the franchise, we get several new dinosaurs to dazzle us.  Spielberg also put them in new locations and situations just to add a little more interest.

But that being said, the good things were great.  The new dinosaurs that I really liked were the Stegosauruses, the pack of Compsognathus, and the Pachycephalosaurus.  But of course, the main villains were the T-Rex and the Velociraptors, though the Raptors were somehow less deadly than their predecessors in the first Jurassic Park movie. 

This time, instead of a single T-rex, we had two of them and their child.  The baby Rex was designed to be almost cute, that is, until his mother prods him to tear the main human villain to pieces.  Unfortunately this took place off camera.  Funny, the death of the man who was devoured by the tiny Compsognathus herd took place off camera as well.  We are shown how dozens of the little monsters chased down and attacked the guy, which was pretty cool, but the killing surge was not shown.  This was strange because when one of the good guys was ripped in half by the two adult Tyrannosauruses, we got to see it all.

This movie had the distinction of having professional hunters going up against the dinosaurs.  They had modern guns, high-tech jeeps and equipment, and actually managed to capture several dinos, even the adult male T-Rex eventually.  There was a cool scene in which the men in their trucks were racing along with the dinosaur herds and capturing them, and that looked cool.  And then, in the film’s climax, the T-Rex was brought to San Diego, where it destroyed property, caused car crashes, and devoured people.  I loved when it bit and mangled a traffic light.

The only really unbelievable thing that happened in the movie was when Julianne Moore, Jeff Goldbloom, and Vince Vaughn were trapped in an equipment trailer that the mother T-rex was pushing over a cliff.  With the rear section of the trailer already dangling over the edge, the humans are holding on to a rope that had been threaded through the windshield of the front section of the vehicle.  As the front half topples over the sheer drop, the trailer slips over the people like a sock falling off a stick.  None of them are even so much as touched by the interior of the vehicle, which is full of equipment, furniture, and electrical consoles.  Nope!  Not buying that one!  But again, that has to do with the script and not the effect itself.

But in the end, the visual effects in this movie were very good.  They were just more of the same effects we saw in the first Jurassic Park film.  Only the dinosaur breeds were different… well, some of them.  But it was enough to give the audiences things they had not exactly seen before, and I can appreciate that.

Dragonheart – 1996

These special effects were mostly good, though not all of them.  They were groundbreaking, but unperfected.  The movie’s big draw was the talking dragon, and for the most part, the effects were innovative and well done.  But sadly, the few flaws that were there just seemed very noticeable.  In a documentary included on the DVD, director Rob Cohen explained that they had a story they hadn’t been able to tell the way they wanted until they saw Stephen Spielberg’s Jurassic Park.

The CGI dragon was unique from any previous animated dragon.  The main thing was that it talked by using lips that very distinctly shaped its words, an impressive effect.  And I just want to give a quick shout-out to Sean Connery who expertly gave the dragon its voice. When you compare its image on the screen to the only other competently realistic dragon from the 1981 movie, Dragonslayer, it had incredibly smooth motion, a wonderful design, and depth and realism… usually.

The problem is that while they gave it skin texture, shadow, and depth, they were inconsistent.  As a result it looked like they were inserting footage of the dragon from various stages of its development, and I know that could not have been the case.  Sometimes he looked a little two-dimensional, sometimes he looked smooth, sometimes he looked rough.  I’m just not sure if this was intentional. 

Another thing that sometimes bothered me is that the dragon didn’t always appear to belong in the image.  He didn’t have any dark lines around him, but maybe it was the lighting that was off.  I’ll be the first to admit that my lack of education in filmmaking prevents me from putting my finger on what the problem really was, but I know when something doesn’t exactly look right.  To emphasize this, there is a certain scene I can recall in which Draco is walking next to Bowen who is on his horse.  They were moving through tall grass, but when the dragon took a step, he didn’t disturb the grass in any way, as if he was completely insubstantial. 

But I’m really being nitpicky.  The things they got right far outweighed the things they got wrong.   For most of the film, the realism was fantastic, and the fire breathing effects were perfect.  A couple of things that looked especially good were the little comic battle when Bowen first encounters Draco.  When Bowen gets caught in the dragons mouth, with his sword resting against its upper pallet, the little stand-off looked good.  I also liked when they showed the dragon swimming under the water of a lake.  Then when his head emerged into the open air, the dark, wet texture of the dragon’s hide was really awesome.

There were a couple other unique effects like the Bowen being dragged along by a rope attached to Draco’s ankle.  He is towed through a forest, banging into trees as he goes.  There were a few battle sequences between soldiers and peasants that brought a little action to the movie.  And there was the film’s climax where Draco dies and turns into a magical golden mist that floats away into the sky, there to become a new star.  In all, the effects helped to make this a fun movie to watch.