Posts Tagged ‘animation software’

Sep

TIFF’08 – Four final mini film reviews – bambambambam

Posted by: Keram Malicki-Sanchez in 2008, TIFF, Toronto International Film Festival 2008, cinema, festival, film

1. Dungeon Masters

Dungeon Masters

An attempt at eye-level documentary of three still-operating Dungeon Masters. One is an active American Reservist who has a wife one would assume to sway the army from examining his obvious need to come out. Another is a part-time apartment manager living in Torrance with a wife and kid who just can’t find a way to make a living doing what he does best – running a D&D campaign. The other is a lonely intelligent girl from Mississippi who paints herself black from head to toe to become a Drow Elf and frequently participates in LARP (live-action role-play). The score is by Blonde Redhead. The film is great, one of my festival favorites, but there is so much more to mine, that I left feeling a bit cheated and curious if it was really as neutral an eye as the introduction claimed. I felt a like the director was mesmerized by the nerdiness of it all. I think there is more to the culture than nerddom. But that’s just me.

Recommend.

2. Who Do You Love

Bleh. What is it with German directors who can’t grasp what it is that makes American music as cool as it is? An outside-in fanboy look at the Chess Record label, it misses every opporunity for nuance, subtext and so on and defaults to the same shitty Lifetime Network Movie of the Week about [Insert Blues/Rock Icon Here] growing-up-in-a-small-time, having-affair-on-his-small-town wife,-seeing-the-error-in-his-ways, trying to -to-get-her-back,-left-onstage-at-the-end-with-the-fans, but-was-it-really-worth-it? formula that we saw in Ray, Walk The Line, etc etc ad nauseum except to the point of caricature.

Pass.

3. $9.99

Stop-motion. Using almost Bunuelesque surrealism, a freaky fallen angel character who I am still contemplating, great voice work from Geoffrey Rush and company, eerie winsome soundtrack, a refreshing and candid fiction about the meaning of life.

Recommend if you can ever find it in distribution.

4. American Swing

American Swing

Some documentaries are just plain archaeological digs that endeavor to retroactively reassemble a story from the few bone fragments discovered. This one feels like that and does a remarkably good job considering the short order of barely viewable beta 3/4″ footage they have to intercut between the HD interviews they shot with the old-folks who once moshed around in a couple of club basements in New York in the ’70’s fucking everything that moved. Then AIDS and coke came into the picture and the scene crashed and roll credits. Cool enough I suppose, if I cared a little more.

For a slow night, or if you need more insight into why people dig the Lifestyle.

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Tags: $9.99, 3d animation, American Swing, animation school, animation software, Bo Diddley, Chess Records, documentary, Drow elf, Dungeon Masters, film production, film reviews, film school, Marshall Chess, The Lifestyle, TIFF 08, Toronto International Film Festival, WHo Do you love, World of Warcraft

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Aug

Animation Makes Strong Statement at Toronto Film Fest

Posted by: Keram Malicki-Sanchez in Hollywood, Toronto International Film Festival 2008, cinema, festival, film, independent, indie, mainstream media, new releases

$Tatia Rosenthal\'s \$

In the first day alone of the 2008 Toronto Film Festival, there are no less than three non-cutesy-ironic-computer-generated-fairy-tale-spoof feature-length films showing.

Like 2007’s massive fest-buzz film Persepolis, based on a graphic novel concerning an outspoken young Iranian girl during the Islamic Revolution that went on to garner an Oscar nom ( but lost to Ratatouille), we see a new 2D offering titled Waltz with Bashir – a memoir of serving time in the Israeli army as it invades Lebanon in response to a series of attacks. Rotoscoped over source footage originally shot on film.

Two stop-motion films in the vein of Wallace and Grommit or The Corpse Bride show on day one of the fest, within 15 mins of each other: Edison & Leo by UK director Neil Burns (Varsity 8 Cinema, 7:45PM) explores intellectual, spiritual and literal theft in a noirish steampunk setting, while Tatia Rosenthal’s $9.99 , voiced by Geoffrey Rush, Anthony LaPaglia, Ben Mendelson and Barry Otto is a soul-searching film, centered around a man who expects to find some answers from a book that claims he can find all sorts of answers for the “low price of $9.99.” (AMC 7 – 7:30PM)

What do I make of it? Puppets are used very successfully as a proxy for a shrink or parent or older sibling as a channel for communicating with young children. Heck even older children. Oscar Wilde said, and I am paraphrasing, that you give a man a mask and he will show you his true self. Animation offers an interesting ambrosia-like buffer that affords us a different way to access the subject matter. Alternatively, animation allows a director to control the performances of his “actors” completely. Every facial tic, eyebrow raise, cloud in the sky, is under his or her direct command.

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