lucasw's Journal: Adaptation, Ballistics, Windtalkers, Trapped, Resident Evil

Adaptation

Pretty good "let's make fun of Hollywood" combined with "the most self-referential movie ever" stuff. I appreciated the third act, but missed the humor from the earlier parts.

Ballistics: Ecks vs. Sever

The final fight Lucy Liu vs. Ray Park was almost a competent action scene. The rest was horrible, bad editing, bad logic, bad choreography, and of course everything you'd expect to be bad (stories, characters, etc.) was also bad. Lucy Liu's character does the bad-ass pose every ten seconds, but they forgot that for that to work you have to have the character do something cool and then get a shot of them all tense in their fight stance or whatever. She's so cool she doesn't have take cover when fired at. And the other bad-ass move, the quick clip changing for instance, looks incredibly slow and unpracticed when I know in the script there's probably a lot of lines about how much a smooth professional she's supposed to look like.

Windtalkers

Boring.

I thought I'd give it a shot on the strength of his earlier movies (MI:2 had some cool scenes, and I even liked Hard Target, and of course all the Hong Kong stuff). There's a lot of very amateurish and experimental looking camera moves where you'd expect super smooth gliding action: The camera will sit at one distance, then zoom in cheesily or abrupt steadicam forward for the dramatic close up annoyingly.

The sequence with Christian Slater and the other code talker guy near the end was decent, but I was asking myself why I was bothering to watch and web-browsing the rest of the last half.

Trapped

Rented this because the previews promised a lot f
Thrillers like this usually work by setting up a situation with ordinary people where the audience can easily map their emotions onto themselves, and sympathize and predict some courses of action taken by the characters- and after the film creates those expectations, it can manipulate and turn them on their head in surprising ways.

There isn't much of that kind of logic here, just a series of threatened or realized violent encounters with some verbal abuse wrapped around them.

The plane's instant fall at the end seemed wrong- and weren't the flaps on the wings down? (which means the stunt pilot was obviously nosing the plane down, rather than falling out of the sky due to lack of airspeed)

There's a sound effect of police sirens at the end, which clearly have an echo to them that would be right in a city with lots of acoustically reflective buildings around- but the last scene is in the middle of a highway with expanses of forest on both sides.

Resident Evil

Best movie of this bunch except for Adaptation. I really liked the clean metallic contrasty look of most of the shots, though the computer effects were pretty weak. The structure is extremely video game like (go figure), with simplistic goals and obstacles and even a boss monster. (I thought Bourne Identity was like a video game for similar reasons)

There is a cheapness I associate with lots of guns being fired (muzzle flash is relatively cheap) but not many things getting shot (squibs and other little explosives and those paintballs that make the sparks being extremely complicated, time consuming, and therefore expensive). My high standards require every bullet shown fired to have a shown bullet hole, but I could be a little unreasonable about it.

A sequel is due in another year- I thought the movie did poorly at the box office, but maybe it was just profitable enough for another go? www.the-numbers.com says it cost $30e6 and made only $39e6, where the usual rule of thumb is that a movie only gets half of the box office and advertising usually isn't figured into the budget- but maybe international gross and video sales made up for it?

I caught a little of the Milla Jovovich and Michelle Rodriguez commentary, at it was extremely entertaining- they were talking about random things or making fun of the movie or interrupting the director when he's going on about special effects (there's also a technical commentary if you want to hear those details and be rid of the actors)