Movies

A Billion Pixels and None of Them Wasted

I think its the most extraordinary studio around. I would love to do my next project with Pixar.

Brad Bird, Director of the Incredibles and Ratatouille

Brad Bird made the above statement a few years after he had written and directed the sadly underrated Iron Giant, about a decade after he’d penned some of the finest episodes of the Simpsons to ever tickle the funny bone, but before he nailed one masterpiece after the other by getting his wish and making his move to Pixar.

This past Friday, one of our clients offered us movie passes that had to be used by the following day. We looked at our schedule, frowned, decided rest time wasn’t all that important, then headed to the theater. While we would’ve loved to have seen something that we had never seen before, we were grateful that we had tickets we could use at a theater that was close enough to walk to.

Daisy: “Let’s see what’s playing.”

Me: “Kung Fu Panda’s gone. The only thing we can all see together is WALL-E, again.”

“Writer Dad,” she said, “I’d rather see something by Pixar twice than just about any other movie once.”

So WALL-E it was.

I’ve been thinking about WALL-E ever since we saw it on opening weekend. Back then, I didn’t have the blog. Now, I do. So sitting there staring at the screen during the second run through, I started looking at the screen a bit more critically, as the sentences started to click together in my head like shapes tumbling to the bottom of the screen in a game of Tetris.

But what could I possibly say that hadn’t already been said better in the weeks leading up to the film’s release, or in the glowing aftermath since? WALL-E’s Rotten Tomatoes score stands at 96%, and of the four percent of those critics who didn’t like it, one has to wonder who slipped rancid butter in their popcorn.

WALL-E has some of the most breathtaking shots I’ve ever seen in a science fiction film, let alone a children’s movie, and a strong message that is stated with surprising elegance.

What Daisy said is true, and I couldn’t agree more. Those grown up children at Pixar have the finest batting average of any filmmakers in history.

Ever.

They’ve never come anywhere close to a bad film, and I’d be surprised if they ever did. There aren’t too many filmmakers, including our most celebrated directors, who could hope to claim the same. Spielberg might be the most successful director to ever live, if you were to balance receipts against statues, but he still made 1942, Hook, and the Lost World.

In my estimation, Cars was Pixar’s weakest moment, and there isn’t another film my four year old son would rather watch, and every one of his friends would line up to agree.

Pixar didn’t get there by accident. No one handed them anything. They invented a genre, did it well before it was trendy (or even financially sound), and did it while rising from the ashes of a small division, making visual demos inside a hardware company. Their storytelling is impeccable, and their characters instant classics. They put mountains of time and thought into each pixel in every frame, without ever reducing themselves to the hurry up and render slapdash cash grab of Dreamworks (cough, Madagascar, cough).

Pixar always lend their stories a perfect ear for dialogue, comfortably nestled in between child and adult, but without the awkwardness of adolescence.

I’m going to stop right now. I fear if I continue, I’ll end up rolling into unbridled hyperbole, and you guys might think me geeky.

Sorry, Writer Dad. Too late.

Like any lover of films, I have my favorites. I know what to spin if I want cheap entertainment, something provoking, or simply to laugh. But if I want to be inspired; if I want to see the fruit of timeless creativity, then my choice is almost always Pixar.

Writer Dad

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Batman Left My Wife Lying Broken on the Floor

The internet is overflowing with superlatives for the Dark Knight, and there’s probably not a single word to disagree with. Movies are a lot like video games; they used to be a fixture of our rituals, and now not so much. We tend to our Netflix queue, but the movies we actually buy a ticket for are few and far between.

But there was no way we were going to miss Batman putting a pounding on the joker.

Since we were already carving out time for the movie, we figured we’d see it in style. We bought our tickets online a full week early, so we could make sure that the shows in IMAX wouldn’t be sold out. Now, if you don’t mind taking a squeegee to your eyeballs, and collecting splintered pieces from your shattered eardrums off the sticky theater floor on your way out, then IMAX is definitely the way to see this movie. The screen is six stories high, and the Dark Knight isn’t one of those movies converted to IMAX, merely to double the noise and ticket price. There are moments when Batman is standing at the edge of skyscraper and the 70MM camera pans around him with what I believe is the full intention to give the viewer motion sickness. I don’t get motion sickness often; in fact I’d say almost never. But I kinda felt it after this one.

Daisy, who spent a year exploring Asia, said that it was kind of like being packed (standing room only) in a tiny relic of a boat, outrunning a storm on the outskirts of the Philippines, but far more exciting. She spent the weekend in recovery.

What made the Dark Knight so special for me, was that I spent two and a half hours in front of the kind of Batman movie that I didn’t think would ever have a chance of getting made. I’ve loved Batman since he had to share my Saturday mornings with the Smurfs. As I grew older, I cast aside the version of Batman that was, I thought, campy and silly, and embraced the mythologies shrouded in shadow.

I always preferred the Batman as the boogeyman of the bad guys; the dark creature that inhabited the scariest ghost stories passed in a frightened whisper from one criminal to another. I liked seeing Bruce Wayne use his powerful position and mind, even more than I loved the gadgets and gizmos.

Christopher Nolan’s first try with Batman was good, but his second is a classic.

Every single note played in perfect tune with the very best of the character’s nearly seventy year history, and yet it was also absolutely believable. The Dark Knight required no more suspension of disbelief than most other movies, and less than any other super hero film ever put to celluloid.

When Christopher Nolan was announced as the director of the Batman reboot a few years back, I was giddy that the guy who directed Memento (a twisted story of insane obsession, beautifully told with a broken narrative) was getting a shot at the darkest of super heroes. With the Dark Knight, Nolan fulfilled his promise; even if he left Daisy a crumpled mass, lying on the floor.

Writer Dad

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A Billion Pixels and None of Them Wasted

“Writer Dad,” she said, “I’d rather see something by Pixar twice than just about any other movie once.”

Ever.

In my estimation, Cars was Pixar’s weakest moment, and there isn’t another film my four year old son would rather watch, and every one of his friends would line up to agree.

Sorry, Writer Dad. Too late.

Writer Dad

Batman Left My Wife Lying Broken on the Floor

But there was no way we were going to miss Batman putting a pounding on the joker.

Daisy, who spent a year exploring Asia, said that it was kind of like being packed (standing room only) in a tiny relic of a boat, outrunning a storm on the outskirts of the Philippines, but far more exciting. She spent the weekend in recovery.

Christopher Nolan’s first try with Batman was good, but his second is a classic.

Writer Dad

A Promise to My Family

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