The current cinema, in memory yet green edition

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• rotch says:

  June 16, 2011 at 4:55 pm

  Where are all the geeks who had issues with your neg­at­ive Thor review? (myself included)

• John M says:

  June 17, 2011 at 12:54 am

  Well, Rex Reed really liked THE ART OF GETTING BY, and Roger Ebert, if his star rat­ings are to be taken ser­i­ously, thought it was MUCH bet­ter than FILM SOCIALISME.
  And AO Scott says Gavin Wiesen has a “brisk, unas­sum­ing style.”
  So…

• J Alary says:

  June 17, 2011 at 2:31 am

  Having grown up on a steady diet of DC Comics in the late 80s/early 90s (Marvel’s Silver Surfer was an excep­tion), I’ve enjoyed some of the recent DC films (Nolan’s Batman films, Singer’s under­rated Superman Returns), but was very appre­hens­ive about a big-screen treat­ment of Hal Jordan, espe­cially with the cast­ing of Reynolds (whom I loved in Adventureland). Green Lantern will likely be the only Summer block­buster I see (I’m rather stoked for The Tree of Life and Midnight in Paris), but I’m sure I will find it to be a life­less CGI affair–not that I should­n’t expect that from an adapt­a­tion of a cos­mic super­hero who part­ners up with an assort­ment of ali­ens. Perhaps in anoth­er real­ity we’d be see­ing a film adapt­a­tion of the old Green Lantern/Green Arrow series from Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams, where our intrep­id earth­bound her­oes fight the Man, pol­lu­tion, racism and over­pop­u­la­tion. Green Arrow is a won­der­fully ana­chron­ist­ic hero who’d be per­fect for big-screen treat­ment, but I don’t think the world is ready for a film about anoth­er “green” guy who hap­pens to have a boxing-glove arrow.

• Oliver_C says:

  June 17, 2011 at 4:32 am

  http://www.comics.org/issue/19944/cover/4/

• Kevyn Knox says:

  June 17, 2011 at 12:21 pm

  Green Lantern is not the dread­ful creature so many have said, but it is far from great as well. I think its biggest prob­lem (and btw, I though Reynolds did a fine job in the role) is its lack of the spec­tac­u­lar. With all the inher­ent poten­tial in the char­ac­ter for this to be a visu­ally stun­ning movie – one that should invari­ably blow its audi­ence away – it just nev­er reaches that. Sad really. Actually the CGI (or whatever it was) in Malick’s Tree of Life is far far far super­i­or to the CGI here. Imagine that, an art film out­do­ing a Hollywood sum­mer block­buster in auda­cious spe­cial effects. Love it!

• Kent Jones says:

  June 17, 2011 at 2:27 pm

  In fact, most of the effects in THE TREE OF LIFE aren’t CGI (the dino­saurs being the obvi­ous exception).

• Kevyn Knox says:

  June 17, 2011 at 3:36 pm

  Wait, those wer­en’t real dinosaurs!?

• Kevyn Knox says:

  June 17, 2011 at 3:41 pm

  And yes, I know, the effects in the Malick were actu­ally done “the old fash­ioned way” – which in and of itself make them better.

• Dan Clinton says:

  June 17, 2011 at 6:20 pm

  @Kent: I assume that you’re talk­ing about the cel­lu­lar imagery and neb­u­lar clouds, but could I trouble you for a couple examples or a link? Those shots did look more tex­tured than CGI usu­ally does, so I’d be curi­ous to know the nitty-gritty.

• Kent Jones says:

  June 17, 2011 at 7:54 pm

  Dan, from the press notes: “Malick wanted every image to feel like a nat­ur­al phe­nomen­on, which meant rely­ing as little as pos­sible on com­puters, and using what [Douglas] Trumbull dubs ‘Non-Computer Graphics.’ ‘Terry and I share a per­spect­ive on visu­al effects and imagery as it per­tains to want­ing to get to some­thing that’s com­pletely organic…It was­n’t that we did­n’t use com­puters on this film…[but] only 10 to 20 per­cent of what you’re see­ing is computer-generated…We talked about doing many of the inter­galactic effects he wanted the way that we did things many, many years ago – using water and paint and high-speed cameras.’…Trumbull put togeth­er a kind of secret labor­at­ory in Austin, Texas, dubbed the ‘Skunkworks,’ where they began to exper­i­ment. ‘We worked with chem­ic­als, paint, floures­cent dyes, smoke, liquids, CO2, flares, spin dishes, flu­id dynam­ics, light­ing and high speed pho­to­graphy to see how effect­ive they might be…We did things like pour milk through a fun­nel into a nar­row trough and shoot it with a high-speed cam­era and fol­ded lens, light­ing it care­fully and using a frame rate that would give the right kind of flow char­ac­ter­ist­ics to look cos­mic, galactic, huge and epic’…Malick did not use typ­ic­al story­bords for these sequences…‘He would rather have mys­ter­i­ous phe­nom­ena occur while the cam­era was rolling…[Dan] Glass also joined the pro­ceed­ings at the Skunkworks in Austin, bring­ing his own assort­ment of smoke machines, dyes, chem­ic­als and oth­er Old School cine­mat­ic tools to add to the mix.”
  Also, there was a sci­ence advisor, a Natural History pro­fess­or from Harvard named Andrew Knoll.
  Hope that’s helpful.

• Dan Clinton says:

  June 18, 2011 at 6:21 am

  Kent, thanks for the info. I’ll have to res­ist read­ing some Freudian sig­ni­fic­ance into the pres­ence of par­tic­u­late milk (how­ever unre­cog­niz­able) in the film’s cos­mo­lo­gic­al sequence.