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Beowulf was my home reading report in high school. After the first paragraph, I decided to talk to my literature teacher so she could give me another. I could not go beyond the first paragraph.

I understand the need for the computer graphics (CG) animation in Zemeckis’ Beowulf. I like to say that ‘all that circus and gore cannot be translated to real-life act, no matter how great the stunts are,’ but it’s really Grendel who cannot be matched. Grendel, that tortured spirit, born the cursed. His torment is one circus act topping another by his mismanaged anger. (This site leads you to the epic translated from the last surviving original manuscript of the Legend of Beowulf).

CG is starting to take the place of an entire live production act, task and crew. Although I’ve read somewhere that actors had to act out their lines and blockings in this film (which would mean two types of production were called to complete it) for the rest of the CG world, voice acting is enough. My daughter and I kept whispering between the acts of gore and glory that the characters are so SIMS-like or Second Life-like.

It is undeniably not that easy to produce a short film using CG but a full-length with epic proportions is truly ambitious. Zemeckis and his team cut through that. Everything was so good and right for every scene. What of the cinematics when CG can provide every backdrop, scene, view, etc in full detail? The score (makes me remember 300) intertwines majesty and fear for the impending personification of the curse.

There was another film on Beowulf & Grendel last year with Gerard Butler, the lead act in 300, as Beowulf; but it did not reach our theatres, I guess.

The
expressions on the characters’ faces are icy and static, though. The motion-capture did not suck much of the expressions from the actors’ faces. It was good for Jolie as Grendel’s scheming mother. But for the rest, they all looked like they came out of a multiple botox session, especially the character of Robin Wright Penn as Hrothgar (Anthony Hopkins)’s Queen Wealhtheow. Her face lacks the expression of the deep emotion she was going through. I don’t know if that was a deliberate omission from the animators.

There is a bit of stop-motion movement that I also noticed there. It’s like watching your characters in SIMS with a medieval setting and period costumes; but the walk and the talk are the same. Of course the graphics in Beowulf are more defined and are truly sharp. There is no blur even when Beowulf sheds off his armor and underclothes. Gasp!

Get the feel with these scenes taken from the movie’s site.

You must see it!

“They may drive each other crazy; but they love each other deeply,” says Matt Groening, creator and executive producer of the Simpsons, in the ABC News interview when he was named “person of the week” last week.

Since its first release as a series for television in 1989, this wacky family has never stopped making people laugh as the episodes touch on real-life issues pervading our conscious living, individually, as a family, or as a community. In the movie, you’d feel the depth Al Gore had infused on Hollywood about An Inconvenient Truth.

The movie. It is about a family sticking together in whatever circumstance — although Bart had wishes to be Ned Flanders’ kid, in the end, he still chose to be with Homer. The characterization of the Simpsons has come full circle, brought about mainly by the other series I’ve seen of them. Watching them for almost three hours sends you to a rollercoaster of emotions.

I started hating Homer for being so what he is. And Marge for letting Homer do as he does and the kids, they are too brilliant for the parents they could not choose. Generally that was how I felt. We may laugh at their flaws and rejoice in their triumphs but there are people like them in our midst; we don’t even have to go far.

The Characters. I love Bart. He is very intelligent. He’d even find himself a new father, knowing his father is a born-loser, living with him that long, and for what? Ironically, the Flanders kids, who are too dumb for Bart, enjoy too much of what Bart is so deprived of and not know it. It is a dilemma most kids face when they begin to grow and know that someone in the family they should respect is not worthy of it. The only connection is genes, nothing else.

And Lisa, too. She is the more analytical one and she goes out of her way to make some changes around her, even if no one would listen. A non-conformist at times. She values those who see things her way.

Little Maggie, though quiet and seemingly unaffected, absorbs the goings-on around her and has her way of agreeing or wrangling on something she does not approve.

Marge is too good. For Homer. If she only married Flanders it would’ve been different.

Homer is hopeless. He will be Homer till his last breath. Like the Spider Pig, he does “whatever a (spider) pig does”.

Exceptional characterization for two-dimensional beings!

Trivia. Did you know that the main characters are taken from real people in Groening’s family? Homer is his father Homer and Marge is his mom Margaret. Lisa and Maggie are his younger sisters. Bart, on the other hand could not be named Matt or Matthew for it would be too obvious. So he made a word play on brat and Bart was born. No wonder the characters are too real!

However, Groening stresses that aside from some of the sibling rivalry, his family is nothing like the Simpsons. He also says, “Families are about love overcoming emotional torture.”

The Issue. I find two significant issues the movie touches and they revolve around environments. The one we feel so alien from us: the what we directly do about it, and the what we must not do to it. And the environment within us: our family — how we look at things from that group perspective and how we act or react when threatened by internal or external forces. It’s like the Butterfly Effect. What affects you, affects the ones immediately around you and that eventually sends ripples to those outside and beyond.

That is why, as a general precaution, what is happening in other parts of the world could happen in our midst. Or, to put it relatively close, what has happened to the Simpsons could happen to us — perhaps in many other different forms; but it could happen, you know.

The Creator. Matt Groening (as in graining), at the age of 23, after he moved to Los Angeles in 1977, described the place in a comic book form. He called it Life in Hell. He photocopied the comic book and distributed them in his work place. He then made comic strips which became popular in the underground. What followed were the syndication of his strips and the publication of all his comic books.

Read more.

Meeting James L. Brooks (Terms of Endearment) and Al Jean, the other producers, followed in 1985 and through collaboration for a future project, the series started in 1989.

An Inconvenient Truth. It is true that the making of the movie took 17 years. And according to the ABC News interview on Groening, an episode takes six to nine months to finish. The men behind the series also claim they do not use any computer graphic thingies, just the old-fashioned sketching — ink and pen.

Not wanting to sound preach-y from the opening stills, The Simpsons hits it to core, telling the whole world the inconvenient truth that our environment needs saving and it still can be saved. And that we can start from our own small circles.

Credits.All Simpsons photos were taken from the movie’s website. The rest, grabbed from other people’s sites (sorry, I didn’t get their names).

Some walk by night. A die-hard Bruce Willis buff could not simply ignore the panache the guy exudes in his films. From his suave appearances in, yet another mid-80s beat, Moonlighting as David Addison, with actress Cybill Shepherd (as Maddie Hayes), to all the others that followed, this guy’s a true natural.

Some fly by day. The coming of age of John McClane, Willis’s role in Die Hard 4.0 (Live Free or Die Hard in its original film release), now divorced from his wife and estranged from his children, and yet his family remains his single topmost priority despite all the action he encounters in his police work, portrays a man bereft of what he could’ve been enjoying in his day — his family, his promotions, his life.

Instead, he stays in the department. In this instance, his 401k retirement plan is already depleted in lieu of child custody and other matters consequential to his divorce.

The plot is a hypothetical fire sale, explained in the movie, where all U.S. government utilities will be disabled through massive hack attacks on all computer-operated systems, thereby crippling the government and sending it to its knees.

****

Nothing could change you.This explosive movie — the recent installment to the Die Hard series — as was the previous, is massive in rough and tumble action, significant and timely in range of subject, and, oh, burning in visual story-telling. And the cast’s chemistry is always greatly interwoven — nothing was left to chance.

Set and sure of the way.Dirty, bleeding, and still funny, McClane sets to resolve, in his own way, first things first.

As all the other Die Hard motion pictures, this comes always almost real and constantly plausible. Young director Len Wiseman keeps up with the signature tradition of the previous films and it could be his redeeming value.

Meanwhile, the bold paragraph entries are the first stanza lyrics of Moonlighting, a song wrtiten by Leo Sayer in the early part of the 70s and sang by Al Jarreau.

One magnanimous mission.

The plot is just like any other piece we have seen before: a planet from light-years away explodes due to ‘political’ problems there and while looking for a new home or a new object to consume, its surviving inhabitants spotted Earth, and blah, blah. But there usually has only one scheme, either the good one – where the good alien has to co-mingle with the earthlings and eventually turn out as heroes in an assumed form – or the evil one, which comes to destroy. Or, in the case of the Silver Surfer, a spy or probe provides all necessary logistics for the successful implementation of an invasion by yet a higher authority.

With the Transformers, however, two opposing sides from one origin are racing towards earth, each with its mission to fulfill: the Autobots, to protect while the Decepticons, to destroy. You know the story.

If you’ve been a fan of the old animated series, you’d be recalling other characters who are not in this new movie; the likes of Omega Supreme or Skyfire or Galvatron, the leader of a breakaway group from Megatron’s. That’s just fine; the old favorites are in anyway.

The great task beyond doubt lies in giving ‘life’ to these warring intergalactic robots – the human figures are a given – and making them extremely huge in look and feel. Aw, but that’s probably chicken feed to Hollywood film-techs and filmmakers. Now, set that enormity in fast-paced action sequence after sequence, scene after scene and you’ll just find the film so breathtaking. They just occupy the entire wide, wide screen. You can’t even dip your hand in a tumbler of plain, freshly-cooked buttered popcorn or sip your ice tea.

Another great plus to this new movie is the details as you must’ve noticed how every frame is so sharp, so crisp, and so seamlessly done; probably because its director, Michael Bay, and producer, Steven Spielberg, have also been fans of the animated version. They did great justice to all mankind.

The series ran for three years in the mid-80s and for the sake of nostalgia, you may consider reviewing the complete series.

It would be a lot better if you have a friend or a relative who might have recorded the old series and have stuck it somewhere. Start the hunt. Better still, a will naming you the sole heir of all the recorded VCRs of a long-gone relative. If that’s the case, let me know, I’ll cover for the conversion from VCR to DVD format. You’ll have the re-mastered copy, you keep all the old VCRs, and then you can forget about me.

One magnanimous trackback, it consciously grips you to look back to the days when . . . I really don’t want to delve deeper in days of yore. So it’s just that; the film brought me back to a lot of fond old memories and that’s one extreme plus. If you’re from the 80s, you’d understand. I waited for this and finally it has come.

The Star Wars Trilogy greatly failed in this aspect; it had none of that fascinating quality despite its obvious effort of doing so.

Truly one magnanimous composition; by itself, it already is one equally magnanimous achievement.