I caught a midnight screening of WALL-E last Thursday night. The movie is simply amazing. I think it currently tops my list as best movie so far this year.
The movie does a few interesting things. It mixes in some live-action video clips, for one, bringing actor Fred Willard into the film. The most daring thing the movie does is that it goes for long stretches without any dialogue aside for the very small vocabulary the robots have, limited basically to their names and a couple other words. Both of these are risky moves for Pixar, but I think they were a rousing success, particularly the lack of dialogue. It makes for one of the most heartfelt, funniest movies of the year.
Something else to note with WALL-E is the short that runs with the film, Doug Sweetland’s Presto. Presto had me laughing harder than I have in a long time. In the short, Sweetland channels Chuck Jones at the top of his form… it’s very trippy to see a Disney short done in the Warner Bros. style. The short alone is worth the price of admission.
Yes, that’s what the new Megaman game actually looks like.
A coupleblogs have linked to this forum post which confirms that Megaman 9 is coming as a Wiiware/PSN/XBLA downloadable exclusive game. Rumored bosses include Magma Man, Galaxy Man, Jewel Man, Concrete Man, Hornet Man, Plug Man, Tornado Man, and Splash Woman. The most exciting part is the news that it’s going to look like an NES game and go back to the series’ roots in terms of design and gameplay. I can’t wait to play this… it’s most likely I’ll download it for the PS3. Unfortunately, the Wii’s storage space is too precious, so I’d rather save it for Wii-exclusive titles.
I just got back from seeing Marvel’s latest comic book adaptation, The Incredible Hulk. Like with Iron Man, I must say that I was pleasantly surprised. Marvel seems to have learned its lesson and shaken off the stupid (refer to X3 and Ghost Rider, if you’re wondering). Let’s hope the lesson is permanent.
After the movie, Lannice mentioned the scuffle over the final cut of the film between Edward Norton and Marvel. This left me curious, so I did some reading. Norton and Louis Leterrier (the director) pushed for a cut that was about 20 minutes longer, a little more meditative. Marvel wanted a streamlined cut, the most commercial film possible. Marvel obviously won the argument. Some film blog got wind of this, broke the story, and branded it a “feud.” The story exploded, but apparently it’s way out of proportion, at least according to a statement Norton submitted to Entertainment Weekly. You can read the whole story and the statement here.
Anyways, I’m left curious about the alternate cut. Theres a total of around 50 minutes of unused material; I guess we’ll have to wait for the DVD release.
A sidenote: at last summer’s Comic Con, they had announced that Norton would also be working on the film’s script. According to another article I read, Norton did a page-one rewrite of the script, rewriting mostly the dialogue but also adding some scenes. When Marvel submitted the script to the Writer’s Guild, the previous writer, Zak Penn, won the arbitration and was given sole credit. The article says “the Guild tends to favor plot, structure, and pre-existing characters over dialogue,” but that’s still unfortunate.
I recently started reading a newish video game blog, 61 Frames Per Second, and it’s pretty good. Recently they had a top ten list called The Ten Most Adventurous Sequels, and in talking about Zelda II they had some nice insights into Shigeru Miyamoto’s career as a game designer. I thought I would share an excerpt here:
The first Legend of Zelda is, arguably, Miyamoto’s true masterpiece, the culmination of his first design era. His benchmarks: Donkey Kong created context and narrative, Super Mario Bros. brought speed and an expanding world beyond a single screen, and the Legend of Zelda created an actual world to explore, an organic place peppered with secrets. After its release in 1986, the next decade of Miyamoto’s career was one marked more by refinement than creation. But, in 1987, Miyamoto got experimental. Alongside the aforementioned Super Mario Bros. 2 is Zelda’s sequel, The Adventure of Link, a sequel so bizarre in its design choices that it’s still seen as a blemish on a series considered unimpeachable by gamers and designers alike.
Here’s a trailer I found on TIGSource for a gorgeous-looking Flash platformer called Scarygirl by a company with one of the most awesome names I’ve heard in a while, Touch My Pixel.
I found a link in BoingBoing Gadgets today to a YouTube channel run by SSI Shredder, an industrial shredder company. It’s called Watch It Shred, where they post a video monthly of various objects being shredded by their machines. For some reason I find it strangely compelling. Seeing something like a car, bowling balls, or metal shopping carts being torn into little tiny bits just makes things seem so fragile and insubstantial.
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