When Ang Lee debuted the first footage from his 3D adaptation of Yann Martel’s Life of Pi at CinemaCon a few months back, the 10 minutes of footage he showed already had the movie bloggers who saw it talking Oscar, and you know movie bloggers aren’t prone to hyperbole (sarcasm, sarcasm). Now that 20th Century Fox has released the first trailer (below), you can judge for yourself, even if you don’t have a neckbeard OR a collection of novelty t-shirts. As someone who enjoyed the book – a parable for religion about an Indian boy trapped on a lifeboat with a tiger, a zebra, and a hyena – my expert opinion is that the underwater zebra stuff looks pretty cool (though CG artists still can’t make realistic-looking waves, have you noticed that?), the music is a little… I dunno… butt-gazing, let’s say. Though it does look like Ang Lee has succeeded in creating that highly-stylized, ethereal movie world that Peter Jackson was trying to create in The Lovely Bones, but without all the child-rape.

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Studios love 3D because they can charge more for it, but with the exception of a few who truly love it (James Cameron, Peter Jackson, Martin Scorsese of late), most filmmakers seem like they just sort of go along with it as a compromise. “Eh, sure, go ahead and convert it to 3D if you must, just leave me alone.” Chris Nolan, on the other hand, has earned the right (read: the money) to tell the studio to suck his jeans if he wants to. And that’s why The Dark Knight Rises, the most anticipated movie of the year and probably the easiest to get people to pay a premium for, won’t be in 3D.

“The question of 3-D is a very straightforward one,” Nolan said in a recent interview. “I never meet anybody who actually likes the format, and it’s always a source of great concern to me when you’re charging a higher price for something that nobody seems to really say they have any great love for.

“It’s up to the audience to tell us how they want to watch the movies. More people go see these films in 2-D, and so it’s difficult data to interpret. And I certainly don’t want to shoot in a format just to charge people a higher ticket price.”

For some filmmakers, you could ascribe not wanting to shoot in 3D to simple laziness, since the 3D rigs are more complicated and less maneuverable (The Avengers was post-converted for similar reasons). But not in Nolan’s case.

Nolan shot nearly half of his Batman finale using bulky IMAX cameras, whose 70mm frame is about 10 times the size of standard movie film. He also insisted that distributor Warner Bros. release “The Dark Knight Rises” in at least 100 IMAX cinemas that can project it on film rather than in the digital format that has been gradually replacing celluloid. [Salon]

Basically, Chris Nolan cares, and that’s why people like him. He’s like a British Ryan Gosling in that way.

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"Whoa, this weed is really self-indulgent."

 The Hobbit is by far my favorite of the Tolkien books, and my only sticking point in seeing the movie (beyond general hobbit-fatigue) is that it’s going to be split into two movies, with the first part reportedly being two and a half hours long. Five hours for The Hobbit seems… long. Director Peter Jackson recently screened footage at Comic-Con, where he was asked if he was planning to split The Hobbit further, into three movies– wait, WHAT?! Jesus, why would you ask that?!?

“That’s a discussion we’re having, yeah,” Jackson said. “We have certainly been talking to the studio about some of the material we can’t film, and we’ve been asking them so we can do a bit more filming next year. Which, I don’t know what would come of that, whether it’d be extended editions or whatnot. But those discussions are ongoing.

“I’d like to shoot a bunch more material that we [couldn't] shoot. There’s so much good stuff in the appendices that we haven’t been able to squeeze into these movies,” Jackson said, referring to the appendix sections found at the end of “The Return of the King” detailing more background on Middle Earth and its history. [Hitfix (with video)]

Oh sure, the appendices, there’s great stuff in there. And hey, what about the dust jacket copy? That’s gotta be worth two more films, easy. Look, I know there isn’t much to do in New Zealand, but Jesus, man, learn to edit. Warner Bros, for their part, deny that there’s any talk of turning it into a trilogy. Thank God.

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Yes, Virginia, It Is A Movie!

As a person who sometimes watches and reviews films for a living, I have this fear. See, the world of film criticism is littered with writers who once seemed not only sane, but competent – insightful, even – who eventually deteriorated into passionless husks, regurgitating the same, semi-meaningless canned phrases and writing things like “fans of the series will find much to love here!” Peter Travers comes to mind. Roger Ebert remains an enjoyable writer, but his tastes have become bizarre and confusing. And this is the norm, not the exception. My working theory on why this happens is, that by constantly bombarding their senses with films they have no interest in seeing, over the course of a career spanning decades, the aging film critic’s brain eventually becomes tenderized into this rom-com softened Sandler mush, no longer able to discern mild innocuousness from excitement, because genuine excitement is such a distant memory that they’re forced to grade a film by how it might feel to the person they think they used to be. Roughly 85 percent of movies, like roughly 85 percent of almost all things, are crap. When you stop pre-sifting out that which is obvious crap, and start seeing everything, just because, it constitutes an unnatural act. An act I suspect that, over time, is like performing your own slow-drip lobotomy. It’s an ugly business, for ugly people.

Ignoring my own rules and looking danger square in the face, I saw Men in Black 3, a film which is obvious crap. And? It wasn’t… that…. bad! Now I’m forced to wonder: have they finally broken me?? Will “joy” soon become the pinging sound my gesturing stick makes against my bedpan as I signal the orderlies for another shovelful of face gruel? WHAT’S HAPPENING TO MEEEEEEEE….

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One project I’ll admit I forgot even existed is the adaptation of Life of Pi, from Brokeback Mountain/Crouching Tiger director Ang Lee that’s scheduled to open this December, and which, last we heard, was being shot in 3D (…yeah). Based on the 2001 Yann Martel novel, it tells the story of a zookeeper’s son who ends up stuck on a lifeboat with a hyena, an orangutan, a zebra, and a tiger named Richard Parker. I was a big fan of the book (I enjoy it more as a tall tale even though it’s clearly intended as an allegory about religion — different parts of the book are written in the style of Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam, respectively), but a weird thing happened when I looked at this still. All I wanted to do was put on my leather, internet commenter skullcap and fly by in my biplane shouting “FFFFAAAAAAKE! GAAAAAAAYYYYYY!”

Stupid fake-ass looking tiger. Should’ve gotten Michael Bay’s pet tiger.

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