Wachowski Brothers and the Speed Racer Movie

Steven Weintraub writes "Susan Sarandon talks about the Wachowski Brothers Speed Racer movie and confirms the revolutionary way the brothers are making the film — the entire frame will be in focus like a cartoon."

Go Speed Racer Go!

[biggles266]

I for one welcome our new always-in-focus overlords.

Re:

[The Dobber]

So I won't need my Strattera?

The "Revolutionary New Camera"

[DJCacophony]

The camera in question is oakley's spinoff camera brand, Red Digital Camera. [red.com]

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[account_deleted]

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Re:

[19thNervousBreakdown]

0x06.

Re:Go Speed Racer Go!

[StCredZero]

Why would Keanu be so bad? He has just about enough emotional range for the Robot.

Re:

[Trogre]

Why the badness towards Keanau? You can't have seen him at the absolute peak of his acting career, as Ted Theodore Logan.

Focus is a tool

[suv4x4]

Focussing on an object draws the people attention to it. It's used as an artistic tool. If everything is in focus, then the public will most likely not even notice (unless they specifically check for this).

I hope they don't spend a lot of money/effort on this "feature", the way they did on the game-quality 3D graphics of the Burly Brawl (ref: Matrix 2).

Re:Focus is a tool

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe, just maybe they're a bit more imaginative than you.

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Re:

[slughead]

But perhaps they couldn't. Perhaps what you perceive as a choice between 10 better ways on their part is a choice, but at the same time the choice they made is the only choice they could have made. You choose to think otherwise, but do you really have a choice in thinking you have a choice, did you choose to have a choice, or did you decide anyway?

Freewill is a myth. I didn't choose to have this headache.

Re:

[2names]

Incidentally, anyone else always read "freewill" in the voice of Geddy Lee?

No, but thanks to your sig, I now read other sigs in the voice of "Chef."

Re:Focus is a tool

[sabernet]

When one is presented a vague idea or goal to accomplish, it always seems easy to those who didn't have to do it.

I can ask dozen different questions, each with a simple answer, but that most people will fumble at. Not because it is difficult to execute the conclusion, but that the conclusion is non-obvious from the offset. Only once it is presented to all the answers, including those to which you would find 'better' become 'obvious'.

Hindsight is 20/20.

Making a graphic novel into a movie sounds easy. The average shmuck(by your own logic, I suppose that would include you), might say "Pffft...The story was already written down and framed, how could they screw THAT up?"

But only once you realize that you have 2 hours of film, a certain budget, actors with certain demands and a market with certain thirsts does the enormity of the task become apparent. How would you convety something that takes 2 hours to -read- into 2 hours of action? And how do you pull it off without boring the snot out of people or resorting to the cheap trick of keeping the silly camera moving too goddamn fast to make out the shortcomings of the choreography(I'm looking at you Transformers and Borne Supremacy).

I happened to like V for Vendetta.

I loved the first Matrix movie, the second one was meh and the third one was crap in my opinion. They shouldn't have been done. But given the massive plot hole-ridden concept the original was based on, I guess they sorta painted themselves in a corner.

But besides all that, I will ask a simple question: how do you make a boiled egg stand straight up on a table without using any materials except the egg and the solid table(no tablecloths, salt, etc...

The solution is simple. But can you think of it?

The answer(in reverse, right to left):

.dnats ot hcihw htiw esab rediw a ti gniwolla kcarc lliw gge eht fo mottob ehT .elbat eht no ti malS

To prove my point, after reading the answer(if you could), the solution becomes far more obvious then it was from the offset.

The big problem is sometimes the average shmuck thinks of himself too highly to probe deeper then a superficial holier then thou, self gratifying way a la Simpsons ComicBookGuy.

Re:

[El Torico]

Filippo Brunelleschi, is that you on /.?

Re:Focus is a tool

[rumli]

The answer(in reverse, right to left): .dnats ot hcihw htiw esab rediw a ti gniwolla kcarc lliw gge eht fo mottob ehT .elbat eht no ti malS

I'm dyslexic, you insensitive dolc!

Re:Focus is a tool

[15Bit]

Then i guess they're going to have to use some other trick to draw the attention of the audience to what they want you to see. I guess there are a number of ways, have the characters more heavily coloured than the background (done very nicely by Spielberg in Schindlers' list with a red child on b&w background), have the characters much larger in frame than usual, maybe layer the background like a cartoon so that perspective is screwed up and the background seems 2D rather than 3D.

There are other ways than depth of field to emphasize an object, but its not easy even in stills photography. In movies i'd guess its going to be very hard to get the right "look" consistently. Good luck to them.

Re:Focus is a tool

[ajs]

Read TFA:

They're doing something where they're layering film so that the front and the back are in focus like a cartoon [...] so they actually have to treat the actors in some way so we can hold our own with the background.

So first off, it's not what the Slashdot summary says. It's going to have multiple planes of focus, but the entire frame will not be in focus. Think of an old cartoon where you had a foreground plane, an action plane and a background plane. It may look something like that, but of course, the real world has more in it than those three planes, so some things won't be in focus. No camera has an infinite depth of field, but it can be simulated by using multiple images, digitally composited. This is something like a focus bracket, which you can see a good example of in Wikipedia's picture of the day from April 18, 2007 [wikipedia.org] (I just happen to have remembered this because it's where I learned about the technique).

Re:

[joto]

Think of an old cartoon where you had a foreground plane, an action plane and a background plane. It may look something like that, but of course, the real world has more in it than those three planes, so some things won't be in focus.

How many "planes" the real world consists of is irrelevant. Unless you're doing extreme close-ups, using tele lenses, or wide-aperture light-sensitive lenses, a small, fixed number of films for a small fixed number of "planes" will be just fine. Remember, a normal, cheap cam

Re:Focus is a tool

[Sparohok]

No camera has an infinite depth of field

A pinhole camera has infinite depth of field. Of course it has some other problems, diffraction, sensitivity, etc.

If you have enough light, fast film, and shoot with a tight aperture, you can get very wide depth of field. Just two or three "layers" would be enough for effectively infinite depth of field even at film resolution. However compositing the layers would be a bit of a chore. For a feature length film, the compositing process would need to be automatic, perhaps assisted with something like a scanning laser rangefinder.

Martin

Re:Focus is a tool

[Hoi Polloi]

they're going to have to use some other trick to draw the attention of the audience to what they want you to see

I prefer to have the subject circled with a big red arrow pointing at it.

Re:

[cHALiTO]

Well, many of us down here in Argentina grew up watching this and Mazinger Z on tv, so you can bet I'll be watching this.

Re:

[LocoMan]

At least here in Venezuela Speed Racer was insanely famous too on its time (it was called "meteoro" here). Even the car's name (Match 5) has by now entered in popular culture to refer to any fast car or anyone that drives like he was in a race. I kinda hope they don't try to do it too serious, though, and make it more of a tongue in cheek thing with a narrator and all like the old cartoons.. :)

Re:

[mwvdlee]

Focus is just one of the many tools to draw attention to parts of an image. There's also things like color, scale, placement, saturation, intensity, shape, etc. And that's aside visual effects (it's based on a cartoon; perhaps cartoon outlines?). With motion pictures you can probably do a lot of stuff with motion or other time-based effects too, but that's not my expertise.

Re:

[El Lobo]

That's not the real problem The real problem is that in*real life*, you ayes don't focus everything like on a cartoon, so you will get a (maybe very cool film) but with a very unnatural view, that eventiually will get your eyes tired trying to absorb every bit of information on it. Focus exists naturally as a filter to select the needed info and get lower priority to the rest.

Re:

[JanneM]

Only the part you're looking at will be in focus; the rest will be out of focus. Just like in real life, where you don't have any externally imposed blur, just your own eyes looking at one part at a time.

You don't get tired watching a two-hour cartoon, after all. Or spend a whole day reading stuff on a flat, in-focus surface.

Re:Focus is a tool

[JanneM]

I, for one, look forward to the new real-time eye-tracking monitor solutions that tracks my focus on the screen and blur everything else than that. Or, er...

..which actually exists, and is pretty cool. The idea is have a constantly shifting jumble of letters, but show the real text at the point the reader is looking. So the reader sees a screenful of clear text, but anybody trying to look over the shoulder, or film the screen or anything will jsut get meaningless junk.

Re:

[lawpoop]

Focussing on an object draws the people attention to it. It's used as an artistic tool. If everything is in focus, then the public will most likely not even notice (unless they specifically check for this).

Yes, focus is a tool, and if you use it all the time, it creates a mood or atmosphere for the film. Sort of like how the original matrix was in all green, to set the mood for the whole film. In another film, say, _Great Expectation_, the color green ( in objects, the color of a room, the color of a dress ) is used to highlight and communicate certain aspects of the film. I would say it all depends on how they use it and how well they pull it off.

Re:Focus is a tool

[jafac]

personally, I think she misunderstood the technology they're shooting for; I think what they're probably doing is HDR cinema - where they're not doing infinite depth of field, (which is actually fairly easy to obtain with a wide aperture), but rather, a high dynamic range, which is a fairly new technology in digital photography, and some automatic cameras with this feature are just starting to appear. It wouldn't surprise me if there weren't people experimenting with it in cinema. The color effect would very likely be very Anime-like, from some of the HDR photography I've seen.

So the cameras are on loan from unseen-U library?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry a chimpanzee - he doesn't like to be called a monkey.

The thing I wonder is: who is the other guard they were talking about?

Great...

[Avenel]

Now when the theater projector is slightly out of focus you won't be able to see ANYTHING.

Wow.

[Shag]

So if I take a photo at, say, f/10 instead of my usual f/1.8, resulting in greater depth-of-field, this is revolutionary?

How can I patent this?

Re:Wow.

[suv4x4]

So if I take a photo at, say, f/10 instead of my usual f/1.8, resulting in greater depth-of-field, this is revolutionary?
How can I patent this?

What's revolutionary is they shoot every scene with several cameras at the same time (or several times with the same camera), using different focus planes each time to cover the entire depth range.

Then they assemble them post-production and boost the saturation, for that very special cartoony-colors, always-in-focus look... otherwise known as how the photos of throw-away consumer cameras look like.

Yea, all the wasted effort... keep in mind the movie took at least twice longer to shoot because they had to use blue screens even for a scene with nothing special in it (only to assist the post-production assembling of the planes).

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[Miseph]

Yea, all the wasted effort... keep in mind the movie took at least twice longer to shoot because they had to use blue screens even for a scene with nothing special in it (only to assist the post-production assembling of the planes).
--

That sounds like the MO alright. I almost have trouble calling these guys directors, because I have in my head this silly idea that when more than half the stuff in the shot is computer-generated, it's not a live action movie anymore. Who Framed Roger Rabbit doesn't even hav

Newfangled Oldfangled?

[Anonymous Coward]

Goodness. That revolutionary way of composing a shot called deep focus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_focus [wikipedia.org] and used as far back as 1922? Pull me up a chair and pour me one of those newfangled qahwat al-bnn all those crazy kids are drinking these days!

Re:

[Detritus]

Is that the same thing as when they use a telephoto lens to compress a shot? Commonly used in action movies when the hero is running towards the camera, away from something that is about to disappear in a huge explosion. It makes the scene look more dangerous than it really is.

Re:Newfangled Oldfangled?

[Eivind]

There's two ways of getting a larger focused area with a single camera and a single lens. Both involve getting less ligth, so both will give higher noise, or force you to film at brigther light.

First, like you say, go farther away and use a tele-lens to pull the foreground to the wanted size. This has the side-effect that, as you say, the background becomes bigger and appears closer to the foreground. (because what matters is the *relative* distance, having the actors 5 meters away and the explosion 50 meters away means the actors are 10 times closer. Having the actors 50 meters away and the explosion 100 meters away means the explosion is only twice as far away, so if you compensate by zooming until the actors are same size on screen, the end-result is a explosion that is visually 5 times larger than in the first case)

Second, use a smaller aperture. With an infinitely small aperture, you get everything in focus, with a small aperture you get a very large focused area.

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[complete loony]

There's a third, but it's only really useful at a small scale. Put another lens between the foreground subject and the background.

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[tgd]

I suspect its not -- deep focus needs a lot of light and doesn't work well when moving.

I'd bet this is multiple image sensors at the end of a split light path focused at two or more planes, with some hefty math to composite them.

Remember these guys get boners for new camera tech.

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[hal2814]

Hey, at least this time when the Wachowski Brothers get credit for something original that's really not original at all, it won't be for raping and pillaging the best ideas from mid-20th Century science fiction novels and short stories. Philip K Dick practically deserved writing credits for the first Matrix movie. I'm a lot less upset about them resurrecting deep focus as something new.

hmm...

[Phybersyk0]

If everything is going to appear two-dimensional I wonder if the actor/background details will be minimised at all. Not really cell-shaded, but something less detailed.

Surely they will follow much of the original Speed Racer construction formula and have lots of close-up shots, re-used footage and the same 4 panels of background speeding by as Speed and Racer X do their thing.

If the story villains don't have polygonal moustaches than I'm not going.

Hmm

[Shinra]

I'll reserve a judgment until I at least see a trailer of the movie.

Deep Focus?

[MikeyNg]

OK, what's the difference between this and "deep focus"? When I first read this, I thought, didn't Citizen Kane (circa 1941) do this?

So it would appear that they're making some differences with color, etc., but yeah - I'd like to see a still or two at least.

Re:Deep Focus?

[Oktober Sunset]

the difference is they add the words 'like a cartoon' at the end, instantly making it both revolutionary and really cool.

Re:

[gowen]

The difference is that Welles used deep focus because of his overarching artistic vision for Kane. The Wachowskis use it because they're talentless hacks who really, really like visual gimmicks. (Note how bad the Matrix sequels got once the original gimmick had got a bit repetitive).

Re:Deep Focus?

[PhunkySchtuff]

From what I can understand of what they're going to be doing in this movie - they're using CGI to compliment deep focus effects.
Deep focus will still give you a depth of field, you just play around with everything in the frame to ensure it's within the hyperfocal distance of the lens.
With this new one, they're taking it one step further - if two things need to appear in the frame, but it's not possible to have them both in focus, they'll be filmed separately and stitched together so absolutely everything is sharp and crisp...

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[eggoeater]

if two things need to appear in the frame, but it's not possible to have them both in focus, they'll be filmed separately and stitched together so absolutely everything is sharp and crisp...

This is EXACTLY how several shots in Citizen Kane were done where deep focus with one camera wasn't possible. I don't remember the name of the technique used to accomplish this in 1939, but it worked seamlessly and they didn't need CGI.

Great.

[pojo_rising]

Now we can have Persephone in focus ALL the time.

Brothers?

[jayminer]

As far as I know, they are not literally "brothers" anymore..

Re:Brothers?

[Phybersyk0]

Who cares. What's really cool is that:

1.) Kym Barret (The Matrix,Reloaded,Revolutions) will be doing the costume design.
2.) John Gaeta (The Matrix, inventor of Bullet Time..) is the visual effects supervisor.
3.) Owen Patterson (The Matrix, etc) is the production designer.
4.) Peter Fernandez (The original American voice of Speed Racer) will have an appearance in the film.

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[Seumas]

Yeah, but too bad it's for a cartoon that nobody under 40 remembers. Jesus, why not do a Mr. Magoo or Magilla(sp) Gorilla movie while you're at it?

Wait, I think they did a Mr. Magoo actually... nevermind.

Re:

[mwvdlee]

I rented that Mr. Magoo movie and tried to watch it three times. In the end I never got beyond the first 10 minutes. And I've been able to sit through some utter crap like Delta Farce and Aliens vs. Predator. It is, without doubt, the worst movie I ever tried to watch.

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[dbcad7]

Or maybe Underdog ? ... yeah have high hopes for that one,

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[Chyeld]

Wouldn't a Mr Magoo film need the exact opposite effect? Everything out of focus?

Please doublecheck

[pedantic bore]

I'm interested finding out more about how bullet time appeared in earlier cinema, but I think there must be a typo in your link because the Zoopraxiscope has nothing whatsoever to do with bullet time. Please post the correct link.

If there is one.

Re:

[Odin's Raven]

Um, I'm probably being incredibly dense here, but I can't see any connection between an early precursor of the cinema and the concept of slowing action down to show individual bullets flying through the air. Did you link to the right article?

GP is not just talking out of his arse, but it's probably easier to understand the link between the zoopraxiscope and bullet time by reading the Bullet Time [wikipedia.org] wiki article - mainly the history section, but also read the technology section if you've never seen a "ma

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Re:

[3waygeek]

You're half right; Andy is still Lana/Larry's brother.

In other words...

[MidnightBrewer]

It's the exact same effect you get when you shoot with a consumer DV camera and a small CCD? Awesome, now I'm on par with the big boys!

tilt and shift?

[toQDuj]

Perhaps they use tilt-and-shift lenses such as inherently used in large format cameras, and which can be bought at a high price for (D) SLR's...

B.

Interesting cast

[ArcadeX]

Speed Racer [imdb.com]
Christina Ricci ... Trixie
Emile Hirsch ... Speed
Susan Sarandon ... Mom Racer
Matthew Fox ... Racer X
John Goodman ... Pops Racer

Focus is a creative tool

[Lars Clausen]

The distinction between focus and out-of-focus areas is one of the two (!) new things that photography brought to art (the other one being motion blur). While there are some situations where you don't want OOF areas (e.g., landscapes), it is artistically stupid to deliberately focus everything. New, yes, and technically innovative, possibly, but it's dropping one of the most powerful tools in your toolchest. It's like a painter only using a broad brush -- yes, you can do some nice things, but there are m

Re:

[Wilson_6500]

Be that as it may, isn't it a deliberate and valid artistic choice to go out of your way to avoid using that tool? Punctuation is a valuable tool for poets and authors, but at least one person made himself very famous by avoiding its use.

Now, the disclaimer is that I'm hardly artistic, but from my perspective it seems to be just another stylistic choice if done deliberately. Of course, any new student artist could make a mistake and misuse or ignore a creative tool, but aren't "good" artists always findi

Re:Focus is a[n annoying] tool

[pla]

it is artistically stupid to deliberately focus everything.

When we look directly at something, everything else in our field of vision goes blurry. But we don't notice that, because our brains automatically filter it out. Subjectively, our entire world always stays in focus, because wherever we look, we focus.

Now, used "artistically"... Yes, blurry backgrounds force me to miss details that the director doesn't want me to know yet - Who blurrily crept up on the protagonist? Did that car in the backgro

3d too I hope.

[B5_geek]

I wish that makers of 3D films (primarily IMAX) would do this. Too often I would get a headache from trying to focus on the 'out-of-focus' background stuff. I always found it difficult to keep my eyes only on what the filmmaker wanted.

Correction

[itsdapead]

the entire frame will be in focus like a BAD cartoon.

There... corrected that for you...

...didn't Disney, even circa Snow White, have some sort of elaborate tower system for simulating "depth of field" with cells? Actually, I take it back - even BAD cartoons will often just have blur in the background to save money and allow re-use of shots (e.g. the transformation scene in just about every Japanese TV cartoon).

To be fair, maybe the answer to making something look like a cartoon is to exaggerate the fl

HDTV

[Tribbin]

Wow, have you seen HDTV quality movies? You can see every hair clearly.

So now is the time that all-focus will contribute to the wow-effect.

Could be the future

[smchris]

I've read that with big screens and hi def people don't take in a whole picture like on an old 19" analog TV, they scan the "view" like in real life. How annoying when part of the virtual world is out of focus.

I've already noticed that myself but, instead of thinking big like the Brothers, I've just mused that our local TV stations might have to invest, as practical, in lenses with somewhat better depth.

Cartoon

[Bloater]

A few things in the interview suggest that they've actually captured multiple depth frames so they can turn the actors and props themselves into drawn style. It sounds like the backgrounds *will* be cartoons. This could be very wierd to watch - real human (and chimp) motion as a cartoon.

This is a first for Hollywood!

[clickety6]

A film where the script, the acting and now the image are all flat and two-dimensional !

Woo-hoo! Next they'll invent super-xylem vision, so they can all be wooden as well!

Pretty light on details

[zero_offset]

I'm getting a huge kick out of these heated debates over such a tiny bit of crappy information. Sarandon says she doesn't understand it, then proceeds to give a really crappy description which amounts to "everything is in focus" ... and suddenly the /. readership are experts on the subject (and why it has been done before, and how they'd do it better, and why one of the Wachowski brothers chopping his nuts off makes him a sister, etc etc etc).

Personally I couldn't glean almost anything useful from the article.

Ironic

[devnullkac]

It's ironic that they would choose this movie to highlight such an effect. As a cartoon watcher in the 1970s, I noticed that Speed Racer was one of the few that would on occasion actually use out-of-focus backgrounds in some scenes.

Dammit!

[Rob T Firefly]

"Susan Sarandon

SLUT!!

...sorry, reflex.

Re:

[everphilski]

(spell slut) ... J A N E T, I love you too!

Watch out for the masterbating angel!

Sigh.

HDR?

[mattr]

What she was mentioning could also be interpreted as a layman's impression of some kind of a high dynamic range setup. Like this camera [hdr-cam.com] for "photo-realistic lighting of CG characters" (a still camera). And look at this example of HDR motion blur [debevec.org], which would make a lot of sense in speed racer, as it would let them put more detail and brighter, more vivid color into the blur, which they could use to blur landscapes they are racing through, or CGI cars that are racing by the camera.

They could be combining HDR

Technical Innovation

[wonkavader]

I love movies that use a gimmick right from the start. Such movies almost always tend to have bad writing/directing, and thus stink on the whole. I wonder if they've written an ending for this? The brother have three other writers working with them. Not many writing credits on them. Best movie of the bunch is Dragonheart. Most of the other titles are kind of embarrassing.

Sigh.

We'll see.

Hey, you all notice that any picture of Trixie has an M on her shirt? That's because Trixie's name is Mitchi.

Re:

[somersault]

Yep.. the first Matrix film was pretty fresh and interesting (to people that don't watch a lot of anime at least!), but they even managed to mess up the sequels. They do seem to be about the gimmicks :o The car scene that they spent millions on in the second movie wasn't even any good. Good car chase scenes don't even need expensive cars or special effects to be good, they just need good drivers and interesting locations/stunts

Re:

[clickety6]

Yep.. the first Matrix film was pretty fresh and interesting (to people that don't watch a lot of anime at least!) ...or to those who hadn't watched the superior "Dark City".

Give me an interesting script and non-pseudo-scientific-gibberish over flashy special effects any day.

Re:

[Capt James McCarthy]

"Give me an interesting script and non-pseudo-scientific-gibberish over flashy special effects any day."

You mean like Hackers? Oh wait, you said interesting.

Re:

[smittyoneeach]

I hope this movie captures the sheer childlike fun of the cartoons.
I want a flick that does for movies what "Peaches" by TPOTUSOA did for rock'n'roll: offer a brief escape from the standard sex/drugs/violence routine.
1.5 hours of pure, guiltless escape-ism, that's what I want.

Re:

[vmcto]

Thanks for getting that stuck in my head all day...

bastard.

Re:

[shmlco]

Actually, their problem is that they think if a little of something is good, then more is better and a lot must be fantastic. It's not that the brawl or the car chase was bad as much as it was that it simply went on and on and one and on. They could have easily cut those sections in half and gotten on with the story and the movies would have been better for it.

Re:

[mwvdlee]

Oh come on, that scantily-clad, elaborate dance scene in the cave was genius and essential to the storyline.

Re:

[somersault]

If only it didn't have the amazingly pathetic 'sex' scene after.. you'd think The One would be able to last a bit longer than that!

Re:Good, another movie I don't need to watch

[MrNiceguy_KS]

When I first saw that scene, my first thought was, "They're doing it in Yoda's bed!"

Re:Good, another movie I don't need to watch

[somersault]

"Soon will I rest, yes, forever sleep. Earned it I have. Twilight is upon me, soon night must fall... argh! WTF doing in my bed you are?!!! Out you get!!"

Re:Good, another movie I don't need to watch

[itsdapead]

Yep.. the first Matrix film was pretty fresh and interesting (to people that don't watch a lot of anime at least!), but they even managed to mess up the sequels

But that was the problem - the first one was completely fresh and different (for mainstream audiences not into anime and extreme martial arts) - the sequels were obliged to follow broadly the same style, but by the time they came out, bullet time, wire-work Kung-Fu and "extreme" fight scenes had become cliched. Have you noticed how tame the bank lobby shootout scene looks today, compared with the first time you saw it? The long delay (probably not helped by the death of two cast members and the post-9/11 hiatus for any film in which things got blowed up) didn't help.

Its not as if the plot of the sequels was any sillier than the first movie (the whole humans as power sources thing - holy thermodynamics Batman!) just that the first film was such compellingly brilliant eye candy that your brain's services were not required, and we never worried about why someone punching you in VR should give you a fat lip in reality. By "Reloaded" we'd seen it all before (with freeze frame, commentary and white rabbits too, thanks to the original's role in popularizing DVD) and were starting to worry about plot holes.

...plus the first film had the "advantage" that it came out fairly close to Star Wars Episode one, and benefitted from rather favorable comparisons... (NB: I still think that Universal should have gambled and released "Serenity" head-to-head against "Revenge of the Sith" - then they'd have been a story, and people love to root for the little guy).

Re:Good, another movie I don't need to watch

[Pxtl]

I disagree. The problem with the sequels is that they didn't even use the same techniques that made the first movies cool - instead of bullet-time morphed cameras, they switched to CG puppetry. The fact is that 3d puppets can't hold up to real people in a fight scene. The car chase scene would've been good had the surrounding movie not ruined it. Look in Hellboy: good fight scene = subway brawl (real actors in costumes) bad fight scenes = everything afterwards (3D puppets). Plus, they completely ditched the bullet-time gunfights in the sequels, which were one of the neatest parts.

Reloaded was bad because it was utterly bereft of a plot. It was like a bad japanese RPG - they kept going to the Oracle to get quests.

Re:

[ccguy]

It seems like hitting on some lottery numbers and then playing those same numbers every day for the rest of your life in the misguided belief that they have some special odds of hitting again.

You wouldn't believe the amount of people playing the combination from Lost. A friend of mine works in the Spanish lottery and can check that kind of things out (and he does, out of boredom). If the Lost number were the winning combination, the prize would have to be shared among 100s...

Re:Good, another movie I don't need to watch

[Professor_UNIX]

Does anybody still pay attention to these guys? I mean, okay, people seemed to like The Matrix (although I never understood why) but everything since then has been uniformly awful.

"Everything since"? According to IMDB they've done the Matrix trilogy, a few Matrix related anime and video games, and then V for Vendetta which was a fucking awesome movie. What are you smoking?

Re:Good, another movie I don't need to watch

[heinousjay]

Assuming for a moment I don't like V for Vendetta (a fair assumption, I found it to be awful) they've made three movies since The Matrix. I'm sort of shocked I had to spell that out for you, since you had the list right in your post, but I'm happy to provide such services to the cognitively challenged.

Also, I am smoking Camel Turkish Silver. Don't see the relevance, but I'm happy to answer you.

Re:

[Tribbin]

They were important for bullet time.

I'm wondering if this all-focus will catch on.

Stop the hating

[Enderandrew]

The Matrix sequels which people bash on religiously, still broke box-office records, and sold quite well on DVD. V For Vendetta did well at the box office, and sold well on DVD.

So yes, studios still very much listen to these guys, and they should.

The major flaw with the Matrix sequels was the script, which had too much exposition. V For Vendetta proved they could take a lengthy graphic novel that is heavy on exposition, and not overload their movie with it. And from AICN's script review of Speed Racer, it will be a movie that focuses primarily on intense action sequences.

In case anyone forgot, Matrix Reloaded, horrid exposition and all, still happens to feature perhaps the most insane freeway sequence in the history of film. The State of California wouldn't let them film it on any of their highways because they said the script for that sequence was unfilmable, and it was guaranteed to kill people in the process.

I'd wager that any real student or lover of film is still very much interested in how these guys will continue to innovate in later movies, even if their previous films have flaws. In fact, I don't think I've ever seen a perfect film. Even my absolute favorites still have glaring flaws.

Re:Good, another movie I don't need to watch

[cyclop]

Not only the human one. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superstition#Supersti tion_and_psychology [wikipedia.org] for example:

"In 1948, behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner published an article in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, in which he describes his pigeons exhibiting what appeared to be superstitious behavior. One pigeon was making turns in its cage, another would swing its head in a pendulum motion, while others also displayed a variety of other behaviors. Because these behaviors were all done ritualistically in an attempt to receive food from a dispenser, even though the dispenser had already been programmed to release food at set time intervals regardless of the pigeons' actions, Skinner believed that the pigeons were trying to influence their feeding schedule by performing these actions. He then extended this as a proposition regarding the nature of superstitious behavior in humans."

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't you mean "the reason why science exists"?

Are brains prone to superstition?

[Colin Smith]

Also. The point being that it's part of our makeup to create significance, whether there is any or not and whether we can rationally explain something or not.

In fact, as one of the other posters pointed out about the pigeons, it may well be a feature of the way brains work. We may well find out that any life which uses something like a neural network to generate consciousness will be prone to superstition and religion.... Which becomes interesting when you start building big neural networks into machines.

Re:Story this time?

[Phybersyk0]

How substantive do you think a movie with a girl who flys a helicopter whilst wearing a mini skirt and go-go boots can be? Don't even get me started on the kid and his pet monkey.

Re:

[Bazman]

Its not just game devs. Animators try real hard to make their animations have that 'film' look. I think Nick Park did motion blur in some of his early stuff - possibly the early Wallace and Grommit shorts. Since then I think he's taken every trick in the cinematographer's book, even borrowing from Spielberg with the crash-zoom shot where you zoom out whilst tracking the camera up to the subject, keeping the same size and making the background do crazy things. I bet there's some lifts from Citizen Kane in hi

Re:

[Anarchitect_in_oz]

Not that ironic, more a timing thing
For the effect to work you need a audience that has grown up with the right visual imagery like improvement of cartoons like graphics to more realistic in games and animation.
I guess they think the time is right to twist it the other way and make the real seem animated.

"like comic books"

[dpbsmith]

In fact, the comic book "look" is actually the Citizen Kane "look."

The "serious" comic book artists of the 1940s were influenced by Citizen Kane and the use of odd "camera" angles, deep focus, views angling up that show the ceiling (traditionally avoided in cinema before Citizen Kane because the top of the set was open and angling up would have shown lights, catwalks, microphones, etc.) derived from it.

This was no secret... it explicitly acknowledged by them... I'm trying to remember where I read a comic bo

Re:

[Bandman]

>In the end, they probably decided that "deep focus" wasn't enough. They want absolutely pristine shots that defy reality,
>to try and distinguish this film from the countless other cartoon adaptations that have all sucked in immeasurable ways.
>In brief, they're trying to do it different than everyone else, and hopefully better.

I think you're relying too much on your premise that the Wachowski Brothers aren't retarded.

They did one thing well. The Matrix. Reloaded was on the fence, and could have bee