One of my all time favorite classic shows, Get Smart, is going to the theaters! Steve Carell plays Maxwell Smart and Anne Hathaway Agent 99. Hopefully, they don’t screw it up, because this has the potential to be really good.
Teaser for Get Smart
Oh boy oh boy oh boy. Jet Li’s last martial arts film is going to be Fearless, and it looks like it’s going to be one awesome wushu packed movie. I am so glad that he is making his farewell with a throwback to his older style movies (ie. Once Upon a Time in China), and not with such stinkers as Cradle 2 the Grave.
Fearless portrays the story of Fok Yuen-gap, the master of the fictional student in Fist of Legend (and Bruce Lee’s Fist of Fury). Fok Yuen-gap is best known for taking on and defeating foreign fighters that challenged him in a series of competitions that took place in China. I expect that Fearless will have some great fight scenes with all the dramatic flare that Jet Li can muster. No kooky R&B inspired scenes or frivolous gun play. This, my friends, is going to be old school Wong Fei Hong style at its best.
At least, I hope it will, or it’s going to be a sad sad farewell for Jet. To this day, I believe that he is the most graceful fighter on the big screen. His extremely dedicated experience in Wushu has brought out some of the best cinematic martial arts fight scenes of all time. He is, in fact, the reason I became interested in Wushu in the first place, and he is in one of my earliest childhood film memories.
So, here’s to you Jet Li. Thank you for your body of exhilarating work. I only wish you wouldn’t leave the silver screen just yet.
I had the pleasure to go to a screening of Chicken Little in 3D Dolby Digital D-Cinema. The technology was quite good, but the movie wasn’t that great. I didn’t see any evidence of pixelation during the viewing, and the picture was super crisp. The 3D experience was good, but could have been better. I attribute this to the content creators, rather than the technology. We really will need to see 3D content techniques come to full maturity until we get a truly great 3D experience. The glasses were also a little clunky for people who already wear eyeglasses. I kept fidgeting with the green glasses, modeled after Chicken Little’s glasses in the movie.
Various 3D shows have come and gone before, usually as gimmicks or one time affairs at theme parks. Consumers have not really had access to 3D entertainment on a regular basis. But this could change soon. The 3D experience definitely added value in Chicken Little. Since the movie is born out of 3D digital models, I would imagine it was quite easy to create a 3D version of the movie (just plop in two cameras an eye distance away in the scene, and write both of them out to two separate video tracks). A notable scene in the movie involved to teams playing dodgeball. It was fun to see all the balls bounce off the screen, some coming quite “close” to the viewer. The 3D element has definitely been integrated with the movie better than previous attempts.
In any case, Disney and Dolby can pat itself on the back for a successful deployment of D-Cinema and 3D. I just can’t wait until Pixar gets involved with it.
My fiancee is on a business trip, but we managed to stay on the phone while watching the same movie in sync. We chose Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, still one of my favorite movies even after three viewings.
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