Film: August 2005 Archives

I'm on a movie review roll! The other night, last night, I watched Touching The Void. A documentary about the survival of two mountaineers who tried to climb Siula Grande, in Peru, in 1985.

This film was a retelling of that story. They interviewed the two survivors,and re-enacted their story for the audience to see while they talked about their ordeal. It was very intense, and a beautiful REAL story about how these two men overcame overwhelming odds. Joe and Simon, the two mountaineers, successfully climbed Siula Grande. It was on the descent that the accident happened. Joe broke his leg. The odds that Joe managed to get off the mountain, alive, gives me shivers just to write about it. During their descent, Simon was lowering Joe, and they got stuck on the edge of a precipice. Sitting there, for over an hour and a half, Simon did the unthinkable. He cut the rope leading to his partner. Both thought the other had perished, and both made it back to base camp, on their own. The description of what they faced, and how they faced it, each alone, thinking the other was dead, made for a riveting tale.

Eighteen years later, in 2003 when the documentary was made, no one has repeated what they have done, which was to scale Siula Grande and come back alive.

A definite tale of courage, determination, and will. I highly recommend this film.

I just finished watching this extremely interesting and thought provoking film. It took a while, as it is two and a half hours long! I split it up over two nights.

The film, while not visual effects related, was very interesting. It detailed how large corporations are slowly overtaking government, and what exactly a corporation is, and what it is comprised of. They're also much larger than government, since large corporations are worldwide.

There were many interviews with CEOs and former CEOs of such companies as Interface, IBM, and Royal Shell, as well as from business analysts and authors like Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore. They all tossed in their two cents about corporations, how people deal with the power that corporations have, and how the power of the people can truly overcome any situation. The film also went into detail about how much power the corporations have, and described several situations where the power they wield truly overpowered news media. It was scary and impressive at the same time.

I would highly recommend this documentary film if you want to see how and why a corporation, a large, global company, works.

Ok. Really. The only reason I saw this film was to see the work that Digital Domain did for it. I'm a big fan of their work, and wanted to see how they pulled this film off.

Ok.. Two reasons. The other one was Jessica Biel. Oh, and maybe the cool fighter jets. It's always an awesome sight to see huge pieces of machinery defy gravity and all logic. I'm talking about the physicality of real objects, not the CG Talon planes that were created. It's been a while since I saw a movie like this, and while I grew up on Top Gun, this approached that level of coolness. The only things missing were the real airplanes flying.

Regardless, the particle effects and hard surface modelling that DD did on this show was pretty excellent. The cloud and gasoline aerial work two thirds of the way through were really great. As well, the Talons on board the aircraft carrier were well done. They were missing some weight when they took off, but overall it was very minor, and something a regular audience member might not pick up on. I'm sure the team did some research, and Top Gun was probably one of those films to see! Some of digital fire work was pretty bad, and I'm not sure how it passed muster. Some clipping in the highlights, which could have been from not protecting for float film delivery. Some of the compositing could have been improved, most notably the radiation cloud over the city. It seemed like it was a TV res scale up! I'm not sure why it was so blurry. Other than that, most, if not all of the comps done of the actors in the jet were well done. I didn't really notice anything horrendous. Only one shot pokes out, and that's Josh Lucas' acting while piloting near the end of the movie, and he's moving left and right in the cockpit like he's dodging bullets, and the plane is going straight. Haha, joke's on you Josh! ;)

Acting wise, everyone performed fairly well.. No Oscar performances here, but they conveyed what needed to be told to progress the story. The fourth wingman does some pretty neat flying, on the cool scale, but it is all digital. This was definitely a popcorn movie. No thinking about what's happening next, because you were pretty much led along.

A fun movie, albeit mindless entertainment. A decent 6 out of 10.