Classic SPT: Watch Ol' Bandit Tweet

View fullsize

He only takes his hat off for one thing... wait, that should be a hashtag. #yotyhofot

Hey kids, keeping this nostalgia train rolling, here's another Classic Still Playing with Toys article resurrected from the depths of March 10, 2010. Enjoy!

If there's one thing that I've learned having suddenly found myself unknowingly in the world of marketing buzzwords, "social networking is changing everything." Indeed, things like AIM, Facebook, and Twitter have changed a great deal in our day to day lives, but I got to thinking... you know what? Twitter is literally just the new CB radio... come back?

Let's be honest, who doesn't want to be Burt Reynolds in Smokey and the Bandit?

The dude has a solid defined personality; he's beloved all over the CB radio by his well-known call sign, he has a way of breaking up Sally Field's marriages, he has a cool hat, cool car, and when the Bandit calls out on the CB for help - everyone responds.

Everyone wants to be the Bandit.

You sign up for Twitter, you "follow" people under their designated usernames/call signs/codenames, you throw out news and opinions as you see them, chat in fragments with people you don't know, and when something's going on - you "scan the dial" to find out more information.

The thought occurs to me each and every time that I log in to Twitter to search for news before it's broken anywhere else - for example as I pass what appears to be a convention of cops on Santa Monica Blvd. and quickly log into Twitter to read how "Wampa261" just witnessed an gunpoint standoff mere blocks and minutes before I had passed by.  How did I find out about Corey Haim's passing this morning, where's the first place I check now for Avalanche game updates, where is the first place I went when a weird lady interrupted the Oscar winner for feature-length screenplay and I was left saying "WTF, mate?"

Twitter.

Not Google, not a message board, not Facebook, not a phone call to a friend... in two seconds, I can find hundreds of people talking about anything and everything just by logging in and doing a quick scan of Twitter. It's instantaneous, in fact - much like the internet made print newspapers and magazines scramble to retool themselves, it's sort of interesting how our social lives are suddenly shifting now that we have this instantaneous source of information. 

I literally knew about Corey Haim's passing the SECOND that I woke up - my iPhone, which also acts as my alarm, sent me push notifications from Twitter that a friend had direct messaged me with the news at three in the morning... crazy...

"What's going on across the street on Hollywood Blvd.? There are cop cars everywhere and they're not letting people walk the sidewalk..." Log in to Twitter... in 140 characters or less, you read that someone has committed suicide at the Hollywood and Highland Center. It's that instant. When my parents and I were stuck on I-70 coming down from the mountains over Christmas Break, we weren't glued to the radio waiting for a traffic report, I was literally Twittering with people that were ten miles ahead reporting the road closures and tunnel conditions. Eyewitness reporting to a frightening level. I've read that emergency services are now trying to find ways to utilize Twitter... can you imagine how quickly the "emergency broadcast system" will be implemented into a service like Twitter or Facebook once they figure it out? The revolution isn't going to be televised; it's going to be sent through the tubes...

I'm just in complete awe how; in the time between I started high school and today, things have changed so drastically. I've gone from wanting a "super-cool" neon landline phone in my bedroom and not having a cell phone, to suddenly no longer having a landline and not knowing what I'd do without my cell phone. I've gone from being yelled at by the parents for being connected to AOL for too long to being connected at all times, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Communication has been made easy, quick, and to the point (which has been a blessing and a bane for someone who really has always felt awkward on lengthy phone conversations... I won't even go into how being connected 24/7 has changed relationships and dating, because even I can't figure out how you're supposed to do it anymore).

It's crazy, Betty...

It really makes you wonder... what's next? Ten years from now, when I'm receiving a heads up display in my contact lenses and my girlfriend or wife is trying to chat with me all day when I'm at work through the implanted audio chip in my head - will I be writing a similar post about how the implant chip is just like Twitter? Seriously, where are things heading? And buzzword filled day job: please don't make me answer that question... let's leave it up to the people that have advanced it this far so quickly, eh?

Classic SPT: We Are Spirits Living in a Rendered World

View fullsize

Jack Sully sure looks real, but that thing in the tube behind him feels a little... blue? Couldn't resist.

Another Classic Still Playing with Toys blog from all the way back on January 8, 2010. In a further effort to preserve some of the more memorable articles from the past, here now is a little blog on thoughts of CGI and its impact on the film biz from the wayback machine which still feels relevant toward my feelings of the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film... Enjoy.

It's okay; I can hear your groans all the way through the interwebs... someone else spewing about how CGI has ruined movies, like we haven't heard that before. But, especially after watching a few twenty to thirty year old movies over the Christmas Break, it continues to be clear to me that movies have completely lost a sense of peril after the advent of CG effects. Oh, and movies have people falling uncontrollably through the air a whole lot more than they used to...

I'm still in a pretty grim mood from seeing Robert Zemeckis' A Christmas Carol... and I saw the movie almost two months ago. You know the old adage that less is more? I really think it needs to be printed to the top of every computer monitor in Hollywood.

But let me rewind a second, I'm jumping completely ahead of myself here...

1985.

Marty McFly is stuck at a hand-painted starting line, while Doc Brown hangs perilously from the hands of the Clocktower. My palms are sweating; I'm engaged and genuinely concerned for both of these characters simultaneously. Doc confidently gets an idea and wraps the cable around the clock's minute hand, while Marty slams his head against the steering wheel in frustration... and the car mysteriously starts. Doc heroically ziplines down the cable and into the bushes - the audience cheers. The hamster running the wheel inside my brain informs me that this is awesome and I smile...

Twenty-odd years later, I'm sitting in the theater and Scrooge is falling through the air (again) hitting icicles, bails of hay, and all these other completely inhuman acts that would otherwise kill a spry teenager let alone a frail old miser. This old dude could (and should) be paste on the cobblestone streets. And, frankly my dear, I don't give a damn.

He's completely CG. He has no weight or tangibility to him. Let me set aside the fact that the story is such a mess that I don't care about him or his redemption in the first place, but I'm not engaged and I definitely am not concerned for him. Why should I be? When he hits something he's going to bounce back up like he's Gumby (dammit). My palms aren't sweating because it's abundantly clear that what I'm viewing isn't real, and it's animation that's attempting to look real, which further confuses that hamster on the wheel. 

As I was sitting watching Jurassic Park for the millionth time, I found myself wondering why I cared so much for the characters in this CG world. Why Jurassic Park, a movie made in the digital age, still made me feel like the films that were made photo chemically. 

I love the new JJ Abrams Star Trek movie, but Kirk on the ice planet getting chased by generic Cloverfield monster number twelve that we've seen CG animated doesn't get the same chemical and emotional reaction from me as the heroes in the gas powered Jeep being chased by the T-Rex ("Must go faster, must go faster..."). 

Why?

Richard Kimbel stands at the edge of a seemingly bottom-less reservoir and looks down - and I feel vertigo right there with him. But Jake Sully falling off the edge of a floating mountain tied to a winged beast doesn't elicit the same response.

Why?

Marty McFly, on his skateboard, latches onto a pickup truck and wheels through the streets of the city and waves to all the passers by and I immediately think, "I want to do that." But Scrooge attaches to the back of a horse-drawn buggy on a fully rendered (and obvious homage to McFly's mode of transportation) and skids through the streets and my reaction is a whole-hearted "meh, whatever."

Why?

I wish I knew. 

Sure, I'd bet that the most prevalent and probably winning argument out there would be that I experienced the former examples for the first time at a younger age when things were new and exciting and I wasn't conditioned to all of these exhilarating moments and events. Maybe time and age has made me so cynical that I don't connect anymore and it's just something that I have to deal with. 

But then why do I feel warm-hearted when I'm watching a movie and something emotional happens? Why do I fight back tears when the main character deals with the death of his father? I obviously have the ability to continue to connect to the characters that I'm viewing on the screen when they're human, when they're real. 

I get choked up at the end of Wall-E and at the beginning of Up... they're fully animated, so it can't be that I'm completely averse to computer generated imagery. But wait, Wall-E - a task-driven robot from the grim future is human, likable, I'm concerned for him and care about him. 

But wait, in the new Star Trek movie I connect with each and every character because they've exhibited signs of being human and I'm enjoying the ride - but the minute the hot pink snow monster starts chasing Kirk, I'm completely taken out of it. Is it because the threat doesn't seem tangible anymore? Because the monster is just a plot device of convenience rather than something that's been introduced ominously and built up to be something to fear?

Ah ha... perhaps that's it. To coin a phrase from the film I was watching that stimulated this internal conversation with myself, the filmmakers were so preoccupied with the fact that they could, they didn't stop to think if they should... 

That's great that we now have the ability in a 3D environment to have Jim Carrey fall through the Earth's inner atmosphere with his arms flailing and the clouds billowing around him. But is that really what A Christmas Carol is all about? It's incredibly perilous that Jake Sully is forced off a cliff with no means of stopping his decent, but I've been watching the CG characters climb two-mile high vines to get to that point without a care in the world, or without any effort being shown. It's obviously not that dangerous because nobody's really concerned. The threat isn't real.

CG is awesome, it's freed up a great deal of visionaries to fulfill their greatest fantasies... but if they lose sight that every human is not super human, that every creature does not need motivation, that the visual and not the story can express danger, fear, and emotion... then what's the point?  You can paint me a picture of a basketball and I'll look at it and go "hey, that looks pretty life-like, that's definitely a basketball," or you can be in the worst, foulest mood of your life and paint me a picture of a deflated basketball that's been worn and overused... and I'll definitely be able to tell the difference.

Because it'll make me feel something.

Classic SPT: Blues Brothers 2000, What the Hell Happened?

View fullsize

If Liam Neeson's daughter can keep getting Taken... surely Elwood can go on a few Missions from God?

In the migration of Still Playing with Toys over to the new site, many of the old articles and discussion threads have been sentenced to the internet Forbidden Zone. In an effort to preserve the one or two of them that were actually decent, we'll be posting up some Classic SPT for your reading pleasure.

The following article was originally posted to Still Playing with Toys on September 5, 2013:

This past weekend, a dinner conversation with friends about the sideways turn of Blues Brothers 2000 prompted a bit of a research binge during lunch today. One mission was to be discovered within the research: what the hell happened with Blues Brothers 2000?

They waited all those years to do a sequel and they didn't wait for Jim Belushi to be available? Where'd the kid come from? Where was the edge? Hey, at least the music was good. -- all these thoughts running through my head as I scoured the web for answers. And then I found it. For some reason two articles that had passed me by over the years where director John Landis had spoken out about the sequel and given some insight as to why it was so lost in the woods.

The first article, from the AV Club gives us this insight from director John Landis:

We'd always intended for a sequel with John, but of course when he passed away, it was obvious we weren't going to do it. But Danny had been performing with John Goodman and Jimmy Belushi and the band, and he said, "You know, this is great, because this music is recognized now—let's do a movie." I said, "Great, sure, okay," and we wrote what I thought was a terrific script. Then Universal Studios eviscerated it. That was a strange experience, because the first thing they said was that it had to be PG, which meant they couldn't use profanity, which is basically cutting the Blues Brothers' nuts off. The first movie is an R-rated film, but there's no nudity or violence in it. It's just the language. Then they said, "You have to have a child, you have to have..." The bottom line was, the only way that movie was going to get made was to agree with everything they said. You know the difference between a brown-nose and a shithead? Depth perception. That's the only time I never really fought with the studio, because they didn't really want to make it. So we did every single thing they said. By the time we'd done that, the script was kind of homogenized and uninteresting. Danny said, "It's about the music. It's just about the music, John, so don't worry about it. We'll get the best people, and we'll make a great album, and get these people on film. We have to document these people." It's interesting, because, as much as I make fun of Danny, three or four of those guys have passed away since we made that movie. People say, "Okay, you've got Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, James Brown, Cab Calloway, and John Lee Hooker in The Blues Brothers—who's in Blues Brothers 2000?" The answer? Everyone else. The first movie has five musical numbers, and the second movie has 18.

Interesting. 

Essentially the downfall of the film was the downfall of several other movie franchises like Robocop, Terminator and others that relied upon a certain edge and certain maturity in order for the lightning in a bottle that they had captured. When the edict came down to make the film more appealing to a broader audience, with it came several of the concessions (ie. "Buster" Blues, Elwood suddenly smiling all the time, etc.).

And Landis outright admits that if they would have fought any of the mandates from the powers that be, the movie would have never been made. So he and Aykroyd decided to focus on the music and to hell with the threads that wove between it.

Another article from IFC gives us more:

I was very pissed off by what Universal did to me on ‘Blues Brothers 2000′ and that was my first experience with the new corporate Hollywood. It’s very different. Everything is by committee now, and they destroyed that movie, though the music is still good. This happens to filmmakers all the time, where producers and studios fuck with their picture, and when you’re promoting the movie you can’t say that. [Laughs.] The directors get blamed for things that are clearly not their fault. .../... It’s a combination of economics and we live in a very conservative and reactionary and frightened time. People are scared shitless in terms of taking risks on movies. Would the studios ever make a movie like ‘Into The Night’ now? Or even ‘Animal House?’

More fuel for the above fire. And an interesting perspective on Animal House - obviously a risk like an American Pie in the early 2000s since it's a film geared toward late high school and early college aged teens but carried R ratings. 

But why no Jim Belushi stepping in to replace his late brother in Blues Brothers 2000? Apparently, from what I've been able to glean, the scheduling of production on his show Total Security didn't allow him to get away in time for production on the film. But why not wait for him? I haven't been able to find an answer to that, but based on John Landis' comments above, my guess would be that the studio wanted to hit a release date within a window of a schedule that wouldn't allow them to hold production until Belushi was available.

Such a strange series of events in another weird tale of how making a film in the Hollywood studio system can be like pushing a Raiders of the Lost Ark-like boulder up a mountain.