Friday, March 30, 2007

Watch Out! The Invisible Men!

Forget 300, Spiderman 3 and Pirates 3. This is the next movie I want to watch.




It's called Os Trapalhões na Guerra Dos Planetas (The Tramps in the Planet War, 1978) and it's quite clearly a rip-off of Star Wars, in which four Earth tramps are recruited by Prince Flik (Luke Skywalker) to utilise "their expert help in retrieving half of the “brain computer" back on his home planet.
I discovered this through a review at The Wave Magazine's site (after typing 'tiki drum' into Google, would you believe?) The review alone is a good laugh and well worth reading:

"There’s a slight language barrier since the movie is in Portuguese, which I do not speak, and the subtitles are in English, which the person doing the subtitling does not speak."

"For added drama, the film switches to super-slow motion every time one of them does a spectacular move like kicking clumsily or shoving someone into the sand. This technique is so overused that the fight drags out longer than the spastic disco song they use for background music and the last few minutes of the fight take place in silence."

"While they search for Zuco, they run into random dangers like invisible men, flying fruit, a giant tarantula and a baby birdman. Each problem is solved in the same way – panicking, then going in the opposite direction of the menace."

I suspect, however, that the reviewer didn't even bother trying to be funny. The film seems bizarre enough. Kind of like Kung Pow, although of course, Kung Pow was meant to be bizarre and pointless. I also suspect that, as with Kung Pow, I'll be several thousand braincells poorer by the time the end credits roll. As would anyone else within a 500 meter radius.

Monday, March 26, 2007

Mathter...The planth!


Now this looks cool. I don't know why...I think because it looks like it could be a bit like Nightmare Before Christmas (yes, I know Nightmare is stop-motion). I couldn't really find much about it...only this one picture, the website, the IMDB.com entry, and this page. It's due October 2008. Oh, and it'll feature Christian Slater, Steve Buscemi and John Cleese.

Seems there'll be a short film first, then a feature film. I really want this to be good. There's been so many mediocre (not to mention non-animated) animated movies lately, and it looks like there'll be a lot more to come. It feels like absolutely everybody is making an animated (or, increasingly, mocap) feature film at the moment. And that's good, I guess, although quality often is thrown out the window in favour of making it quickly and cheaply. Ah, the old Creative Triangle...Good, Fast, Cheap - pick two.

Anyway, the point is that among all these titles lined up for release, the sun catches the edge of this one in a certain way...
Maybe I'm speaking too soon. Maybe it won't be anything like Nightmare. Maybe I'll be horribly disappointed when it is released. Maybe this isn't the silver lining on the non-Pixar/DreamWorks cloud. Maybe I'll have to go and burn down their studio after seeing the trailer. We'll have to wait and see.

But I'm hoping....