Tuesday, January 16, 2001 - Land of Opportunity

Too long since I've written here. Every day so little gets done.

I've started making storboards for the new project. It's amazing how easily it's coming together. I guess I'm collecting all of those images, plans I've let build up into my subconscious, purging them all onto nice crisp canary legal paper. If I go any further I'll have to start seriously thinking about really shooting this thing.

Saw The Cell last night on DVD and enjoyed it. Intriguing story, well-executed. Imaginative imagery well-woven with the plot. About 15 minutes too much in fantasy land. They could have cut out a bunch of that stuff and made a stronger movie. And Jennifer Lopez was annoying, but what movie doesn't have at least one annoying protagonist these days?

Watching the special features, I realized that a scene or two were cut out that would have made for a greater film. The director should have stuck to his guns when it came to the inclusion of the necrophilia bleach cadaver masturbation while suspended from the ceiling bit. It explained the character in one graphic short scene, in a way that 20 minutes of prancing around in the guy's psyche couldn't. But snip snip, surely to appease the MPAA gods and guarantee more market share, avoiding an NR rating. Who says that we live in a free society, or that film can truly achieve the highest level of art, when it concerns itself with such mundane matters.

Another annoying thing I noticed is that most Special Feature The Making Of sections on DVD don't talk about how a film is made at all, but shows the cast/crew waxing poetic about how great the Director is and how they'd all love the chance to work with him again, blah blah blah. Then you proceed to the graphics section and get an overdose of the nerdiest SFX babble this side of The Matrix. You wouldn't understand it unless you were an FX nerd yourself, meaning you'd already know all that stuff.

What's needed in the bonus section is a well-balance description of what resources it took to make the movie, how the work was divided, what processes were in place, what general problems were encountered, something the curious film buff can absorb, something interesting, technical, but not too technical.

Kind of like highlights of this Diary.

-George

Dum spiro spero.