Ntuple Indemnity

Well, wouldja look at that: Chicken Little hits the sweet spot, a $40M figure that could be spun for good or ill depending on who’s doing the publicity. I was going to crunch the figures and pull up a few comparisons, but as usual, Jim Hill has already done it.

My review of Jarhead is in today’s Gateway, and the editorial staff is as on the ball as ever when it comes to excising my litany of tasteless puns and Mock Turtle simile soups. As always, if you have a grip on what my blogging style is like, you can probably identify what’s mine and what’s not. My impression of the film remains intact, though: amusing as a style piece and an evening’s entertainment, but in attempting to be more serious and dramatic than its only cinematic cousin (David O. Russell’s outstanding experiment, Three Kings), conventional to a fault.

There’s also one specific item of trivia I don’t mention, because it doesn’t belong in a review, let alone any piece for a general audience. It is, if at all possible, even more obscure than Docking Bay 327 in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, which I alluded to under nearly identical circumstances.

Jarhead has, to my knowledge, the first explicit reference to Metroid in a theatrical feature film. It’s a bit of a throwaway, because… well, it’s actually in error, though made as a figure of speech and not with the presumption of being factual. One has the impression that William Broyles had a little gap in his screenplay marked, “Name of popular video game from circa 1990 goes here.”

The scene runs thus: the marines are sitting on a jumbo jet to Iraq and discussing what is it they’d be doing instead if they weren’t gallavanting off to defend freedom and pop some ragheads. “Sitting at home trying to get to the ninth level of Metroid,” one says. “You know what happens when you get there?” replies another. “Nothing. You go back and do it all over again.”

Thematically, it hits the nail on the head when it comes to encapsulating Jarhead‘s attitude towards war: escalation, redundancy and repetition. Only Metroid doesn’t have levels; in fact, the series is so notoriously nonlinear that there’s an entire video game subculture dedicated to exploiting pathways unintended by the designers. So the point is totally lost – it’s no different from claiming rock and roll had stale chord progressions, and mistakenly citing the Beatles – but hey, they tried.

Tetris would have been a better example. On the original Game Boy release, the ninth level was murder.

In other news, Nintendo’s worldwide Mario Kart DS servers are online (though nobody has the game except for Nintendo and the press), and their Wi-Fi service website is live, and the documentation reveals a lot about how it will work. Hits: day-to-day, game-by-game stat tracking on the Web; a sporting interface not unlike the software that comes with most wireless LAN cards; WEP key setup that doesn’t suck aside from the pain in the ass of having to punch in my entire 128-bit hex key instead of my clever passphrase. The promised one-touch setup only applies to proprietary Buffalo routers at partner hotspots, though I suspected as much.

Misses, neither of which apply to me: the drivers on the USB connector for those without Wi-Fi are Windows-only (presumably under the assumption that since Macs have built-in wireless, users probably have a network going already – or maybe it’s just shortsightness); and for those of you who care, no WPA. The website also gives pretty bad layman’s advice for securing a home network (using your phone number as a hex key? Please!) but that’s the price of selling cool toys to the non-technical.

Also, if the Wi-Fi configuration software is embedded in the game cartridge, does this mean I have to punch in my setup all over again come Animal Crossing in December? Or does it write the profile settings into the DS firmware? If they haven’t finalized the Wi-Fi implementation until now, I’m guessing it’s the former, which would be a pity.

I have Mario Kart DS on pre-order, so I’ll give it a spin next week. Whether or not I report on the experience here will depend on the length of said spin, or perhaps its angular momentum. For now, it’s back to civilization – or maybe just back to Civilization.

I’ve been a lifelong sucker for computer animation. As a teenager I fancied the idea of going into the business myself. I won science fair medals for conducting raytracing experiments that I don’t even fully understand anymore. There was a time when I could have claimed to have watched every all-CG feature film to be released in North American theatres. I can still name the exceptions: Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, Jonah: A Veggie Tales Movie and Valiant. I expect the claim to give way sooner or later, because in spite of how CG productions take years, the market is overflowing with them nowadays and reaching a saturation point where it simply isn’t enough for a movie to be a digital representation of three-dimensional space. It has to be more.

I’m also a Disney fan, albeit a repatriated one. It’s a pity that so many people, particularly those with disposable income, have a perverted obsession with outgrowing things. The majesty of the Disney classics is that they improve with age. You’ve only truly grown up when you have learnt to fall in love with them all over again. That’s what makes them classics.

Remember when the Magic Kingdom had brand power? The flat one, with a chorus of strings playing “When You Wish Upon A Star” – not the 3D one over music by Randy Newman, which I think has been subverted by the mischievous hopping lamp that follows it everywhere.

Those were the days. þæt wæs god cyning.

Things have changed. For one thing, I’m not going to see Chicken Little this weekend.

It isn’t because the promotional campaign makes it look both terrible and shameless about it. It could always be better than how it’s sold, and I’ll know for sure when I see it next week, or the week after that. Bad advertising (badvertising?) is a common sight when it comes to animated features. One wouldn’t have thought Shrek or The Iron Giant were any good from the trailers alone. Sadly, only one of them made money.

It isn’t because it’s not on the top of some imaginary list of mine this weekend. As a matter of fact, it is; V For Vendetta was moved back to March, and I saw Jarhead on Wednesday.

I’m not going to see Chicken Little this weekend because I want to do my part. See, I firmly believe that a low box-office take this weekend is a good thing. At best, I expect it to be a modest hit with no shelf life. Most of the pundits are calling it at $38M, and I think that’s generous – though of course, releasing it on 3600 screens guarantees a decent aggregate figure. And I’m not going to help unless it actually turns out to be any good as a movie, because I like the message this would send.

I haven’t cared about opening weekend grosses in a while, but this is one that actually matters. Let’s examine the possible scenarios.

Chicken Little is a hit. Either it opens above $50M, or it has enough staying power between now and Christmas that a $200M total is within reach. Consequences: Disney laughs its way to the bank. Pixar loses a whole wad of chips at the negotiating table now that WDFA has proven to be a viable competitor with a hardly competitive film. They never get their sequel rights back, and Circle 7 finishes their own Toy Story 3 directed by Bradley “Pocahontas II” Raymond. The next round of Disney trailers feature the titular American Dog, Wilbur Robinson and Rapunzel shaking their respective booties to disco music. Rumours of a return to cel animation are squashed for a full decade more. Bob Iger joins Michael Eisner in hell, but on the plane of the corporeal, the suffering continues.

Chicken Little makes money, but generally disappoints. This is what I expect – an opening under $40M, and run-of-the-mill drops of 40-50% a week before ending up with Shark Tale figures, or maybe even as low as Robots territory. Here we’re talking $130-170M – big, but not for a CG film with the Disney label, and not in 2005. Consequences: Pixar has an upper hand in negotations, because Disney is no longer so sure it can afford to have them as a direct competitor. We might even see some big, lopsided concessions; the best-case scenario has sequel rights going to Pixar and Circle 7 shutting down Toy Story 3 – a huge loss for Disney and a huge win for the consumer. Future WDFA projects reevaluate their ability to out-Shrek DreamWorks, and stop trying so hard to do just that. We will hear rumblings of greenlighting cel animation again in the post-Rapunzel pipeline, and maybe the company will stop blaming the medium.

Chicken Little bombs harder than the Enola Gay. This would be an opening under $20M and a total gross well under $100M, comparable to Disney’s figures in its waning years. We’re talking about sub-Dinosaur numbers here. It isn’t going to happen. If it does, Disney will be on its knees begging Pixar to come back – a good thing. This isn’t all rosy, though. Disney’s stock price will plummet. The detrimental effect on the brand name may carry over to hurt the success of future releases, regardless of whether or not they are any good. Investment in the computer animation industry as a whole will drop. We still have no guarantee of a return to traditional 2D animation, either. It’s just as likely that animators will be fired in droves, and the Disney legacy dies a horrible, horrible death.

I think the second scenario is the optimal one here, though none of its effects are guaranteed. It would certainly cause a lot of unease; in fact, the cold critical reaction to Chicken Little is already having some effect on the company.

This morning, the news came in that Disney has halted production on Rapunzel Unbraided. Word is that the shutdown is a temporary one to rework the project from the ground up; just how temporary, time will tell. But I like what I’m hearing: less of the pop-culture trash nobody cares about. In essence, less of the Unbraided, more of the Rapunzel; less of the Shrek and more of the Disney.

I have never once seen Disney try to be wacky and hip and come out of it looking good. A Glen Keane film deserves to be better. Keane is a legend, folks. Every day of the year, mascots and stage performers around the world hop around in costumes based on stuff he drew. He created Ariel in The Little Mermaid and Aladdin in Aladdin. He designed the Beast in Beauty and the Beast, the most iconic sympathetic monster this side of King Kong. And I’m sure the five of you who saw Treasure Planet fondly remember the seamless cel/CG hybrid that was his Long John Silver – half scurvy pirate, half Howl’s Moving Castle.

The visual concept behind Rapunzel Unbraided – an oil painting that moves in 3D space – is one of the most exciting developments I’ve heard of about the future of the now rather unexciting movie business, which has with few exceptions become aesthetically stagnant now that the wonders of technology are peaking.

But it’s all for naught if the film has to work against an abrasive and annoying screenplay that plays for cheap laughs. This is supposed to ring in the next Disney Renaissance, after all. I’ll agree it’s not a wholly reasonable expectation, but I’ll sleep better at night knowing that they care enough to try.

And all it took was for the critical community to call Disney on the carpet and tell them their bespectacled gallinaceous emperor has no clothes, let alone groove. Imagine what would happen if the public agreed. All that needs to happen is for Chicken Little to fail by just enough, and we’ll hopefully see some meaningful change of the same bent.

Whether or not the film is any good is immaterial. I’ll answer that question later this month.

At this precise moment I don’t have time to expound on why contrary to what you might have gleaned from Jessica Warren’s review in The Gateway, but well in line with the mainstream press, Corpse Bride is certain to be the most lighthearted fun you’ll have at the cinema this year – at least, until we see hide or hare of The Curse of the Wererabbit. Whatever I said a few months ago about “So Long and Thanks For All The Fish” being a shoo-in for the Original Song Oscar is now seriously in doubt in the face of new and viable competition that almost makes the award seem like something other than an antiquated joke.

I will be investing in repeat viewings. You should too. Come for the exorcising voice of Christopher Lee and classic Mexican calavera cabaret in the same tradition as the epitome of interactive literature. Stay for the first and second best scenes involving pianos since that Polanski war film from a few years back, and stop to notice the Harryhausen nameplate.

So UADS alumnus Alim Merali, who has already taken his place in CUSID history by serving up the textbook example of a low-burden case, has self-published the introductory book on competitive debate that he’s bandied about for the past three years or so. Talk the Talk: Speech and Debate Made Easy has a strong pedigree of blurbs behind it already; a free PDF version of the whole text is available for online perusal. I can’t say I’ve dug into it myself, as the 152-page CUSID Central Debating Guide compounds a backlog of incredible girth.

As an aside, I normally entertain mail from my readers, but any and all instances of “So where’s your book, Nicholas Tam?” will be ignored with extreme prejudice.

You really can get anything published nowadays, though. Just ask Stephen Lanzalotta, author of The Da Vinci Diet: Weight-Loss Secrets from Da Vinci and the Golden Ratio. Picture me as suffused with ennui as I am once again forced to point out for those fetuses joining us after the commercial break that first of all, his name was Leonardo, and secondly, Dan Brown wouldn’t know the Golden Ratio if the plus-minus sign ripped the square root off the unsuspecting five and shoved it up his sacred feminine. Never you mind the inherent ridicule of this unwanted circumstance.

All-nighters, asymptotic complexity proofs and three-day Scrabble marathons don’t admix.

Keeping in mind that I’m not a stickler for correspondence to source material when it comes to movies adapted from books – relatively speaking, anyhow – I have a few observations to point out regarding the new Goblet of Fire trailer. Like a lot of trailers for big franchise movies that are near enough to release that most of the effects work is done, it shows everything – so if you don’t want to see everything from Hermione’s pink ball gown (yes, it’s pink here and not blue) to Lord Voldemort himself, avert your eyes.

First of all, the tombstone in the graveyard scene has been fixed. Early promotional images such as this one revealed an egregious error – that is, the presumption that Tom Marvolo Riddle’s dead father was also named Tom Marvolo Riddle, which was from the outset more improbable than the transfiguration of a pair of missiles into a sperm whale and a bowl of petunias, and then flatly contradicted by events critical to Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Near the end of this trailer there are a few shots from the resurrection in the graveyard (like I said, it shows everything), and the inscription has been corrected.

Much more irritating than anything else – and I suspect this will end up being my greatest annoyance with the finished product when I see it in November – is Dumbledore’s butchered pronunciation of “Beauxbatons”, which is similar to how they pronounce “Baton Rouge” in the drawl of the former Confederate states. Seriously, William the Conqueror died for this? Oh well – I suppose they already neglected to drop the silent T in “Voldemort”, so all bets are off. Now we’ll just have to deal with the premise that a Bulgarian kid learns how to enunciate Hermione’s name but the only one You-Know-Who ever feared stumbles over his French after a century of practice. What would really be upsetting is if the francophone characters do the same.

Like Cuaron’s flying Iceman Dementors in The Prisoner of Azkaban, there are a lot of neat visual inventions on display – Mad-Eye Moodyvision, Sirius Black speaking in the form of the embers in the fire instead of a disembodied head (which makes me wonder what will be done if they keep the scene of Umbridge fumbling about for his presence in Phoenix), and the rippling Jumbotron at the Quidditch World Cup, to name a few. I can see plenty of dynamism befitting the scope of the tale, a pulse that was sorely lacking in the Columbus films. Now that we have a pretty clear idea of the look of the film, the big question mark is the pace.

As some readers may have noticed – and whoever they are, I admire their persistence in providing return traffic in the face of abject futility, however motivated by ennui it may be – this alleged weblog has been less than rife with recent activity of late. As pleasurable as it is to thumb my virtual nose at virtual people in this besotted cyber-realm with only words as my weapon, I must admit it has not in contemporaneous times been my first and foremost love.

Advance Wars: Dual Strike is not my first and foremost love either, but it is most of what I have been galvanizing to fill the few extant temporal vacuums that betray the character of the astute hobbyist. It is, in short, probably the most enthralling video game I’ve played on any system this calendar year – the dream strategy title for those who prefer patient and methodical turn-based analysis to the rapid improvisation of an RTS, but can spare neither the time or the commitment to get mired in late-game micromanagement. For a crude associative description: think of it as a Sid Meier game with everything removed except combat and cold, hard cash. As a result it moves a lot faster, but has just enough depth to open the possibility of dragging out a battle to be settled by attrition – and you will sit through the ordeal without realizing how many hours are going by outside your soap bubble of virtual warfare.

In a way, the various incarnations of Advance Wars – and this one in particular, given the tangible manipulation of pieces offered by its supplementary touchscreen control scheme – mark the natural evolution of the tabletop board game, with all the conveniences of the digital age as their selected adaptations: interchangeable and editable board layouts, automated calculations in the place of twenty-sided dice, and artificial intelligence robust enough to provide competent opposition when there exist no other DS owners within a radius of thirty feet. I almost wish Dual Strike were released with support for Nintendo’s global Wi-Fi network to launch in November, but it already provides a bountiful playing experience as it is; besides, the scale of multiplayer matchups it makes possible have a tendency to result in disconnections and dead batteries.

And now for something completely different. As you may know, Disneyland celebrated its 50th anniversary this summer after a year of renovations and refurbishments – and boy, was it worth it. I’ve had the good fortune of visiting the resort on numerous occasions, and it’s never looked so good. The original rides are now decorated with gold-plated anniversary cars (or horses, or teacups, or whatever applies). There’s a museum of Disneyland memorabilia with such exhibits as blueprints and schematic artwork, every variety of admission ticket from every era, and a cheesy but insightful doc short hosted by Steve Martin and Donald Duck.

Classic Disney scenes are on display throughout the park in the form of photo collages assembled from the visages of animators, staffers and guests, each of them consisting of two to ten thousand images. As you enter Main Street, there is a grandiose two-level monochrome collage where these photographs congeal into the faces of the men and women who were with Uncle Walt’s empire when it began, which in turn compose a still from “Steamboat Willie”. I’ve found an online archive of these exhibits, and the one I just spoke of is here, but a mere JPEG does not capture the sheer ambition of the monument. Nor does a photograph show you that the Haunted Mansion collage glows in the dark. There are wonders to behold at this happy place, and this is just one of them. There are others.

The fireworks, for instance. Nowadays, we are so accustomed to pyrotechnics that it’s easy to be disenchanted at how fireworks, while still magnificent once you delve into the constructed choreography of a given display, all look and feel the same. Sure, the last decade or so have brought us the odd laser projection every so often, but we are fundamentally looking at the same old centrifugal fractal patterns set to Tchaikovsky, right?

Well, since 17 July, Disneyland has restored genuine spectacle to the ancient art of synchronized rocketry. The proverbial magic is back. Sparks fly over the repainted Sleeping Beauty Castle to the tune of “When You Wish Upon a Star” like the opening titles of a feature film, but live and right in front of you. Tinker Bell zips around the parapets. And it’s all narrated by Mary Poppins – that is to say, Julie Andrews.

Then the display becomes a sort of interpretive dance of light and sound, a whirlwind tour of Disneyland attractions representing each of its sectors (though “It’s A Small World” is noticeably absent, and the New Orleans sector is underscored by Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag” played, not surprisingly, too fast). There’s a broadside battle waged right over the heads of the audience for “Pirates of the Caribbean”, and if you sit close enough you can see the Jolly Roger aglow on the Matterhorn’s peak like a distant Bat-Signal. “Star Tours” has laser cannons and explosions of green flame that light up the night set to John Williams’ end credits to Episode IV. The Frontierland shooting gallery features ducks with targets on them projected on the castle itself, which move about and seemingly get shot down one by one. And so on.

I’ve never seen anything like it. Chances are you haven’t either, unless you paid the House that Walt Built a visit of your own in the last seven or eight weeks.

If you plan to visit Disneyland anytime in the near future, or if you’ve never been there – make it so and make it soon. The “Happiest Homecoming on Earth” celebration is supposed to last until September 2006, according to the five-part golden anniversary retrospective that was posted at Jim Hill Media the same week I was in Anaheim, though by next summer’s end the top-billed novelty may have tapered off somewhat.

You really do have to see those fireworks show. My description does it about as much justice as a Klingon court-martial.

I haven’t devoted any of my recent blog-writing to what’s going on in wide-release cinema, in spite of having seen a passable, if less-than-usual quantity of major films of the ones that hit theatres between May and August, that quantity being eleven and a half. (The English dub of Howl’s Moving Castle is the half.) I attribute this to two causes. The first is that July and the better (or in this case, worse) part of August were for all intents and purposes dead, and all rumours of a box-office slump are for once both patently true and justified. The second is that the big films of May and June that were any good, a surprising number of them, turned out to be phenomenal; simply praising these achievements is a monotonous and redundant activity, and critiquing them intelligently takes too long.

Perhaps I will at some point offer a synoptic assessment that gathers and dispenses with the lot, but not today. For now, just go see the most satisfying film of the past few weeks, and certainly one of the best of the year. It’s called The Constant Gardener and it stars Lord Voldemort.