Computers
by Nathan Williams

Possibly the worst thing I’ve ever seen in a movie theatre (and I’ve seen Sphere) was Mickey Rourke getting repeatedly hit by a cartoon car in Rodriguez’s Sin City. I don’t know what a Gollum or a Jar Jar looks like in real life, so, fine, make those ugly bastards on a computer. But I know what a car looks like. And a man getting run over by a cartoon car (even if it’s rendered in super-hifi 3D) is just plain stupid, unless that man is Bob Hoskins.  This sentiment also applies to cartoon car racing (Faster and the Furiouser).

My favorite part of Marty’s The Aviator is when Hughes is filming his Hell’s Angels and Marty keeps reminding you how amazing it was that Hughes used hundreds of real planes dogfighting to film the crazy thing. But when Marty shows Hughes (DiCaprio) filming, do we see real planes? No, we see hundreds of swirling cartoon planes. Marty seems to be saying, “Wow, they used to make really good movies back then. I just can’t compete. Please enjoy these cartoons.” And to remind you the planes aren’t real, he has the camera do ridiculous things like go through a plane or zoom into DiCaprio’s eyeball, just to make sure that if your vision is fuzzy or something and you think you might be seeing real planes that no, sonny, you ain’t seeing real planes. But $150 million dollars buys a lot of hard disk space.

Seriously, how hard is it to drop a Rolls Royce off a bridge and film it in slow motion?

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