Looper: Closing a year of over-hyped sci-fi flicks.

Ok. Time-travel movies are impossible to get right. But come on… people have tried harder in the past.

Looper – the “next Matrix” or whatever it gets called in the hype machine that is cinema in 2012 – starts witty and fast, but its initial idea gets tangled up by time paradoxes and it gets slower and slower. The production design is nice, but the random outbursts of sadistic violence sickened me. Yes, Bruce Willis is bad-ass as always. But it feels like he was cast simply because Looper feels like a bad adaptation of Twelve Monkeys.

Instead of trying to evade time paradoxes, Looper’s script writers even go over the top in that they are introducing us to people with telekinetic abilities early on in the film. Then they completely forget about them and their implications on society for the rest of the movie (and about 30 years into the future).

Why not introduce fire-breathing dragons as well? If you can just get rid of time paradoxes at will and you already have X-Men in the movie… why not go ALL the way?

Still… 7 out of 10 for stylistically fusing the 1950s and 2040’s 🙂

What If?

The author of the infamous xkcd web comic also has a site about “answering hypothetical questions with physics”. Of course there’s the well-known “What if everybody jumped at the same time” question.

But how much energy could you get out of Yoda, if he used The Force to generate electricity?

Bastion

It’s been a long time since I’ve bought a real computer game. Usually I just spend some pennies on cheap iPhone games. But the reviews on this one convinced me: Bastion is a great hack & slash game.

I absolutely dig its style, which reminds you of Anime titles like “Castle in the Sky” or Nausicaä, where the world is heavily influenced by the presence of giant animals or monsters as well as fantasy technology that mixes swords and gunpowder.

The game’s story is pretty straight forward, and although it gives you the illusion of choice by deciding which weapon or skill to upgrade, it basically doesn’t matter to the plot and the order in which you have to fight through all the different levels. This, however, is no demerit! The game offers you about a dozen weapons to discover which can be upgraded in different ways. You can equip two at a time and are free to choose your combination. Each weapon has two modes of attack (usually a melee and a ranged one) and you have a shield that can also be used to attack.

The best thing about Bastion, however, is its voice acting. The game feels like an audio book. You learn about the plot and its back story piece by piece through narration which comments on your actions, sometimes foreshadows, but never gets repetitive. Check out this gameplay video to get an idea of how that works:

The voice actor they hired is seriously cool and he reminds me of something I’ve heard a couple of years ago on the album “Rough and Rare” by Yonderboi:

VFX/Nuke Blog

I’ve just discovered that Jan Burda, a very talented compositing artist I’ve worked with in the past, has opened up his own blog. He has written some Nuke tutorials, so head over to his place and have a look!

Colorful

This is nerdy. The RGB Colorspace Atlas by Tauba Auerbach is an RGB color cube in a handy 20cm x 20cm x 20cm book.

But what gamut is it in? 🙂

The exhibition’s page at MOMA claims that “Each volume contains the entire visible spectrum” which is probably hogwash. But it’s a cute project anyways.

Go See Cabin In The Woods

I think “Movie Bob” called it the best thing you’re gonna see this summer, and I think he was right. After having watched hyped blockbusters like Batman and Prometheus with a bitter taste in my mouth I was delighted to actually enjoy a movie all the way.

“Cabin in the Woods” is kinda hard to describe without spoiling anything. So I won’t. From the very first scene it’s clear that the movie is a mix of genres. Never since “Scream” have I seen a horror movie that takes such a fresh and hilarious take on the familiar “a group of attractive students gets killed in the woods” story. I enjoyed the fact that most of the time the movie looked like a good old 80’s flick with makeup effects instead of CGI.

Here’s the trailer (can’t be embedded, sorry)

9/10 (the “must-see” level)

Any Project

The fate of any project, not just advertising 🙂

Found via clientsfromhell.net…

Using the botched Jesus restoration meme is a hilarious new take, but the underlying problem isn’t new at all. Here’s an old one I remember in one way or another since pre-YouTube times:

And finally, these comics by The Oatmeal examine the issue as well: