Lileks points us to the online trailer for Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. Looks like a fun idea: What if the rampaging robots from the '40s Superman cartoons really existed, and Jude Law was the only one who could stop them? The various city-smashing Art Deco robots look fantastic, but there's something claustrophobic-looking about the shots with actual humans in them. Here's why, according to the IMDb entry on Kerry Conran, the writer and director:
Wrote a CGI program that allows him to shoot an entire movie against blue screens, and fill in the backgrounds with images. Having an already-existing 3-D storyboard of every scene in his computer, all he needs to do is replace the computer-generated figures with live actors, and he has finished his film.
Damn you, George Lucas. Damn you to hell. But who am I kidding? I'll be there to watch the pretty pretty people and the pretty pretty splosions. Even if it's just a shinier version of one of those crappy '90s CD-ROM games.
And Conran is from Flint, Michigan. Hmmm... maybe he and Michael Moore could collaborate on a movie where all of Moore's fantasies are made real through the magic of CGI. They could have a bank with a rifle vending machine in the lobby! Dubya furtively ushering the Bin Laden family onto a plane, whispering "We did it!" Etc.
Posted by Jim Treacher at January 3, 2004 01:07 PM