Trends of 2012 we Want to See More of
High Frame Rate 3D
There is so much money tied up in 3D now that I’m really not sure if it’s going away anytime soon. That said, if it’s permanent I want it to be high frame rate. Visual effects photographer Douglas Trumbull has been on the leading edge of high frame rate photographer for over twenty years, shooting as high as 120 frames per second in order to create images that are so crisp that they become like 3D without the glasses. The Hobbit is the first time that a wide release blockbuster has been shot in 48 fps and the result, while jarring for some and certainly not perfect yet, is something worth experiencing. On the show we talked about some the the pitfalls, things felt like they moved too fast at first and the CG and live action appeared more disconnected, but the 3D itself was more convincing than anything I’ve seen before and if we remember that this is the first time this has been done, there is hope that solutions can be found for these issues. The 3D was so good in fact that when arrows were shot at the screen my eyes involuntarily spasmed as if they were actually afraid something was going to hit them. It also eliminated the pop-up book appearance of traditional 3D because the image is so crisp that objects gain weight and dimensions themselves, rather than being simply set apart from other objects. You almost notice the 3D less as a result. It becomes like looking into a window, which is what they’ve been telling us for years. Maybe it’ll never work right, but we want to see more films try.
Cease and Desist orders against Asylum
Asylum is the company that produces the films that are meant to take advantage of the promotion of big budget films by naming their movies things like Transmorphers, American Battleship, Age of the Hobbits, Alien Origins, and then formatting the cover art to make the movie look like their blockbuster counterparts. I watched Alien Origins this year in the wake of Prometheus in order to make a point about the criticism settled against Prometheus by reviewing a film with no real value. Their movies skirt any content that might require actual production efforts and tend to be completely unaware of the story elements that make the blockbusters actually enjoyable. They’re clearly a kind of scam, which is why it’s exciting to know that major production companies are finally fighting back. It started with American Battleship, which got Asylum sued because it so closely resembles the promotional material for Battleship. After that, Age of the Hobbits was served a cease and desist order because of the use of the word ‘Hobbit’ which is a word actually coined by J.R.R. Tolkien in The Hobbit. It’s title now changed to Clash of the Empires, this may signal the end of Asylum.
Live Recorded Musicals
I really didn’t like Les Miserables but it wasn’t because of the singing or the performances. Whatever the direction and the musical itself might have done to try and ruin my enjoyment of it, still the way that recording the singing live on set allowed the singing to sound genuine has made the music from the last seventy years of musicals seem ethereal. There have always been times when you could tell that the music is per-recorded, but the argument has always been that there was no way else to do it, but that’s no longer true, and Tom Hooper proved it. Now, maybe the squared off, bland staging of the scenes was a result of the recording but probably not and if so another director will find a way to solve that. I don’t need polished audio and polished vocals, I need polished characters and heart-felt words.
Smiling Kristen Stewart
Kristen Stewart is not very good, but we were convinced this year that if she would just put all her effort into smiling instead of the shallow brooding she always does she might just be able to carry a role rather than ruin it. I always argued that she was good in Adventureland, and I think that’s still true, but now I realize that it’s just a coincidence that the role actually called for that kind of behavior. I tend not to like the characters she plays because they never seem to enjoy anything. When she smiles, she’s having fun, and suddenly so am I. Plus, she’s actually pretty when she doesn’t look frumpy or high.
– James Hart
Is there something from this year you found really exciting but we missed it on this list? Leave a comment below, email us, or call, and we’ll talk about it on the show.
This was a really bizarre trend this year. There were a number of films originally scheduled to release in 2012, some of which we even had trailers for, that were then postponed to next year. They each had their own reasons, some more understandable than others, but it honestly became more than a little frustrating. One of them still has trailers showing before Les Miserables advertising that it will be out at Christmas.
So this is what 50 years of stories has come to. In a surprising move Marvel decided to end The Amazing Spider-Man with issue 700, what was puzzling at the time is Spider-Man is Marvel’s most popular hero. But with comics you need a way to bring in new readers as evidenced with DC’s relaunch of all of their comics, the very popular “New 52”. When this was announced I was at first sad but I started to think, “what story would I tell if I was given the chance to tell the last Spidey story?”
Most of the time however his ideas seemed scattered and unfulfilled. He kept trying to put Spider-Man in bigger then him moments. I disliked that a lot of the time Spider-Man was a supporting character in his own book. This was never more so then the last big storyline featuring Dr. Octopus “The Ends of the Earth.” In that story Doc Ock is dying and he is playing his trump card, basically using satellites to kill millions of people on Earth (this story is going to pop up in my critique of Amazing 700). In the end Spidey could have let a dying Octavius do just that, die but he chooses what any hero would, he still saves the bad doc.
It’s pretty obvious that Dr. Octopus is Dan Slotts favorite Spider-Man villain. That’s fine, Doc Ock is a great villain, in his biography in Spider-Man: Inside The World of Your Favorite Neighborhood Hero, it describes Otto Octavius “thinking of himself above moral concerns and valuing his perceived scientific triumph above human life.” Slott nailed that on the head in his stories featuring Doc Ock. Otto not only wanted to appear superior(see what I did there) to average people but also he had no value on human life, his end game was killing MILLIONS of people. Fast forward to issue 698 where it is revealed that Octavius has somehow managed to switch his and Peter Parker’s mind, meaning that he now had is brain in Spider-Man’s body. And Peter was trapped in the dying, decaying body of Dr. Octopus. 
I really liked this twist. You knew something was wrong with the character of Peter Parker, especially the way he was hitting on Mary Jane. It was scary thinking that what would a psychopath do with the power of Spider-Man. Also Peter was now in a race against time because he is dying in Doc Ocks body. It was a couple of tense issues. But then came issue 700…
I’m really not sure how we got here. I grew up watching a movie with my parents every Friday night and no one ever wanted the movie to be bad because that would make for one disappointing Friday night with the family. But over the past few years the internet has turned a corner on movies and become the enemy of cinema by turning audiences against their films. I’m not talking about torrents—I’ve made my stance on that very clear on the podcast—I’m talking about the internet’s love for tearing apart a movie on a minuscule level to try and make good, enjoyable movies seem stupid, thereby creating an antagonistic atmosphere among movie-goers.