Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

InstaPundit
USS Clueless
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue
Ravishing Light
Rosenblog

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Sunday, September 26, 2004
23:05 - Sky Captain	(top)
In a couple of words: thoroughly cool. In fact, I can hardly think of any complaints. True, the movie is rife with little technological implausibilities (for example, sorry, you can't just converse at a normal level inside the cockpit of a fighter plane�and much of the technology, such as the floating airships, would require a power source not of this earth in scale); but the whole movie is one big technological implausibility, so I'm not going to fault them for that. It's one of those movies that takes place in a universe that's juuuust a bit parallel to our own�where happenstances like giant robots and apocalyptic plots by mad scientists are just sort of taken in stride, where city traffic still hurries people to and from work even as airplanes swoop through the streets at breakneck speed blasting away at each other from ten feet above your head. It's much, much larger than life, and as such it's pulp... and, hell, it's good pulp. The movie is very deliberately vague as to the year it actually takes place; careful examinations of newspapers (yes, they come spinning out toward the camera over a backdrop of a churning printing press) reveal that it's a very kooky 1939. Everything from the New York skyscrapers to the Radio City Music Hall seem larger than they should, somehow. Even the cars are in shapes that never quite existed. It's not obvious what's different in this universe from the 1939 of our own. The year is never made any clearer in the dialogue, nor is there much else to indicate the geopolitics of this strange version of history; Hitler isn't mentioned, for example. It's a setting that's detailed enough in technical and historical matters to be fascinating, but vague enough that they don't have to worry about tedious explications of just how all this stuff works. It's the only way a pulp piece like this could work, and it's pulled off very well. Even so, the movie plays quite loosely with anachronisms. I'll forgive things like holographic radar screens and levitating guard robots as part of the fun of the thing; but other stuff, such as the repeated references to "World War I" and "The first World War" are harder to excuse, as is the fact that Sky Captain flies a P-40 Warhawk, which first entered service in 1940. I can't help but think that these must be oversights. It's not like the movie is without errors; in one scene toward the beginning, when Sky Captain is striding into the humungous hangar on his base as the hundred-foot-high doors slide open, you see that up above the doors have those huge banks of dusty-opaque windows in grids like you saw in old factories, some of them punched out and shattered so as to give a very realistic, lived-in look. But, startlingly, I noticed that every one of these banks of windows had exactly the same pattern of broken and missing windows; it was repeated over and over, block after block of identically broken-out windows. They even appeared in that same formation elsewhere in the hangar. It's like they only bothered to make one bitmap of "factory windows" for every possible use; considering that the only things that weren't computer-generated were the actors (every single scene was shot in front of a blue screen), and considering how lavish and realistic every shot was, this erratum is particularly shocking, in a "gee that's silly" sort of way. An error that could only have come from careless computerized world-building, in a shot that's otherwise 100% convincingly real, tweaks the brain a bit, like the black cat/deja-vu effect in The Matrix. I'm sure there are other, similar flubs that I missed this time around, too. But those are small things, and they don't detract at all from the story, which is told in excellently punchy fashion (I was sort of at a loss to think what role in the evil plan the kidnapped scientists played, but that's about the only thing I had trouble with). It isn't a funny movie, but there are four of five moments of such genuine humor�and administered with such zest and timing�that they deliver far more than their fair value in punctuating the narrative. (Polly's eye-roll at "Are you still glad you came?" was priceless. And the movie's very last line of dialogue can hardly be beat.) It seems to me that as an experiment in moviemaking technique, Sky Captain does much more successfully what Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within tried to do; where that movie fell down (the characters, being CG, still just didn't ring true enough to be believable), this one shines, because the actors are real and everything else is rendered (using Pixar's RenderMan, it should be noted). I fully expect to see more movies using this technique in the near future; it might just open up a region of storytelling that was inaccessible in the past. The current miserable state of Hollywood is to do remakes of old movies, even good ones, because there just aren't any new ideas that fit into the traditional medium. CG makes the execs look at 2D properties like Garfield and Scooby-Doo with the voracious eyes of those who see a new unmined field of ready-made ideas that haven't been done before because it was too expensive to animate them in 2D. But this is the first time I've seen CG actually successfully break open a whole genre of filmmaking. It's everything that was so wonderful about the Fleischer Superman cartoons, sharing with them a lot of DNA, as well as tapping into that steam-punk League of Nations vibe that seems so tantalizing even today. Perhaps it's just serendipity that the movie that does it is itself a remake of a particular film genre; but it's a really good one, regardless, and superbly worth one's time. (Oh yes... wouldn't the radiation in that cave have ruined all of Polly's film anyway? Not that it really matters from a plot standpoint, I guess, but I kept expecting them to make a big deal of that little detail...) (Oh, and that Michaelangelo-esque statue in Totenkopf's office, of the guy pulling out the other guy's brain, was a work of inspired genius.)