Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

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

  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.

On My Blog Menu:

InstaPundit
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As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
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Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue

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Tuesday, January 15, 2002
22:59 - Beauty and the Big Screen	(top)
I've now seen Beauty and the Beast twice in its new IMAX release, once on the regular six-story flat screen and once on the Dome screen at the Tech museum. And I can say with certainty that I have no desire to see any more flat movies on the Dome screen. Sure, the sound is great, the picture is nice and clear, and the theater itself is a funky shape that gives you a weird plane'arium-like sense of cameraderie with the rest of the small audience. But the unfortunate fact is that the dome-morphed picture is so bizarrely distorted that even in the very middle of the theater, you can't properly enjoy the movie. Doorways are curved like Dali watches, close-ups of faces look like half-baked Shrinky Dinks. And on top of all that, the Dome screen really isn't all that big. I've seen many 35mm screens that were bigger. I've sat seven rows back at the Chinese Mann. I know from big screens. But the "real" IMAX, the flat kind-- now that's something else again. The sound is crystal-clear, the visual detail is crisp and clear, the colors are rich... a thoroughly enjoyable experience. I only wish now that I'd had some way to see this version and the previously released theatrical version side by side. I have no idea what's been modified for this release, aside from the one scene ("Human Again"). And likewise I can't tell any differences in the new TLK trailer, other than general audio-visual richness and clarity, which I ascribe simply to the IMAX presentation. I'm led to believe that there's a lot of extra detail that's been added in; I can't see it, though. I don't know what I should be looking for. There weren't more birds than usual, I don't think there were more animals clustered around Pride Rock... I really don't know. If anybody has any insights to offer, I'd love to hear them. I'm not wild about the fact that IMAX is a 4:3 ratio screen, by the way. All this special-edition-ness, and it's pan-n-scanned. But hey! That means the DVD release will be the world premiere of the leftmost and rightmost vertical strips of the "Human Again" scene! `:)` Anyway, the movie itself is very cool. I never saw it in theaters in its original run (it wasn't until TLK that I started to take an interest in such things), but now I wish I had. There's a historical awareness to the character design that was pretty much lost after BatB-- it was the last movie where the characters (especially the secondary ones, the villagers and so on) were designed in that 40's-Peter-and-the-Wolf style, with the round red noses and the big yappy mouths and the manic motions where people throw each other around the stage and bounce each other like basketballs and gravity's effects are like elastic. Mingled with the up-and-coming Andreas Deja's muscle-man animation of Gaston and the proto-TLK movements of the Beast, it all made for a very engaging ensemble, if inconsistent like nothing else until Pocahontas. The whole ending feels very flat, though. The characters after their transformations feel like they're animated by second-stringers, the final ballroom dance is populated by 2D courtiers in tableau, and then there's the Prince: blaugh! I always get the feeling that Belle only kissed him because the camera was watching and she didn't want to lose face. His head and hands were disproportionately big (to say nothing of his lips), and his animation was bad. And these are only a few of the reasons why she probably would have been just as happy if he'd stayed just the way he was.