The CG Society selected 2015’s Allegro’s Legendy Polskie Film SMOK (The Dragon) as one of the 10 best CGI films of the year. I have to agree that this is an amazing little film, and while it uses the visual medium to tell the majority of its story I was grateful for the limited number of English subtitles it needed to get the dialog across.
Warcraft looks like the winner this weekend, with some amazingly well done CGI and Fx work, and hopefully a story and plot that is just as good. When the portal between universes opens, one race faces destruction, the other extinction, unless they can learn to work together. The MMORPG the movie is based on has a huge number of devoted players, if they were true enough to the source material they can’t help but have a hit on their hands; if they weren’t, then the deserve the crash and burn that same fanbase will put them through. Most games turned into movies have been real turkeys, but there have been a few exceptions; I hope this is one of them. If you are not interested in this one, other options this weekend include Therapy for a Vampire, in which Sigmund Freud has to help a vampire deal with his undying relationship with his wife, and Now You See Me 2, which only has to be half as good as the original to be a total winner.
Monster Trucks will be hitting the theaters this January, and it looks like silly family fun for all! I don’t know (or care, really) whether it has a serious story at its core to impart a range of morality tales for our edification. But I have every intention of being in the theater to enjoy it on the big screen once they release it.
It looks like they have put some effort into Warcraft: The Beginning, which will be hitting theaters on June 16th, 2016. There is nothing to their web site so far, but there is a little bit of info on their facebook page. Personally, the trailer sold me; I will definitely be in the theater for this one.
A short but intense and well executed Sci-Fi story, with some amazing CGI work. The Gift was created as part of the Phillips/DDB London/RSA collaborative effort to show off the video quality of some Phillips TVs. What is amazing about this piece is that DDB London wrote the five lines of dialog, and handed it to five different directors, who made five totally different films. The phillips.com/cinema web site doesn’t seem to be there any more, but it looks like they uploaded everything to their YouTube account. If you want to see them all on a single page, check out the Creative Review article.