señor taco’s travels

No Country For Old Men

Last week I got a chance to see No Country For Old Men at work. I didn’t know much about it going into it and I had no expectations other than it was a Coen Brothers film.

There is little I can say that many reviewers before me haven’t already said. This movie is an excellent execution of cinema. I was blown away by Roger Deakins’ cinematography. It was so beautiful and felt like real life, never taking you out of the story.

The acting was superb. Josh Brolin was great as a person living in West Texas. His depiction of a person living a life where he is getting by and surprised by little. His character, a Vietnam vet, behaved exactly as one would expect. Javier Bardem executed a fantastic role as the bad guy. He’s carried the perfect persona of evil but also with a sense of morals, twisted as they may be.

Overall I can’t recommend this movie enough.

Rating: 5/5

The Lookout

I saw The Lookout on video and I’m a bit sad I didn’t get to see it in the theater. Both Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Chris) and Jeff Daniels (Lewis) ran perfectly believable roles. The movie really sucked me in and made me care for Chris and Lewis and have sympathy for how they were flawed by exaggerating the flaws we have in ourselves.

As with Brick this is a quirky kind of film that really gives an actor like Gordon-Levitt a chance to show that beyond 3rd Rock from the Sun’s comedy he can be very serious and versatile. I look forward to seeing more movies with him.

The story was very engaging and real. These kinds of stories feel very simple but has so much emotional depth that it sucks you in. See it if you can, I recommend it on an HD format if possible.

Rating: 4.75/5

The Devil And Daniel Johnston

I love well done documentaries. The Devil and Daniel Johnston is one of those. Daniel Johnston is a singer, songwriter, and artist. He gained a bit of notoriety in the 80s and fortunately he documented a lot of his life with audio and film.

Seeing the story of Daniel move from creative genius to nervous breakdown to his current life in Waller, Texas gives a great insite into how the world sees Daniel.

Sadly we can never know exactly what was going and how Daniel was seeing the world, but we can get a very good look through the hard work of the film makers. They poured over a lot of audio and footage and interviewed many people that knew and worked with Daniel to paint a very vibrant picture.

Daniel has been covered by many artists. For anyone that’s even a little bit creative I highly recommend viewing The Devil and Daniel Johnston.

Rating: 5/5

Helvetica

If ever there was an obsession for designers it’s typefaces. The movie Helvetica catalogs the history, usage, and current philosophies on the use of the sans-serif typeface Helvetica. Helvetica is every where you look. You probably see it and don’t realize it. It’s a clean typeface designed by the Swiss type designer Max Miedinger with Eduard Hoffmann. The simplicity and neutrality of Helvetica allowed it to become a staple of 20th century modern design.

There are people that love the type face and there are people that hate the type face. Both sides are presented well but there is a bit of a bias towards the love and positive aspects of Helvetica. I doubt this movie would be interesting to people not interested in design but it’s short enough that it won’t bore you if you try it. The extras are really cool, more of the interviews from the movie that expand on design that might not be related to Helvetica.

In the movie there is only a small mention of the typeface Arial. Arial is a cheap nock-off of Helvetica that stems from Microsofts desire to not pay licensing fees to Linotype for Helvetica. If you use Arial please stop now. Just switch to Helvetica and produce better looking documents. If you want more on Helvetica vs. Arial then you can just do a Google search but here’s the easy way to spot Arial. Comic Sans too, just don’t use it.

Overall, Helvetica is a great documentary that shows passion in normalcy. Design-type people should see it for sure. For non-design types it does provide hints about how designers work and think.

Rating: 4.75/5

This movie is definitely not the 1990 rubber suit version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I really enjoyed TMNT (2007) and I think it went a long way towards capturing the feel of the comic series.

In watching it the city of New York just didn’t feel right. Over at Ironic Sans They addressed this very same issue. It was good, but not in a “hey lookit, I know that location or skyline” way.

On the animation side the animation was well done with the exception of the lip sync just not meshing up well, but that could have been done with an eye towards dubbing the movie in to multiple languages and wasn’t distracting once I stopped paying attention to it. The lighting was solid if a bit bright for my tastes.

Overall I enjoyed it and I hope that more movies get made. It makes me hopeful for the Astro Boy film that Imagi is working on now.

Rating: 3.5/5

I wish they would show this before every movie these days. AquaTeen Hunger Force rules.

After a good Saturday ride Jason called me a we went and saw The Host. I didn’t know anything about the movie other than it was getting good reviews, a lot of people at work really wanted to see it, and the poster has a person in the grasp of a tentacle. What more do you need?

The film is from South Korea and features visual effects by San Francisco-based, The Orphanage.  I’m glad they released it as a subtitled movie rather than an english dub as the emotion in the voices was good to hear.  The movie is not a horror movie as some would think (like the couple that sat next to me and I had to tell to be quiet twice).  It’s a straight up monster movie with laughs.  They were purposefully trying to get laughs and it worked, because when you weren’t supposed to laugh you knew it.

The visual and special effects were great and really helped to sell the story.  In a horror movie they would have hidden the monster for a while, where as in The Host they brought it out as soon as they could and it worked great.  The actors playing the central family did a good job of coming across as somewhat disfunctional, but still loving.

The ending isn’t what you’d expect and I think that is a good thing.  The only knock I have against it is that there were a couple of points in the film where the pacing was a bit slow.  It seemed like maybe a little tighter editing would have fixed that, but this is a Korean film and I’m not familiar with what works in that culture.  I’ll probably buy this once it’s out on video because it’s going to be watchable again and again.

Rating: 4.75/5

Jason and I went to see 300 last Friday at the 12:01am screening. I actually loved the film. It was a great translation from the graphic novel by Frank Miller and it lent itself to story telling as if you were listening to a person recount it all.

It was definitely gorey but used it to tell the story. I was also happy that the movie was a svelte 117 minutes. There were many places where it could have slowed down more in exposition, but the director and editor just kept going and telling the story.

Overall I think I’d say I’d see this movie again, and I might when it comes to work on Tuesday.

Rating: 4.25/5

Last night I went with J9, Lorelle, and Kari to the href="http://www.picturepubpizza.com/">Parkway Theater to see a screening
of The Lost Boys. I
hadn’t seen that film in about ten years and I forgot some of the cornier
things, but it was still fun to watch again. I keep forgetting about the
Parkway. I definitely need to go there more often.

Recently my friend Yun Shin
asked me if I’d be an extra in an independent movie he’s directing (he may
have written it too, I’m not sure). So, I showed up and was Speed Dating
Extra #1 for the day. Little did I know Yun would stick me in a prominent
place right in front of the lens. There were about eight to ten shots where
I’m right in the frame, more than half of them I’m behind women that are
talking to the main character and facing the lens.

It was an interesting process to watch and be a part of. I’d do it again,
but I really enjoy being behind the scenes in my work much more. The high-lite
of the day was sitting through many shots with another extra named Kate.
Not only was she beautiful, but she’s smart and witty. I tell you, if I
didn’t think it was inappropriate to ask her out on the set I would
have. Now we’ll have to see if I can work up the chutzpah to do it
after the fact.

I’ll be sure to post if the movie ever comes out.

src="/SenorTaco/images/incredibles-1.jpg" alt="at the wrap party" />

Photo by Dan Weeks

This weekend was the Pixar cast and crew
screening and wrap party for The
Incredibles. My roommate was kind enough to invite me and I’m really glad
he did.

Not only was the movie fantastic (and that’s all I’ll say for
now because I don’t want to spoil it for anyone) but the wrap party was great.
It was held at the old Alameda Air Base in one of the hangers (see the above
exterior shot). There was plenty of booze and food and I got to hang out
with my friends. My roommate and I both rented tuxedos with white dinner
jackets and I must say, we were pretty sharp looking.

It was a fun night. They had photographers doing prom-type pictures. At the
end of the night I got one of the best pics I took of my friend Jaime posing
with his picture in which he’s posing with some of the Incredibles characters.

src="/SenorTaco/images/incredibles-2.jpg" alt="Jaime posing" />

Photo by Dan Weeks

Okay, so they’ve met before, but yesterday it was announced that the Scrat
short Gone Nutty was
nominated for an Oscar in the Short Film (Animated) category. This is the
third project I’ve worked on that’s been nominated for an Academy Award (the
other two being Bunny which won the Oscar in 1998 for Best Short Film
(Animated) and Ice Age in 2002 (but lost to Spirited Away)).

All of this work was of course at Blue
Sky which seems like a lifetime ago already. Congratulations to everyone
that’s worked on it and best of luck to them on February 29th.

I went this weekend and saw Big Fish and I liked it a lot. Tim Burton
is a great director, but sometimes his storytelling falls apart. Thankfully
Big Fish already had a good foundation of a story behind it so it didn’t
suffer from Burton’s often wandering eye (I mean, really, just look at
Sleepy Hollow, so much potential but without a strong story Burton
couldn’t save it).

The storytelling as a mix of present day and what we think is fantasy helps
paint a picture of the father that everyone should be able to grab on to. He’s
just someone that wants to make life interesting. The cinematography was
great because the lighting was on mood the entire time and the camera angles
always evoked the correct emotion. I loved the use of forced perspective to
tell the giant’s story and the deliberate under-use of the split-focus lens
only where it really helped (unlike in href="http://imdb.com/title/tt0272020/" title="The Last Castle @ IMDB">The
Last Castle where it must have been used in about 30 shots, bleh).

Some of the people I was with didn’t like the movie because of the slower pace
in the story telling. I however thought it fully connected with reality.
That’s the way the story should have been paced. I loved it. The mix of
what one thinks is fantasy with what is real is great. The way it was all
wrapped up at the end worked great too. A touching ending mixed with great
storytelling, go see Big Fish if you like Tim Burton and want to see
a good flick.

(update @ Tue Jan 20 16:39:53 PST 2004)
On further thinking one thing that really bugged me about Big Fish is
there was no reason to care about Billy Crudup’s character. You were so in
love with the Albert Finney/Ewan McGregor character that you didn’t care why
Crudup’s character had the feelings he did or acted the way he did. He just
came across as a bit of a whiney bastard.