Batman: Dead End

After reading about the tragic suicide of actor Andrew Koenig, best known for his portrayal of “Boner” during the 1980s on television’s Growing Pains, I was surprised to learn he played the Joker in one of the best fan films I’ve ever seen, Batman: Dead End. Apparently this short movie premiered during the summer of 2003 at the San Diego Comic Con, but I wasn’t aware of it until Dan showed it to me last year. I’ve posted the movie below. It’s eight minutes long and was directed by Sandy Collora, who, as of this writing, has made a feature film called Hunter Prey (See the trailer here). I couldn’t find any information about a release or DVD, so my guess is you’ll have to keep checking Netflix for a release date.

At any rate, if you haven’t seen the video below, check it out. Nothing could be cooler than Batman, the Joker, Aliens and Predators, right?

Theater Goobs Monkeyhump Avatar’s 3D

After screening a murky, dark and generally crappy presentation of Sherlock Holmes last night, sympathy is in full effect for Danny, a regular reader/commenter here at AATM who recently pointed out the horrible 3D experience he had with Avatar at a Westates theater:

I’ve never had an issue seeing 3D at the theater. [I] saw Up in 3D and A Christmas Carol 3D and both were fine. I got the depth of field and all was nifty. But this…this was bad… Lines meshing through lines, focus slightly off, going crossed eyed when subtitles would pop up on screen. There was zero 3D effect for me.

Apparently, the Westates theater chain told Danny he was crazy. As it turns out, they may simply be unable to correctly operate their own equipment. Westates aren’t the only ones, either. From “Tech guy Al Magliochetti” as noted over at Hollywood Elsewhere, L.A. theaters are half-assed too:

“A 3D frame is made up of two images, a left and a right. Polarizing filters are used on the projector along with convergence lenses to merge both images into one and then filter it so that each of the two images is sent to the appropriate eye and canceled out by the other.”

“The goobs, however, appear to be projecting the film one half frame out of sync, which would normally invert the 3D and make it backwards (background objects appearing closer). And yet to fix that screwup they also inverted the polarizers, meaning that whenever anything is static or slow moving the 3D looks fine, but the minute any fast action occurs the 3D effect collapses and the whole film flattens out until things slow down again.”

“This isn’t something that could be threaded incorrectly so I’m presuming it’s been incorrect since the opening last week, and thereby giving several thousand viewers several thousand headaches.”

That would explain a lot… has anyone else experienced similar problems?

On Transformer Tuesday, Reviews Still Matter

While picking up my “you know better, but it’s the explosions!” copy of Transformers: Revenge of Bombacity The Fallen (T:ROTF)at the local Best Buy today, the checkout guy was shocked, SHOCKED, when I told him how dumb I thought Michael Bay’s latest foray into robots and asplosions was. Hypocrisy? Sure, but there’s an underlying point here: if everyone loves the movie, does reviewing it even matter?

After our review of T:ROTF on the 6/26 radio show, we received a lot of incredulous responses to the fact that we not only didn’t grope and leghump T:ROTF, we sent it home and called its parents. Everyone we spoke to seemed to have loved it. We didn’t. In fact, most reviewers who enjoyed the first one didn’t either. The usual “who listens to reviewers anyway?” consensus began percolating.

But instead of quickly debunking reviewers as out of touch, consider this: thoughtful criticism (good or bad) introduces necessary shades of contrarianism which contribute toward a holistic view. Criticism’s ability to provide underlying perspective on unrecognized or disregarded themes and techniques is the point– a contrary opinion isn’t demanding a reader to agree, but it does suggest there may be more than one facet of a film worth looking into. So here’s the kicker: where film is undeniably a medium with the innate ability to shape perception and embed itself into cultural relevancy and lexicon, its examination deserves more than a simple adrenaline rush/laugh meter litmus test.

Roger Ebert put an exclamation point on it the idea: “It’s not a critic’s job to reflect box office taste. The job is to describe my reaction to a film, to account for it, and evoke it for others. The job of the reader is not to find his opinion applauded or seconded, but to evaluate another opinion against his own.”

So hey Best Buy checkout guy. Put those shocked looks away. My head-hanging hypocrisy dictates I’ll enjoy T:ROTF on a purely visceral level as played out in spurts and clips. But please… (please!) keep in mind that as a whole, T:ROTF remains an intentional insult to your intelligence with its choice of loud over logic, geographical defiance, and insistence on overpowering your brain’s ability to process information. And when you see that shot of two wrecking balls clanging together in a thinly veiled allusion to robo-testicles, realize it’s the cinematic equivalent to hanging a set of plastic testicles from a truck– both of which require a wagging finger of shame and a quick cerebral palate douching.