CGI
Adam Sweeting
I always liked that line in the 1960 Spartacus movie when Spartacus's lover Varinia (Jean Simmons) is bidding a silent farewell to the crucified rebel gladiator. "Tell da lady no loidering," growls the Roman sentry standing guard nearby. I can't tell you whether the line will appear in this new and lurid rehash of the Spartacus legend, though if it does it won't have quite the same Bronx ambience about it since most of the accents are from the Antipodes, the series having been shot in New Zealand. It also arrives tooled up with all available digital technology, and whatever it lacks in Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Just don’t say you weren’t warned. "The Legend Begins in 3D," it says outside the Odeon Leicester Square in rather boisterous capitals. This is very much episode one of what the moneybags on Mount Olympus, working out of their Hollywood 91601 address, envisage as an all-whizzing, all-banging trawl through the Greek legends. The formula is as you were. It’s the age-old cinematic derby, yet another epic widescreen face-off between man and special effect.Things have moved on a tad since the last time Clash of the Titans played across our screens. That was in 1981, when visual trickery was in Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Must rush, have to hurry: like the fretful White Rabbit with his pocket watch, fans have been eagerly anticipating the arrival of Tim Burton's Alice, which finally arrives in cinemas this week, albeit for a limited period following the controversial decision to push the film out quickly on DVD. Mindful of this, I hastened to the IMAX, Waterloo to catch it in 3D, larger than life and twice as natural, on the very biggest screen available. 30,000 people have already pre-booked tickets for Alice at the London IMAX. Is it worth the wait?The action is set within a framing story. Alice, now aged 19 Read more ...
Veronica Lee
For those of us brought up on classic Disney animation - from the first, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, through The Jungle Book and Lady and the Tramp to, more recently, The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast - it’s sad to think that a whole generation of children have seen animated films only through CGI and Pixar. But now comes The Princess and the Frog, Disney’s first entirely 2D, hand-drawn animation since 2002, which, with its sumptuous drawings, soft colours and Jazz Age setting, could almost be seen as a retro exercise. That is underlined by the fact that the film’s co-directors are Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There is a sequence in which a monstrous tree of otherworldly dimensions, its boughs as sturdy as oaks, its twigs as vigorous as saplings, crashes spectacularly to earth in roaring, creaking, shattering, time-expanding slo-mo. In a film that’s full of them, this is very much the premier-cru money shot. Remember the last time the director, deploying the computer-generated forces of a sound-stage deity, downed another very large object? Back then it was a boat. This time it’s a piece of wood. Tiiim-ber-r-rr!!There is no argument, of course. Avatar is an astonishing creation. For sheer Read more ...
Jasper Rees
This week the BBC News online magazine is running a Portrait of the Decade. Each day has brought a consideration of the words, the events, the people, the objects and, today, the cultural highlights of the decade. I was invited to consider those highlights.In years to come, when they look back on the culture of the Noughties, no one will struggle to identify the overarching theme. This has been the decade in which the professional, the trained talent, has had to budge up and make room. A decade ago, who’d have imagined that the biggest stars in pop would be sourced from a Saturday-night Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Door-sized detachable nipples, an angel of death with a dick to die for (literally), a cave of an arse housing a disco-dancing unit of storm troopers and an all-singing all-dancing couple of randy cadavers. Ever wondered what the Europeans might have done if they’d ever got hold of the Carry On brand? The ENO’s new production of Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre offers up one possibility. Few new productions have been so keenly anticipated as this one from Catalan theatre company La Fura dels Baus that opened the ENO’s new season last night.And it was hard not to be impressed by the scale of their Read more ...