Word: skies
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...time. I mean, if there's one thing that holds cinema back from being a 21st century art form, it's people. So let's go with pixels. They're cuter, cheaper, better behaved. They can simulate funny sea creatures (Shark Tale), re-create 1939 Manhattan or Shangri-La (Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow), visualize a future dystopia (Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence) with a wave of a wand, the click of a mouse...
...Sky Captain is every bit as much an animated film as Shark Tale. Kerry Conran's script has a plot lifted and sifted from lots of '30s films--The Wizard of Oz, Lost Horizon and a dozen sassy newspaper comedies. But the technique is the star here: Conran's devising of a Deco-meets-delirium universe that he projected onto a blue screen, in front of which the game, clueless stars--Jude Law as the intrepid flyboy, Gwyneth Paltrow as a plucky news gal--recited their lines...
...diminishing Conran's achievement; we're simply noting that he hasn't attached his technical virtuosity to a ripping yarn or infused it with behavioral brio. The first of its kind often doesn't work; Sky Captain may be the Moses that leads other directors to a blue-sky, blue-screen promised land...
...Oshii has been perfecting his vision for a couple of decades now. Like the Patlabor series of videos and films and the original Ghost in the Shell (1995), his new movie takes a story of tough detectives tracking sophisticated robots and dresses it in some gorgeously painterly images. As Sky Captain is set in the proto-past, Ghost 2 is set in the retro future--Blade Runner territory. Like so many films inspired by the stories of Philip K. Dick, this one is awash in meditation on the basic Phildickian questions: In a world where men and machines coexist, what...
...Satellite pictures show that 14 insurgents have moved south and prepared an ambush near Ramadi's soccer stadium. Humvees and trucks ferry troops that way. Upon arrival, they head to the rooftops. An explosion occurs to the west, and the streets cough black smoke into the sky. The town briefly goes quiet save a few isolated shots. Pigeons perch on a rooftop aerial, cooing softly. Bitsui tries to clean the blood from his fingers. "You just hate for that to happen," says Cpl. Edward B. Wiley. "You see a kid like that, it makes you sick. But some of these...