I rented Equilibrium over the Memorial Day weekend. Not surprisingly, due to it’s treatment by the studio, I had totally missed this one. It was in-and-out fairly quickly at the end of last year–I barely remember seeing some stuff about it on AICN, but that’s about it.

Ignore the box art and review quotes hammering home the comparisons to The Matrix—aside from an admittedly nifty martial-art-with-pistols called “Gun Kata”, this film owes more to Fahrenheit 451 than it does to the Wachowski brothers’ work. Christian Bale plays the lead, a “Grammaton Cleric” (and tell me that wasn’t written by a gamer) whose job it is to track down “Sense Offenders”–those who rebel against the government’s laws against emotion and emotionally provacative works such as art, literature and music. Verdict? Pretty cool. A good rental.

Still very busy. I’m about two months out from the move back to Kansas, and the freelance gigs are coming in…which is great, because that will make for a seamless transition to full-time writing. Of course, it does mean that right now, I’m essentially working two full-time jobs, but that’s OK. I won’t have to worry about that for much longer. It’s good to be back to the swing of research and writing again….well, research I enjoy, anyway. There’s research at my current corporate day job, but I can’t find it within myself to get excited about IRS 401(k) guidelines, or the “Catch-up Contributions” allowed under the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001. Reading

The Great Pulp Heroes
and The Deer and The Cauldron (both for projects I’m currently working on) is much, much more interesting.

GMS

Big-budget Pulp

Read this L.A. Times Story about “The World of Tomorrow”, a big-budget, digital-effects pulp action movie tentatively set for release next year, starring Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow. Don’t know how this one slipped under my radar….

To quote the article:

“World of Tomorrow” is set in 1939 (the title comes from the New York World’s Fair of that year) and owes much to the Saturday-morning serials that movie theaters used to show. It is split into seven “chapters,” with titles like “Winged Terror” and “Shadow of Tomorrow.” As for the film’s content, Avnet, an experienced producer who found success with “Risky Business” 20 years ago, and who also directed such films as “Fried Green Tomatoes” and “Up Close and Personal,” described it as “Buck Rogers meets Indiana Jones.”

It begins in New York City, where Polly Perkins (Paltrow), crack reporter for the Chronicle newspaper, wonders why so many world-famous scientists are missing. Around this time, strange flying machines threaten Manhattan, and gigantic walking robots tramp down the city’s streets, crushing everything in their path. Polly joins forces with her old flame and sometime adversary Capt. Joseph Sullivan (Law), also known as Sky Captain. He commands the Flying Legion, battling bad guys in his Warhawk P-40. He and Polly fly to a remote part of Nepal (think Shangri-La) to track down the crazed mastermind Dr. Totenkopf, who seems to want to destroy the world.

OH HELL YES. Sign me up. I’ll even willingly put up with Gwyneth Paltrow for this one.

(Cool article about digital effects compositing, too. Give it a read.)

GMS