Movies

MILE HIGH TOY STORY

Could a digital animation studio thrive in Denver?

Colorado isn't where most movie studios look for talented animators-- a fact Nathan Briley and Elder Cordero would like to change. "Here in Colorado, there's no studio to create animation," Cordero said. "Maybe if we can make deals with another animation company, we can create jobs." An animation studio, however, is a distant goal for Briley and Cordero. For the time being, they are concentrating on a computer-animated short film.

The 14-minute film, titled Monarca, will be submitted to various film festivals. Once on the festival circuit, Briley and Cordero hope it will get the attention of investors who can provide the finances needed to expand Monarca to a 105- minute feature.

Monarca takes place in the Amazon, drawing heavily from Cordero's experiences. Cordero, who is directing the film (Briley is producing), grew up in South America. "I was always in contact with nature," he said. "That helped me a lot to appreciate what nature can do for you."

Cordero also talked about building his own toys as a child, and developing a highly visual imagination. Using this ability to visualize, he developed and built a robotic arm with two friends in high school. After winning several awards at various science fairs, they submitted the arm to an oil company, which awarded them each with a $45,000 scholarship. This brought Cordero to the Colorado School of Mines in 1992, where he studied engineering for three years.

It was during a trip to Disneyland in 1994 that Cordero first got the idea to pursue animation. "They had a Lion King parade, and seeing all those creatures from The Lion King, and the kids on the street ... it was amazing. That was my first time at Disneyland and that's when the idea popped into my head: 'Wow. You know, I would like to see a parade based on creatures from the Amazon. '"

From that idea came a story about a group of scientists who are competing with a greedy corporation to find a substance that can only be found on the top of a mountain in the Amazon. Along the way, one of the members of the scientists' group meets an Amazonian woman who introduces him to the various creatures of the rainforest.

"Besides Fern Gully, there's really no other [animated] film about the rainforest," Briley said. "And Fern Gully was a real green [environmental] film ... we're not trying to do that. We're trying to have a really fun film in the Amazon, and show the beauty of the Amazon."

In addition to avoiding comparisons to Fern Gully, Briley and Cordero are trying to make a film that isn't reminiscent of A Bug's Life. After showing storyboards to various children, they decided a computer animated film with an ant in a major role was too similar to the Disney film, so the focus of the film was shifted to cover a wider variety of rainforest animals.

A Bug's Life comparisons aside, the reactions from focus groups have been positive, leading Briley and Cordero to the conclusion that they are creating a good family film. The fact that Monarca entertains children will also be a major selling point to distributors, who may be attracted by the marketability and merchandising options a successful family film presents.

"We're doing a film that's first and foremost one of the best films we can do," Briley said, "but marketing-wise, there's a lot more opportunities ... so there's a lot of reasons for someone to invest in us. Not just to make a really cool film that's going to do well on the movie side, but also with the merchandising side there's a lot of opportunities."

Ultimately, Briley and Cordero would like to use the success of Monarca to bring an animation studio to Denver. "There are people in the local area who are really skilled in computer animation, but there's not a whole lot, at least creatively, for them to work on," Briley said.

That success is still a long way off. At the moment, Briley and Cordero are still financing the film out of their own pockets. "I work a lot of overtime to finance the project," Cordero said. "A lot of overtime. I work for Qwest, but hopefully, this year I will quit."

"That happens a lot, though," Briley responded. "Especially on a first project. You have to finance yourself until you prove yourself."

Briley and Cordero said they have found a few corners to cut without drastically affecting the quality of their film. By using a less expensive computer than most animation studios (" The process is kind of slow, but the results are the same quality," Cordero commented.) and using people who will work for free or for a portion of the film's profits, Briley and Cordero are able to save money until they can find companies that will invest in Monarca.

--Chris Ward

Movie Reviews

SNATCH

When I went to the screening of this movie, there were a hell of a lot of Euro-looking people sitting all around me. Maybe it's because they were all from Europe and love British director Guy Ritchie, or maybe it's just an annual invasion and I wasn't warned. They were all wearing black clothes too hip for Colorado, and a lot of them had their hair dyed wild and aggressive colors.

Judging by their hair and hip posturing I'll bet most of them have seen and liked Requiem for a Dream, and therefore enjoyed this movie's editing style. Certain scenes jump and grind together like the

heroin injection bits in Requiem, though of course these sequences are nowhere near as grim as even the lighter scenes in that delectable nightmare.

I don't think that Ritchie would be making movies if it weren't for Pulp Fiction. Not that he should feel bad about this; at least, instead of completely biting that style, he has pepped it up a bit with some music-video sensibilities and added some nearly slapstick comedy. Just like Pulp Fiction, this film is full of fast talking criminals you wish you were as cool as thrown into cataclysmal situations you'll never be in

and find bloody resolutions. This film is not a huge departure from Ritchie's similar and equally likable, Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.

Snatch's action revolves around a diamond heist, and Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels is about a drug deal run amok. Snatch has nearly the same feel but a bit more charisma from a diverse cast including Benecio Del Toro as a creepy four-fingered gambler, Brad Pitt as a gypsy ("pikey") boxer, Vinnie Jones as a bullet-toothed roughneck, and Dennis Farina as a wise-ass American diamond peddler. Rade Serbedzija is superb as an insane, tough and despicable Russian who dodges bullets.

My problem with movies like Snatch is they make me wish I knew how to fight, shoot guns, and rob. It's tough after seeing a movie that makes being a hard-ass look so engaging, and easy for me to snap out of it and realize that I'm still a pussy. This movie really took the gem out of my doughnut. B+
--Josh Tyson

TRAFFIC

Watch enough nightly news programs like "20/ 20" or whichever one has that dolt Stone Phillips-- and accept the truism that America is losing the war on drugs. Bullocks.

Try holding onto that belief when you're partying with rich preppy white kids (Erika Christensen, Topher Grace) who attend private schools. These young Americans are on the winning end of the drug trafficking situation. They're smoking reefer, snorting cocaine, freebasing some other white shit, and best part is, it's as cheap and pure as ever. And it's all tits until one of them ODs and has to be dragged to the emergency room. Pity.

And those crooked cops in Tijuana (Benicio Del Toro, Jacob Vargas), they're making the shit cheaper thanks in part to the ineptitude and manipulability of American anti-drug task force. See, the DEA works off of tips from one drug cartel and ends up busting that cartel's rival. Pawns that they are (Don Cheadle, Luis Guzman), the DEA still work diligently to win this war. And the cartels with their unlimited resources can continually refine their product with plenty of money left over to pay off the border patrol and export the stuff with minimal hitches.

America even has a Drug Czar (Michael Douglas). This token position is designed to put a name and a face on our front lines--" We mean business!" this face says. With utterly expendable policy and procedure, he gets to run circles around the whole situation looking for an in.

What the DEA doesn't realize is these kingpins they're after are actually pillars of their communities. With wives (Catherine Zeta-Jones), children, charity fund-raisers and SUVs. Can't get much more upper-middle-class than that.

Just as this half-assed and confusing analysis suggests, this is a complex movie and it may take more than one sitting to get it fully figured out. Who's working for whom, who's doing what to whom, and for what reason, etc.

This movie has solid performances all around, especially from Del Toro and Christensen, tight cinematography, and a harmonious way of weaving these stories together into one sweeping panoramic dissertation on the drug trafficking situation between Mexico and the United States as a whole. Director Steven Soderbergh (sex, lies, and videotape, Schizopolis, Out of Sight, The Limey) has this one dialed. A---
Josh Tyson

Cast Away

[PG-13 2h 23m]
Tom Hanks gets left on an island by himself without $1 million.
Starring: Tom Hanks, Helen Hunt, Nick Searcy.
Directed by: Robert Zemeckis.

I've never been there, but after seeing Cast Away, I believe that Tennessee is the strangest place on our planet. It has to be, since Tennessee is portrayed twice as alien as the deserted isle Tom Hanks finds himself on during this long movie's middle third.

Hanks plays a FedEx employee with a pretty almost-fiancée (Helen "Use The Oscar To Get Roles While You Can" Hunt) and a serious obsession with clocks. On the way to Malaysia his plane crashes and he's washed up on an island smaller than Go-Go's offices. There are no monkeys, no pirate ships, no waterfalls cascading into crystal-clear lakes where bikini-clad brunettes swim. Survival is a matter of wit, luck, and recreating human inventions one painstaking breakthrough at a time.

You'd think this would be a movie kept secret as long as possible, for fear of spoiling the plot. However, thanks to Dreamworks' ham-handed trailer, everyone already knows about Wilson the plucky volleyball and the main character's triumphant return to civilization after four years of maroonment. The island stuff makes for a pleasant movie, but the writers must have known the marketing folks were going to suck the drama out of the movie by spoiling the ending in the commercials, because everything in civilization is infused with Slow High Drama. People are subdued, make puzzling decisions, ignore plot holes, and generally act like fictional retards-- a bad move in a story that emphasizes realism in its middle. Even Hanks seems at a loss for how to act in the denouement. Aside from his astonishing weight loss, he never gives a sense of what his New Self is thinking about all this humanity. He looks, for all the world, like a lost puppy, as if director Robert Zemeckis only included the footage of Hanks standing around between scenes, and cut the scenes themselves. C
--Chris J. Magyar

DVD Report

THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI (1920)

Dr. Caligari is a traveling sideshow artist whose show is built around Cesare the Somnambulist. Cesare has been asleep for 23 years, yet can answer any question posed to him. At night Caligari sends Cesare on murderous errands, and our narrator/ hero Francis sets about figuring out who is behind the killing. What follows is a series of plans and counter-plans, as well as bizarre and shocking revelations about what is really going on.

For a movie 80 years old, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari still works remarkably well. The sets that director Robert Wiene uses to enliven the production are the very definition of expressionistic, and their influence can be seen in the works of filmmakers even today, notably Tim Burton. If you want to see the roots of movie horror, you need look no further.

There is a black, semitransparent horizontal line that runs through parts of the film, starting with the scene where Caligari first presents Cesare to the fair. This line, about nine-tenths of the way up the screen, must be a flaw in the original elements, because 16mm prints of the film I've seen usually crop the top of the screen off at this line. All in all, leaving the line in is preferable, because the cropped versions badly throw off the film's compositions.

The big feature here is an audio commentary by Mike Budd. The commentary is rather dry, and is devoted almost entirely the artistic merits and techniques of the film. Don't expect many interesting stories about the making of this film, but get ready for theories about how Caligari foresees Hitler! There is also another short film called Genuine: A Tale of a Vampire. Apparently only excerpts from the complete film are included. No context is given on the disc for why this film is included, but it is directed by Robert Wiene and features some Caligari-esque sets. B

--Scott Hamilton