Image Credit: Everett CollectionGetting pumped and ready to review the new Clash of the Titans, I of course went back to watch the original version. It would be fair to say that its special effects have not aged well. Then again, they were touchingly out-of-date even at the time. Made in 1981, Clash was the last movie to feature the special-effects magic of Ray Harryhausen (who produced the film), the wizard of stop-motion imagery whose heyday was the 1950s and ’60s, when he was known for the then-wondrous effects in movies like The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), Jason and the Argonauts (1963), and One Million Years B.C. (1966). (The latter film quickly found a place in pop culture as an automatic springboard for Raquel-Welch-in-a-loincloth jokes. Her effect was indeed special, though the movie also had some extremely cool dinosaurs.)
In 1981, the special-effects era — by which I mean, the all-F/X-all-the-time era — was just in its infancy, and Clash of the Titans, clunky and backward-looking as it was, had obviously been made to capitalize on the success of Star Wars. It even had a chirpy mechanical owl that was a shameless knockoff of R2-D2. At that point, however, Ray Harryhausen was swimming against the tide. In general, stop-motion imagery, with the grand and glorious exception of King Kong (1933), has a way of becoming almost comically dated with time. When you watch the classic 1964 TV Christmas special Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, it now appears as if those little models of Rudolph, Herbie, and Yukon Cornelius are basically just standing still, with an occasional flash of movement. Harryhausen’s films, seen from the vantage of our era and its impeccably smooth digital imagery, look 10 times more herky-jerky now than they once did.
My personal favorite of his movies was always The Mysterious Island (1963), with its eye-popping parade of giant wildlife creatures (that crab! that rooster! those bumblebees! those fin-backed dino lizards!). It was much more fun to me than any nuclear-accident monster movie. The most stunning of Harryhausen’s films, by almost any standard, is Jason and the Argonauts, with its awesome skeletal armies. Harryhausen’s movies were outsize creature-feature fairy tales designed to bliss-out your inner child. And they did. By the time he made Clash of the Titans, though, his imagery no longer gave you that full, amazing storybook “Wow!” It was now lodged in a zone somewhere between wonder and kitsch. READ FULL STORY »
Image Credit: Jaimie TruebloodWho needs Washington when you can have White Castle? Kal Penn’s reps confirm that the actor will leave his post as Barack Obama’s associate director of public engagement to return to his acting career. First up for the actor: a new Harold & Kumar movie, this one with a Christmas theme. New Line Studios has confirmed that the movie, to be directed by newcomer Todd Strauss Schulson, will begin filming in late June with an eye on a holiday 2011 release. (Creators Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg are moving to Universal to direct American Pie 4.) The studio, now a division of Warner Bros., is still deliberating whether it will be shot in 3-D. Penn began his White House stint last year, shortly after his character on the television show House was abruptly killed off in April, per Penn’s request to join the Obama administration.
