digital Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Last week, a company called Halcyon (which sounds like a name that would be involved with a Terminator film) bought all merchandising, licensing and film rights to The Terminator franchise from former producing partners Mario Kassar and Andrew Vajna. At the time, it was reported that Arnold Schwarzenegger would not be involved in the series going forward, what with being a Governor and all. In fact, that's been a known fact for quite awhile now, leading most fans to write off any and all potential future installments. Well, don't whip out the pen just yet; according to a few different sources, Arnold will be back ... just not in the flesh.

First off, Moviehole reports that Schwarzenegger has signed on as Executive Producer for the three Terminator pics Halcyon plans to churn out, so says the Governator's rep Annabelle Gross. Not only that, but The Post Chronicle reports Schwarzenegger has given Halycon permission to use his likeness in the fourth installment. Thus, we'll most likely see some cruddy digitally-created Arnold instead of the real thing. Halycon partner Derek Anderson said, "We'll be using computer altered stock images of Arnold. That way we can span his entire career, from the frightening '80s era Terminator to the ice cool T2 version." If used sparingly, I could see this looking fairly cool. I just hope they don't plan to use digital Arnold as a main character; it's one thing if we see his face, but once they start looping in old dialogue, I might be forced to throw something at the screen. "How many times is he going to say 'I'll be back!?'" Regardless, those who felt a Terminator 4 would be nothing without Arnold should be mildly pleased -- I mean, this is better than a five-second cameo, right?

UPDATE: Clint from Moviehole has emailed Cinematical telling us that this entire story may have been fabricated. According to Clint, Halcyon has told him that none of it is true. His source claims the quotes came from EW magazine in Australia; however, EW doesn't know a thing about it. Of course, should we hear otherwise, we'll let you know.

About a month ago Erik informed us that director Rob Cohen was preparing a movie called Rage and Fury, a film that would somehow "feature" the legendary yet still-deceased Bruce Lee. The word "feature" just kinda lingered there vaguely, and we were offered precious little additional news with which to slake our curiosity/incredulity. But in response to a script review posted over at Latino Review, Mr. Cohen has stepped forward to politely volunteer some new information...

They're going to be digitally re-creating Bruce Lee for this movie. Yes, from scratch. Like Gollum and Dobby and Aeon Flux.

Frankly I think it's nasty. I hate it when I see dead actors digitally resurrected for insurance commercials, and I sure as snot think it's kind of gross to do the same thing for a feature film. But then again, I may be asking for too much common sense from the man who directed XXX, Stealth, Daylight and The Skulls -- plus the guy already directed Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, which means that Rob Cohen is a man single-mindedly obsessed with bringing Bruce Lee back to life. Heck, maybe he could program his digital Bruce to make out with him!

For his follow-up, Rob Cohen plans to direct a musical featuring Gene Kelly, River Phoenix, Natalie Wood, Phil Hartman, Madeline Kahn and Heather O'Rourke. Think that joke's in bad taste? So do I.

In what surely will come as no surprise to anyone who has seen a big-budget film out of Hollywood lately, digital effects are transforming the way movies are made and giving filmmakers new opportunities to show things on screen they could only dream about a few years ago. Over at the New York Times, they have a pretty good article that explains how digital effects are used by filmmakers to enhance several recent films, including Director Tony Bill's WWI story Flyboys.

Digital effects have been around for quite awhile and really came into the spotlight when a computer generated stained-glass knight dropped from the window of a church and started trying to kill people in Young Sherlock Holmes. This film has the distinction of being one of the first, if not the first, to use CG effects in such a way.

A software-based company in San Francisco has released a new program that can censor DVDs on the fly. It uses an online movie database of existing "safe cuts," or you can upload your own. Their player then uses these cuts to generate a "cutlist," which plays the movie according to that list in real-time, effectively censoring it. This process does not create or leave behind a hard copy of the altered film, it edits everything in the background, splicing together a new version of the film as you watch it, leaving you with the original movie intact after viewing.

This differs from an earlier lawsuit against a company called CleanFlicks which was upheld in court because it was decided that they caused "irreparable injury to the creative artistic expression in the copyrighted movies," by actually taking your DVD, and creating a "clean" copy of it with all the sex and profanity edited out. Basically, they sent you a duplicate that they created, with none of the bad stuff in it, meaning they physically alter the original movie content on the actual media.

Another company, ClearPlay, provides a similar service through a standalone DVD player that has filters built in to screen out portions of the movie the viewer finds objectionable. Since they don't change the movie itself, they have been safe from lawsuits, so far.