Sparkles after Hitting

Rating: Null/10 (23 August 2010)

This is the most fun I've had at the movies for a while. I believe is it because it is inventive in several ways and the inventiveness is coherent through the thing and across the narrative pathways (cinematic effects, narrative rhythm, character reactions). It is not difficult to push the envelope in any one of these, in fact I see it done even accidentally because film conventions form such narrow roads.
But it seems difficult as getout to control it well enough that it emanates from a coherent world, to make a long form project that lives in the inventiveness rather than just sees it from time to time. Much of this is credited to the filmmaker, and how he can focus his team. Since there is very little motion capture, the effects did not have to be planned in advance and I imagine there was a lot of tinkering.
Some of the credit has to go to the source, which I understand is a comic. I have not seen it but I imagine the overall shape was set and refined there.
But we have to give the key actor credit too. He has to understand the cosmology of the thing well enough to convincingly inhabit it. This is a difficult acting challenge. Remember Bill Murray? It was his gift I believe to anticipate the finished tone of the film and place himself square within it. "Groundhog Day" depended on us seeing that it made sense to him.
I have to admit to a generational deficiency that made this even better for me. The girls were unattractive, excepting the redhead drummer who is shunted to buddy status. They were emotionally damaged, intellectual nitwits and not physically desirable. In the story of course, they are all a guy lives for, literally. I am imagining that it made sense to the young audience that these trivial beings mattered. But for me, it increased the weirdness and otherworldliness of the thing.
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.