See, for a long time I was forgetting that Topher Grace and Tobey Maguire were different people.

This has been a confusing discussion for me.

In other news I just saw Say Anything. It was adorable. And the ending was great.

ETA: And Ione Skye has a cute lisp.

I caught the middle of Shadowlands on cable over the weekend, and had to watch the rest of it even though I knew I'd be sobbing before it was over (and I was!). The last scene has Lewis meeting a new student at his office, and I could have sworn that the actor playing the student was Tobey Maguire with a dubbed-over English accent. He wasn't, but looked amazingly like him.

I just came back from A Scanner Darkly, and last night I saw The Science of Sleep. Reality is not high on my brain's list of Things To Percieve right now.

I really liked both of them. Science of Sleep provoked a really interesting discussion with DH -- turns out we were viewing the main character almost completely differently, and came away with exact opposite opinions on what the overall tone of the film was. But Gael Garcia Bernal continues to be the hottest thing EVAR, not to mention funny as all get out. And acting in three languages, meaning he's also got to be pretty smart. In conclusion, GUH. (Oh, and Michel Gondry's writing and direction were cool too. But more importantly, there's a scene with Gael Garcia Bernal in a bathtub.)

A Scanner Darkly was also pretty cool. I love this style of animation, and it works amazingly well for this story. Robert Downy Jr is hysterical, and Keanu is Keanu. (Which is to say, adorable, even animated. He's just so Keanu-y.) I can't comment on it as an adaptation because I haven't read the book in way too long to remember it that well.

Rotoscope animation is just wonderful, isn't it? I have the urge to run out and see if there are any video stores open after midnight that stock Ralph Bakshi movies.

I dislike rotoscope animation intensely. It's Uncanny Valley territory for me.

I stopped reading Spiderman comics before Venom came along. Maybe I should go do some research. What are the "Ultimate" versions?

They're kind of "modern" retellings of the Marvel canon. They started, what, four or five years ago? But everything is reset in the Ultimate universe, so the writers get to do things differently yet still tell some rockin' stories.

Ultimate Spider-Man is written by Brian Michael Bendis, who is awesome and horribly prolific like nobody's business.

I dislike rotoscope animation intensely. It's Uncanny Valley territory for me.

I get an Uncanny Valley feeling sometimes from Bakshi's rotoscoping, though I still like it. I thought he used it to good effect, rotoscoping over footage from WWI and II for Wizards and Lord of the Rings (though I dislike some of the other things he did with his LotR).

I don't get that Uncanny Valley feeling from Linklater's rotoscoping technique. I think that style really suits the films it's been/being used on.

I think that style really suits the films it's been/being used on.

Totally. There are a few things in Scanner that I can't imagine being done as well with live action, but you also get to watch real actors' real performances. There are some really subtle visual effects achieved just in the way that he plays with depth perception here.

(I thoroughly loathed Waking Life, but that wasn't the fault of the animation. I thought the animation was beautiful, and it was a shame it was being wasted on such a monumentally pretentious piece of crap.)

Guess I'll check out Scanner. And Ultimate.

I don't have time for my job.

I dislike rotoscope animation intensely. It's Uncanny Valley territory for me.

Yes, this. It also makes me feel like the animators are just being lazy. I absolutely hated it in the Bakashi LotR (not that there was much to like in it) and those current commericals that use it drive me up the wall.

Ultimate Spider-Man is written by Brian Michael Bendis, who is awesome and horribly prolific like nobody's business.

Yup. I absolutely love Ultimate Spider-man. It had a brief slump for few issues awhile back, but other than that it's been consistently really good. (Unlike, say, Ultimate X-Men which seems to be all over the place in both art and writing, but it manages to get better again every time I start thinking about dropping it.)