stories grown deep like stars | 12:51 PM >

There's something I've been meaning to say to you, dear readers, for about a week now.

OH

MY

FRACKING

GOD!!!

Don't listen to Rotten Tomatoes or the other reviewers, listen to me: this is it. This is the movie the real fans, the folks who read the black and white comics, suffered through the Archie rewrites, enjoyed the TV series, played all the video games, watched the three movies and waited for a proper rebirth, have been waiting for. Sure, there are problems: the lip sync is often off or just wrong, and the visual difference between the studios who animated shots (as not all were done at Imagi) is very visible. The horrible one-liners during fights still fall flat. But after TMNT: The Movie III hit theatres I remember Eastman talking about the movie he'd make next if he had the chance. He said that it'd be about the Turtles a few years down the road, older and growing apart as a family. He said that something close to fifteen years ago. Took him long enough, but boy did he end up delivering.

What really shocked me was that the new aspects and influences did not overshadow the old, and the "past" is referenced in an almost reverential way while the plot moves forward. Casey and April are unmarried, but living together. (That was a shocker for a kids' movie.) Mikey still skateboards and wisecracks, but a lot of the jokes around him are actually funny. The voices, movements, and attitudes of all the Turtles really set them apart age-wise, and you do end up feeling like Leo, then Raph, are the oldest two. And without spoiling anything, the fight scene in the rain is another thing most folks have been waiting to have done properly for fifteen years. They could have skimped here, having it interrupted early or not directly showing some of the hardest hits, but they don't. By the end of it I was tingling.

Anyway, the move was apparently produced for $35 million, so after the second weekend they're close to making back their investment. I hope this bodes well for the sequel they hint at, at the end. And oh, the voice talent! Sarah Michelle Gellar playing April O'Neil, Patrick Stewart as Max Winters... Even the four "unknowns" they chose to play the Turtles were perfect.

Anyway, enough geeking out. Go see the movie.

Speaking of animation, though, the MTV Spiderman series by Mainframe is up on iTunes now. I watched a few previews, just to check quality, and was surprised at how unbelievably bad the animation looks to me now. I wonder if I'd feel the same way about Beast Wars?

Last week I, sick of Windows XP locking up (even after a reinstall), installed Ubuntu. The hype seems well-deserved. Naturally, being a Linux distribution it has rough edges and places that were designed by engineers for regular people -- thusly, being totally incomprehensible -- but overall it's more than a step in the right direction, a step that's been needed for far too long. The two things I was most happy about: my wireless card worked out of the box, and -- AND! -- getting X up and running with full OpenGL acceleration on my NVidia 6200 was actually *easy* thanks to Envy Project. It still took too much dealing with package dependency hell (for one thing, to get the most useful packages that are kind of "blacklisted" you have to edit the apt-get repository list to include the extra spots), and out of the box DVD playback doesn't work (that's a big thing), but overall it's been the best distro I've tried yet.

I've also been playing a lot with Blender 2.43's new Sculpt Mode. I've finally got a handle on how to best use the tools. It's not quite like sculpting in clay, as you can stretch things into shapes that don't work properly at all, but once you figure out what's possible it's actually quite nice. I've been using it to work on my current project, sculpting a kind of matted hair, to pretty decent success:

I'm actually further along than that image shows, at this point. I might post here again when she's closer to done.