Flags Premiere!

While this movie opens to the general public on October 20th, the cast and crew will be seeing it nine days earlier, on October 11th in Beverley Hills. It'll be my first cast and crew screening here in LA, and I'm not sure what to expect. Red carpet and Clint Eastwood? Subdued mayhem? WWII fans protesting or cheering? I can't wait. We've got a couple more weeks on Letters, and even though it contains less gratuitous effects shots, there are a significant amount of visual effects that we did add into the show. Nope, not gonna tell ya what they are. You'll have to see the film to find out!

Last night I got the chance to see Open Season over at Imageworks.. While the VES turnout wasn't great (Imageworks crew had their screening on Monday night), we still had a good time. We saw it in the De Mille theatre, which is a smallish theatre located on the Culver City Sony lot. I was hoping that it might be digitally projected, but nope, regular old film. The great part about screeners is that there are no commercials or previews! Yay for getting straight to the movie. The humor in the film was spotty, some great laugh out loud moments, dispersed with copious amounts of silence. I wasn't a huge fan of the character design, but the fur rendering and water effects were excellent. The environments were nice, but sometimes lacking in detail. The voice talent was adequent, but I still could picture Martin Lawrence playing a bear, as opposed to a bear talking, if that makes any sense. I guess that's the problem with getting recognizeable voices, you picture the actor, not the part they're playing. I had the same problem with Owen Wilson in Cars, but had no trouble with the actors in The Incredibles.