A study in contrasts

I was looking something up on IMDB earlier, and saw a mention of the upcoming Seventh Son.  For some reason, I couldn't play the trailer at IMDB, so I went to Apple's trailer site.  And the first thing that caught my eye there was the sequel to How to Train Your Dragon (which I didn't know was in the works, but I'm happy to see it.  We just watched the first one again yesterday).

So I had to watch the trailer for HtTYD, and it was basically one long sequence of Hiccup and Toothless flying (plus an odd couple seconds at the end of Hiccup taking off the mask he was wearing earlier; couldn't figure out what that part was doing there).  Cool to watch, but gave nothing away, as far as what the movie's about.

Then I searched for, and watched, the Seventh Son trailer.  I should point out, here, that the reason I was curious about the movie was to see if it was related to Orson Scott Card's book (though the picture didn't look promising, as far as that was concerned, there was still hope.  I think the movie, though, is actually based on The Spook's Apprentice, which I hadn't heard of before tonight).  I haven't read that one in ages, but loved it in high school.

As expected, no relation.  But what was interesting was the contrast.  Whereas HtTYD2 was one long scene, Seventh Son probably had fifty cuts in its two and a half minutes (actually, that was a WAG; I decided to watch again, and got up to 140.  I wouldn't be surprised if I missed a few, too; although I am cheating a little bit: that 140 is counting cuts where several cuts probably came out of the same sequence, and might be together in the final.  Still, the point remains that about the longest anything stayed on screen in that trailer was about three seconds).  Interestingly, though, the Seventh Son trailer did show a fair bit more about the movie, and what's going on in it.

Anyway, will definitely watch HtTYD2.  Might watch Seventh Son on blu-ray, when the time comes.  It has potential, but I'm in no hurry (of course, I now see that it's still half a year off; I guess I'll be waiting quite a long while).

How to Train Your Dragon, Redux

I finally got around to reading the book, How to Train Your Dragon, by Cressida Cowell, over the weekend as well. I had read, somewhere, that it was very different from the movie, and it certainly was. In fact, the resemblance didn't go much beyond the names of most of the main characters.

David Brin, in his blog, recently wrote that the main difference between fantasy and sci-fi is that fantasy generally goes back to the status quo, while sci-fi generally learns from the past, and moves on. By that metric, the book is fantasy, while the movie is sci-fi.

To me, the book is ok, but the movie is excellent. And having read many books on which movies were later based, this is a very rare experience for me. I'm told the movie for Fight Club is much better than the book, but since I haven't read the book, it's impossible for me to say.

The movie, I guess, is much more positive in its outlook, and Hiccup managed to accomplish a great deal more. It's a tad oversimplified in trying to train a wild animal (particularly in how long it takes, especially the non-Toothless dragons), but just fabulously well-done. The scenes with just Toothless and Hiccup are, across the board, flippin' awesome.

The book? Eh, it wasn't bad, but just didn't do much for me. I guess we'll see how my kids like it, when they're old enough to read it. But if you've only got time for one, I'd definitely go with the movie.

Here (also) There Be Dragons

I mentioned previously seeing the trailer for 'How to Train Your Dragon'.

I never did manage to catch it in the theater (alas), but did pick it up when it came out on blu-ray. Well, I waited a couple of days to see if Target's price was better than Amazon's that weekend, but when it wasn't even close (I was surprised it wasn't within 10%; in fact, it was about 30% more), I bought it at Amazon after all.

Did I like it? Well, when it finished playing, I hit the pop-up menu to check the extras (not realizing that it was a completely separate extras menu than in the main menu), and saw 'Trivia Track'. Being curious, I went back to the second scene of the movie, and ended up watching the rest of the movie a second time with that on. It was an absolutely brilliant idea as an alternate use of a subtitle track, and was mostly interesting.

I really, really liked the part where Hiccup is being trained, and where he is making friends with Toothless. It was just a beautiful sequence of scenes. And I was very amused how the Romantic Flight (according the Trivia Track, what they called the sequence with Astrid's first flight) was largely lifted from another movie (my first thought was that it was from Superman, minus the drop, but now I think that wasn't it).

I think there are a couple of key reasons that I liked the movie. The now-typical misunderstood geek finds acceptance is one part, but the other, I think, was just the finding that enemies were enemies only because of misunderstanding (or, perhaps, external influence).

It's similar, I think, to why I very much enjoyed Marion Zimmer Bradley's Mists of Avalon (incidentally, when I was in seventh grade, for English class, we had to read an Arthurian book. My teacher was more than a little surprised when that was the one I chose). It wasn't so much the reversal of viewpoint from the men to the women that I liked (I was actually pretty indifferent to that), it had more to do with a view that the enemy wasn't truly evil, but just had different priorities than the "good guys".

I think part of why I liked it, also, was that it was driven by very positive emotions, rather than dwelling on negative ones. This is much the same reason why one of my favorite movies of all time, despite it's extremely high cheese quotient, is Love, Actually. The opening sequence to that, with Hugh Grant's voiceover, talking about the arrivals gate at Heathrow, and mentioning the last calls of those who died on 9/11, is very powerful. If you haven't seen that one, do yourself a favor, and watch it.

Anyway, getting back to 'How to Train...', I enjoyed it very, very much, and would highly recommend it.