Dumbworld: A Sacramento Based Blog on Entertainment, Media and Art

 The Capital Film Arts Alliance, as part of the Sacramento Film and Music Festival, put on a competition to create a movie trailer.  The entries are showing Wed, August 13 at 6:30 pm at the film festival. Go to www.sacfilm.com for more info.

Our trailer is for a film called The Muddkids about two kids that go into the forest.  One kid dies and the other must deal with the Muddkids, avengers of evil deeds.

The music for the trailer was done by composer Richard Altenbach.  Richard is an A-List Violinist who has worked on numerous Hollywood Films with composers such as John Williams, Danny Elfman and Howard Shore.  His film credits include Indiana Jones IV, Jurassic Park I, II and III, Spider Man I, II, and III, Pirates of the Caribbean I, II, and III, Matrix I, II, and III, Titanic, King Kong, and Beowulf.  Richard also has worked with pop singer Natasha Bedingfield.  Please go to http://www.bachiosaurus.com/ for more information on Richard Altenbach.

The highlight of going to see the new Indiana Jones movie for me (see here for my thoughts on it) was seeing the trailer for the new David Fincher movie (director of Fight Club, 7even, and Zodiac), The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.  See the trailer here.

I don’t go to the movies a lot, although I do watch a lot of movies.  When I heard somebody else say that they walked out of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull , and then proceeded to dump on the quality of the products coming out of Hollywood, the first thing that I thought was ‘snob.’  

This was the only review I had heard for the movie.  I decided I would check it out for myself and boy was I sorry.  I would have walked out too, if it wasn’t for the hope that it was going to get better and less implausible (after all I was raised on Indiana Jones and Steven Spielberg movies– Does Steven Spielberg even make bad movies?). 

So what’s the verdict?  Buzzwatch’s Jargon Tracker tracks the popularity of phrases on the interweb.  One of the more popular phrases this week was “Nuke the Fridge.” 

“Nuke the Fridge” references  the implausible scene from the movie, where to survive a nuclear bomb test, Indy hunkers up in an old refrigerator (and is thrown along with the fridge miles through the air– and survives of course!).  Nuke the Fridge is meant to signify anything that has left the realm of reality (sort of like “Jump the Shark”).

I’m sure there are a number of scenes that are equally as out there as the Nuke the Fridge scene, but the one that comes to mind is a CGI heavy scene where the dude from Transformers (his name escapes me) gets caught up in some vines during a high speed chase.  Transformer dude gets lifted out of the jeep, and as the jeeps speed off, he proceeds to swing through the jungle with a bunch of monkeys and somehow cuts off the racing jeeps at a pass. 

 I try to learn something from every movie I watch, and from Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, I learned, just because you can do something with CGI doesn’t mean that you should.