Ok, I have been conspicuously absent from posting on COP for a while. I changed jobs ‘ but that isn’t the real reason I have been so silent. In January, we had a historic first for the gay community in the US (and I’m not even talking about gay marriages.) Showtime (a cable TV rival of HBO) began the first ever TV series about the lives of a group of friends who are all lesbian or bisexual.

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I’ve been a longtime fan of comedienne Margaret Cho, so I was very excited to see the filmed version of her stand-up, Notorious Cho. Filmed in the post 9-11 era, she jumps right at the beginning of her act, talking about that sacred cow of American experience and she manages to sound both patriotic and sarcastic seemingly without any contradictions. This characterizes the bigger themes in this movie. She seems so sure of how funny she is on stage she is able to slip in some truly positive messages without detracting from her humor.

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Now that most American animation studios have decided to give up handmade animation and skip to computer animation, let’s take a closer look at the computer drawn animation. It made me realize that just CGI (Computer Generated Imagery) is not a bad development per se. If it is done properly. In this article a closer look on some CGI-made movies, both animated movies and real life animation.

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Some people may recognize the name of director Mathieu Kassovitz from the title roll of Amélie, in which he played Audrey Tatou’s love interest. Some may even know he is a well-known director in homeland France, with La Haine being one of the best titles he has directed. When production company Dark Castle decided to bring Kassovitz to the States for Gothika, one might assume they wanted him for his creative European input. Something similar to Jean-Pierre Jeunet, for Alien: Resurrection and -hey- Amélie. Well, you could see it coming. Dark Castle is known for making standard cliché horror movies and squeezed out everything that was creative in Kassovitz, to direct a standard, non-surprising horror movie that can better be categorized as a psych-thriller, without truly being psychological and without being thrilling.

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The Douglas family had been sitting on the script for this film for quite some time, when father Kirk passed it to his son Michael, who hired the ‘then unknown- Czech director Milos Forman to direct the movie. It is ironic that a movie that was initially turned down by all major studios made such an impact at the Academy Awards, sweeping away the most important awards and thus doing justice to this true masterpiece in movie history.

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Without any doubt one of the most controversial movies of 2004, The Passion of The Christ, tells the story of the last 12 hours of Jesus Christ. Director Mel Gibson had major difficulties finding a distributor for his magnus opus, for which he financed the $25m budget personally. In the United States this film was immediately called Anti-Semitic and not true to the Bible version. To me it was of devastating beauty (hmm wrong word maybe) and extremely impressive.

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