BEST use of CGI LATELY.

Ideally, you'd first define what you mean by "LATELY".

The obvious one is Return of the King, or any movie in the LotR trilogy.

Also, I know everyone hated I, Robot but it had some really great CGI moments with robots fighting each other in very brutal ways, and the work they did on the main robot character Sonny was almost as good as Gollum in LotR.

Sin City
Gladiator
Alexander
House of Flying Daggers
Fight Club
Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence
Zatoichi (the new Beat Takeshi one), it looked cheap but it was still cool.

I agree completely about GLADIATOR, it's perfectly used for the crowd scenes in the coliseum. It never takes you out of the film.

I like the shot in BAD BOYS 2 of the car flying over Martin Lawrence's head in. It's a nice quick scene that works nicely with a lot of the real chaos which made up that sequence. On a similar note any CGI used during the crane chase in T3 never seemed to detract from the large amounts of actual carnage going on.

I love it when movies use subtle special effects as a way to progress the story. A perfect example of this would be Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

But for flat-out awesomeness, the most recent great entry into the special effects stakes has to be War of the Worlds.

Oldboy, sans the ant crawling on the arm, and Irreversible both represent how CG should be used. In subtle ways, but also in ways that manipulate the camera. In Irreversible, there's a shot when they're in a cab and the camera drifts between the front seat and the back seat, going in and out through the car's window to do it. Park Chanwook used CG in a lot of similar ways, allowing punches to appear like they connected harder than they did in the hallway scene, and others.

Now you've got me thinking about Fincher's use of this kind of effect in Panic Room.

OLDBOY is great, but LOTR is the undisputed king of recent times. Didn't think that much of WOTW or anything this summer really, although the space battle at the beginning of REVENGE OF THE SITH was fucking amazing.

I'd say Fellowship of the Ring, moreso than The Two Towers and Return of the King, had the best visuals in that Trilogy.

Eternal Sunshine is a great example of using CG in subtle ways. It definitely helped enhance the film. I'd say Revenge of the Sith (90% of it) and War of the Worlds were great with the CG this past summer.

Really, LOTR kicks the argument for subtlety in the ass with it's mastering of great-big effects, which would be fine, if WETA and PJ were the only people allowed to do it. Seeing as they're not, I'll take the subtle approach for most films.

Shaun Of The Dead used it very well.

I think War of the Worlds, although far from subtle was used very effectively, and of course the LotR trilogy.

I really don't know how much of it was CGI, but that shot of camera swooping around the car, going in and out for me was the best visual effect in War of the Worlds. Most people I talked to about that shot did not even notice anything unusual about it.

A Very Long Engagement - Some really nice CGI in it. Some of it was a bit fake looking though (probably on purpose)

Transporter 2 on the other hand....

Although the film itself is crummy, I thought the effects in Chronicles of Riddick were excellent, much cooler than anything in the SW prequels. The opening space battle of ROTS didn't strike me as particularly dazzling, just tedious and badly paced. And the ships still seemed too plastic for my tastes. On the other hand, the stuff with ships in COR was really visceral and just seemed more 'real', at least in a sci-fi setting. David Twohy is an awesome SFX director (I enjoyed the opening crash sequence of Pitch Black very much).

And a gripe about LOTR: although Gollum is an undoubted triumph, I found the battle scenes in TTT and ROTK a bit disappointing - not enough colour, and the charge of the Rohirrim in ROTK looked like one mass of light grey objects crashing into another mass of dark grey objects. It didn't help that Jackson chose to film it on a field of dull brown tussock either.

I'm going to mention Pirates of the Caribbean, not because of the walking corpses or anything so obvious. What impressed me after listening to the commentary was that they never bothered to police their surroundings or skylines for modern touches. They simply went in and filmed, regardless of the presence of telephone lines, parking lots, airplanes, or whatever else. The CG technicians then went over the shots and digitally erased everything that shouldn't be there, and in many cases, filled it with things that should. That, to me, is what digital effects tools are all about. They made the filmmakers' lives easier.

Buckbeak in Prisoner of Azkaban. There's plenty other CG that works in that film (The dementors) and there's plenty that doesn't (Werewolf Lupin). But Buckbeak was just perfect.

Also, aside from the creatures living in the basement/parking structure/whateveritwas, Lucas' enhancements to THX 1138 were pretty well implemented.

Lord of the Rings is a bit of mixed bag - some of it looks beautiful (the shot in Return of the King where we are introduced to the Mumakil stomping up the dust), some of it looks a bit ropey (the swirling armies of the dead taking down the White City) - but it should be saluted for the amount it managed to create and envision on a relatively moderate budget by Hollywood standards.

I have to second I, Robot - the effects in that film were seamless, best I have seen in ages. Same with Eternal Sunshine, using them in a slightly different way and integrating them so well into what looks a very grainy, shaky-cam style approach. Michel Gondry is so frighteningly imaginative and technically gifted to boot with effects work like that.

My sentiments exactly. Also, A.I. has great effects.
I think Michael Bay's films generally have pretty good CGI (someone mentioned Bad Boys II, I'd throw in The Island).
The photogrammetry shot of the break-in in Panic Room is awesome.

Return of the Sith, while still shaky on the CG people and cuts between computer-generated and real actors, was the film that made it clear that nobody ever needs to build a model of a spacecraft ever again.

And I don't want to hear any of that 'models have warmth' or 'soul' rubbish, either!

THX 1138 was great in the enchancements, I couldn't even tell which where enchancments and which weren't, though I highly disagree with you for Buckbeak. Buckbeak was too fluid and the lighting didn't seem right to me. It could have had more detail. AS soon as I saw it it screamed 'FAKE!' to me.

To me if I see CGI and register in my brain that it is CGI the CGI has failed in one way. Though, if it is CGI and you know it is fake and are able to accept it because there are so many other things going on that you couldn't care less, that is the difference. Gollum for example, most of the time through out both the movies you never think "Wow that was a great CGI effect" every once in a while you will see it. Though, with buckbeak the whole thing screamed CGI to my face.

Much love for WOTW, personally, but I found the opening space battle of ROTS, as well as most of the movie, to be fucking annoying. Impossible-to-follow camera moves, ladybug-bots, and countless plot issues made it clear to me in the first few minutes that this prequel would be no different from its retarded stepbrothers. For all its faults, give me ROTJ and the coherent climactic space battle and I'll be happy. The prequel CG LOOKED great, but was not Star Wars. What better proof is there than the Clone War begun has shots from the end of AOTC which were visually arresting but looked more like a videogame cutscene than my galaxy far, far away.

I'm also not enjoying the use of CG blood splatters during fight sequences in such flicks as Blade: Trinity and Alexander (though overall I found what was done effects-wise with both to be fairly effective).

Hope to not get flack over the loosely-defined "recent" requirement, but I'm always blown away by the mirror shot in Contact. I miss the days when Zemeckis used effects for dramatic enhancement/story advancement.

Oh, and I'll second Irreversible. The blending of practical and digital effects in that movie produced mind-shattering results (pun apologetically intended).

Constantine, in the sequence with the chair.

It's only a small sequence but the CG Pharmaceuticals showpiece in Layer Cake was nice and yeah Oldboy, the knife in the back was a neat trick.

Watching the making of stuff though, it seems like just about, if not all, of the effects Gondry used were practical, just using physical camera tricks. Even the LOTResque mini Carrey shot was done by making a really long slanted disproportionate room to fool the camera. Old school filming at its finest.

Black Hawk Dawn.

Episode III. Lucas created entire worlds in CG.

War of the worlds was also fantastic. Very subtle work and it really shows how important the director is in selling CG effects.

No one has mentioned it yet, but Casshern used CGI well. It came across as a live action anime in many ways. Very artsy and stylish visuals.

I'm not saying the movie itself is great. I didn't dislike it, but I found it sort of slow.

Answering this question is self-defeating. For the best CGI, I likely did not notice/realize it was CGI when I was watching it, I didn't care or cognitively dwell on it because the suspension of belief and storyline was preserved.

The best I can think of is Shaolin Soccer. None of the effects were annoyingly obtrusive, and all of them were subservient to the story (instead of the all-too-familiar vice versa).

Exactly what I just said.

I kind of agree that CGI should be as visually perfect as possible, but I guess I don't agree that is the only way to judge CGI as having 'pulled it off' or not.

For example - the use of CGI in Shaolin Soccer ruled. It was very apparent that is was CGI though as the budget wasn't large for this film (I'm assuming), but it was still an excellent use of CGI. The scene where the girl Mui is making the dough and spinning it the air with her Tai Chi is a great example of CGI that is obviously CGI but still works perfectly in the film.

Is that the new version with the chick from Buffy?

Also, the opening scene of A.I. with the android chick opening up was amazing CG work.

So even if you saw something impossible, realistic as it might be, you wouldn't wonder if it were CGI later on after having finished watching the movie?

From Mayhem:

That's not what I mean, I mean that dwelling upon special effects for their own sake is counter-productive. They serve the storyline, and nothing else.

The best question to ask, in my mind, is this: "What movie best integrates special effects seamlessly, effectively, and unnoticeably into the narrative thread of the story".


From crazyman:

I said it better.

you could say the same thing about practically any aspect of a film's composition, though.

Quit being so cynical.

BWAHAHAHAAH.

Seriously, though, CGI is a means to an end, and as such we should appreciate it only in that context and not as an end in itself.

Again, ditto for every other part of a film. Saying it's useless to discuss it as anything other than a means to an end is just being a nihilist. I think there's nothing at all wrong with discussing each part of the machine on it's own merit. You can discuss what makes good cgi work just as well as you can discuss what makes good dialogue work. Sure, for each, and every other component of a film for that matter, if it's working perfectly it just flows into the experience. You wouldn't want dialogue to seem "written" just the same as you don't want cgi to be noticed as computer work. Nobody seems to have a problem looking at good dialogue as such though. Sure, during the experience, the overal experience, the end that the means all add up to is the important thing, but surely we have the ability to sit back after the fact and analyze its actual mechanics. It's absolutely not a moot point. Especially since for I'm sure the grand majority on this board, everything we're discussing here is for the sake of the discussion itself. It's an academic endeavor for most everyone here, that's what a discussion board's main purpose is for. So this is definitely not the time and the place to say "it doesn't matter how it works as long as it works." Save that for the workplace.

n1. seems like 50% of people's responses to my posts have been primarily about my username.

anyways, if people dismiss a great show of visual effects, why not editing or acting or cinematography? doesnt seem that one is harder to do very well than the other...

This is a piece of cinema snobbery I've always had a problem with: we should salute great directing, acting, writing, editing, cinematography, and so forth, but great special effects are something to be ignored. I call bullshit. Great effects work is like any other piece of the film-making puzzle. When it's great, it should be recognized, in the same way we recognize a great screenplay or a great performance.

For my money, I would have to say the first Matrix film was textbook example of how to use effects in service of a story. Everything on the screen made sense in the story that was being told. For example, the bullet time effect wasn't just for showing off but rather it was to show how Neo could bend time in the world of the Matrix. The same thing with the wire work. Plus the effects were perfectly integrated with practical effects. The lighting and textures were spot on. I was never pulled out of the film once. Another one that stands up even today is the first Jurasic Park. They are still the best CGI effects I've seen come out of Hollywood.

I'm not denigrating the importance/efficacy/skill of CGI. Just trying to put it in perspective, as I very often see both it's importance being skewed.

Its importance gets skewed in a negatively unfair way compared to the other aspects of filmmaking, yes.

Excellent examples.

When I first heard that no miniatures were used in the filming of JP, I was at a loss. I didn't know until I saw the "making of" shows how CG was used. That's the point here. You don't realize it as you're watching it, but as a fan of film, you learn about it later, and can appreciate it for what it is: excellent CG work.

Not to be nitpicky, but it's "suspension of disbelief."