I have two movies to recommend.
Nobody Knows is terribly touching, and for exactly that reason, hard to watch. It depicts dramatic story-like events, but it doesn’t give the usual cues to suggest you process it in a story-like far mode. The main characters are children, who you see in near mode, up close and personal, mostly without words. If you love children, you will love these children. Things happen to them, but slowly, and without clear “here is a key event” markers. So you process the events as near, with less story-mode emotional distance; you are more naked to the full terror of bad possibilities. It makes me wonder what other stories would feel like, if we felt them as nearby. And if I would dare to watch them.
The Third & The Seven, a free ten minute entirely CG (computer graphics) clip, is a truly spectacular demo of what CG can do today. I’ve watched it daily for two weeks now and still marvel at its details. See the hidef version if you can. If you doubt at all that virtual reality could really be as detailed and vivid as our reality, take a look. (HT Rob Wiblin).
You know, movies have never been real. The fact that cgi can mimick reality means less than you think because movies have always been reality mimickers.
The real potential of cgi lay in reducing the cost of movie creation so that a wider variety of stories can be told. As it stands not however, cgi adds enormously to the cost of film productions and the high the budget the worse the more banal and retarded the story.
Ryan, Thanks for the info. It took me a while to get back here, but the information you provided was quite interesting. Not knowing much about CGI, I had assumed only some of the special effects were done that way. I am impressed.