Hollywood Ingenuity

It's definitely a cool shot, but I have to throw in with the overuse of the handheld in these films. Maybe I'm just old....

But the other part is the LENGTH of these scenes. The chases and the fights seem to draaaaaag on forever. Their purpose should be to move the story, but instead they have become the story. I dig action, and one of my favorite death scenes is when Paul Newman kills the KGB agent in Torn Curtain. It seems to take forever. But it's very real and it is designed to show how hard it can be to kill a man.

I think that these scenes need to be edited more tightly, and not just in the Bourne films. The crazy 88 fight scene in Kill Bill almost put me to sleep.

Mix it up. Have a dude pull out a piece and down a guy when you expect the long scene, a la Harrison Ford's diarrhea-motivated scene in Raiders. Classic.

And yeah. More wide shots... Make it worth while to see on the big screen.
 
Good points Jim. I agree. Overall, films are to long. I cite Into the Wild again, which I realy liked. It easily could have lost 30 minutes in length and would have been a better film. Why does every modern director feel the need to make over two and sometimes over three hour cuts? Audience abuse in most cases.

Dan
 
I have brought this up before in other threads, and I think it often comes down to self-indulgence. I know that the director has a vision, and I respect that. But I have never been a huge fan of the "Auteur Theory" as it relates to creating something for the masses. ITW only cost 15 million and it had Sean Penn behind it. SO who is going to tell him that for 15 million, he has to make it shorter? Nobody.

Same thing with Lucas, Tarantino, and Rodriguez. Who fights with them? Who tells them no?

Obviously you could say the same about Spielberg or Howard, but their tastes are more mainstream and designed for the masses. SO they make fewer clunkers...although we could talk aboout the DaVinci Code...

Say what you want about the evils of the old Hollywood system (and there were many), but that system of creative confict between studio, producer, director and writer forced people to shake out a script or a film until the only things left really mattered.
 
sadly, the shot where a camera is being held by a stuntman jumping off a roof is the steadiest shot in the whole movie. I loved the movie, but absolutely hated the camera work. Made me a little nauseous at times.
 
Jim Brennan said:
The chases and the fights seem to draaaaaag on forever. Their purpose should be to move the story, but instead they have become the story.
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I like drawn out fights. I hate 20 second fights and chases that are over too quickly. The main reason I'm seeing an action film is for the action.
 
Billz said:
I like drawn out fights. I hate 20 second fights and chases that are over too quickly. The main reason I'm seeing an action film is for the action.
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Makes me think of the hilariously over-long fight scene in John Carpenter's "They Live", which is entirely about one guy trying to make the other put on a pair of special sunglasses. It goes on for like 10 minutes, and all it is is a stand-there-and-punch fist fight.

I'm sure it was overlong on purpose, for black-comedic value, and it succeeded IMO.

A minor classic moment in film history...
 
Yes, the scene in They Live is definitely played for laughs, and it is a great scene.

I'm not saying that every car chase and fight scene has to be short. But mix them up. It takes me out of the movie to see a guy get his head bashed on a concrete wall 5 times, stabbed in the arm, thrown out a window, have his car blown up, and then he walks away. I remember saying outloud in the theatre "Enough already"

I like the scene in LA Confidential where we first meet Bud White. The intensity of the character comes from Crowe's performance both before and after he kicks the guy's ass. Very effective scene. Granted, it's a different kind of movie. I just think these things are overdone at times.
 
Revisiting the over-use of the close-up, I wonder if this stems from our current TV driven age. In reading "Behind the Seen" the other day, mention was made that Walter Murch uses little cut-outs of people when he edits. He attaches them to his monitor, below the screen to give the image relative scale. It reminds him that people willbe viewing his work on a 40 foot screen, and helps him balance his shots accordingly.

Not only do we as viewers see far more movies on a TV much smaller than that, but an increasing percentage of revenues are driven by DVD and TV rights relative to theatrical distribution. I can't help but think that this evolving statistic affects the decision of directors, DPs and editors, either consciously or sub-consciously.
 
=Prodigy= said:
I saw this video on television and my jaw dropped. I would love to be a camera operator if I did stuff like that all the time!

Anyway, I kinda wish when the camera operator/stunt man, followed bourne's double, he would have actually landed in the house as well and kept running behind him. That would be an even crazier shot!
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of course that would have defied the laws of physics therby winning him a Nobel prize.
 
Icarus2005 said:
of course that would have defied the laws of physics therby winning him a Nobel prize.
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I think it is very possible, the stunt man did it, and the stunt cameraman had a harness on attached to a cable. He could have glided into the house and somehow quick released the harness.

Of course it would have been much more complicated (and perhaps more dangerous), but with the money they had, I bet they could have figured it out.

It was a cool shot regardless.
 
The editing in the trailer made it look like he did too, with the way that they cut away.


Also, on a side note; It's cool that the whole image is flipped horizontally in the movie. :)

- Mikko
 
mikkowilson said:
Also, on a side note; It's cool that the whole image is flipped horizontally in the movie. :)

- Mikko
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I've noticed that in some trailers a certain shoot is flipped. What's the deal with that? Did they alter it so when I was played back in theaters it would look new? Or is it simply a decision made by taste?

Weird.
 
Jim Brennan said:
It's definitely a cool shot, but I have to throw in with the overuse of the handheld in these films. Maybe I'm just old....
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Not sure how old you are, but I turned 21 a couple of months ago, and I certainly have difficulty buying into the "mtv generation" of film making, with excessive use of handheld camera work, constant zooms in and out, and ECU's. I try to avoid using these things. They all CAN serve a purpose, but when people misuse, that's where the problems start.
 
I'm with you lawsuit boy. Sometimes these new movies look like the willy wonka chocolate river video with all those flashes and cuts.

Sometimes I have to look away because I'd hate to seizure.
 
Although it is definitely slower paced (something I tend to miss in modern films), the original Alien was filled with ECUs, intentionally giving a claustrophobic feeling. That, I think, is the big difference in a lot of films nowadays. They follow the current fad, rather than creating something unique. Sad, really.
 
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