Star Trek

ecking said:
I disagree. Some people chalk it up to being a tv thing and maybe it's true, but I prefer mediums and CUs to the almost overuse of wides I'm seeing these days. A lot people are throwing up unmotivated wides that show nothing, or mundane things, especially in indie projects where they don't even have the locations or production design for it. I don't need a super wide of some kid standing in front out a house like it's an epic house, why should I care? I'd rather see the kid, a lot of times these days I find myself almost waiting for CUs so I can figure out who the hell I'm watching and what they look like. I want to feel personal with my actors.
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Well Walter Murch would disagree with you.
"If you can see the eyes there's no reason to go closer" i.e. motivation.

As would most industry professionals.
"Cut it close and they'll give you a $100K to make a TV show. Cut it wide and they'll give you a million to make a movie" - Gary Marshall.

Closeups = intimacy which has to be earned and shouldn't be overused. If you cut close all the time, it won't mean anything when you finally cut close when the actor reveals his dark secret or whatever. And I can't imagine away you could get the same kind of emphasis at such a moment buy going wider. So if you use them all the time, it's like using an exclamation point at the end of every sentence. Takes away their punch and then the sentence you really wanted to have punch is just like the others.

  • What who do you see in a wide shot - places and strangers people on the street,
  • Who do you see in gunslinger - aquaintances and co-workers
  • Who do you see ribs up - friends at dinner
  • who do you see face only - family or close friends in a hug or kiss hello or goodbye
  • who do you see so close you can't see the whole face - a lover.
And if you're saying Closeups aren't more predominant in TV work than in film, you're not in the territory of debatable theory there but widely accepted fact, so you'd just be flat out wrong there. Which is all I said in my original post to which you responded - that we were probably seeing a lot of closeups due to the TV background. I offered no theory or judgment as to when or how much they should be used, only that the producers past work experience was a likely reason.
 
Jack Daniel Stanley said:
Well Walter Murch would disagree with you.
"If you can see the eyes there's no reason to go closer" i.e. motivation. As would most industry professionals "Cut it close and they'll give you a $100K to make a TV show. Cut it wide and they'll give you a million to make a movie" - Gary Marshall.

Closeups = intimacy which has to be earned and shouldn't be overused.

  • What who do you see in a wide shot - places and strangers people on the street,
  • Who do you see in gunslinger - aquaintances and co-workers
  • Who do you see ribs up - friends at dinner
  • who do you see face only - family or close friends in a hug or kiss hello or goodbye
  • who do you see so close you can't see the whole face - a lover.
And if you're saying Closeups aren't more predominant in TV work than in film, that's not a theory it's a widely accepted fact, so you'd just be flat out wrong there.
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I agree mostly. Then there are filmmakers like Sergio Leone who throw these rules out the window and make them work. But Sergio alternated between absurdly tight close-ups and grandiose wides, and really held them. My issue with JJ here is that even stuff that should've been wide seemed shot in close-up, or a compressed wide, like the space ships. Occasionally there would be a real wide shot but it would last all of a second.
 
craigbowman said:
Considering how abissmal the franchise was getting, I found it a refreshing change. It didn't feel like nemesis at all. Nemesis made me nauseus. This one was actually fun to watch and I left the theatre in a much better frame of mind.
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Agreed. Watching this was like "hey, Star Trek doesn't suck anymore."

It was fun. Nero was awful. Came across as a professional wrestler, not as a Romulan.
 
Batutta said:
I agree mostly. Then there are filmmakers like Sergio Leone who throw these rules out the window and make them work. But Sergio alternated between absurdly tight close-ups and grandiose wides, and really held them. My issue with JJ here is that even stuff that should've been wide seemed shot in close-up, or a compressed wide, like the space ships. Occasionally there would be a real wide shot but it would last all of a second.
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Right, and I wouldn't say those are rules - just kind of what's there to be aware of as you choose to manipulate it.

And I would say Sergio used these "guides lines" quiet well. He wants us to go very intimately into that character's eyes - sense his rage, before cutting to the vast desert he'll have to ride across to fulfill his rage, or whatever, and was also trying to emphasize how epic the environs were. I think of you go that tight on an actor - it is actually epic in that setting.

I just know I've regretted going close too much at times and made my own work seem too claustrophobic.

I think the issue is that for some reason with early filmmakers the knee-jerk seems to be to go close or way close without considering the impact, so it's worth asking is doing so motivated or not.
 
Seems like the more epic you want it to feel, the more comfortable you should be with wide.

That said, I wasn't really annoyed by the closeups. Didn't much care for the Fifth Element production design, and the plot was asinine, but I thought they nailed the characters, with the exception of Scotty (whom they made into a grinning idiot).

Not much depth to the script, but it was OK as a popcorn flick.
 
Even better reason to stay away from the excessive CU's: Chris Pine has bad skin.

(Or is it just that he was getting beat up in every other scene?)
 
Batutta said:
Guess I'm a die hard then...That's from Naked Time, right, where everyone goes crazy and horny? Didn't they revisit that in The Next Generation?
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They sure did. When that scene up in the film. And he said "fencing" my friend laughed. But she remembered the fencing ep. Then we actually got to see him fence and it was like..."Damn. Dude kicked ass!"

-Nate
 
I thoroughly enjoyed this new Star Trek. I was not disappointed. Although Kirk trying to score a point with the green alien lady was a bit on the corny side but does show how desperate he is to get....well...laid.

Three thumbs up in my book.
 
Green alien chicks need lovin', too. I'm just saying.

The characters totally carried it, for me. The story was nothing special (can we *please* retire the time-travel stuff? Hardly anyone ever uses it to advantage, or as much of anything but an excuse...) the art direction veered between decent and embarrassingly bad, and there were some real head-scratchers in terms of problems with plot and timing.

But I'll forgive its glaring problems because it was just so much fun.
 
Not particularly. I spent about half the movie sitting there thinking wow, these starships all have gigantic basements... except for Nero's ship, which was basically *all* basement (one with a plumbing problem, I guess, since everyone was sloshing around in ankle-deep water all the time...)

Also curious as to how the Augustus Gloop-cuisinart ride relates to the warp drive. Transparent aluminum pipes, and all.
 
Sad Max said:
Also curious as to how the Augustus Gloop-cuisinart ride relates to the warp drive. Transparent aluminum pipes, and all.
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I liked the conspicuous INERT REACTANT sign, in case we were wondering why he didn't dissolve in chemical soup.
 
Reading through the various places on the 'net, and the absolutely gushing reaction to everything, I'm reminded of something Harve Bennett said:

They [the fans] where hungering for more Star Trek. They went and they saw it [TMP] over and over again but it was embarrassing to watch the fans because they were all apologists for this picture. “Well it’s not that bad, it’s a different kind of Star Trek”. Instead of really just acknowledging that it was…[]…They tried to explain that it was wonderful and you were an idiot for not understanding it. It was wonderful to watch them [the fans] f*ck their minds over to explain away a bad movie.

The truth was that here was this movie that they wanted to love and…they were so disappointed but they wouldn’t dare say that they were disappointed. It was only after Star Trek II came out that they started saying “this us much better then the first one, Boy the first one was really awful”
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Now, I think it was far more watchable than TMP, and far less boring than many of the '90s series episodes, but I see a lot of the same thing going on -- not here, but elsewhere. I think after months and months of hype over what Team Abrams was going to be doing, no one wanted to be disappointed.

So maybe, with the next film, they'll get a truly good script, radically redo the production design, take it all more seriously, and come up with a grand-slam home run.

But then they may risk wives not loving that film as much as they do this one. :)
 
You know, I actually think TMP gets a bad rap. I'm not saying it's my favorite at all, but the musical score alone makes it watchable for me. And it has a real sense of the grandeur and scale of space, something I wish the new movie had more of. I don't hate it. I don't hate the new film either. I'll probably watch it again. I just wish it were better.
 
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