1) 2001: A Space Odyssey
2) Being There
3) Zabriskie Point
4) 8-1/2
5) Andrei Rublev
6) Citizen Kane
7) Vertigo
8) Wings of Desire
9) A Woman Under the Influence
10) Network
The future of cinema will be like its past: a mix of forms unified only under the broadest of categories. Under the world’s omnipresence of screens, cinema is hard to separate from visuality itself. Moving pictures will exist in many modes, and none of those are likely to be a dominant one.
Yet despite competition from video games (neurological feedback-based versions of which are surely in our future), and despite Hollywood’s creative dead-ends, it seems to me quite certain that there will be enduring demand for controlled visual narratives, both in episodic and self-contained (feature) forms.
Last night I attended a double feature of Casablanca and Citizen Kane in Los Angeles. Two films anyone can easily watch online or on DVD, and yet around 200 people, most of them young, were willing to shell out ten dollars to see it on the big screen. And they drank up every scene.
There is a lesson here that should offer comfort to anyone concerned with story in cinema: a library of good films many decades old will still generate revenue: Casablancas and Citizen Kanes will still hold any audience rapt through their entire runtimes. How much money will Grand Theft Auto 4, or Resident Evil 5 be generating in 30 years, or even in 5 years? In interactive media, the appeal is far more technologically dependent than the appeal of feature films. Video games not even ten years old seem painfully dated to us now, and not worth playing, let alone purchasing. This is because interactive media offer sensation, but they fundamentally do not satisfy the demand for narrative.
The strength of cinema was always story, and that will continue. Over a long enough timeframe, all good films (good meaning narratively strong) will make money. Eleven years later, a DVD of Boogie Nights can still be bought in any Walmart or Target in the country because its narrative strength assures that it will remain in demand. How likely is it that you’ll see copies of “300” or “Punisher: War Zone” in stores ten years from now?
Independent filmmaking certainly has a future: it is merely afflicted at present by mediocre talents who are deficient in narrative sense and seem unable to walk a rigorous line between the twin pits on either side of good filmmaking: on one side, the comforts of conventionality and lazy assumptions about the audience’s emotional involvement; and on the other, breezy arbitrariness and whimsy which tries to pass itself off as originality and daring, but is in fact only the failure to establish a frame of meaning.
I don’t think figures as prominent as Speilberg or Lucas can be called “overrated”: their fame is of such size that they will generate plenty of criticism and backlash. I think the standard of “overrated” needs to depend upon a filmmaker’s estimation among critics and cinephiles. Plenty of films are huge successes while at the same time being, to most people, clearly pretty bad (Indiana Jones 4, anyone?) In short, Lucas and Spielberg are hated by far too many people to be called overrated.
At the same time, I don’t think Marc Forster can be called overrated either: everyone thought STAY was terrible! And many say the same of the new Bond.
Therefore, to be overrated, a director must have a strong reputation among critics and people who write about movies.
So enough with these lightweights, for most overrated director, I nominate: MAX OPHULS.
He is beloved by virtually every film critic there is. David Thomson adores him; Andrew Sarris calls “Lola Montes” the greatest film ever made. But I think this is all bunk.
I find his films trite, precious, boring, and on occasion, visually hideous. Lola Montes is universally hailed for its extravagant visual beauty: I think it is garish, chintzy, and disgusting to look at. All of his films are celebrated for their sweeping, ornate camera movements. I find his framing and his placement of actors to be awkward and obtrusive. And in “Letter to an Unknown Woman” there is a scene where the lovers enter this amusements park ride; basically a carriage that has scroll paintings of landscapes roll past the window. This was one of the few occasions when I have literally found a movie painful, yes, somehow, physically painful to look at on the screen.
I don’t know what it was, maybe it was the whirring sound that did it. The scene just struck my neurons with pain. The way the actors are shoved to the edges of the frame while this black-and-white smear of painted landscape whirs by, and then just holding on that awkward shot for most of the scene: that is the prime example of how I find Ophuls’s framing to be horrendous.
Some likely contenders, I know, have not yet been released (Benjamin Button, etc.), but I’d like to know what people think some of the best films released in 2008 are.
I agree, it’s insufficient for people simply to say a name of a director they hate: we need to explain why we think they are OVERRATED, which generally requires some reference to why those directors are, by many, admired.
The point of this, maintaining a high level of discourse, should ultimately be for us to help each other delineate our own tastes, clarify why and how we respond to films, and to help each other learn to appreciate works we may have disliked in the past.
Of course we must remember that we are talking about movies here: we all watch and respond to films uniquely, and while there are aesthetic standards which allow us to say “That’s good” and “That’s bad” and explain why, these remain subjective matters. I happen to find Ophuls films tedious and annoying, but I understand perfectly well why others may watch his films and find them filled with romance and verve.
And Kubrick has always been divisive. He is (almost) universally revered now, but Pauline Kael was bored out of her mind by 2001 when it came out. And to this day David Thomson, a prominent critic of excellent taste, despises Kubrick as a maker of ice-cold, anti-human and pretentious films. I love Kubrick but I understand completely how some viewers could find him boring and alienating.
John Ford worked in the old factory system and made an enormous number of films, so quickly and under such conditions (limited control of story and no final cut) it is difficult for any film to turn out good, let alone ALL the films a single director made. But John Ford was a great original in his style and his humanism. People often have a shallow idea of Ford films as gruff, chauvinistic male strutting (John Wayne films). They should watch My Darling Clementine to get some idea of Ford’s subtlety, his attention to female characters and delicate emotions. No one had captured landscape so definitively or with such majesty as Ford: there were Westerns before Ford films, but he captured the essence. Yet Ford can be legitimately critiqued for sentimentality. His patriotism, while beautiful and authentically inspiring (see The Iron Horse, Young Mr. Lincoln) could easily slip into uncritical dullness. Likewise, it can be argued that he never forced himself to confront actual history, and always retreated into the comfort of mythology.
I think The Searchers is an important film, as it reveals the racist rage in America’s westward expansion in a way almost unseen in any other movie.
On the other hand, he simply made a few stinkers. The Informer is a maudlin, overrated mess. And probably the dozens of his films that no one watches anymore… well, there’s probably a good reason for that.
I don’t know what everyone loves about The Dark Knight. I think Nolan’s recent films (everything after Insomnia) have been horrendously edited. I think the “realism” of the new Batman films is a travesty. Gotham City was always supposed to be a nightmare projection of urban decay an mass criminality, which only Tim Burton has effectively captured.
So Nolan comes on trying to modernize or contemporize the series, and to me the results are silly. It reduces Batman to the level of an ordinary action movie. Yes, Heath was fine as the Joker, but the plot surrounding him is ridiculous. Wherever he goes he’s able to have retroactively had dynamite planted all over a building? And apparently Gotham’s gangs are willing to suddenly betray their longtime bosses and flip over to the Joker’s side, for no apparent reason or financial reward?
Christian Bale’s Batman voice is laughable, the action scenes are a hash that completely lack even the most basic architectures of cinematic tension. Aside from Heath, this really was a pretty crappy movie.
And it made 530 million dollars. Oscars, here we come :P
J Dickson is partly right: it is very common for a film to seem initially unimpressive, or even quite bad, only to gradually gnaw at our minds, be seen again, and succeed. I agree that canonical films need to be seen more than once, especially if the first viewing was negative.
On the other hand, this won’t always work. Some serious cinephiles are simply going to continue to hate Kubrick (or Ophuls).
Such is the lot of avant-gardes. What begins as utter shock to social sensibilities is rapidly marketized, banalized, and becomes par for the course. I’ve had shit flung at me in a gallery space, and as time passed the experience proved to be not that impressive.
Self-damaging is done by untold millions of people in multitudes of ways; from cutters to drug abusers to people who are merely sullen. Cleverer people with exhibitionist streaks do this and get it to be called art, which is fine. But it is all reducible to basically the same message: our consciousness, “the self,” is built on unstable, self-contradictory, excessive, animalistic foundations, and in many people the edifice of self is cracked enough that they must endeavor constantly to rip it open, to prove to others that it is false. What a scandal that we can create civilizations and things of beauty, and yet we wake up with bad breath and have to take shits, and sometimes we get so sick that we shit out of our mouths.
Worthwhile as a reminder, I suppose. But not particularly interesting to me as art.
Chicago, a few years back. I forget the name of the guy’s concept art operation. Basically everyone was waiting around with the customary wines and cheeses, and then this fellow and his harem of girl assistants come out, shit on the floor, and start flinging it at the attendees. Go figure.
Pushing the limits of cinema through experimental forms is great. But I think we have to admit that the more profound, or at least the more influential, advances in cinema have come from within industrial narrative film establishments (whether private or state-run), rather than from true outsiders like Stan Brakhage or video installation creators. Certainly there are significant and fascinating in-between figures like Chris Marker also, and absolutely experimental cinema can be very rewarding and excellent stuff (I’ve been watch Project 05 clips with great interest). But in terms of aesthetic and cultural force, the mainstream is, well, the mainstream.
Anyone interested in cinema needs to confront the fact of authority in cinema production with somewhat more than blanket hostility.
How did the Hollywood studios become the cartel they are anyway? They triumphed because they captured a broad audience’s taste for fantasy. And in the first place, they recognized fantasy (wish fulfillment, an idealistic or just unrealisitc view of life) as having greater appeal than other approaches to cinema (straight documentary, social realism, etc.). Their audience of course, was and in many ways still is, masses of people with jobs and hassle-filled lives looking for a brief respite from their daily concerns in the form of thrills, romance, or plain amusement. Narrative coherence was expected (nowadays I’m not so sure), and creative daring and experimentalism was often met with skepticism and commercial failure (the careers of people like King Vidor are interesting to study). And yet there have unquestionably been advances in mainstream narrative film, and there will be further ones, and I do not see feature films declining as a cultural product, economic and social changes aside.
I am a screenwriter and hopefully soon will be a director, and I cannot deny that I am interested in reaching as large an audience as possible, as well as in improving through my work the dreadful quality of mass-market cinema production. I think it is inadequate for creative people who want to work in cinema to dedicate themselves solely to the cause of “self-expression”. That is fine for people with the means to make cinema entirely by themselves, but doing so in turn greatly limits the potential audience (and the kind and degree of the audience’s interest) in his/her work.
Please understand, I do not admire kowtowing to vulgar sentiments or reliance on conventions, or compromising one’s own artistic values. I mean, rather, that I want people working in the industry to focus more on the end product, and on the understanding that an audience is going to approach that end product with a set of expectations. Buying a movie ticket or renting a DVD carries with it a very different set of expectations than those in effect when browsing clips on youtube, or going to a video art installation.
Experimentation is certainly worthwhile and interesting, but it is still to me ultimately a curiosity. A fully realized feature film simply has more cinematic heft: an achieved reality rather than a shimmering fragment. And of course another part of this is the public, social weight that is accessed through achieving a feature film with significant production value.
Some of my favorite directors (Antonioni, Lynch, P.T. Anderson) obviously made deeply personal impressions on mainstream filmmaking: they have made films that were wholly or at least generally the films they wanted to make, works of self-expression. I’m just dubious whether the future of filmmaking needs more of that, or whether filmmakers themselves might not benefit the medium by trying to temper their personal vision with a more objective approach toward the medium and its audience.
In other words, the boundaries of filmmaking have more aspects than simply the personal side of the creator’s expression, and the technical side of the means of distribution. There is also to be studied the variety of ways that audiences watch cinema, and perhaps more importantly, the ways they want to watch cinema.
Many of the clips of 05 are quite alluring. The strangest part is the weird feeling of familiarity. Some of these places (Sunset and Vine, Santa Monica Beach) I’ve actually been to, but other places where I certainly have not been still give off a strange deja vu.
The topic of voyeurism, or privileged viewing access, is very important in Hollywood aesthetics. Since the inception of American cinema, one of the fundamental draws of buying a ticket to the movies was the appeal of being granted access to a spectacle that is exclusive; that you have no other way of seeing than in this dark space. (Imagine yourself as a working stiff in the 1920s; what deep, secret titillation there must have been in a DeMille film promising to take you inside ancient Egyptian palaces, to witness Cleopatra and her attendants, etc. – The Globe theatre in Shakespeare’s time operated on a similar principle.)
This may well be the profoundest part of cinema’s transformation: screens and media are now so ubiquitous and saturating, that to a see a great Hollywood spectacle no longer feels like much an exclusive privilege. You can see the same damn crap pretty much anywhere. (isn’t this also why CGI spectacles are so banal, why the new Star Wars films and the Indiana Jones 4 are so totally unimpressive?).
My own prediction is that the spectacle economy of Hollywood will collapse; and that narrative economy will take its rightful place as the prime attractor of feature films.
The famous full-body shot of Bardot that opens Mepris was something Godard never intended: he was forced to shoot it by his producer, who needed Bardot’s exposed goods to market the film.
A strange lesson about the compromises in the film industry: if Godard’s (often pretentious and pseudointellectual) artistic motives were fully honored, the film would lack one of its most alluring and erotic elements.
As always with Godard, the line between genius and bullshit is infuriatingly thin and porous. I like Breathless also; but the first film was more of a stunt, I’ve always felt Mepris has more depth to it; despite its studio budget and whatever commercial compromises had to be made, I think Mepris is more of a work of art.
Even Godard admits to this in Histoire(s) du Cinema, where he grudgingly allows that Mepris may be his definitive contribution to film history.
Interestingly, when it was made this film was the most expensive ever produced in Europe. The brief glimpses you get of the city with its distorted shapes was all built exclusively for the film. And then Dreyer shot it almost entirely in close-ups, barely using the sets at all, infuriating his producers. And yet those faces are some of the most extraordinary ever captured on film.
Yes, it’s dated badly, and really nothing about it says “Sam Fuller” to me. The suspense sequences to me are no different from any other bad 80s horror-exploitation flick.
It’s a shame but Fuller really lost his stylistic touch in his old age, as so many great directors do. The Fuller films to watch are almost all from the fifities, plus Shock Corridor.
No, Breathless would not work without the jump cuts. Godard realized this as he was putting together his first cut, at well over two hours, and realized it was unwatchable. So he slashed the movie apart with reckless abandon, tossed in sarcastic, goofball music cues, and we have a supposed masterpiece.
I feel very differently about this film every time I see it. Sometimes I am content to drink up the atmosphere and the menace and just roll with it. But recently I’ve come to see this film as a challenge to cinephiles. We, of course, like to take movies seriously, but I think we can only take The Godfather seriously at our own peril.
Studying an audience’s reaction to The Godfather is very revealing: the way they will chuckle with illicit delight in anticipation of the moments of violence. Indeed, it is depressing but I believe true, that many if not most people who love The Godfather love it mostly for the stylishness of its violence.
So let’s take one of the iconic moments: the severed horsehead in Harry Woltz’s bed. It gets giggles every time, and it affirms what is to me one of the most problematic assumptions of the film: the mob violence occurs mysteriously, even magically; that when the mob sets out to do something, it will simply happen, without human risk or mistake. And that’s what the scene is: after Tom Hagen is refused, he leaves, and yet the next morning, someone (Tom Hagen? Or some invisible and anonymous family connection?) has managed to sever the head of Woltz’ prize stud, carry it into his bedroom, tuck the huge bloody thing perfectly under the covers right next to Woltz’s sleeping body, all without being noticed by anyone, let alone Woltz. It just appears there in his bed as a nightmare; waking up covered in blood.
Everyone loves this scene, right? To me it has always reeked of phoniness. Oh, sure, it can get away with the horsehead alone as a one-off stunt; this is a thriller after all. But the movie then adds insult to injury. The point of Tom Hagen’s visit was to intimidate Woltz into putting a family scion into one of his pictures. He refuses, gets the horsehead. But then after the retribution, we cheerily learn that Woltz has reconsidered. Doesn’t this violate the very logic of threats and carrying them out that so much of the movie depends on? Why would Woltz knuckle under when what is precious to him has already been taken away, as apparent punishment for not doing the Corleones’ bidding? The only rational response to the horse head is to hire security guards for his mansion, and dedicate yourself to never allowing that actor in another picture again.
But the movie prefers to exist by the credo that anyone can be killed without consequences, or rather that the consequences will always be favorable for the killers.
Magical violence allows the film to perform some rather incredible narrative fudging. One of the most forgettable sequences of the film is Michael’s long exile in Sicily, while the killing of the police captain cools down. He spends time with the old family, and actually marries a girl. The whole point of being in Sicily is that no one knows he is here; it is the old country, it is safe. And yet his young wife is blown up in a car bomb, an event that has no apparent consequences throughout the rest of the film, other than to heighten the sense that we need more killing.
Vito’s realization that “It was Barzini all along”, i.e., he is responsible for all the double-crosses, the gunning down of Sonny, etc., is another instance of plausible plot fudged by violence. In all the times I have seen this film it is has never been clear to me how Vito arrives at this knowledge. It is just information, just plot delivered to excuse the story’s continued progression into a great montage of murders
Great films, to me, achieve a balance between entertainment and narrative gravity or seriousness; between the illusionist’s quickness of the cut, and narrative plausibility. I do not believe The Godfather is a great film; I believe it is very pretty, quite well-acted, and a tremendously overrated film. Where I am undecided is whether the problem with The Godfather is the weakness of its plotting, patched up by deaths, or if there is a deeper root of fascism in the film. Is the magical violence that pervades the movie merely empty showmanship, or an actual endorsement of brutality?
This looks interesting. Curtis’s “The Power of Nightmares” is very worthwhile viewing, though his analyses do not always seem entirely impartial or entirely accurate.
Hello guys. Been away awhile. These are stills from a little movie I made for a reel, and as practice for my first feature. I just finished shooting and it’s not edited yet. Shot on a Canon Vixia HF10, lighting from the screen of a MacBook Pro in that first one.
I definitely agree about the filmmaker’s obligation to know about every element of the craft. You don’t have to start out with comprehensive knowledge though. I command plenty of textbook knowledge about f-stops and white balance, keys and fills and eyelights, etc., but that’s all effectively useless compared to actually doing the work and discovering intuitively what results in what you want.
And all elements of craft, as concerns the director, have to be subordinate to storytelling. Getting the perfect contrast between the light on a face and the shadows on the wall is quite useless if the material is pretentious and inane, or if the actor is unexpressive or phony.
Live-action motion pictures are always the result of an interplay between elements that are controlled and elements that are merely captured in their happening. And on much reflection, I honestly think that cinematography is not an element that requires a lot of controlling, as concerns cinema purely; obviously it is necessary for the creation of specific atmosphere, etc.
So, knowing that I had no budget but a $600 camera, and no time for elaborate lighting setups, I wrote a short script that does not need any particular visual atmosphere to communicate its ideas. Yep, I used autofocus. And automatic light sensitivity too, sometimes!
To be frank, I think the visual element in cinema has always been vastly overrated. I care about how cinema MOVES, not how it looks. The primacy of movement ends up making the sound design MORE essential to good cinema than the visual design, paradoxical as that may be. The post sound work will end up being by far the most expensive and time-intensive element of making this short.
Ultimately, you can very well get away with rough visuals and even fairly rough editing, because those can be aesthetically resolved as creative choices. Rough, amateur SOUND, however, will destroy you.
I just mean that the visuals always get overemphasized. I can’t tell you how many projects of film school friends I’ve helped out on where they agonize for absurd amounts of time over getting a frame just so, or precisely adjusting for the right light, when the nature of the scene being shot doesn’t require anything like that kind of precision. I want to yell, GET AWAY FROM THE FRIGGING CAMERA, DIRECT YOUR ACTORS AND CALL ACTION.
Basically I only mean that the idea or tone or, generally, the MOVEMENT of whatever is being shot needs to be prioritzed. When the central idea is clear, then the right visual design will fall into place, based on its importance, whether it’s an elaborate tracking shot that moves through different regions of light intensity and color temperature, or whether it’s a handheld camcorder set on autofocus.
I kept my camerawork fairly classical, and I think going handheld on such a small camera actually results in a smoother feel because your muscles don’t get fatigued. The camera is definitely optimal for truly renegade, surreptitious work however. I may try a little project like that soon.
The Vixia can shoot at 24 fps, which is nice, and I like the picture it gives. There’s a model with a slightly larger lens which would give a better viewing field at short range, but it was beyond my pocketbook. Still, the tiny thing gives data density of up to 17 megabytes per second, which I think is just about the point at which digital fuzz starts to look convincingly like a rugged, grainy stock.
As you can see from the first still, I like darkness. That is particularly dark, as her face is at an oblique angle from the light source. For one shot I used nothing but an iPhone display for the faintest blue light on the face and in the eyes. Other than that, the entire picture was shot with unaided ambient light.
The feature is going to be a real movie, so I’d like to be able to use the Genesis and those delicious Panavision lenses. Alternately, I could do what Jonathan Demme did in Rachel Getting Married and use a Sony fitted for Panavision lenses. I will have a DP and very specific lighting schemes, but I do intend to rely on sets in which the only light source is a computer screen on a character’s face.
As liberating and instructive as it is to shoot handheld with a nifty small camera, the experience has definitely taught me that elements of feature film grammar — a smooth track-and-pan, a slow dolly-in, having a visual range of primes from 18mm out to 300mm — really are essential to what I want to communicate emotionally in the feature. My budget will likely be less than 500k, but I’m really going to push for as much production value as possible.
I am very curious about Ceylan’s work. Every shot of a sky in his movies seems to be astonishing. Climates is atop my Netflix queue (I prefer DVDs to watching online movies: image quality. Even Netflix’s streaming service has this incredibly irritating skip-frame issue). I unfortunately missed 3 Monkeys when it played in LA theaters.
The last hour shoot day is inevitably the pits. Your crew is physically tired. Your actors are emotionally tired. And you, the director, are mentally tired.
It is a struggle to fit together the basic elements of what your shots are. You forget to tell the actors the basic information of when Cut will be called. You find it necessary to take 60 second breaks to try and remind yourself of what you want. Everyone just wants to go home.
And of course there are crucial scenes you have to cover and you’re behind schedule, so the pressure is only higher when everyone is feeling sluggish.
Blech. Try and schedule so that everything important comes in the middle of the day andonly simple, boring stuff is done at the end.
Yeah, the technology is getting pretty impressive. Eventually Hollywood is going to have to realize that they’re not going to hold onto their prestige through technological advantage, and that vapid styles like Paul Greengrass’s handheld megaproductions or Michael Mann’s ugly attempts at urban authenticity through HD are precisely the wrong way to proceed. They will have to return to strong storylines and actual, disciplined production values (i.e., elaborate human choreography and precision timing) to keep themselves distinguished from the mumblecore amateurs.
What's your Top 10? over 3 years ago
1) 2001: A Space Odyssey
2) Being There
3) Zabriskie Point
4) 8-1/2
5) Andrei Rublev
6) Citizen Kane
7) Vertigo
8) Wings of Desire
9) A Woman Under the Influence
10) Network
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Boundaries of Filmmaking over 3 years ago
The future of cinema will be like its past: a mix of forms unified only under the broadest of categories. Under the world’s omnipresence of screens, cinema is hard to separate from visuality itself. Moving pictures will exist in many modes, and none of those are likely to be a dominant one.
Yet despite competition from video games (neurological feedback-based versions of which are surely in our future), and despite Hollywood’s creative dead-ends, it seems to me quite certain that there will be enduring demand for controlled visual narratives, both in episodic and self-contained (feature) forms.
Last night I attended a double feature of Casablanca and Citizen Kane in Los Angeles. Two films anyone can easily watch online or on DVD, and yet around 200 people, most of them young, were willing to shell out ten dollars to see it on the big screen. And they drank up every scene.
There is a lesson here that should offer comfort to anyone concerned with story in cinema: a library of good films many decades old will still generate revenue: Casablancas and Citizen Kanes will still hold any audience rapt through their entire runtimes. How much money will Grand Theft Auto 4, or Resident Evil 5 be generating in 30 years, or even in 5 years? In interactive media, the appeal is far more technologically dependent than the appeal of feature films. Video games not even ten years old seem painfully dated to us now, and not worth playing, let alone purchasing. This is because interactive media offer sensation, but they fundamentally do not satisfy the demand for narrative.
The strength of cinema was always story, and that will continue. Over a long enough timeframe, all good films (good meaning narratively strong) will make money. Eleven years later, a DVD of Boogie Nights can still be bought in any Walmart or Target in the country because its narrative strength assures that it will remain in demand. How likely is it that you’ll see copies of “300” or “Punisher: War Zone” in stores ten years from now?
Independent filmmaking certainly has a future: it is merely afflicted at present by mediocre talents who are deficient in narrative sense and seem unable to walk a rigorous line between the twin pits on either side of good filmmaking: on one side, the comforts of conventionality and lazy assumptions about the audience’s emotional involvement; and on the other, breezy arbitrariness and whimsy which tries to pass itself off as originality and daring, but is in fact only the failure to establish a frame of meaning.
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Who do you think the most overrated director is? over 3 years ago
I don’t think figures as prominent as Speilberg or Lucas can be called “overrated”: their fame is of such size that they will generate plenty of criticism and backlash. I think the standard of “overrated” needs to depend upon a filmmaker’s estimation among critics and cinephiles. Plenty of films are huge successes while at the same time being, to most people, clearly pretty bad (Indiana Jones 4, anyone?) In short, Lucas and Spielberg are hated by far too many people to be called overrated.
At the same time, I don’t think Marc Forster can be called overrated either: everyone thought STAY was terrible! And many say the same of the new Bond.
Therefore, to be overrated, a director must have a strong reputation among critics and people who write about movies.
So enough with these lightweights, for most overrated director, I nominate: MAX OPHULS.
He is beloved by virtually every film critic there is. David Thomson adores him; Andrew Sarris calls “Lola Montes” the greatest film ever made. But I think this is all bunk.
I find his films trite, precious, boring, and on occasion, visually hideous. Lola Montes is universally hailed for its extravagant visual beauty: I think it is garish, chintzy, and disgusting to look at. All of his films are celebrated for their sweeping, ornate camera movements. I find his framing and his placement of actors to be awkward and obtrusive. And in “Letter to an Unknown Woman” there is a scene where the lovers enter this amusements park ride; basically a carriage that has scroll paintings of landscapes roll past the window. This was one of the few occasions when I have literally found a movie painful, yes, somehow, physically painful to look at on the screen.
Max Ophuls: most overrated director EVER.
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Favorite Cinematographer over 3 years ago
I’ll second (or third) most of the people cited.
But no one mentioned Harris Savides!
Lance Acord also.
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Who do you think the most overrated director is? over 3 years ago
I don’t know what it was, maybe it was the whirring sound that did it. The scene just struck my neurons with pain. The way the actors are shoved to the edges of the frame while this black-and-white smear of painted landscape whirs by, and then just holding on that awkward shot for most of the scene: that is the prime example of how I find Ophuls’s framing to be horrendous.
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Best title over 3 years ago
Sex, Lies, and Videotape (Not THAT great movie, but the title, you must admit, is a killer).
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The Best Films of 2008 over 3 years ago
Some likely contenders, I know, have not yet been released (Benjamin Button, etc.), but I’d like to know what people think some of the best films released in 2008 are.
So far, I would nominate:
Paranoid Park
WALL-E
Rachel Getting Married
Not much else. It’s been a pretty lean year.
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Who do you think the most overrated director is? over 3 years ago
I agree, it’s insufficient for people simply to say a name of a director they hate: we need to explain why we think they are OVERRATED, which generally requires some reference to why those directors are, by many, admired.
The point of this, maintaining a high level of discourse, should ultimately be for us to help each other delineate our own tastes, clarify why and how we respond to films, and to help each other learn to appreciate works we may have disliked in the past.
Of course we must remember that we are talking about movies here: we all watch and respond to films uniquely, and while there are aesthetic standards which allow us to say “That’s good” and “That’s bad” and explain why, these remain subjective matters. I happen to find Ophuls films tedious and annoying, but I understand perfectly well why others may watch his films and find them filled with romance and verve.
And Kubrick has always been divisive. He is (almost) universally revered now, but Pauline Kael was bored out of her mind by 2001 when it came out. And to this day David Thomson, a prominent critic of excellent taste, despises Kubrick as a maker of ice-cold, anti-human and pretentious films. I love Kubrick but I understand completely how some viewers could find him boring and alienating.
John Ford worked in the old factory system and made an enormous number of films, so quickly and under such conditions (limited control of story and no final cut) it is difficult for any film to turn out good, let alone ALL the films a single director made. But John Ford was a great original in his style and his humanism. People often have a shallow idea of Ford films as gruff, chauvinistic male strutting (John Wayne films). They should watch My Darling Clementine to get some idea of Ford’s subtlety, his attention to female characters and delicate emotions. No one had captured landscape so definitively or with such majesty as Ford: there were Westerns before Ford films, but he captured the essence. Yet Ford can be legitimately critiqued for sentimentality. His patriotism, while beautiful and authentically inspiring (see The Iron Horse, Young Mr. Lincoln) could easily slip into uncritical dullness. Likewise, it can be argued that he never forced himself to confront actual history, and always retreated into the comfort of mythology.
I think The Searchers is an important film, as it reveals the racist rage in America’s westward expansion in a way almost unseen in any other movie.
On the other hand, he simply made a few stinkers. The Informer is a maudlin, overrated mess. And probably the dozens of his films that no one watches anymore… well, there’s probably a good reason for that.
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The Best Films of 2008 over 3 years ago
I don’t know what everyone loves about The Dark Knight. I think Nolan’s recent films (everything after Insomnia) have been horrendously edited. I think the “realism” of the new Batman films is a travesty. Gotham City was always supposed to be a nightmare projection of urban decay an mass criminality, which only Tim Burton has effectively captured.
So Nolan comes on trying to modernize or contemporize the series, and to me the results are silly. It reduces Batman to the level of an ordinary action movie. Yes, Heath was fine as the Joker, but the plot surrounding him is ridiculous. Wherever he goes he’s able to have retroactively had dynamite planted all over a building? And apparently Gotham’s gangs are willing to suddenly betray their longtime bosses and flip over to the Joker’s side, for no apparent reason or financial reward?
Christian Bale’s Batman voice is laughable, the action scenes are a hash that completely lack even the most basic architectures of cinematic tension. Aside from Heath, this really was a pretty crappy movie.
And it made 530 million dollars. Oscars, here we come :P
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Who do you think the most overrated director is? over 3 years ago
J Dickson is partly right: it is very common for a film to seem initially unimpressive, or even quite bad, only to gradually gnaw at our minds, be seen again, and succeed. I agree that canonical films need to be seen more than once, especially if the first viewing was negative.
On the other hand, this won’t always work. Some serious cinephiles are simply going to continue to hate Kubrick (or Ophuls).
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The Best Films of 2008 over 3 years ago
Let the Right One In was pretty good; much better than the insipid Twilight. But I don’t think it really went as far as it could have.
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Perversity Is a Matter of Perspective over 3 years ago
Such is the lot of avant-gardes. What begins as utter shock to social sensibilities is rapidly marketized, banalized, and becomes par for the course. I’ve had shit flung at me in a gallery space, and as time passed the experience proved to be not that impressive.
Self-damaging is done by untold millions of people in multitudes of ways; from cutters to drug abusers to people who are merely sullen. Cleverer people with exhibitionist streaks do this and get it to be called art, which is fine. But it is all reducible to basically the same message: our consciousness, “the self,” is built on unstable, self-contradictory, excessive, animalistic foundations, and in many people the edifice of self is cracked enough that they must endeavor constantly to rip it open, to prove to others that it is false. What a scandal that we can create civilizations and things of beauty, and yet we wake up with bad breath and have to take shits, and sometimes we get so sick that we shit out of our mouths.
Worthwhile as a reminder, I suppose. But not particularly interesting to me as art.
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BEST SEQUENCE OR SCENE FROM ANY FILM(CAN BE AN OPENING OR ANYTHING ELSE) over 3 years ago
The extreme slow-motion explosions of household goods at the end of Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point
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Perversity Is a Matter of Perspective over 3 years ago
Chicago, a few years back. I forget the name of the guy’s concept art operation. Basically everyone was waiting around with the customary wines and cheeses, and then this fellow and his harem of girl assistants come out, shit on the floor, and start flinging it at the attendees. Go figure.
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Boundaries of Filmmaking over 3 years ago
Pushing the limits of cinema through experimental forms is great. But I think we have to admit that the more profound, or at least the more influential, advances in cinema have come from within industrial narrative film establishments (whether private or state-run), rather than from true outsiders like Stan Brakhage or video installation creators. Certainly there are significant and fascinating in-between figures like Chris Marker also, and absolutely experimental cinema can be very rewarding and excellent stuff (I’ve been watch Project 05 clips with great interest). But in terms of aesthetic and cultural force, the mainstream is, well, the mainstream.
Anyone interested in cinema needs to confront the fact of authority in cinema production with somewhat more than blanket hostility.How did the Hollywood studios become the cartel they are anyway? They triumphed because they captured a broad audience’s taste for fantasy. And in the first place, they recognized fantasy (wish fulfillment, an idealistic or just unrealisitc view of life) as having greater appeal than other approaches to cinema (straight documentary, social realism, etc.). Their audience of course, was and in many ways still is, masses of people with jobs and hassle-filled lives looking for a brief respite from their daily concerns in the form of thrills, romance, or plain amusement. Narrative coherence was expected (nowadays I’m not so sure), and creative daring and experimentalism was often met with skepticism and commercial failure (the careers of people like King Vidor are interesting to study). And yet there have unquestionably been advances in mainstream narrative film, and there will be further ones, and I do not see feature films declining as a cultural product, economic and social changes aside.
I am a screenwriter and hopefully soon will be a director, and I cannot deny that I am interested in reaching as large an audience as possible, as well as in improving through my work the dreadful quality of mass-market cinema production. I think it is inadequate for creative people who want to work in cinema to dedicate themselves solely to the cause of “self-expression”. That is fine for people with the means to make cinema entirely by themselves, but doing so in turn greatly limits the potential audience (and the kind and degree of the audience’s interest) in his/her work.
Please understand, I do not admire kowtowing to vulgar sentiments or reliance on conventions, or compromising one’s own artistic values. I mean, rather, that I want people working in the industry to focus more on the end product, and on the understanding that an audience is going to approach that end product with a set of expectations. Buying a movie ticket or renting a DVD carries with it a very different set of expectations than those in effect when browsing clips on youtube, or going to a video art installation.
Experimentation is certainly worthwhile and interesting, but it is still to me ultimately a curiosity. A fully realized feature film simply has more cinematic heft: an achieved reality rather than a shimmering fragment. And of course another part of this is the public, social weight that is accessed through achieving a feature film with significant production value.
Some of my favorite directors (Antonioni, Lynch, P.T. Anderson) obviously made deeply personal impressions on mainstream filmmaking: they have made films that were wholly or at least generally the films they wanted to make, works of self-expression. I’m just dubious whether the future of filmmaking needs more of that, or whether filmmakers themselves might not benefit the medium by trying to temper their personal vision with a more objective approach toward the medium and its audience.
In other words, the boundaries of filmmaking have more aspects than simply the personal side of the creator’s expression, and the technical side of the means of distribution. There is also to be studied the variety of ways that audiences watch cinema, and perhaps more importantly, the ways they want to watch cinema.
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Boundaries of Filmmaking over 3 years ago
Many of the clips of 05 are quite alluring. The strangest part is the weird feeling of familiarity. Some of these places (Sunset and Vine, Santa Monica Beach) I’ve actually been to, but other places where I certainly have not been still give off a strange deja vu.
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Boundaries of Filmmaking over 3 years ago
The topic of voyeurism, or privileged viewing access, is very important in Hollywood aesthetics. Since the inception of American cinema, one of the fundamental draws of buying a ticket to the movies was the appeal of being granted access to a spectacle that is exclusive; that you have no other way of seeing than in this dark space. (Imagine yourself as a working stiff in the 1920s; what deep, secret titillation there must have been in a DeMille film promising to take you inside ancient Egyptian palaces, to witness Cleopatra and her attendants, etc. – The Globe theatre in Shakespeare’s time operated on a similar principle.)
This may well be the profoundest part of cinema’s transformation: screens and media are now so ubiquitous and saturating, that to a see a great Hollywood spectacle no longer feels like much an exclusive privilege. You can see the same damn crap pretty much anywhere. (isn’t this also why CGI spectacles are so banal, why the new Star Wars films and the Indiana Jones 4 are so totally unimpressive?).
My own prediction is that the spectacle economy of Hollywood will collapse; and that narrative economy will take its rightful place as the prime attractor of feature films.
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breathless or contempt over 3 years ago
The famous full-body shot of Bardot that opens Mepris was something Godard never intended: he was forced to shoot it by his producer, who needed Bardot’s exposed goods to market the film.
A strange lesson about the compromises in the film industry: if Godard’s (often pretentious and pseudointellectual) artistic motives were fully honored, the film would lack one of its most alluring and erotic elements.
As always with Godard, the line between genius and bullshit is infuriatingly thin and porous. I like Breathless also; but the first film was more of a stunt, I’ve always felt Mepris has more depth to it; despite its studio budget and whatever commercial compromises had to be made, I think Mepris is more of a work of art.
Even Godard admits to this in Histoire(s) du Cinema, where he grudgingly allows that Mepris may be his definitive contribution to film history.
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the passion of joan of arc over 3 years ago
Interestingly, when it was made this film was the most expensive ever produced in Europe. The brief glimpses you get of the city with its distorted shapes was all built exclusively for the film. And then Dreyer shot it almost entirely in close-ups, barely using the sets at all, infuriating his producers. And yet those faces are some of the most extraordinary ever captured on film.
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What did you think of White Dog? over 3 years ago
Yes, it’s dated badly, and really nothing about it says “Sam Fuller” to me. The suspense sequences to me are no different from any other bad 80s horror-exploitation flick.
It’s a shame but Fuller really lost his stylistic touch in his old age, as so many great directors do. The Fuller films to watch are almost all from the fifities, plus Shock Corridor.
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breathless or contempt over 3 years ago
No, Breathless would not work without the jump cuts. Godard realized this as he was putting together his first cut, at well over two hours, and realized it was unwatchable. So he slashed the movie apart with reckless abandon, tossed in sarcastic, goofball music cues, and we have a supposed masterpiece.
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Objections to The Godfather over 3 years ago
I feel very differently about this film every time I see it. Sometimes I am content to drink up the atmosphere and the menace and just roll with it. But recently I’ve come to see this film as a challenge to cinephiles. We, of course, like to take movies seriously, but I think we can only take The Godfather seriously at our own peril.
Studying an audience’s reaction to The Godfather is very revealing: the way they will chuckle with illicit delight in anticipation of the moments of violence. Indeed, it is depressing but I believe true, that many if not most people who love The Godfather love it mostly for the stylishness of its violence.
So let’s take one of the iconic moments: the severed horsehead in Harry Woltz’s bed. It gets giggles every time, and it affirms what is to me one of the most problematic assumptions of the film: the mob violence occurs mysteriously, even magically; that when the mob sets out to do something, it will simply happen, without human risk or mistake. And that’s what the scene is: after Tom Hagen is refused, he leaves, and yet the next morning, someone (Tom Hagen? Or some invisible and anonymous family connection?) has managed to sever the head of Woltz’ prize stud, carry it into his bedroom, tuck the huge bloody thing perfectly under the covers right next to Woltz’s sleeping body, all without being noticed by anyone, let alone Woltz. It just appears there in his bed as a nightmare; waking up covered in blood.
Everyone loves this scene, right? To me it has always reeked of phoniness. Oh, sure, it can get away with the horsehead alone as a one-off stunt; this is a thriller after all. But the movie then adds insult to injury. The point of Tom Hagen’s visit was to intimidate Woltz into putting a family scion into one of his pictures. He refuses, gets the horsehead. But then after the retribution, we cheerily learn that Woltz has reconsidered. Doesn’t this violate the very logic of threats and carrying them out that so much of the movie depends on? Why would Woltz knuckle under when what is precious to him has already been taken away, as apparent punishment for not doing the Corleones’ bidding? The only rational response to the horse head is to hire security guards for his mansion, and dedicate yourself to never allowing that actor in another picture again.
But the movie prefers to exist by the credo that anyone can be killed without consequences, or rather that the consequences will always be favorable for the killers.
Magical violence allows the film to perform some rather incredible narrative fudging. One of the most forgettable sequences of the film is Michael’s long exile in Sicily, while the killing of the police captain cools down. He spends time with the old family, and actually marries a girl. The whole point of being in Sicily is that no one knows he is here; it is the old country, it is safe. And yet his young wife is blown up in a car bomb, an event that has no apparent consequences throughout the rest of the film, other than to heighten the sense that we need more killing.
Vito’s realization that “It was Barzini all along”, i.e., he is responsible for all the double-crosses, the gunning down of Sonny, etc., is another instance of plausible plot fudged by violence. In all the times I have seen this film it is has never been clear to me how Vito arrives at this knowledge. It is just information, just plot delivered to excuse the story’s continued progression into a great montage of murders
Great films, to me, achieve a balance between entertainment and narrative gravity or seriousness; between the illusionist’s quickness of the cut, and narrative plausibility. I do not believe The Godfather is a great film; I believe it is very pretty, quite well-acted, and a tremendously overrated film. Where I am undecided is whether the problem with The Godfather is the weakness of its plotting, patched up by deaths, or if there is a deeper root of fascism in the film. Is the magical violence that pervades the movie merely empty showmanship, or an actual endorsement of brutality?
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breathless or contempt over 3 years ago
Oh I agree, there are many charms in Breathless, and the cavalier spirit and all the tossed-off gestures contribute to that.
But it’s still a stunt. Breezy, capricious, fun, a good stunt. But still a stunt. (Alphaville was a better stunt).
Whereas Mepris has the depth and gravity of a real work of art.
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Objections to The Godfather over 3 years ago
Then instead of saying what you disagree with you might try disagreeing with it.
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Century of the Self over 3 years ago
This looks interesting. Curtis’s “The Power of Nightmares” is very worthwhile viewing, though his analyses do not always seem entirely impartial or entirely accurate.
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cinematography about 3 years ago
Hello guys. Been away awhile. These are stills from a little movie I made for a reel, and as practice for my first feature. I just finished shooting and it’s not edited yet. Shot on a Canon Vixia HF10, lighting from the screen of a MacBook Pro in that first one.
I definitely agree about the filmmaker’s obligation to know about every element of the craft. You don’t have to start out with comprehensive knowledge though. I command plenty of textbook knowledge about f-stops and white balance, keys and fills and eyelights, etc., but that’s all effectively useless compared to actually doing the work and discovering intuitively what results in what you want.
And all elements of craft, as concerns the director, have to be subordinate to storytelling. Getting the perfect contrast between the light on a face and the shadows on the wall is quite useless if the material is pretentious and inane, or if the actor is unexpressive or phony.
Live-action motion pictures are always the result of an interplay between elements that are controlled and elements that are merely captured in their happening. And on much reflection, I honestly think that cinematography is not an element that requires a lot of controlling, as concerns cinema purely; obviously it is necessary for the creation of specific atmosphere, etc.
So, knowing that I had no budget but a $600 camera, and no time for elaborate lighting setups, I wrote a short script that does not need any particular visual atmosphere to communicate its ideas. Yep, I used autofocus. And automatic light sensitivity too, sometimes!
To be frank, I think the visual element in cinema has always been vastly overrated. I care about how cinema MOVES, not how it looks. The primacy of movement ends up making the sound design MORE essential to good cinema than the visual design, paradoxical as that may be. The post sound work will end up being by far the most expensive and time-intensive element of making this short.
Ultimately, you can very well get away with rough visuals and even fairly rough editing, because those can be aesthetically resolved as creative choices. Rough, amateur SOUND, however, will destroy you.
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cinematography about 3 years ago
I just mean that the visuals always get overemphasized. I can’t tell you how many projects of film school friends I’ve helped out on where they agonize for absurd amounts of time over getting a frame just so, or precisely adjusting for the right light, when the nature of the scene being shot doesn’t require anything like that kind of precision. I want to yell, GET AWAY FROM THE FRIGGING CAMERA, DIRECT YOUR ACTORS AND CALL ACTION.
Basically I only mean that the idea or tone or, generally, the MOVEMENT of whatever is being shot needs to be prioritzed. When the central idea is clear, then the right visual design will fall into place, based on its importance, whether it’s an elaborate tracking shot that moves through different regions of light intensity and color temperature, or whether it’s a handheld camcorder set on autofocus.
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cinematography about 3 years ago
I kept my camerawork fairly classical, and I think going handheld on such a small camera actually results in a smoother feel because your muscles don’t get fatigued. The camera is definitely optimal for truly renegade, surreptitious work however. I may try a little project like that soon.
The Vixia can shoot at 24 fps, which is nice, and I like the picture it gives. There’s a model with a slightly larger lens which would give a better viewing field at short range, but it was beyond my pocketbook. Still, the tiny thing gives data density of up to 17 megabytes per second, which I think is just about the point at which digital fuzz starts to look convincingly like a rugged, grainy stock.
As you can see from the first still, I like darkness. That is particularly dark, as her face is at an oblique angle from the light source. For one shot I used nothing but an iPhone display for the faintest blue light on the face and in the eyes. Other than that, the entire picture was shot with unaided ambient light.
The feature is going to be a real movie, so I’d like to be able to use the Genesis and those delicious Panavision lenses. Alternately, I could do what Jonathan Demme did in Rachel Getting Married and use a Sony fitted for Panavision lenses. I will have a DP and very specific lighting schemes, but I do intend to rely on sets in which the only light source is a computer screen on a character’s face.
As liberating and instructive as it is to shoot handheld with a nifty small camera, the experience has definitely taught me that elements of feature film grammar — a smooth track-and-pan, a slow dolly-in, having a visual range of primes from 18mm out to 300mm — really are essential to what I want to communicate emotionally in the feature. My budget will likely be less than 500k, but I’m really going to push for as much production value as possible.
I am very curious about Ceylan’s work. Every shot of a sky in his movies seems to be astonishing. Climates is atop my Netflix queue (I prefer DVDs to watching online movies: image quality. Even Netflix’s streaming service has this incredibly irritating skip-frame issue). I unfortunately missed 3 Monkeys when it played in LA theaters.
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The Highs and Lows of Filmmaking about 3 years ago
The last hour shoot day is inevitably the pits. Your crew is physically tired. Your actors are emotionally tired. And you, the director, are mentally tired.
It is a struggle to fit together the basic elements of what your shots are. You forget to tell the actors the basic information of when Cut will be called. You find it necessary to take 60 second breaks to try and remind yourself of what you want. Everyone just wants to go home.
And of course there are crucial scenes you have to cover and you’re behind schedule, so the pressure is only higher when everyone is feeling sluggish.
Blech. Try and schedule so that everything important comes in the middle of the day andonly simple, boring stuff is done at the end.
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cinematography about 3 years ago
Yeah, the technology is getting pretty impressive. Eventually Hollywood is going to have to realize that they’re not going to hold onto their prestige through technological advantage, and that vapid styles like Paul Greengrass’s handheld megaproductions or Michael Mann’s ugly attempts at urban authenticity through HD are precisely the wrong way to proceed. They will have to return to strong storylines and actual, disciplined production values (i.e., elaborate human choreography and precision timing) to keep themselves distinguished from the mumblecore amateurs.
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