Kim Vickers

Bundling the matches should work: On the "First Blood" DVD, there's a scene where Stallone strikes a match in a black cave. The director says that the DP (Andrew Laszlo) lit the scene with the match alone -- although it was actually two wooden matches glued together for more light. Worth checking out that scene for reference.

In still photography, there's a general rule: doubling the MP count delivers 25% more resolution. In other words, a 12 MP DSLR is only 25% "better" than a 6 MP DSLR. You need to go to 22 or 24 MP to get to medium format resolution. If this is the case, wouldn't a 65mm digital camera have to produce something like 12K resolution in order to truly qualify as "65mm digital"??? I've heard that anything above 8K is actually beyond the human eye's ability to resolve detail (unless you're sitting in the front row of the theater), and therefore quite pointless, but I'm sure there's more than one side to that story. Maybe this just turns into semantics at a certain point, but I'd love to get some opinions on this. Also, the specs on the Phantom 65 and HD seem quite impressive. They seem to suggest a 14-stop latitutde, which would be "best in show" for digital cameras, as far as I'm aware. On paper, this thing looks like the first serious match for film. At least the design looks "right." Has anyone put it through its paces? Results?

There's a scene in Raiders between Indy and Belloq, sitting in a Cairo cafe. Jones thinks Marion is dead and he's hungry for blood. Then Belloq patronizes him with a lesson in archaelogy 101, rubbing salt in the wound. The scene is shot with Jones's face in the foreground, slightly out of focus, and runs as a master, until Jones pulls his gun. The patrons pull their guns and Jones is rescued by a gang of...children. Great performances by both actors, great script. Probably the quietest moment in the film, but for my money it's the most memorable. Almost feels like something out of Casablanca. The two sequels produced lots of whiz-bang, but nothing on the thematic or creative level of the above scene, which is why I find the sequels quite disappointing in comparison.

I'm not sure anybody's accusing him of anything. He's made a couple of very good pictures, a couple of duds. For people of a certain generation, Fight Club is their Apocalypse Now, Seven is their Psycho. The trouble with this generation is that they can't tell the difference between David Fincher and Stanley Kubrick. Hence this thread ;)

I'm kind of surprised a notorious "full-frame" director like Fincher deemed 2K, 10-bit digital robust enough for big screen work. IMO, it isn't, compared with a 4K scan of 35mm neg. Anyhow, one very good reason to see the film is to see how the Viper does in the hands of a good cameraman, and make up your own mind about it. Unfortunately, I can't think of two more reasons.

Blast Reduser forum, if it makes you feel better. I, for one, am completely intrigued at the PROSPECT of a 4K digital camera with onboard recording that baselines at $17.5K. The business proposition alone is enough to make me stop and hear out Mr. Jannard. I can't imagine why any serious filmmaker would be eager to lampoon such a scheme -- at least until the results are a known quantity. Way too many people on this site are looking to "prove" how much they "know" about professional filmmaking techniques by damning Red and digital cinema in general. I would think a serious pro would want to see how the camera performs before spouting off in the negative.

It's best to leave Kubrick alone. He's one of filmdom's true originals. Those who try to emulate his style usually meet with disaster, as Spielberg did with A.I. In a similar way, a lot of screenwriters waste a lot of time trying to immitate Preston Sturges. Can't be done. Move along. Fincher can be copied. The question is why you'd want to? Fincher himself is a copy of Ridley Scott, who is himself annotating a lot of Kubrick's work. (Alien/Blade Runner:2001, Duellists:Barry Lyndon, Gladiator:Spartacus, Matchstick Men:Lolita.) A copy of a copy of a copy = Bore-ing. Zodiac was 2 hours and 40 minutes I'll never have back. R.I.P. Stanley Kubrick. And I'll take Sir Ridley over Fincher any day of the week.

Being a skeptic is one thing. Being an a**ho** is something else. Unfortunately, Jim Murdoch is an a**ho** first, skeptic second. THAT'S why there's such animosity towards him. I suppose it's his karma. Perhaps the only thing to do is ignore him. Sad.

Personally, I think the reason Jannard doesn't want you to come by his booth is that he'd have to be physically restrained to keep from kicking your teeth in. I know I would.

Where you stand is fu@$ed in the head. Seriously. Other artforms have low-cost production. Music doesn't require millions of dollars. Painting only requires a modest income to afford brushes and canvas. Writing doesn't require any more investment than a cheap laptop. Why should film alone require the resources of small armies and merchant banking schemes? The answer, of course, is that it doesn't have to. It's merely the status quo. Movies aren't really made with money. They're made with talent. But far too many talented people don't get the opportunity to make their film, because the money and the institutions that protect that money stand in their way while grade-z non-entertainment like Miami Vice is granted $135 million of the world's resources, and theater attendance goes into the dumpster. Half the people running the studios couldn't find their butts with both hands -- and yet people like YOU defend the status quo as if it's something we're all desperate to maintain. WE'RE NOT and neither are the legion of moviegoers who aren't buying tickets. Get a frigging clue, Murdoch! There's no reason why, in the digital age, a good movie camera can't be made in the price range of a good upright piano. It may not have all the attributes of 35mm systems, but Jannard is going to prove that it can be made to come damn close. I'll take damn close at $17,500. It's a hell of a lot more opportunistic than the $175,000 it costs in the analog world, just in film and processing. So F-U Jim Murdoch. There. I feel better.

Curious: What should 65mm neg be scanned at, in your estimation?

Bravo. I've been waiting for somebody to put it so succinctly. "Ali" was the first sign that Mann had finally "jumped the shark." Then came the cliched and uninspired "Collateral" and now this steaming pile. Who cares what he shot it on? What he shot was puerile and tedious. VHS would be too good for it. Fact is, Mann's films do not age well. His best film, The Insider, now plays like a better-than-average made-for-cable melodrama. Nothing wrong with that. Nothing particularly noteworthy about it, either. The BBC makes this kind of stuff by the container load (not that you get to see much of it in America) and the directors are comparatively anonymous, but I digress.... Storyteller he can be. Auteur he ain't. To be an auteur, Mann would have by now tied in his penchant for male brooding to some grander, overarching theme. So far, all he's got is cops and robbers, with no sense of humor. Maybe the French dig this crap.

I'm kind of thinking about the look Richardson got on JFK. It seemed like he used filters or netting throughout, even outdoors. I loved the "humid" look to that film. I think there's a scene at a racetrack early on with Jack Lemmon, where the effect was more subtle. A warm, low-con look. I suppose, though, it would only work for your purposes if the interiors were shot using the same type of technique, otherwise you go "outside" and it looks like there's a different DP at work. I haven't seen the show, but, thinking editorially, is it possible to get an actual outdoor establishing shot of the neighborhood, or the house, under partially overcast or completely overcast conditions? If that's the first shot I see, and I don't see harsh sunlight, it might make the job a little easier in terms of matching.

Do diffusion filters or netting help? Not too much to be obvious, just enough to give you a little extra glow???

If he's truly a "friend" you tell him what you think. If he's more of a "professional associate" you tell him what he wants to hear.

Note: "sic" is put in brackets by an editor to highlight an error in the original document. It doesn't mean "sick."

And I'm happy to go on record as saying that if you're going to assault something for its alleged technical faults, you should at least spellcheck your posts. Back on topic, it seemed entirely appropriate to me that a movie about a Libertine should take so many...liberties photographically.

You've never heard of an XDCam? I assure you, the cameramen I know who use it are quite professional.

And your point is?

Google "1 terabyte optical disc" and see what comes up. Can you imagine a 4K XDCam that uses 1 tb discs? Do you think Sony can?

Variety's review of Superman Returns singles out Siegel's camerawork and gives the film the highest praise of any summer blockbuster in recent memory. From the review: "Regular Singer cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel has contributed significantly to giving the film a fantastically clear, clean and stable look; "Superman Returns" is an unalloyed pleasure simply to behold." Read the entire review here: http://www.variety.com/VE1117930841.html

I'm an editor on documentaries and I'm always hammering the people I work with about the need to cut out exposition in stories. I see that blank look coming back a lot and it drives me crazy, because I know the person has no idea what I'm on about. That's why I'm forever grateful to Ron Howard for making this movie. He has saved me from having to explain what I mean. Now, when people ask me, "What's wrong with exposition?" I'm just going to tell them to go and watch this movie. Virtually the entire running time of the film is comprised of one tedious expositional sequence after another. Sleep-inducing. It didn't have to be this way. Oliver Stone had a similar expositional problem to overcome in JFK -- which is 1000 times the movie this is -- and he did it in fine style, with one major sequence, the Mr. X sequence with Donald Sutherland, tying all his expositional threads together in one riveting performance. JFK tells a story of a historical coverup. Da Vinci Code offers up a lecture of a historical coverup. See them back to back and see why one works and the other doesn't.

I'd love to see Ridley go back to making smaller, more intimate pictures again (i.e. The Duellists). The performances in his films are usually excellent. IMO the best bits in Alien were the scenes around the kitchen table, with the crew eating and chatting. I think that's what made the chestburster scene so interesting -- it starts out as a simple little kitchen table scene. Nice storytelling lesson there. If you doubt he's a great director, go back and watch that scene. The first ten minutes of Thelma & Louise are outstanding as well. The performances are perfect. I frankly think he's better at the intricate mechanics of filmmaking than he is with the bigger moving parts, but I know that's a minority opinion.

Session 9 takes place mostly in and around an abandoned mental institution. A couple of scenes in houses and cars, but that's about it. I believe the budget was $1.5 million, shot on HDCam. It's probably the best low-budget thriller I've seen. Very creepy. One those odd cases where the HDCam look actually enhances the weird feel of the movie.

I think you've just nailed the problem. It's not that Ridley makes "bad" films, per se, more that Hollywood today resembles Detroit in the 1970s. Detroit got away with making crappy cars until the Japanese came along and made markedly better ones at the same price point. Unfortunately, Hollywood still has no "industrial" competition on the level of Japanese carmakers, and so the misery at the multiplex continues. As the Hollywood film industry continues to plumb new depths of mediocrity in its big releases, Ridley seems to have eschewed his perfectionist approach in favor of a more workmanlike one. I'm guessing this is a smart man's method of survival in a business that too often regards smart people as a threat instead of an asset. I hope he at least gets the Irving Thalberg award one day. He deserves at least that.