KH Martin

Well, there are only two dozen shots of a real tiger in the whole movie, the rest are digital. I don't know if those 24 or 25 cuts are the impressive beautiful ones or not though. My guess is that PI -- which I haven't yet seen -- is an accomplishment in terms of making piecemeal vfx-heavy filmmaking seamless, without distracting from the artistry and mood. That should have given it an edge over SKYFALL, which I found to be an infuriatingly stupid, wrongheaded mess that has effectively ended decades of Bond admiration (Roger Moore era excepted, along with this short thug they've got in the tuxedo now) that dates back to age 4 for me. Maybe somebody should have the tiger from PI duke it out with the CG komodo dragons from SKYFALL. Winner gets to eat the rest of Daniel Craig's face off, along with the hands of John Logan, to keep him from doing any more 'creative typing' that he passes itself off as screenwriting.

Hey, if you believe half of what is reported about Craig, he'll probably ride just about anything too. But more on topic, I'd love to find out what Sony is putting in their free Kool-Aid to get people to love CASINO and SKYFALL. Because they are both epic fails in just about every category I'd judge them as movies AND as Bond movies.

That's a new bit of info for me, thanks! I'm always trying to amass more info on 2001 and ST - TMP -- kind of perverse fascination there about the masterpiece and (as Sean Connery might voice it) the crashhterpiece.

Was this common knowledge? I'm pretty sure Trumbull is the one who said Kubrick had gotten MGM to sign off on it originally on the basis of 3-panel, but that nobody really thought it was going to be possible (I'm thinking this would have been late 64/early 65 ... the film didn't start shooting till December 65.)

The project was SOLD as 3-panel job, but they never shot anything in that format, going Super Panavision. It was hard enough to do any of the macro nebula stuff and the slit-scan with a regular camera. I don't know if it was in the Bizony book or somewhere else that I came across this, but It was very late in production when they finally saw the film on a curved screen, and I guess that was a shock to many systems. I guess all the UK MGM screening rooms must have been flat. Other possible source may have been John Alcott ... I read a pretty lengthy transcript of an interview with him when I was with CINEFEX, parts of which were included in their seriously incomplete and occasionally inaccurate article on the film.

I am so jealous! The last time I saw it in 70mm was in 1989 (first time was in L.A. in 68, when I was 7 -- really ruined me for ordinary movies!) A 35mm print circulated 10-11 years back that I caught and was able to show my wife (who was blown away even with that version), but I'd sure like to see it properly again. They keep running it as a blu-ray at a little theater nearby, but that's just going to trivialize it to see it in that fashion. Was there one shot during the hotel room sequence at the end where everything went kind of pink? I noticed that on the 35mm, and I think I noticed it earlier on prints as well, but I assume the source is still pristine.

You shouldn't feel guilty for not loving the movie; I sure as hell don't and I absolutely hated it (with the exception of the Shanghai sequence, which succeeds almost entirely DUE to Mr. Deakins.) Certainly Craig is in large part responsible for the tone, but even more for the shift in focus on character -- one that actually puts Bond seriously out of character. But it's a group effort, there's a lot of blame to go round -- too bad nobody notices that this has got more plotholes and idiot character moves than CASINO ROYALE (which is actually saying a lot.) But these movies are apparently immune to criticism because they are Bond movies ... which is odd, because they are celebrated because they are so serious and believable (ahem) ... yet serious movies should not be immune to criticism ... I'm just happy I've got the Dalton movies and the Connerys to rewatch and the original novels to reread. BondReboot is moving further afield, practically turning into AbramsTrek on its wrongheadedness.

There were models used for art dept. planning, but the early tests with miniatures seemed problematic. That's according to stuff I heard for an article I did on the film's cinematography & vfx (skip to the last page for the miniatures reference) http://www.hdvideopro.com/display/features/to-middle-earth-and-back-again.html

Not a chance. This is probably going to be the first Bond movie I NEVER rewatch. I thought that was gonna be the case with VIEW TO A KILL, but I actually did rewatch most of that just to hear some of the music and for the model work. TOMORROW NEVER DIES I bought for three bucks just because it was cheaper than the CD and it let me access the music score, which was a ton better than the movie. But there's not even ancillary interest on this one. My wife said she might rewatch it on video just to see if there was something worthwhile that she missed in the theatre, but I think I'll be in the other room rewatching a Dalton Bond film or FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE.

The letters 'drag' I can agree with. But outside of Children Of Men, the only thing I find terrific about the new millennium and filmmaking so far is that Kubrick's 2001 is set in this century. As for SKYFALL, I think I'll invoke the lead sentence of a Cinefantastique magazine review of THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN to sum up my feelings: JAMES BOND IS DEAD (but by watching the Dalton films after suffering through SKYFALL, he can live again, at least in memory.)

That is one schizophrenic mess of a movie! And as a Bond movie, it just plain ain't one. Really nice miniature pyro work, though, and the Shanghai highrise fight was shot beautifully. I own pretty much all the Bonds, but they ain't EVER getting more money out of me on this one. Even my wife said it felt like her second trip to the dentist this week.

My SKYFALL cinematography/vfx article is up online at http://www.hdvideopro.com/display/features/secret-agent-man.html There is a bit of grammar that needs fixing, plus the last two pages have images and mentions of things that might be slightly spoilerific.

Based on the snippets of footage and a Deakins interview, I'd say this is an interesting step away from what has gone before in terms of imagery, since so much of this Alexa shoot is relying on actual source light at low-levels, a la DRIVE. That's at a considerable remove from the way pretty much any of the previous Bonds, all shot on film, seem to have been handled. As for the film itself, I've gone from being cautiously optimistic to bracing for an angry/negative response to the movie. That's based in large part on my love for not only most of the Connery films and both Dalton films, but also the Fleming stories, which I've read countless times. Since this whole startover with Craig, I think they've really messed the character over (and that's not just the 'becoming Bond' part -- CASINO ROYALE's Bond would only be credible if he were played by a 20something he comes off so immature and impulsive) and SKYFALL seems to have gone a lot further into creating this whole new 'wrong' Bond with an emotional backstory that is at odds with nearly everything I know about the character. I'm actually offended by some bits that seem like they were inserted just to subvert expectation, at the expense of who Bond has been, just to make it seem trendy. And I'm not talking about the way Bond always takes a bit from its times, like Blaxploitation in LIVE & LET DIE or the post-STAR WARS cash-in of MOONRAKER, I mean letting a writer whose solo credits include BATS and STAR TREK NEMESIS mix his usual pastiche of older movies approach with stuff that is more about the early life of Ian Fleming than about his wish-fulfillment character. Totally wrongheaded. Then again, I've never understood the love for the 2006 CASINO ROYALE, where the spying basically consists of killing baddies to get their cellphone info ... baddies who are supposed to be brilliant, but apparently can't memorize phone numbers or throw their cells away in a timely manner. The fact Craig is physically so utterly wrong for Bond in terms of appearance doesn't seem to matter to most, but that's another glaring goof IMO ... he looks more like Felix Leiter AFTER he was fed to the sharks, or like 2nd villain's henchman, than Bond. All you have to do is look at the scene where he picks up a baddie's girlfriend in CASINO to see a guy who looks desperate, not Bond-like in the slightest. To keep from ending on even more of a downer lone-nut mode, I'll say that I found parts of QUANTUM -- the parts that didn't suffer from ADD editing -- to be good, and I'm very excited that miniatures are back in the Bond universe. The VFX supe thinks that with the instant review of hispeed available on Alexa, that modelwork might actually stage something of a comeback, and that there are third-scale miniatures for big moments in the film's climax.

VERTIGO has no business being at the top of the list and I'm not just citing William Goldman (no movie with Kim Novak could be the greatest movie of all time) when I say that. Oddly enough, VERTIGO came in the mail today from netflix, because we haven't seen it in a couple of years, but the idea that it is anything remotely as innovative as KANE is hard for me to see. Love that TARKOVSKY got STALKER on the list (almost makes up for Richard Brooks or Frankenheimer not having one of his real good ones on there), and that 2001 is still up high on it. Not enough political paranoia movies for my taste, though I ain't really holding my breath for TWILIGHT'S LAST GLEAMING or THE PARALLAX VIEW to leapfrog up anytime soon.

Not a whole lot from him on that one. I wrote that article, and during the interview, he wasn't very forthcoming with the usual tech details (just seemed to downplay a lot of the work as you just look around on set and see what needs to be done.) I tried to get him to open up by enthusing about PRINCESS BRIDE and ALIENS, which I think were his first two feature DP projects, but again it was kind of an 'aw shucks' thing with him. Wound up doing it as much about ILM's end as about Biddle's (though that was not my intention, especially given how compromised so much of the VFX are given voluminous late additions by the director.) Biddle's Bond movie always looked very different to me in every format. In the cinema, very nice, on VHS, very pale, and on DVD, somewhere in between.

It's really a serious trial-and-error effort. That's what I've gotten from the various references to how it was done in 2001, and from very modest experiments I tried myself in the Super8 days combining smoke in a clear cube with liquids beneath/behind it. It is VERY hard to scale most liquids in motion to seem big without shooting way offspeed ... look at some of the liquid stuff for folding space in Lynch's DUNE to see how easy it is to go very very wrong. There are one or two online interviews with Con Pederson -- I think one is on Todd Vaziri's long-discontinued site -- that discuss the 2001 stuff a bit, which was done (uncredited) by a group called FX y'all (!?)... this stuff was all shot before Kubrick even left for England, and helped get the film greenlit. All of the liquids in a cigarette-pace-sized field stuff shot by Alcott years later apparently wasn't used at all, though he discusses his involvement on that in the Cinefex retrospective on 2001 (beware ... there are more than a few errors in that piece, like getting the YEAR wrong when the Dawn Of Man sequence was shot.) You can look at old CINEFANTASTIQUEs from 1982 to get an idea of how they did the in-tank nebula in TREK II, which is just a variant on the cloud tank stuff in RAIDERS and CLOSE ENCOUNTERS.

Well, you don't always need one of those. CHINA SYNDROME only has source music outside of what passes for a title song, and several Lumets in the 70s don't need it either. Maybe SOUND would be a better added category. Along with editorial.

Regarding master filmmakers ... I agree with you, totally. I think the way I marvel over Se7en isn't Fincher-specific at all, more due to the confluence of Fincher, Daruisz, and Andy Walker, plus Shore, plus ... well, it all just gelled. But nothing else in Fincher's resume is anywhere near as good (I really like THE GAME and much of FIGHT CLUB, but not in the same way I love Se7en and JFK, I can let wash over me time & again, the way other people feel about the first couple of GODFATHERs.) I remember thinking Fincher was getting too Hitchcock previs-minded around PANIC ROOM, which I thought really stunk. From interviews, it seemed like he was really interested in solving ALL problems prior to shooting, which, while it worked for Alfred, is I think a little limiting for others, and sometimes just a plain-out bad call when you have talent capable of inspired improvisation. There aren't many people who can work like Kubrick, or even if they could, that they could afford to work that way. Same for Malick. Warner seemed to trust Kubrick and indulge him and that was a good working relationship between the two (at least until Kubrick died, and Warner dicked off about reissuing 2001 theatrically in more than a token way in the year 2001) I always wonder how it could have been for Welles if he had a studio underwriting him for a guaranteed tiny budget, sort of like Woody Allen had at UA in the 70s.

Yeah absolutely, those are usually pretty much givens in his pics. I had huge issues at first with ALIEN just because of the Vietnam era tech (toggle switches everywhere), but after a few years I accepted this is what people consider 'future real' -- just like blinking light computer panels were 'it' in the 60s and reused through the 70s (and probably just as inaccurate as sound in space, which very few folks have dared to deal with outside of Kubrick and Whedon.) But there's a viewpoint in the design, I grant that. And it looked better in most senses than films that tried to extrapolate a future and wound up boring your ass off (I'm looking at you, Harold Michaelson on STAR TREK THE MOTION PICTURE.)

I've loved BLADE RUNNER from day one, but I've never found it to be a perfect blend at all. I'd say Se7en fits that description to a T, but BR succeeds because of score, ambiguity, cinematography and occasionally performance. The director orchestrates and chooses on all this, but I think BR's success is that there was too much good stuff to get it all messed up, especially when he had Rawlings cutting it damn well. The fact Scott didn't even seem to understand the material (what leaps to mind is when he misread a Peeples rewrite, taking a Deckard voiceover remark as being literal rather than figurative, and extrapolating that Deckard was a repllicant on that basis) makes me think the ambiguity is unintentional at times, contrived at theres, unlike, say, Kubrick with 2001, where any rethink was motivated by huge amounts of post time to reconsider and reconfigure. It took me nearly a quarter-century to appreciate ALIEN, but that never stopped me from dropping huge coin for the fancy laserdisc in order to be able to look at it and more importantly, to be able to see much of the artwork generated for it that wasn't used. I honestly think that ALIEN's prime success is due to Hill's rewrite of Obannon, even though not all of it survived into the final. The fact that ALIEN (and to some degree ALIENS) was a movie that made me want to see a movie in that universe SANS any extraterrestrials (or at least sans the xenomorph) makes me think that it was more scripting and performance that I found compelling than actual filmmaking.

I was just rewatching an old interview with Orson Welles, a really long comprehensive one, done by British TV. All that stuff about how he was doing all this terrible crap for other films in order to self-finance his own work. I was just thinking how if you could have put Welles on ice for a generation, he could have been shooting his movies economically and actually being able to afford to finish them. I remember there's a book of talks with him and Bogdanovich where they both rail about how old fashioned and ridiculous it is that you have to load film in a camera to make a movie. I was offended when I first read it, but when somebody's probably lived through enormous traumas owing to that methodology, I can see how they'd welcome any other more direct means. Even though I can only usually imagine shooting film, I can absolutely see the advantage of digital for economy and freedom. Think I'm going to take out Welles CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT (my next to last VHS movie, along with Tavernier's DEATHWATCH) and give it another viewing. Try to see past the postsynch issues to see it for the fascinating indy masterpiece it is.

Look at what I wrote. I forget HE made the movie. I keep thinking it is a QT flick that just looks bad photographically. Perhaps I should describe it as a QT flick that survives Scott.

I keep forgetting he made that. Yeah, TRUE ROMANCE absolutely smokes all of the others (no pun intended.) The shower glass fight with Gandolfini and Arquette, the big squareoff at the end, and the Walken/Hopper scene alone are, as they say in the flick, just so cool.

I really think LAST BOY SCOUT is a totally misunderstood movie. And I also see it as the quintessential Willis movie, one that has an edge that was missing from what went before, but still has some glint of humor that doesn't survive past PULP, and it hints at how well he delivers 12 MONKEYS. Then again, i haven't liked any of his stuff since THE SIEGE. CRIMSON has a real hodgepodge script (Tarantino AND Robert Towne as scriptdoctors), and the WEPS guy changes his mind so many times that I wish Denzel and Hackman had blown HIS head off. But it just works for the stuff with the two leads, which I find seriously compelling.

For me, Tony Scott only has two seriously entertaining flicks, and those are LAST BOY SCOUT and CRIMSON TIDE. ENEMY OF THE STATE tries, but part of the problem with all his films is trying to deal with the smoke levels, it looks like Peter Hyams but with a good DP in most instances. Then again, I only find three of Ridley's films outstanding, and an awful lot of clunkers. Maybe his kids will make more successful movies?