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Oscar nominations 2016


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I was watching Meet Me In St Louis the other night on DVD, never seen it before. I thought, my gosh in many ways filmmaking has actually gone backward. The colour is spectacular, every shot looks like an oil painting. DOP was some guy named George Folsey.

 

In so many ways CG has ruined movies and the process of making them. What always comes to mind first is Richard Attenborough staging the biggest scene in the history of film at the beginning of Gandhi, 300, 000 extras were brought in, 300, 000!! Nothing like it has ever been achieved in film since. So we achieved the height of film greatness in 1982.

 

R,

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Richard.. ok thanks.. but like really attacked..!! I think the scene in Revenant of the bear attack is very convincing .. and that would just be impossible with a real bear.. and a real actor.. let alone an A list one.. how did you shoot it with the real bear ..?

 

Have a look, but I did it.

 

R,

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The thing about the studio era from the late 1920's through the early 1960's is that, being bound by soundstage work for various reasons, there were plenty of visual effects going on, enough for each studio to justify a whole department working full time on them. "Gone With The Wind" is a great achievement in cinematography but it also has a lot of matte paintings, some doing set extensions, and process shots.

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Yes that's true matte painting has been around for quite a while.

 

Then film hit that sweet spot where location filming became all the rage, and a lot of great product was produced. Now we are heading back the other way.

 

Get the actors in front of the green screen, action!

 

R,

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CG explores a parallel universe from that of photography. It's an imaginary world, that sometimes looks like a photographic one, and at other times some exaggeration of it. A lot of photography also tries to do the same thing. To enter the world of preconceptions. The world of assumptions. Or the world of the visionary. The seer. Or the blind. Or the blinded.

 

"What is the difference?" becomes the rhetorical question of this world's proponents. Because the whole concept of difference is alien to it's understanding of the universe. What grips the imagination of the new visionary is the formula. The equation, in which everything equals everything else. Or anything equals anything else. Where anything and everything is the Same. Belongs to the same universe. The same thing.

 

But against this, photography could make a difference. If it has to take place in a low budget so called "art film" then that is what it will do. To experiment there, or anywhere else it finds fit.

 

But many art films won't actually explore this at all. On the contrary they'll treat the photographic image with the same derision that a philosophy of digital effects will do - as if the photographic image were no different from a special effect. Indeed there is no longer any such thing as a special effect. There will just be effects. Of which the photographic 'effect' becomes just one of any number. Or perhaps, within the world of effects the photographic 'effect' remains the special one.

 

Or not so much a special effect, as a special defect.

 

In order for photography to offer an alternative to the imploded self fulfilling world of the preconceived, it must do so. It must work in a way that finds that which the visionary is unable to see, but that which photography can.

 

To bust out of the art studio and back into the world. To originate within the world rather than within an illustration. And if artists are to be employed find those in a life drawing class that actually spend most of the time looking at the model, rather than at their drawing. For they will be the artists, rather than the wannabes.

 

C

Edited by Carl Looper
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Nothing is really new. I just finished reading U.K. cinematographer Christopher Challis' autobiography "Are They Really So Awful?" He shot a number of movies for Powell-Pressburger like "Tales of Hoffman". He said that at some point, maybe in the 1960's when front projection was developed, some producers had this idea that movies no longer needed to build sets anymore, they just had to shoot plates in various real locations and then project them behind actors on a stage.

 

Not that different than the green screen virtual set stuff that George Lucas was attempting on the Star Wars prequels. Every now and then someone thinks that have a "new" idea about how to make movies more efficiently and thus more economically. Today you hear the occasional person suggest that if you shoot 6K or 8K, etc. you can just shoot a wide master and crop to get all of your coverage, or they suggest shooting in 6K or 8K with everything centered so they can crop and compose the image in post, as if there was something better about making a compositional choice later than earlier. Sure, it's annoying and a threat to the power of the cinematographer, but I'm not ready yet to start panicking about it because every day, I run into producers, directors, and cinematographers who prefer to do things "the old-fashioned way".

 

On the other hand, I also don't see a problem with using modern tools if they are helpful. Filmmaking is always hard, even a simple scene with two people talking in a room can get difficult, problems can arise, so you need to be aware of your options to solve problems.

 

I shot the other day in a house where it was supposed to be a sunny day outside but the worst El Nino storm was raging. So I closed the curtain sheers to hide all the rain and I lit the house to look sunny when it was dim and dark outside.

 

But if I had a certain shot that needed to be done with the curtains open looking at the sunny street, and it couldn't be changed story-wise to a rainy day, and we couldn't return to this location with first unit, then putting a green screen out the window and shooting a plate later on a sunny day might have been an option if there was the budget for it. Is using a blown-out curtain sheet to hide the weather "real" cinematography but using a green screen out the window to get a sunny view less of a job of cinematography? And what if I had, for example, used rear-screen projection on location at night to project a plate of a sunny day, would that be more "real" cinematography than using the green screen because it was done in-camera instead of composited in post? It's all trickery after all, and I'm the one finding a solution even if I'm not the one doing the composite work if I went with a green screen.

 

Even "Citizen Kane" is full of effects shots, not all were done in-camera by Gregg Toland, but most of the ones done in post were still designed by Toland and Welles.

 

Lubezski physically suffered enough working months in the cold shooting handheld on the Alexa for "The Revenant", I wouldn't take anything away from him because there are some CGI alterations, especially for stunt work or to stitch shots to look like a continuous take. The movie clearly shows his artistry at work, his craft, his skills.

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It also said previously that it was "gut-churningly brutal, beautiful storytelling"

 

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/dec/04/the-revenant-review-gut-churningly-brutal-beautiful-storytelling

 

It is the good thing about opinions, there are as many as people are in the world, even if they come from the same source!

 

Have a good day.

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Like I said....the Oscars are now wrapped up in America's social problems. The celebration of achievements in film are now secondary.

 

http://variety.com/2016/film/awards/spike-lee-jada-pinkett-smith-oscar-boycott-1201682165/

 

I also want to be the first to predict that there will be at least one winner who lambasts Donald Trump, maybe more. Again......hi-jacking a celebration of film to make a political statement.

 

R,

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You, too. :)

 

Though I do wonder why you felt called out and needed to issue a rebuttal of a simple thesis that stated the film was no good.

 

I didn't feel that way, I just pointed that the same newspaper has different critics which either like or dislike a movie that we were discussing, hence, if you put one which says that the movie is a "violent meaningless glorification of pain", which I might agree with, it had been interesting to post the other one too, just for the sake of seeing the different point of views that one source has :)

 

 

Like I said....the Oscars are now wrapped up in America's social problems. The celebration of achievements in film are now secondary.

 

http://variety.com/2016/film/awards/spike-lee-jada-pinkett-smith-oscar-boycott-1201682165/

 

I also want to be the first to predict that there will be at least one winner who lambasts Donald Trump, maybe more. Again......hi-jacking a celebration of film to make a political statement.

 

R,

 

Richard, you're not familiar with the Spanish Oscars, The Goya Awards, right? :D

Every single year, most of the artists who win any of the awards make a political statement, usually very left orientated.

 

Early in the 2000's they even recreated and satirised the political party in the power at that time, it was kind of funny!

 

http://elpais.com/elpais/2014/02/10/inenglish/1392035815_358685.html

 

Have a lovely day!

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Back to Mad Max: Fury Road which I just watched...

 

I'm saddened to say that I haven't seen anything this mind-numbing in a long while. With all due respect to John Seale and his crew, this film has no business being nominated for the Best Cinematography Oscar, simply due to the fact that there is virtually no story to the film. And cinematography is all about the visual depiction of the story, so it's pretty hard to do any kind of visual storytelling when there is little to no story to begin with.

 

There is virtually no introduction to the world of the film, no character expositions and a plot isn't even alluded to until an hour and twenty minutes into the film. Visually, I loved the timing/color saturation & the VFX. I don't fault Seale for the film's shortcomings. The way I see it, George Miller just didn't give him much to work with.

 

The original Mad Max (1979) was on cable the other night and even that had everything this was missing: a story-arc, character development (to the point that you empathized with them) and an interesting concept of a post-apocalyptic world.

 

It's really too bad because Miller had a chance to properly re-introduce the Mad Max franchise to an entirely new generation, as well as mine, but he completely missed the mark.

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For better or worse, the movie relies on you having seen "Mad Max" and "Mad Max 2 / The Road Warrior" (or even "Thunderdome") to have any sort of emotional grounding or story arc for the main character. It's almost like a short film in between Mad Max 2 and Mad Max 3 in terms of story development (in that there is very little on its own.) But I liked it as a visual and visceral exercise in motion, energy. Some movies are more like experiments in style than work as complete narrative experience in terms of character and plot.

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For better or worse, the movie relies on you having seen "Mad Max" and "Mad Max 2 / The Road Warrior" (or even "Thunderdome") to have any sort of emotional grounding or story arc for the main character.

 

I respectfully disagree, David. I saw all of the Mad Max movies when I was young and didn't really feel that Mad Max: Fury Road made any connection - emotional or otherwise - to them. Granted, its been years since I saw Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981) or Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (1985,) but this felt very disconnected, to say the least, to the original three Mad Max films.

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I loved Mad Max Fury Road. One of the few movies I bought on DVD. Geez I love the last two shots with the music and the platform making the wipe to black, awesome.

 

R,

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Now you get why I'm so furious about Mad Max Bill...

 

Your argument, Tyler, was basically that George Miller "promoted" the DIT to DP on the film, relegating John Seale to C-camera operator - information that apparently only you are privy to. And even when asked, you still failed to provide any links to any of your "sources."

 

I never disagreed with you or anyone else that Hollywood is producing mindless entertainment. That's hardly new.

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I couldn't wait to get it off my screen! Poop is too nice of a word for the drivel produced in Fury Road. It's just eye candy for people who have no problem switching off their brain. Maybe a good thing? I honestly can't switch off my brain, it's always chewing on something and from the first frame to the last, I was contemplating what I could have been doing during those two hours. It is truly a movie with no purpose for existence, much like Jurassic World, where at least the filmmakers got a passing grade because it had a script, all be it, a very thin one. Fury Road is on the Oscar list for one reason... it made a lot of money and that's the sad reality about Hollywood. Had Beasts of No Nation been nominated for several categories like it SHOULD have been, life would be good! Let movies like Jurassic World and Fury Road come and go and let the truly great films float to the surface.

 

When I think Miller spent a decade prepping Fury Road, my head explodes. It feels rushed and nonsensical, as if they threw it together in a few weeks and hurried through post.

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Your argument, Tyler, was basically that George Miller "promoted" the DIT to DP on the film, relegating John Seale to C-camera operator - information that apparently only you are privy to. And even when asked, you still failed to provide any links to any of your "sources."

Watch the interview's and read the ICG and AC articles. You can tell a lot through a persons body language.

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Damn Tye, you're being so insulting here. So, I switch off my brain when I watch Fury Road and love it? Trust me, my brain is fully on, and I'm enjoying every minute of it.

 

 

91 wins and 135 nominations: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1392190/awards?ref_=tt_awd

 

Best reviewed film of the year on Rotten with an insane average rating. Really? Sure, you can not like the film, but really, all the critics who loved the film, all the awards it got, the Critics Choice sweep, all of us who love the film are basically retards, that's it?!

 

Goddam, this blows my mind, I just cannot condone this.

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If you judge Fury Road for what it is (dessert) and stop comparing it to what it isn't (food for the mind and soul) then you can appreciate the craft behind it. It's pure escapism. Nothing wrong with that. Like jumping on a roller coaster. Producing anything that visually striking is pretty damn impressive and I wouldn't fault the film for it's visuals taking center stage over the story.

 

Spending too much time on character development and plot might have bored the target audiences as much as the filmmaker. Who knows? Just speculating. I'm generally more of a fan of films from Wes Anderson, Noah Baumbach, Neil Labute etc. But I can still appreciate Fury Road and Age of Ultron, Force Awakens. Technically astounding.

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