Category: flix

In a fun moment in Das Boot, the enlisted men sing along to a recording of It’s a Long Way to Tipperary

This clip is pretty complicated:

• Das Boot is a movie about a German WWII U-Boot crew
• the song is British and became popular during WWI amongst the soldiers. It’s associated with WWI
• …but it was also a popular song
• the song is about being homesick
• because it’s British, it’s annoying to the officer who is party-line Nazi, who clashes with the captain during the story, playing to the anti-war theme of “the people who make wars (politicians) are not the people who die in wars”

After hearing a lot about how awesome Mad Men is we finally watched it. While the Art Direction is indeed good, there’s some major problems with the show:

• The acting is not very period – it reeks of contemporary cable drama. I realize the challenge of getting actors to act like people in the 1960s, and even that it may not be desirable, since the audience might not be into it.
• The writing is a bit overconfident: Some of the history jokes and flourishes the writers add are incorrect in stupid ways:
  • Flourish example: A long “brilliant” speech declares advertising is about telling people they are happy, and that everything is alright – but even an incredibly stupid advertising person could tell you that this is the EXACT OPPOSITE of what advertising is about. The basic message of all advertising is “you could be MORE HAPPY THAN YOU ARE NOW with this product.” Nice try, nerds!
  • Anachronism joke example: “There’s no magical machine that duplicates things” or something – making reference to the audience that there are not yet copy machines. Ho ho weren’t things primitive then! But actually there were ways to duplicate documents – they were called mimeographs.

PROBLEM: importing an Adobe Photoshop file into Final Cut Pro looks like a flat image. That’s bad. It’s supposed to be a sequence, so you can play with the individual layers!

SOLUTION:

• open the file in Photoshop
• Re-save it, exactly as it is, using “Save As…” — make sure the Layers checkbox is on!
• delete the file in Final Cut Pro and re-import it. If this worked, the icon should now be different, and look like a sequence.

The problem:

– different takes: you have footage of someone saying a long speech, but for whatever reason you don’t have a completely usable take with the entire speech. This could be because the actor dropped a line, or stumbled over part of a line, someone could jostled the camera, or another camera issue, or there could be a technical issue with the sound, like a dog barking in the background or a sampling problem where the sound cuts out. You have to stitch together two takes. But how?
– speech too long: you have a good take, maybe only one, but the speech as written is just too long. The audience may lose focus when they watch the scene. You may or may not need to cut some of the middle of the speech. But how can you integrate the two or more pieces of the take left over?

Solutions:

Use Multiple Angles:
Your basic editing, you’re cutting between cameras for the same speech. If you only had one camera, it will of course be for a different take – with a consistent performance from the actor you can cut the sound from one single take into another if you have to in order to avoid differences in sound quality. This obviously requires some advanced planning since you’d need to have shot this when on location in the first place!

Cutaways: while the speaker’s audio continues, cut to:

• a reaction shot of the listener. This is pretty much covered under “multiple angles”: the footage you took of the other actor, listening while the person is speaking. Since their mouth is not moving, it could well be from another take and they could therefore be reacting to a different line, so be careful it makes sense! Reporters do this all the time; sometimes faking the reaction footage of themselves after the interview, as famously depicted by William Hurt in the film “Broadcast News.”
• a photo of the thing the person is talking about (especially for documentaries – like the “Ken Burns Effect”)
• an object in the same venue as the speaker – for example, the dialog is in a cafe; you show the napkin dispenser… or one that could plausibly be there, if you didn’t film it originally (pickup shot road trip!). Good for developing atmosphere.
• a totally random other shot – this has to do with Eisensteinian theory of continuity, but basically you pick something that the audience can relate on some metaphorical level to the situation or dialog or character

If none of that is going to work, you’re stuck with a shot of the speaker. So we’re down to:

Dissolve into same shot:
Cut for sound, omitting some footage between two takes — that is cut the dialog so it sounds good, and then adjust the video. The simplest non-jarring transition is a dissolve between the two takes. Popular in documentaries.

Mirror the shot on the next take:
This is similar to the dissolve except it lets you cut between two takes of the same shot. I saw this in The Aristocrats (2005), directed by and I think edited by Paul Provenza. He took a shot of a comedian talking, and cut directly to the same shot that had been flipped on the vertical axis, so left is right. If the shot is done slightly lopsided, or especially if you mirror AND zoom the shot a little, it looks like a different camera.

While at mom’s for New Years Day we saw on KTSF “Kigeki Hatsumode Ressha” – which seems to be a Japanese version of the late 1960s “square guy going on odyssey through bohemian weirdness” movie!

It was fun; hopefully I’ll be able to find it on Play Asia or Yes Asia.

I’ve been running through a bunch of the movies of Wong Kar-wai (王家衛) recently.

In the order I saw them in:

• I originally saw 2046 in the theater, and it was the first of his movies I saw. I liked it, but didn’t quite understand it past a superficial level. I discovered the reason only recently…
• At some point I saw My Blueberry Nights, which, although filled with beautiful and famous young Western actors, is not very memorable. Natalie Portman steals the movie, as predicted. I originally saw this movie because of my search for Road Movies, a genre of which this is not a great example.
• A filmmaker friend, Chris McGilvray, pointed out that 2046 is actually filled with references to In the Mood For Love… so I saw that one. 2046 makes a lot more sense now! It’s a bit slower, but paired together they are my favorites so far.
• Days of Being Wild – a slacker playboy seduces shopkeeper Maggie Cheung and then psycho floozy Carina Lau, and then flips out and leaves for the Philippines. Not much happens in it, but the performances are interesting. I wouldn’t recommend this one except to arthouse film fans/
• Chungking Express: Two stories. I liked the second half of this movie, the part with Faye Wong and Tony Leung, much better than the first. I’d actually recommend watching this one FIRST – it’s the lightest of all the movies so far, and the DVD release has a short review by Quentin Tarantino describing the film’s significance and who the actors are.
• Fallen Angels, as of Oct 29, is my new favorite. It starts out with the strongest premise, and the most compelling characters. Its second half starts meandering… Wong is not real plot-focussed I guess. Still the best edited, although still better in the first half than the last. Actiony.

I’m watching Wong Kar-Wai’s Chungking Express.

This is random but the bar at around 26 minutes in: I’ve been there. It’s a Hong Kong bar called Bottoms Up, and their sign is a pictures of a lot of bare butts. We walked by it a dozen times when I was I think fifteen or so.