The Way It's Done

A few months back a friend pointed out to me how the action movie hero is basically a thing of the past. He was right, but what's even more obsolete these days is the action movie director. In the 90s America had the best action movie directors in the world. Guys like Antoine Fuqua, John Singleton, sometimes Michael Bay, Brett Ratner to a lesser extent and the best of the best, Rob Cohen. Look at the titles these guys produced: The Rock, The Fast and the Furious, 2 Fast 2 Furious, The Replacement Killers, Money Talks, XXX. These were real action movies. They prided themselves on big, bogus stunts, real explosions, great special effects and, to top it off, interesting enough characters to keep the story flowing.

But there was also an art to what they did. They knew how to film action and capture it in such a way that the audience got the most excitement out of it. They put the audience in the middle and built the action around them. Nowadays action is alienating, it jumps and bounces and comes from all angles so fast that it's nearly impossible to know or care about what is happening.

I say this because I realize that I didn't so much hate The A-Team as hated the way it was made. It's not that this style of hand-held, shaky, quickly edited action is anything new but The A-Team does it worse than just about everyone else, to the point where all the big stunts are blurred by a frenzy of editing.

I went into the film wanting to see some entertaining action and was left with even more of an appetite for that stuff leaving it. Funny then that today I actually saw some good action in the form of last year's Star Trek reboot. The film is enjoyable in a forgettable sort of way but it kicks things off after the title with a great car sequence that is not only filmed well, but knows how to use special effects to their fullest extent. Instead of then giving the film a one minute review I decided to break this sequence down into pieces in order to show how good action is filmed.

The first shot at 00:27 is a great one. The camera tracks past the car at a furious clip. Instantly we have kinetic motion. However, going along with what I said in the first paragraph of my A-Team review, director J.J. Abrhams doesn't cut after he's passed the car. Instead he turns the camera 90 degrees as the car turns out onto the road and continues to track away from it until it too far to continue to care about visually. It doesn't matter that we aren't in the heat of the chase because the camera continues to move and that's what's important. Not only has Abrams set up what to expect for the next two minutes, but he's also established the landscape in one unbroken shot.

00:36 finds the camera in front of the car. Abrams wisely films at medium length to ensure that the car is not only in the centre of the frame but to show both the road and the landscape as it whizzes by. We associate road and landscape with reality and thus the sequence is grounded in the plausible and therefore all the more exciting. That's the value of establishing landscape in action films. Abrams, without cutting, swings the camera around to show the young Kirk inside. Not only is Abrams building character visually with this introduction, but he's also establishing the entire setting for the sequence.

Doing it like the Russians did, Abrams cuts to a close up of the speedometer around 00:40 as one last visual stimuli to establish what we are to expect before getting into the heat of action.

Staring at 00:41, with only 6 cuts in 20 seconds Abrams builds even more character by having Kirk take a phone call from the owner of the car, scolding him for stealing it, which Kirk ignores. It's a breather moment in the midst of the adrenaline

1:00 leads to the beginning of a joke. In close up Abrams films Kirk loosening the car's top. At 1:04 he cuts to outside the car for the punchline of the top flying off in the wind and let's the audience appreciate the full impact of the moment at 1:05 when he cuts to a long shot of the topper flying into the air, completing the joke at 1:08 as it lands on the road behind the camera as the car zooms off in the background.

An excellent shot happens at 1:12 which begins as a long shot, tracks to the left quickly and intercepts with the car when it is at medium length. The audience can't feel the excitement of being in a speeding car themselves, so it is up to the camera to not only capture the action but mimic it as the camera is the audiences sole connection to the action.

1:17 employs another kid hitchhiking to set the scene once more. Abrams cuts between both Kirk's view from the car and the kid's view from the road. At 1:24, after Kirk has driven by, Abrams shoots the kid in close-up from the side and uses a camera trick to make it look as though the background has shifted in the wake of Kirk's rushing by.

As a police hover cycle zooms by, Abrams establishes it's presence in relation to Kirk at 1:30, not through editing but by swinging the camera around the car so that it is at eye level in a medium shot, capturing both Kirk behind the wheel and the cop in the background. The key to a great chase sequence is to establish distance between the participants by showing them together in the same shot. Editing one imagine of the car and then alternating with an imagine of the cycle would give no visual sense that these two people are occupying the same space. To take from a theory by Andre Bazin, by putting the two things in a single image without a cut, it gives the sequence a sense of realism, especially since the bike is quite obviously a special effect.

Abrams cuts to Kirk's reaction, then shows another shot of the two in the same frame but from the bike's perspective. This sets up the next shot at 1:39 which starts with a close-up of the cop and then stays in position but pans left and tilts downward to look over the cop's shoulder as he looks down on Kirk in a high angle. Abrams has established this cop as having power over Kirk.

1:44 sees Abrams taking from the Russians again as he quickly cuts to a close up of Kirk's foot jamming on the gas pedal and cranking the wheel left.

At the cut at 1:45 Abrams stays with the cop as he looks back and sees Kirk evading him in the background. The cop has lost his power and is once again on Kirk's level as they are both visually on the same plane in the shot.

1:53 cuts between head-on shots of the intensity of the cop on his cycle and Kirk in his car in order to show how desperately fast the chase has become. Abrams adds to the motion of the sequence once again by starting the shot of Kirk's tires at 1:53 and moving in quickly on them until they are in close-up, giving the sense of the car speeding up. The odds are now winner takes all and neither party is giving up without a fight.

The gate at 1:55 is a nice, if cliche visual flourish. Abrams raises the stakes at 1:59 as he starts with a high angle long shot of both cop and Kirk in hot pursuit. He then, without cutting, tracks the camera overtop of them and pans up slightly to show the canyon that is comping up in the distance. Not only has Abrams maintained the excitement of the sequence, but in one shot has also established the danger the lies ahead. as the camera flies towards the canyon.

Abrams cuts from a close up on Kirk as he gears up for what is coming to an extreme high angle long shot. He films from in front of both car and cycle as he pulls back over the canyon, revealing even more of the drop as we see the two parties speed toward it.

One last close up of Kirk, the gear shifter and the gas pedal as 2:12 moves back outside for an overhead shot as the car drifts around, sliding towards the canyon. Abrams tracks left and up past the car, while still keeping it in the shot to show the full extent of the canyon drop from overhead.

Kirk jumps out of the car in slow motion and 2:17 begins the action portion of the sequence's final shot. Kirk, in close up, lands as the car skids behind him and tips over the canyon. The camera continues to track with Kirk as he himself slides towards the drop. When Kirk makes it to the edge where he grabs hold going over the side, the camera, without an edit, swings over top of him, shooting him from above and tracks up to reveal, for the first time, the canyon floor as Kirk hangs over it, praying to dear life.

The sequence ends as Kirk pulls himself up and is established for the first time by name as the cop asks for it. Captain James T. Kirk has now had his character established for the rest of the movie. Now that's how you film action.

Michael Bay Shows Restraint

There's a great article running over at Deadline Hollywood today about how studios are getting all hot and bothered over converting their big movies into 3D at the last minute. Personally, I've never seen a movie in 3D because A) I'm too cheap to pay extra for the gimmick, B) I've never seen a movie that gave me a burning desire to see it in 3D and C) in a post-Avatar world, 3D has stopped being about quality and is now just about studios desperately raking in as many spare dollars as they can.

James Cameron himself says it best in the article when he notes how after Toy Story theaters were flooded with sub par 3D animated films as if someone got it in their head that the success of that movie was in seeing cute things brought to life by computer animation and not say because of quality, originality, characters, story, etc. Now it seems that every movie is being converted into 3D at the last minute in order to capitalize on the success of Avatar, as if Avatar wasn't a big success because of quality, originality, characters...you see what I mean? It especially struck me that Warner Bros. made the announcement that all of their big tentpole releases will go through the 3D conversion process, especially considering when theaters didn't even care if they boycotted Alice in Wonderland a few weeks before its release because, as Mad Hatter mentioned in my comments section once, there are so many 3D movies lined up that exhibitors are sweating just trying to find enough 3D enhanced screens to get them onto.

And then Michael Bay weighs in on the pressure he is feeling on converting his Transformers 3 into 3D. Bay says that he tried to shoot the film using a real 3D camera so that the technique would feel authentic and have an air of professionalism about it, but it was too bulky to work with his complex, high speed style of action filmmaking. He proceeds to discuss, with a large degree of truth, that, despite what you may think of his movies, he always delivers a technically sophisticated product and he's not going to jeopardize that by giving it up to a technically unproven gimmick that he isn't sold on. Good for him. Like him or not, it's up to director's like Bay, who have clout within the studio, to ensure that the quality of their pictures don't suffer under the narrow-sightedness of a studio that thinks people will flock to anything just because it's 3D. And plus, if Transformers 3 is anything like Transformers 2, adding 3D into the mix will only result in leading to faster, more severe migraines.

In an age where studio tentpole pictures are getting worse and worse (Marmaduke? Yogi Bear? Battleship? Come on now) Hollywood is now trying to cut corners once again by not taking the time and effort that Cameron did to make Avatar's 3D process such a success, instead resorting to after-the-fact rush jobs. When will studios ever learn that fads become so because they possess a large degree of specificity and when you saturate the marketplace they will simply die off because audiences are bored with them? Personally, I can wait to see Warner Bros. shooting itself in the foot once 3D films start to bomb at the box office and to be honest, I see that happening sooner then later (Piranha 3D anyone?).

Check out the full article here.

Remember Andrew W.K.?

Andrew W.K. was that rocker dude in the early 2000s who wore all white, talked in insane tongues, wrote infectiously catchy rock songs like Party Hard and She is Beautiful, and was supposed to be the golden saviour of rock, only for his career to fizzle out after his third album was never released in North America.

Well apparently, there have been rumours going around that Andrew W.K. might not be real after some cryptic comments he made during a lecture about how he isn't the same person now as he was back then. Collages have been made comparing his early pictures to more recent ones and, although the similarities are there, there are also just enough differences to believe that he just maybe isn't the same guy. Thus, it has been speculated that Andrew W.K. is a fictional character that his record label created and has been played by different actors over the years.

Anyway, whether Andrew W.K. is real or just a character isn't the point. What matters is that this got me thinking about another big celebrity in the movie world who may just be a fictional character played by someone else. Check it out:

Could it be that Michael Bay is just Michael Bolton in disguise?

You decide.

Transformers 3 News

Quite frankly, after the giant mess that was Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, I have next to no expectations for Transformers 3, nor do I look forward to it in the least.

However, according to shaky source Perez Hilton, Michael Bay, although vague, has gone on record and said that the third film will feature less robots and less explosions. This is strange news coming from the man who didn't even want to do the third film for fear that his talents were being marginalized by the franchise and because the studio was pushing him too quickly into production when all he wanted was a break.

This could be construed as good news seeing as that second film was nothing more than a hollow, brain-dead, incomprehensible cartoon with live faces popping up every once in a while. Although really, the franchise, at this point, has become so stupid that I don't even know how Bay or anyone else could condense the material into a meaningful story, especially considering what an arbitrary role the human characters play in the films.

Of course, at this point the franchise has made so much money that the studio doesn't even care if Bay turns in a good film or not. Just look at how many glaring, lazy mistakes were visible in the second film.

So, I don't know, is this good news? Will it renew interest in the series after Revenge of the Fallen alienated as many people as it amused? Has the studio finally heard the outcry that more is not more? Will Bay renege on his word and make another, loud, obnoxious hunk of crap? I know Bay has made good action movies in the past and know he will make good ones again in the future, but I'm not so sure he can control himself on this project unless his budget is significantly slashed.

I'm indifferent.