Film, television, ramblings.

 

Just saw The Bourne Ultimatum. Holy God!! After about the first fifteen minutes I needed a drink. I’ve never seen such a dynamic film. Apart from the usual thriller stuff, what got me was the editing. Birds eye view to closeup to midshot to full body; it never stopped and it worked. Its dislocating not in the sense of losing the narrative but as if you are being grabbed by the lapels and being shoved back and forth. I remember the first time I watched NYPD Blue and though I didn’t mind the show I hated the herky jerky camera work and thought the cameraman must be seriously ADD. There is a fight scene in this that might be the best ever wrought on film. It is almost but not quite indecipherable. The stop to fast motion to rapid changes of perspective perfectly mimic the experience of fighting; tunnel vision, selective attention, overwhelming impact. Most good fights in cinema are voyeuristic in nature but this one seems participatory. And the car chase/wrecks seem freshly imagined as well.

 

I hope the franchise keeps going because there has not been a bad movie yet. Liked the last Bond but it doesn’t really come close to this tour de force. Damon, who I never imagined in any role like this, has become the exemplar of the action hero. I was wondering though if the fast collage that makes up this film would have been viewable to the average person ten years ago.

 

Just watched The Killer again (the Chow Yun Fat) and was astonished at how pedestrian it seemed. At the time of its release it was hot and dynamic. Now it just looks like another bad Chinese film with a couple of good moments. There is a little recognition of the first time appearance of scenes that became clichés of every action film since (the being propelled backward on your back by the force of the bullets spewing out of your twin pistols). But man, 90% of this dialogue would have been dropped in a normal North American film. It would have been seen as both too implicit and too mawkish.

 

And then I saw about 30 minutes of Rapid Fire, the Brandon Lee vehicle. Not the best of films but great for Powers Booth as a renegade scenery chewing and outrageously gleefully over the top police chief. He fills the part to bursting and has the best lines. One of his retorts on congratulating one of his cops on a bust is “get yourself a bad of donuts”. He’s an actor who has rarely been used well.

 

And that got me thinking about why is it that you can often identify a bad film by the first frame you are exposed to. A shot of a car door or a street lamp, the outside of a house, a reaction shot. How is it that that is so obvious? Is is an actual different film stock or is the subtle difference in composition such a tell for talent.

 

But back to something good. The Shield. This is simply the best show on peasant television. The last really great cop show was Homicide: Life on the Streets. That show was based on a book by David Simon which chronicled on year of an unsuccessful investigation into the death of a young black girl. It was a case that the department took to heart and never really managed to put behind them. Like the book, the show was more human than most of the ones before it, the cops weren’t as pretty, and they had problems.

The Shield has the same well rounded characters but has added into the mix police corruption, and more politics. They both have extended character development. In The Shield, detective Vic Mackie is trying to become a good cop after being a very bad one, and still has to cover up some, and protect some bad people, to stay viable. He juggles this with a broken marriage and being the father to a disabled son. In Homicide, one of the most erudite officers, Frank Pendleton, suffers a brain aneurism and his frustrating attempts at work became central to at least one season.

I noticed watching The Shield that the director was Nick Gomez which rang a bell. Looked him up and realized it was because of a couple of shoestring budget life on the street films I had seen a long time ago. Liked his work then and saw that he had also directed episodes of Homicide, Oz, Sopranos and Brotherhood, effectively cornering most of my top ten list of great television shows.