Hi all,
I've been on a bit of a movie run lately. I sat down to watch Quantum of Solace last night. I really enjoyed Casino Royale and I got Quantum from Netflix on Blu-Ray so I was really rarin' to go. After a half an hour of viewing, I turned it off, put the movie back in it's Netflix envelope and dropped it off in the mailbox. And I'll tell you why.
Quantum of Solace is guilty of the worst trend going in filmmaking today. The director, Mark Forster, has chosen to film all of the action sequences with a very shaky camera for, I can only assume, the effect of making things appear gritty, and has then put together these scenes with fast/hard cuts that can total (no word of a lie) about five per second. That's right. In one second there will be five shots/angles. The combination of these two "styles" makes the film virtually unwatchable. It is so frantic and chaotic that one simply isn't able to process what is happening in front of them. Yes, you know that there is a car chase happening or there are two people fist fighting, but you literally can't make heads or tails of what is transpiring. To see the opening car chase, click here, and you will see precisely what I mean.
I can't be certain of when this shaky-cam trend started but I feel certain that Michael Bay can be blamed for the fast cuts. And we all know what a horrible director he is. The first time I remember seeing both in a film was in The Bourne Supremacy, another film that was rendered unwatchable. The real heartbreaker is that they invest millions of dollars and lord knows how many man hours into creating these scenes and they don't allow the audience to enjoy them. It's like getting tickets to the Superbowl and being stuck sitting behind a load bearing pillar. Why? Why train actors in martial arts and then shake the damn camera all over the place? It could have been terrific, people, but it's utter rubbish.
Not Recommended
Another film that I saw recently was Tokyo Gore Police. With this one you can pretty much guess what you're going to get by reading the title. It takes place in not-so-distant-future Tokyo, in which the police force has been privatized leading to excessive human rights abuses. There is also an underground group of genetically modified people called Engineers, whose DNA has been reconstructed so that when injured they are able to heal and adapt to the wound using objects in the area (ie. a the top of a man's head is taken off and it re-grows with two gun barrels coming out of the eye sockets). This of course leads to the birth of the Engineer Hunters, a specialized group of the police force with the sole purpose of hunting them down and eliminating them.
I'll be honest, I'm a big fan of the violent aspects of Japanese film, but this picture completely exceeded anything I've ever seen or even thought imaginable. Tokyo Gore Police is so off the charts when it comes to violence and sexual excess/debauchery that it's difficult to recommend it to anyone, but that's not to say that I didn't LOVE it. I did. There are very evident cinematic influences here, most notably David Cronenberg, Paul Verhoeven and Terry Gilliam. If you're familiar with these directors then you'll know that they are three of the oddest and most creative out there. So basically if Videodrome meets Starship Troopers meets Brazil sounds appealing to you then you may want to give this a whirl. But don't blame me if it's too much for you - you've been duly warned. Oh... I should mention that the lead character of Ruka is played by Eihi Shiina, who also played the beautiful psychopath in Audition. I just about jumped out of my skin when she came on the screen. Those who have seen Audition will know what I'm talking about.
Recommended, but WATCH AT YOUR OWN RISK!
AB