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One disturbing trend at IMDb since it got "discovered" is that the comments and scores are less sincere than they were years ago. It is common to see the minions and flacks of the filmmakers flooding the comments and scores with fatuous and fulsome praise, or casting negative votes for the work of rival studios. I have found a fairly good workaround for this problem. In the IMDb score area, press on the "vote here" column and check to see how the Top 1000 voters score it. These are people like me and Tuna, people that watch a vast number of movies. We are not affiliated with any particular film, and we don't even pay attention to which studio produces or distributes a film, so we are obviously not inflating or deflating the scores of a particular studio. Overall, this is scored 5.4 at IMDb, which is not very high at all, about like two stars, but much too high for this movie. The Top 1000 voters score this 3.6, which is just about where it belongs. By the way, this is the grand prize winner from the 2002 Sundance Festival. Huh? Here is the deal. Rebecca Miller, daughter of the playwright Arthur Miller (remember him? You read his plays in high school, and he was married to Marilyn Monroe), wrote a book of short stories. She decided she didn't need no stinkin' filmmaker to bring her precious words to the screen, just a video camera. She either didn't get a camcorder that works properly, or maybe used some 1975 analog model from her dad's closet somewhere, because the photographic quality is the worst I've ever seen on screen. I'm talking any screen, at any time. Including my own home movies that I made of the kids back in the late 70's. The colors are faded, bleached, and/or unrealistic. The photographer has no idea how or when to use lighting, nor how to keep moving images in focus or even in the frame. There is significant motion blur. And that isn't an easy thing to achieve in a film where nobody moves very much. It's not like we're watching the battle of Helm's Deep, after all. It's a bunch of people whose biggest exercise is dialing the telephone. The stories have some merit, but I was shocked by the fact that nearly every critic ignored the truly amateurish filming. Personally, I have to stick by a tried-and-true rule. No matter how good an idea you have, and no matter how good the performers, if you're going to make a good film, you have to read additional chapters in the camera operator's manual after you finish the reminder to remove the lens cap. As one IMDb comment said, ""This isn't even a movie. It's a collection of ugly, washed out, grainy, pixelated, flat, unlit, out-of-focus images, often still, with very little dialogue, while a narrator reads three of the auteur's unrelated short stories. Just because it's possible to shoot a movie with a consumer camcorder doesn't mean that everyone should try to do it." If Ed Wood could come back from the dead and make a chick-flick on video, this would be it. You want to know the best part? It won the award for best cinematography at Sundance! Best film? OK, I could understand that, because it's the kind of precious material that sometimes moves people who crave a fusion of film and literature. I'll admit that the stories could be evocative, and appealing, especially to the uptown frou-frou set. They were probably very good stories in written form, and could appeal powerfully to women. But best cinematography? C'mon! That tells you more about Sundance than about the film. As Ty Burr of the Boston Globe wrote: "'Velocity'' represents everything wrong with ''independent film'' as a commodified, sold-out concept on the American filmmaking scene. It's a series of postures signifying immediate Sundance acceptance". He's right on the money, dadgummit! When I read his essay, I realized that this is essentially a made-for-Sundance movie. The technical problems are compounded by the process of converting the DV images to film, which induces additional artifacts, giving the whole thing a "grainy" quality. I am not exaggerating when I say that the overall video quality is much, much worse than those bootlegs that they make in Asia by watching real movies and filming the screen with a digital camera. The sound is better than a bootleg, of course, since you can't hear the audience chatting and sneezing, but I'm sure they would have added that if they could have figured out how. |
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We might overlook the technical quality if the
photographer at least knew what to do with the camera, but the whole
thing has a hand-held aesthetic that just cries, "look at me, I'm
deliberately avoiding the look of Kodak moments". People go in and out
of focus. The image is shaky. People seem to be barely in the frame
while the camera focuses on the middle of a a bare wall. It has a
amateurishness that makes a Lars van Trier film look to be as studied
and orchestrated as a David Lean epic. It has so many close-ups of
eyes that Sergio Leone would be embarrassed. Especially since Sergio
would at least have had them in focus. Rather than elaborate on this, I think the point is best made with this frame to the right. Do you have anything worse than this in your family films or photo albums? I'll bet not. Not even the ones taken when drunken Uncle Dwight commandeered the camera at family Christmas. |
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