Okay - before I begin with the ranting, let me just apologise for my long and lazy absence. One thing about this whole blogging malarkey that I never fully realised before Fulltimecasual.com paid me the big bucks to write here is that it's actually quite tough. And I never realised just how bad my grammar and spelling is until I had to start caring about it.
For example, you may have noticed a tingly sensation just now as a million English teachers suddenly cried out, and there was suddenly silence, because I just started a sentence with a conjunction. Additionally, there is a factual error in my poorly written copy: I don't get paid shit, nobody here does. Actually, Pete beats us with a clapperboard until content comes out, then the sweatshop children clean off the blood and tears and present it to you here.
But I should stop. If Pete finds out what I'm telling you, he might make me watch Meet the Spartans or something. So on with the rant!
Roger Ebert has been at the center of film criticism in the US forever, but I never realised until this week just how much he
gets it. When I say he
gets it, I quite arrogantly mean that he agrees with my late-night drunken rants about the many problems of modern blockbuster filmmaking. That particular rant has been going for a good twenty years now and is still showing no signs of concluding (I believe it's currently up to "Shoot the Glass Part Eighty Seven - Seriously, How Fucking Cool is That Line?"), but Ebert really hones in on one of the big ones: too often, so damn often, the craft of filmmaking is lost because CGI becomes an easy crutch.
One of Spielberg's finest moments is
the air traffic control scene in Close Encounters. It's full of impenetrable jargon and radar-screens you need to be a trained expert to understand, but it works because it relies on good filmmaking - the understated urgency of calm and professional voices, the growing tension of the increasing number of onlookers, the overlapping conversations, the very opaqueness of the actual situation... you're a fly on the wall at a real event. It's a three-minute scene in one set with a few set-ups and some cutaways - they probably banged it out in a day.
Compare that to the whiz-bang of
the defense of Zion sequence from the final act of Matrix Revolutions - full of brilliant CG and virtual set-design, thousands of hours of work, but you just don't care. The place, the characters, the situation are all so manifestly constructed and clumsily presented that you're just waiting down the time to find out if they have a Rage song playing over the credits.
And
Ebert gets it!
