Apologies

by Jeremy Bernatchez on Jul.09, 2009, under Film

I realize I haven’t actually been taking advantage of the fact that I have this blog setup now and can actually WRITE things here.

So, first of, a couple thoughts on some recent movies I’ve seen:

Transformers 2: Two words. Robot balls. For those that have seen it, you understand what I’m talking about. I thought this was the perfect movie for me to be able to shut my brain off while watching. It was enjoyable in an action-movie sense, and did have some pretty awesome effects.

But really, Mr. Bay, did you have to resort to fart humour? Robots farting is good for kids, but you clearly were not aiming this for kids, with all the gratuitous sexual content (can you say upskirt?) and other things just not fitting for young’uns. At least it had a decent story, and seemed to flow a bit more than the new Terminator (the first half of which I thought had very little flow and I often had a hard time figuring out what was going on, but it came back with a bang in the latter half)

Public Enemies: Thought this was a good movie. Acting was great; Johnny Depp is awesome, as always, and Christian Bale was good, though it almost seemed like his accent changed part way through. I love the fact it was my girlfriend that pointed out that Baby Face Nelson was the sidekick Tommy in “Snatch”, one of my fav films!

My main qualm is that I thought it looked awful. From a creative standpoint I thought it was great. DP did a fantastic job, but from a technical standpoint, i think it was not good at all. There were a LOT of scenes (and i even noticed it in the trailers), where it looked like there was a crap-ton of motion blur, normally associated with a bad job of de-interlacing or using a slow shutter (if shooting 24p, using a 1/24 shutter will usually do this). I found it really hard to watch because normally you’re used to smoother image quality. Video gain was also something i found really awkward, but mainly when it went from one scene with a lot of it to another scene with none, back to the high gain.

Grranted, I went into it already thinking largely about it because of seeing weirdness in the trailer, so that likely ruined some of it for me.

Done rambling. Public Enemies otherwise was a fantastic film, and it’s a good sign for the creative team when they can get you rooting for the bad guy