I know I'm not the only one who's annoyed with this.
I can't be.
I can't imagine a time or place where shoddy camera work or really crappy stability of a camera could be misconstrued as a "gritty action sequence." If I can't see anything happening in a shot, I personally grow angry. If I wanted horrid camera work, I'd watch a wedding home video.
I started this post because I wanted to watch the Bourne trilogy, a very solid series of films that should stand as in the top ten of all trilogies ever made...and I just can't watch Supremacy or Ultimatum.
Why? Because of the shaky damn camera work in every single fight scene of the Supremacy and Ultimatum. The reason for this shaky camera work is the changing of directors from Doug Liman in Identity, to Paul Greengrass for Supremacy and Ultimatum.
I respect Greengrass as a director, the rest of Supremacy and Ultimatum? Fantastic. Just top notch filmmaking, with a great director at the helm.
The man just cannot do action scenes properly.
Doug Liman did an excellent job with Identity, allowing for the fight choreographer's work to stand for itself, and the actors and stunt men to do their jobs. The scene where Jason Bourne stabs a man with a simple Bic ballpoint pen? I couldn't stop laughing. I had to go back at least four times the first time I watched that scene just to see Bourne stab the living hell out of another man with a Bic pen.
But with Greengrass' directing in Supremacy and Ultimatum, it just made every fight scene (one of the main draws of these films, let's face it) unwatchable.
This vexes me.
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2 comments:
I think it CAN be a really good tool to use for any film maker, BUT it has to be used sparingly, and not take away from the scene. In other words, if it means you can't see a thing and have no idea what's going on because of the camera work, you're doing it wrong.
Though I can't think of any examples off the top of my head, I've found the same to be true for scenes where the point of view switches often, i.e. switching rapidly between camera 1, 2, 3, and 4 through 12.
It can certainly add something to a scene if done right, and for (one-on-one) fighting scenes, it doesn't bother me as much, but especially during slower scenes with lots of people, it gets annoying. Like when early on in the movie, there's a lot of different camera views and rapid switches (not close-ups, but just different views). I find that this confuses me terribly about what is going on.
Maybe it's not the best explanation, but I couldn't manage any better. And maybe it's just me. :P
Oh, I absolutely agree, Isaac. Slash cutting is definitely a plague of filmmaking, just as much as the shaky cam.
Like I said, I have a lot of respect for Greengrass as a filmmaker, the non-action sequences of Bourne 2 and 3 are fantastic, but the shaky cams just boggle my mind with how irritating they are.
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