With Redbox Review it is my hope to answer a simple question,
to wit: having decided not to see a particular movie in the theater, is
it worth the $1.25 to rent that movie from your local Redbox?
The hardest thing to explain to students in any intro to film class is the importance of editing.
Students generally understand the function of the screenwriter, the director, and the actors and actresses who populate the landscape of a film. There is an intuitive understanding that someone selects the costumes, that someone sets the lights, and that someone points the camera. But this intuition breaks down in the face of assembling a final product. There is a person, in a dark room, assembling the individual shots into the final product? Having read the script, couldn’t a monkey successfully patch the whole thing together? Well, no. Perhaps the most widely known piece of cinematic inside baseball is that editors are the ones who make films work, and perhaps the easiest way to demonstrate this point is to examine the flaming wreckage of a film that not only went off the rails, but that fell a thousand feet into a canyon and exploded.
With that in mind, I present to you Winter’s Tale, the most un-intentionally hilarious movie since Keigo Kimura’s Utamaro: Painter of Women (1960).
Let’s start with the positives. This movie stars Colin Farrell, Russell Crowe, William Hurt, Jennifer Connelly, Will Smith, Eva Marie Saint, and the actress who played Lady Sybil on Downton Abbey. For those who are counting, that is eleven Oscar nominations for acting, and four wins… plus one Colin Farrell, and one Lady Sybil. It was adapted for the screen and directed by Akiva Goldsman, who wrote Practical Magic, Cinderella Man, The Da Vinci Code, and was a producer on Hancock and Deep Blue Sea. The man is a pro. He even has an Oscar of his own (for his adaptation of Sylvia Nasar’s A Beautiful Mind). We are talking a murderer’s row of ringers. I would pay $50 dollars to watch these people eat dinner and converse.
So how does it all go so wrong? The answer is in the editing room.
Not one beat of this movie is right. For example, we are meant to believe that Peter Lake (Farrell) and Beverly Penn (Lady Sybil) fall in love in less time than it takes Farrell and William Hurt to have a bizarre conversation about the pronunciation of claret, wallet, and filet. If they would watch Downton Abbey they could have included valet, if they had a mind to, and the scene could have gone on another seven minutes. The pronunciation conversation is awkward and funny, playing on the discomfort of meeting the stern parent of a significant other, but it does nothing to forward the movie’s goals. Later, when the house is on the verge of exploding (a development that occurs literally without warning), the essential repair made by Farrell’s character (who, ironically, has a knack for sensing the structure of complex systems—a knack sorely lacking in the film’s editors) occurs off-screen.
All throughout this movie characters jump from one place to another with no sense of motion or continuity. Characters are introduced out of nowhere and fade back into nowhere. When a movie works, we develop the sense that we are watching real people on the screen. We know who they are, where they are, and what they are doing. Winter’s Tale, based on a 500 page novel replete with backstory, gives you the feeling that all of the necessary character development was left on the cutting room floor.
Even the sound editing is off. At one point Farrell’s character walks into a Brooklyn Brownstone and the score soars triumphantly for no reason at all. I’m sure it was for no reason, because I asked the people I was watching the movie with why it had happened and no one could even guess.
Perhaps this movie knows its faults. Characters are frequently saying to one another, “I don’t understand what is happening.” This makes perfect sense. Why should the audience be the only ones?
Rating: .5/4
Redbox Verdict: Save your $1.25
This content appeared originally at Pop, Shop, and Troll
The hardest thing to explain to students in any intro to film class is the importance of editing.
Students generally understand the function of the screenwriter, the director, and the actors and actresses who populate the landscape of a film. There is an intuitive understanding that someone selects the costumes, that someone sets the lights, and that someone points the camera. But this intuition breaks down in the face of assembling a final product. There is a person, in a dark room, assembling the individual shots into the final product? Having read the script, couldn’t a monkey successfully patch the whole thing together? Well, no. Perhaps the most widely known piece of cinematic inside baseball is that editors are the ones who make films work, and perhaps the easiest way to demonstrate this point is to examine the flaming wreckage of a film that not only went off the rails, but that fell a thousand feet into a canyon and exploded.
With that in mind, I present to you Winter’s Tale, the most un-intentionally hilarious movie since Keigo Kimura’s Utamaro: Painter of Women (1960).
Let’s start with the positives. This movie stars Colin Farrell, Russell Crowe, William Hurt, Jennifer Connelly, Will Smith, Eva Marie Saint, and the actress who played Lady Sybil on Downton Abbey. For those who are counting, that is eleven Oscar nominations for acting, and four wins… plus one Colin Farrell, and one Lady Sybil. It was adapted for the screen and directed by Akiva Goldsman, who wrote Practical Magic, Cinderella Man, The Da Vinci Code, and was a producer on Hancock and Deep Blue Sea. The man is a pro. He even has an Oscar of his own (for his adaptation of Sylvia Nasar’s A Beautiful Mind). We are talking a murderer’s row of ringers. I would pay $50 dollars to watch these people eat dinner and converse.
So how does it all go so wrong? The answer is in the editing room.
Not one beat of this movie is right. For example, we are meant to believe that Peter Lake (Farrell) and Beverly Penn (Lady Sybil) fall in love in less time than it takes Farrell and William Hurt to have a bizarre conversation about the pronunciation of claret, wallet, and filet. If they would watch Downton Abbey they could have included valet, if they had a mind to, and the scene could have gone on another seven minutes. The pronunciation conversation is awkward and funny, playing on the discomfort of meeting the stern parent of a significant other, but it does nothing to forward the movie’s goals. Later, when the house is on the verge of exploding (a development that occurs literally without warning), the essential repair made by Farrell’s character (who, ironically, has a knack for sensing the structure of complex systems—a knack sorely lacking in the film’s editors) occurs off-screen.
All throughout this movie characters jump from one place to another with no sense of motion or continuity. Characters are introduced out of nowhere and fade back into nowhere. When a movie works, we develop the sense that we are watching real people on the screen. We know who they are, where they are, and what they are doing. Winter’s Tale, based on a 500 page novel replete with backstory, gives you the feeling that all of the necessary character development was left on the cutting room floor.
Even the sound editing is off. At one point Farrell’s character walks into a Brooklyn Brownstone and the score soars triumphantly for no reason at all. I’m sure it was for no reason, because I asked the people I was watching the movie with why it had happened and no one could even guess.
Perhaps this movie knows its faults. Characters are frequently saying to one another, “I don’t understand what is happening.” This makes perfect sense. Why should the audience be the only ones?
Rating: .5/4
Redbox Verdict: Save your $1.25
This content appeared originally at Pop, Shop, and Troll
No comments:
Post a Comment