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What are your favorite shots in a movie?


John

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43 minutes ago, Stefancos said:

Its very well shot.

 

I'm talking specifically about the "let's have the actors constantly stare at the lens in closeup."

 

Its the sort of thing you should never, ever, EVER do. By all accounts, it should take you out of the movie and be cringe-worthy, cheesy and awful. That it isn't is really a testament to Demme and Fujimoto's talent.

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Wes Anderson is the only other filmmaker I can think of who frequently uses that effect and pulls it off well. 

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Many filmmakers use it momentarily, as a piece of punctuation.

 

But not as a sustained shot, as Demme does. Its somewhere between too balsy and too bonkers.

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9 hours ago, Stefancos said:

Its a brilliant device to show the growing intimacy between Clarice and Lecter.

 

Its primarily a device meant to unnerve the audience, because you're really not used to people staring into the lens. Second, it puts the audience in Clarice's shoes in the most literal way. Its anything but subtle, but it works.

 

And last, it feeds into the underlying theme of the male gaze, again quite literally.

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10 hours ago, John said:

Yes, the cinematography is definitely one of the film’s greatest strengths. 

 

Even in grotesque scenes like the shot above, there is a macabre sort of beauty in the framing and lighting. 

 

There's a few memorable shots but a lot of it looks kind of dated like an old TV movie, IMO. The greatest strength is of course Hopkins.

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Horror is a very subjective genre. I personally don't find all that scary, but I've seen it work its magic on others.

 

By far the scariest shot of Hannibal is this:

 

SotL_1635.jpg (1920�1080)

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1 minute ago, Chen G. said:

Horror is a very subjective genre. I personally don't find all that scary, but I've seen it work its magic on others.

 

By far the scariest shot of Hannibal is this:

 

SotL_1635.jpg (1920�1080)

 

Hannibal himself isn't really scary, but when you first watched it and it was all still novelty, you didn't think the scenes with the serial killer and the girl were tense? 

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Just when I first saw it?! I still get dilated pupils when Catherine starts screaming in the well.

 

But one or two really tense moments don't make the film as a whole all that scary to me. I enjoy it more as the story of Clarice and as THE most expertly crafted crime thriller, than I do as a horror film.

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1 hour ago, Chen G. said:

But one or two really tense moments don't make the film as a whole all that scary to me. I enjoy it more as the story of Clarice and as THE most expertly crafted crime thriller, than I do as a horror film.

 

Would you accept that it's a 'psychological horror-thriller'?  

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  • 2 weeks later...

I thought the who point of Hook's production design was that it looked like a big Hollywood pantomime? I actually remember reading that at the time, in an Empire magazine preview (I was only 14, and I remember one of my aunt's friends, whom I had a bit of a crush on, had a collection of them at her house under the coffee table).

 

You only need to look at the establishing shots of Captain Hook's ship to realise how stagey it was all supposed to be.

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23 minutes ago, Quintus said:

I thought the who point of Hook's production design was that it looked like a big Hollywood pantomime?

 

That a choice is intentional doesn't necessarily make it good.

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56 minutes ago, Chen G. said:

 

That a choice is intentional doesn't necessarily make it good.

 

Sure, except that wasn't my point anyway. I don't think Hook looks great. I hate pantomimes. 

 

Sorry if you thought you'd hit the ground running with this sage tidbit of obviousness.

 

My post was more a reply to the implications mentioned above that Hook somehow looks unintentionally interior bound.

 

Mind you, there's a certain fanciful aspect to the London scenes that I quite like, though. There's definitely a touch of movie magic in some of those sets, in full whimsical effect.

 

Dean Cundey's most uninspired lighting was in Jurassic Park. I've already made my thoughts on this known here though. It is a visually serviceable movie, and that's it.

 

Conversely, Cundey is no hack or easily dismissed cameraman either; before his Nineties bland rut he would also photograph early John Carpenter classics and he made the 80s indelible on nostalgic minds forever by way of Back to the Future.

 

So I by no means have got anything against the guy.

 

Unlike say, David Koepp.

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Steven Spielberg: "I still don't like that movie. I'm hoping some day I'll see it again and perhaps like some of it".

 

Funny that he was also $15 million over budget and 40 days over time with Hook.

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It's not just his displeasure with classics and silence about Always that annoys me, but also when he talks about his movies describing obvious things that everyone knows as though his audience are retards. He comes across like such a simpleton. He also denied any sort of 9/11 analogy in Munich when the movie ends with the fucking twin towers. I don't know. He needs to get back in the E.T. ride intro and direct us to the interplanetary passports.

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