David Fincher: "And the Other Way is Wrong"

David Fincher is, without a doubt, one of the finest, most visually precise of all living American filmmakers. With his marvelously twisty -- and twisted -- new film Gone Girl just out, editor Tony Zhou -- who's previously broken down the style of other directors like Edgar Wright and Michael Bay -- has put together this terrific, illuminating look at Fincher and what he does (or more so, doesn't do) in his work. If you haven't seen the bulk of Fincher's films, spoilers follow, so approach at your own peril.

Anatomy of a Trailer

By now moviegoers should be familiar with the generally hyperbolic audio-visual sensation offered by modern Hollywood trailers (i.e. increasingly fast-cutting of money shots set to loud booming music). But if you really want to get into the details of trailer analysis, New York Times have taken it a step further by breaking down the trailers for 5 of this year's 9 Best Picture Nominees into cleverly devised interactive graphs that show shot length and exactly where in the movie the clips are taken from. You can see some fascinating patterns emerging from the different approaches. Click here to read more. Very cool stuff.

Piecing Together the Action Sequence

Jim Emerson, who runs the excellent blog Scanners at Chicago Sun-Times, has put together a great video essay taking apart a key action sequence from Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight. It makes for a nice follow-up to Matthias Stork's Chaos Cinema essays, cogently scrutinising how certain editorial choices have affected the way this particular action sequence has turned out. It's not something that I noticed, nor probably most viewers out there; if you watch it uninterrupted without Emerson's commentary, it seems to hang together fairly well. And that's what's cool about this essay, is that it's examining the flaws of an action scene that isn't actually all that terrible or incoherent - Nolan's fight scenes are much worse - but the problems with "spatial integrity" are still there, as he persuasively points out:
In the Cut, Part I: Shots in the Dark (Knight) from Jim Emerson on Vimeo.

Emerson also looks at the the Angelina Jolie chase scene in Salt, which comparatively has a better sense of on-screen spatial relationships, even though it drops the ball where logic is concerned in one crucial bit:
In the Cut, Part II: A Dash of Salt from Jim Emerson on Vimeo.

Notes:

• It's kinda interesting that he used Salt as an example. Noyce may have executed this sequence skillfully, but rest of the action in Salt is pretty forgettable and plagued with "Chaos Cinema"-style editing.
• Stork's essay made me re-watch Ronin - for the first time since its theatrical release - and it was simply a breath of fresh air and much better than I remembered. Frankenheimer really knew how to direct good, clear action.
• I'd like to see an essay from someone defending Paul Greengrass's Bourne films and how his use of shakey-cam can be argued as effective (or in the greater scheme of things, how this technique can be used well).
• Check out the comments under Emerson's essay. If you're really into this stuff, you'll lose yourself in it. Great stuff.

Chaos Cinema: The Decline and Fall of Action Filmmaking

This terrific, well-presented video essay by film scholar Matthias Stork basically looks at how crappy action films have become today. Although there is a time and place for chaotic editing and visuals, this essay convincingly argues that most contemporary Hollywood action films are lazily shot, bludgeoning experiences that don't really care about the viewer.


Chaos Cinema Part 1 from Matthias Stork on Vimeo.


Chaos Cinema Part 2 from Matthias Stork on Vimeo.

(via Press Play)

We Need To Go Deeper

It's the film that refuses to go away. Here's more food for thought, if you've just caught up with it on DVD... (SPOILERS EVERYWHERE)

Watch the film's dream levels unfold simultaneously:



A cool video essay looking at how Inception's parallel editing harks back to the pioneering work of D.W. Griffith:



Last but not least, Christopher Nolan's hand-drawn Inception map: