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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Haven't read all the comments here so forgive me if someone else brought this up, but you have completely misinterpreted the meaning of this phrase.
The sharp end of the stick is the end that gets bloody. The guys who get bloody are not the wielders of the stick, they answer to the wielders of the stick - pretty much the opposite of what you said.
Craig, you have it on the nose. I found the shakey (camera man on high doses of caffine)filming to be incredibly distracting to the movie. I did like "Bourne Ultimatum" but it very hard to watch. As an effect every so often "shakey camera effect" would be nice, but all the time through the whole movie, very dizzying & very noticeable.
The Bourne movies, to borrow from everybody else, pretty much redefine the action genre, and put the rest to shame.
Zacharek's description of Damon in a leather helmet fit for a 1940s football player makes me jealous I didn't phrase it first.
Possibly the greatest contribution of these movies is the depiction of a relentless, completely badass assassin with a heart who doesn't speak in glib one-liners.
However, I still can't look at the still moments of Damon without thinking of "Team America," and the deadpan delivery of the Matt Damon puppet who only said, "Matt Damon."
Greengrass seems to me a hack, a dim-wit who can mangle any story with shoddy direction and camera-work. Greengrass doesn't seem to know how to hold a camera steady, even for the duration of a conversation between two characters over coffee. We left United 93 halfway through because we became motion sickened. We felt the same in this latest Bourne, but had to know how the story ended for the characters. It made me furious that dozens, hundreds of people supported this movie, worked behind the scenes in pre and post production, all so that Greengrass could poop out something that could have been made by a 4-year old. The original Bourne Identity, well-directed by Liman, was smooth and stylish; fight scenes and chase scenes were filmed and choreographed to convey speed, action, motion, but also to make clear what was happening.
Terrible directing and filming makes a hash of what could have been a fantastic movie. We left saying "if only we could have *seen* that scene where...".
It's a franchise action flick, but it was able to hold Zacharek's (and my) interest, while provoking some thought. I can't fault her for enjoying it.
(In the way that I would not fault a trained 4-star chef for liking burgers and ribs at a summer cookout. It's not that the chef is mistaking the dripping baby back ribs for haute cuisine; the chef is merely liking them for what they are.) :-)
Although my wife hated it, I'm willing to overlook the comic book dialog and characterization, the cliched plot and the confusing editing. Matt Damon has done a very good job with the character, the improvisation in some of the fight scenes is entertaining, and some scenes (particularly Waterloo station) are very well done.
But we have to do something about that shaky camera. Good grief! I found it very hard to listen to the dialog (not missing much, I admit) because that shaky technique was making me so aware of the camera. I don't think Greengrass originated this, it appears to have originated in some TV police shows, some film school hack's notion of cinema verite.
Rather than making scenes "real," the shaky camera feels contrived and obvious and, well, stupid. Is there some way we can communicate to these people: understand the intention, it doesn't work, think of something else?
I couldn't agree with Craig Rhodes "Mind numbing MTV formula movie" more.
The plot was thin and the cinematography was fatiguing (resulting in many comments from friends concerning induced motion sickness). To assemble such an exceptional lineup of world-class actors that appear in the "Bourne Ultimatum" and then to have them mired in this kind of movie is disappointing. "Bourne Ultimatum" is a milestone in shaky-camera cinematography combined with amphetamine-like editing of the extreme-close-up; so much so that I wonder if there is now some new digital-editing software named 'house-fly-cam' and "attention-deficit-O-matic' that was used to save money on hiring a human camera-shaker and to implement those hundreds/thousands of sub-second edits.
Don't get me wrong, I like action flicks as much as the next guy, but years after brilliant action films such as "Indiana Jones" and even the "Bourne Identity", we should expect more from a studio with a truck-load of money and top actors than the look-and-feel of a 1990's video game suffering from an underpowered CPU.
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Salon headlines in your mailbox
