Letters to the Editor
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Good Cinematography is Dead
Say for Janusz Kamimski and Lance Acord, the art of tweaking the emotions of audiences through brilliant cinematography seems dead. Directors and DP's alike have too many tools to not try something. Usually the result is a perverted style that looks neither original or necessarily helpful to the film. And all too often the film looks, as you mentioned, painted or animated without reason.
Take Soderberg for example. He used to use a straightforward, traditional approach (Sex Lies & Videotape) depending on angles, perfectly timed movement and close ups. The subtle style he created added immense tension without the viewer even noticing.
Flash forward to Traffic and K-Street. Both leaned so heavily on effected color schemes and pointless handhelds that the former succeeded in spite of the stylistic mistakes, while the latter failed miserably.
With so many color altering techniques, both in camera and in edit, DP's don't need to depend any longer on traditional tools of the craft - light trucks and available light - and rarely does the environment in which the story takes place mean anything (Acord's stunning Lost in Translation being the most recent exception). DP's can predetermine how dark a city will look, or how sunny it will be. In the end, you get films like Ocean's 11 and its odd yellow hue, for no discernable reason whatsoever.
Directors like Rodriguez, Tarentino, and even Lucas have gotten away from the traditional techniques that made their films great to look at in the first place. The end result is most films today look like some bastardized Michael Bay concoction that would make Lazlo Kovacks puke in his grave.