Joho the Blog
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August 06, 2004
Saw the Bourne Supremacy last night. It is, as they say, a taut thriller with an interesting character at its center, played by an appropriately scowly Matt Damon. But, oh when will Hollywood learn to edit? The showpiece car chase is an unintelligible swirl of blurry car shots cut together so rapidly that perception outpaces narrative. Just as you're about to figure out which car is the one that's smudgily swerving to avoid which other car, you're shown another car streakily swerving out of the way of some other indiscernible patch of color. There's a reason why Monet painted haystacks instead of chase scenes. Then there's the mano a mano fight scene between two guys dressed in black that consists of one black patch doing things to another black patch until one of the black patches stops moving. As my nephew pointed out afterwards: You have to hand it to the Matrix for at least letting us know who was fighting whom...for example, the chase scene on the highway in Matrix II (or was it Matrix III, or possibly Star Wars 12). I haven't seen a movie this badly edited since Is Paris Burning? in which they film opposing soldiers heading towards each other from both sides of the action so that sometimes the soldiers running to the left are the Germans and sometimes they're the French. But that was just inadvertently incompetent. The Bourne Supremacy is downright arty. Posted
by D. Weinberger at August 6, 2004 10:19 AM
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Comments
You are spot on. The sad thing is: I think this editing was intentional, which means that someone somewhere thinks that blurry unreadable mess was a good thing.
If not for schadenfreude, I'd be crying all the time.
Posted by: Anonymous | August 6, 2004 01:59 PM
Agree on the editing, it sucked. I'm not sure any frame was even stable, let along lasting for more than 15 seconds. It was exhausting watching it, though I kind of enjoyed the story.
The scene where Bourne swipe's the CIA case officer's Treo and pops some kind of bug into it was a blur, and it was obviously meant to be, but I was kind of interested in seeing it so it bugged (no pun intended) me.
I guess the conventional wisdom is to blame it on MTV. Whatever the blame, it sucks.
Posted by: dave rogers | August 6, 2004 02:29 PM
Hey, Dave! The car chase was a too-wide smudge on a decent movie. Annoying, annoying, annoying.
And I agree about the close-quarters fight too. It seems at first, when they do that, that they're hiding bad choreography, but I think it's another kind of stupidity. You can't shoot a cool-ass fight like a "Law and Order" scene, even if bouncy-cam helps give the movie "immediacy" or something.
Ever see the Madonna video "Ray of Light?" Same problem. Madonna's dancing, but they show it in this jerky stop-motion style cause it looks cool or whatever. You do /not/ try to improve on Madonna's dancing. She's no Jackson, but the way she moves is a core value proposition, you know?
Posted by: Jed | August 9, 2004 07:52 PM
I thought the car chase was done that way to give the audience the "feel" of it. If you were driving at the speed he was driving, and driving down the wrong side of the highway sometimes in that situation, you'd be distracted, hyped-up, confused, seeing things in a blur, and generally screwed up, too.
Posted by: Tim | August 14, 2004 12:55 AM