Well, maybe. It's either this or Dawn of the Dead. Anyway, it's my favorite Romero film. Will, it's either this or Dawn.
So, did up an ASL for Knightriders, Romero's kind of odd, kind of beautiful knights-on-motorcycles epic.
Yes, it's knights...
... on motorcycles:
To repeat that: Knights!
On motorcycles!
And at 2 hours and 25 minutes, it's epic.
It's kind of crazy, but also kind of, I dunno, parts of it always get to me. Might be one of those things you had to see at the right age, I dunno. I wouldn't want to oversell it, but it's doing its thing and it's... One of Romero's things is he comes up with an idea and he runs with it as far as he can go. This is one of those movies where he does that.
So, here's the stats:
Average shot length: 3 seconds
Length of the film: 146 minutes 7.9 seconds
Number of shots: 2901
Standard deviation: 4 seconds
I included the 2 1/2 minute closing credits shot, and wasn't able to grab the white flashes (2 to 4 frames) from the opening sequence. Full details, as usual, are here.
Again, a bit of the fast side, in terms of editing. Started poking through Day of the Dead the other day, and it's looking much slower. And Romero's Martin, made just before Dawn, came in at an average shot length of 4 seconds for 1425 shots, with a standard deviation of 3.9 seconds, and looked something like this:
Anyhoo, check out Knightriders if you haven't seen it, and want to see a young Ed Harris as a modern day King Arthur (or King Billy here) in an idealized clash of idealism with reality, or something like that:
It's also worth checking out for Tom Savini's great performance as Billy's nemesis, Morgan. Really, the man is spot on in his performance. He has some nice scenes and good chemistry with love interest and chief mechanic Angie, played by Christine Forrest (also Romero's wife):
Also present are a young Pat Tallman (of B5 fame)...
... and a guy named Brother Blue as Merlin:
One other thing that makes the film great, if you're a Romero fan, and if you've watched his films from the seventies, are the various familiar faces that pop up in the cast. 
Back in the day, Romero didn't really have a repertory company of actors like some directors, but watching this film makes it feel like he did. And given that the film's about banding together as a family through thick and thin, their presence resonates with the film, and makes the community depicted on the screen seem a bit more organic and real. At least, it does to me.
So in addition to Savini...
... and Christine Forrest (Christina in Martin, and a cameo in Dawn)...
... you get Ken Foree (R)... 
... and Scott Reineger from Dawn...
... Harold Jones, Clank from The Crazies...
... Antone Dileo (L) who'd go on to play Miguel in Day of the Dead, and James Baffico (R), from Dawn...
Note: It's Dileo, as Miguel, in the opening of Day, who does that "Hellooo.... Is there anybody out there? Hellooo.... Is there anybody out there" thing that was sampled on, I think, a Gorillaz album.)
(Edit: At least, I think that's Dileo in the above picture. Now I'm not so sure. Hm. He's listed in the credits on imdb, though.)
... John Amplas, Martin himself (also later appearing in Day)...
... and other familiar faces that pop up here and there. Even the cigarette dude from Dawn:
It's also worth checking out for the score by Donald Rubinstein, who plays the lead minstrel:
Knightriders also has one of my 10 favorite scenes, which I'll maybe save for a later post. And it has some great moments like this:
And to close out, my favorite shot in the film, and again, not to hyperbolize, but one of my all time favorite shots, period:
Okay. That is all of that.
Thursday, February 28, 2008
Cinema Report: Romero's Best Film
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Double Yoi
Myron Cope passes away at 79. Man.
If you grew up in or near the Burgh, Myron was a part of the world you just expected to be there, like the rivers, hills and sky.
Pics from the Post-Gazette and the Trib Review.
Obits:
Post-Gazette
Trib-Review
Pics of folks showing off their Terrible Towels, which Myron invented.
What Myron did with the money from Terrible Towel sales a little while back.
A little sound montage of bits of Myron broadcasts from the Radio Hall of Fame. (It's on the little radio, dahn in the right corner.)
And sound bites from Myron's broadcasts and various Copeisms.
Good ol' Myron Cope.
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Jocko Madigan Says...
"You always have a problem, Patsy, because you can't keep out of trouble. You know that, don't you. You have no self-control . . . You have no more self-control than a bucket of mercury dumped on a marble staircase . . . Oh, you, you're like some violent disorder in nature, some large but unprofitable storm. You keep whirling in circles, Patsy. If you ever go more than 10 feet in one direction, it's because some woman is 9 feet away. Then it begins all over again."
- Jocko Madigan, ex-doctor, drunk, and aide-de-camp to Pat Novak for Hire, May 21, 1949 - "Envelope for John St. John."
Sunday, February 24, 2008
Gie Me a Canny Hour at E'en...
Title's a Burns reference, from one of my favorite verses.
After ASLing this movie...
... went for a short walk along the lake path just after the sun set below the horizon. It was up in the thirties for the first time in forever. Still a bit of winter, and more snow and more cold to go, but on days like this, you can start to remember Spring again.
Plenty of people ice fishing:
"And oh how they danced, the little people of Stone'enge."
There are a few ice and snow sculptures on the lake. Closer to the Terrace, there's a lake monster biting the shore.
I think this is the ridge from the ice quake a month or so back. Looks like a ridge, runs a good distance along the shoreline:
Heard a bird singing the other morning. Seeing this felt like that:
Getting all Casper David Friedrich on these next two:
I seem to have been taking a lot of shots of bare, ruined trees against the clear Wisconsin sky. Must be a motif, an expression of something:
On the way back. Ice fishers packing up and heading in:
Snow like waves on the shore:
Looking back, a little bit of light left in the sky:
The lights by the boathouse again:
Framed like this, it kind of feels like Godzilla's due just over the skyline:
Last rays of the sun on February 24, 2008, here in the upper midwest:
Okay, that's it. (Fort Pitt.) Need to get over to Monona at sunrise one of these days.
Post script: The ASL for The Crazies (pictured at the very top of the post) came in at a surprisingly long 2.8 seconds, with a standard deviation of 3 seconds. Which of the two activities documented above was a better use of time is open to debate.
Pat Novak Says...
"Jocko was right about the neighborhood. When I left him, I doubled by my place and left the envelope. I put it inside another envelope, and stashed it behind some books, and then I headed out to look up John St. John. Oh, it must have been about midnight when I got there, and it was the kind of a neighborhood where a For Rent sign reads like a ransom note. I found the place, though. It was an old rooming house. A third floor apartment. I knocked at the door, and when she opened it, I knew it was time to wire home for money. A tall, blonde blister with lots of Fahrenheit. She stood there, leaning against the door, smiling, looking at me as if I had gold plated muscles. It gave you a weak feeling where your dinner ought to be. And her voice came right out of the oven."
- Pat Novak, for Hire, May 21, 1949 - "Envelope for John St. John"
Cinema Report: "Dammit, Flyboy!"
Hey, lookit. Did up an average shot length (ASL) for the U.S. theatrical release of the original Dawn of the Dead (directed by George A. Romero) via cinemetrics:
Average shot length: 2.5 seconds
Length of the film: 125 minutes 15.3 seconds (closing credits not included)
Number of shots: 3017
Minimum SL: 0.2 seconds
Maximum SL: 24.5 seconds (opening shot)
Range: 24.3 seconds
Standard deviation: 2.2 seconds
Here's more or less what it looks like:
(Note the longer the shot, the further the white line hangs down from the x-axis.)
Couple of things to note:
1. I'll need to run through this again to doublecheck things.
2. Second longest shot, at around 20 seconds, was the slow zoom out from Fran and Stephen awake and motionless in bed, about 94 minutes in.
3. It seems to me this is pretty damn fast for an American feature film in 1978.
4. I'm pretty sure this is par for the course for Romero, probably up through Knightriders. I'll dive into The Crazies next. (The film that poses the question: "Why Are All the Good People Dying?")
5. I'll also need to check this against the remake. I have a hunch Romero's film is cut just as fast, on average, if not a little faster. I compared two sequences from the films a while back, an action scene from the remake (when the trucks pull up with more living folk), and a montage that just showed the zombies hanging out at the mall in the original, the "No discernible intellect" montage, and they both had an ASL around 1.8 seconds. I think Romero's montage was more like 1.87 seconds, but still, pretty fast for a more or less meditative scene.
6. This is actually lower than the ASL I found for Neil Marshall's The Descent (2005), which was at 3.4 s (1683 shots in about 94.5 minutes), and looked like this:
(Those lines running to the bottom of the graph are shots longer than 30 seconds. Just trying to keep the size of the graph down a little.)
There's still some very fast cutting in Marshall's film (like in the opening scene), but there are more shots, I think, which are allowed to play out a bit longer. This'll pull the ASL up a bit. For example, there are more shots in The Descent which run for 10 seconds or longer (with the longest at just over 52 seconds). In Dawn, by contrast, Romero's more likely to cut around rapidly even during a slower scene (Romero acted as his own editor on the film), and by my count, there were fewer shots which ran 10 seconds or longer, with the longest at a bit over 24 seconds. And this in a film with a 30 minute longer running time. (Along similar lines, note that shots in The Descent have a standard deviation of 4 seconds, versus 2.2 seconds for Dawn.)
7. This ASL is identical to the ASL Charles Leary found for Land of the Dead, released 27 years later.
(It can be found in the Cinemetrics database, along with the entries for the movies I clocked, over here. The program for doing this, developed by film scholar Yuri Tsivian and his programmer son Gunnars, can be found there as well, for the few people who occasionally read this blog who might not know about it.)
Which is interesting, given that one of the complaints made by Romero-faithful who hated Land was that Land had this sped-up, jerky editing style. Further evidence that it's not just the cutting pace which affects our reaction to the film, but the kinds of edits that are made. (Hm, Longest shot was much longer, over 56 seconds. But Leary found a standard deviation of 2.4 seconds, again very close to Dawn. And the longest shot, if I'm reading the data correctly, is again the first shot.)
8. By way of comparison, for those who never think about this stuff, a couple of other ASLs I found recently:
Days of Heaven (1978): 6.3 seconds.
Killer of Sheep (1977): 13.2 seconds.
Two-Lane Blacktop (1971): 12.4 seconds.
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007): 6.8 seconds.
That last one feels a bit fast, but as far as I know, only one extra shot found its way into the count (gunshots can make the hand twitchy when counting), and during the few scenes of action (like the train robbery), there are some shorter shots in there. Still, that's lower than that of Munich, at 7.9 s. It's also well below the 12 second ASL Bordwell cited for There Will Be Blood in his recent article in Variety. Guess I should doublecheck Jesse James, but man, that was a marathon.
Okay, enough of that for now. I'd meant to end this post with the more important stuff I learned and/or rediscovered after going through Dawn for the umpteenth time, but it's late, and I'm more tired than the Resident Evil franchise, so, maybe tomorrow.
In the meantime, here's these:
