Cinema Report: Change of Pace, Change of Place

Took a crack at the Dawn remake yesterday. Too many errors to submit by the time I was done, but it's looking like an ASL around 2.9 seconds? 2.8? 3? somewhere around there. So, a little bigger than that of the original, like I suspected. The remake will probably have a larger standard deviation, though - it goes really fast, but not as often as the original.

Hadn't watched the remake in a while and man, it really doesn't hold up well. Setting aside that no one sounds like they're from Wisconsin (where it's ostensibly set), it's just kind of, I dunno, it is what it is. It's largely a generic action movie, filled with stock characters moving along stock character arcs to hit the expected story beats. It seemed to miss the point of the mall setting, which only provided a) a backdrop for the "Get Down with the Sickness" montage and b) a generic source of all supplies necessary. (The whole "let's watch how they go about making this place work as a hideout before everything goes to hell" element of the original is gone.)

And the remake raises what I'll call The Cougar-Dawn Paradox: Cougars are scary. Zombies are scary. But zombies that run and sound like cougars are not scary.

Oh well. On the plus side, the actors did well enough with what they had and were likable enough, the zombie makeups were generally good, and the opening reel and the opening credits are still pretty good. Best addition to the whole thing was Andy's gun shop, and how that all played out.

Anyhoo, changing latitude and attitude, today, I ASL'd Kelly Reichardt's Old Joy, a brilliant, quiet film from a couple years back. Got two extra shots in by mistake. (Really wish there was an "undo last shot" button in the program.)

Set in and near Portland, the movie follows Mark (L) as he heads out for a trip to Bagby Hot Springs with old buddy Kurt (R):


Mark leaves behind his pregnant wife Tanya, who's not so big on the idea:


Here's the trailer, if you're unfamiliar with the film:


And here's the skinny:

Average shot length: 16.9 seconds** --> See note 1, below
Length of the film: 70 minutes 53.9 seconds
Number of shots: 251** --> See note 1, below
Minimum SL: 1.7 seconds
Maximum SL: 111.7 seconds
Range: 110 seconds
Standard deviation: 16.9 seconds

And it looks like this:


(As before, any lines ending in a red dot continue past the edge of the graph as shown. Just trying to keep it down to a manageable size.)

Details here

A few notes. Spoilers ahoy.

Kind of dumb to talk about spoilers for this kind of film, and the audiences for this kind of film, but I often find, when the plot itself is relatively slight, and low-concept, if you know plot points ahead of time, the sense of moment-by-moment discovery which is vital to this sort of film gets compromised. (For example, I wonder if some of the mumblecore backlash was due to this.) So if you're reading this, and you haven't watched it, go watch it. It's only 70 minutes, won't take you too long.


Really.



No, really.




Okay now.

1. Taking out the two extra shots, at about 45 minutes and 66 minutes, there's 249 shots, giving an ASL of 17.1 seconds. (Note that an extra shot or two in a more quickly cut movie, or a longer movie, will have less impact on the overall ASL. Here, it shifts it a bit.)

2. . I'll need to go back and check to see what the longest shot was. I think it's the one where Kurt's in the car, and Mark's outside the car, in the background, talking to Tanya on his cell. The shorter shots (under 4 seconds, say), seem to come not quite regularly, but not irregularly either.

3. Second dip comes after the evocative, 65-second St. John's Bridge shot:

First shot that follows is 18+ seconds, pictured at the top of the post, which leads into the wordless series of shots that get Mark and Kurt to the gas station. About 2 1/2 minutes without dialogue at this point. Just driving through the Northwest landscape with Yo La Tengo on the soundtrack.

Immediately prior are two longer shots of about 73 seconds and 69 seconds. This is the "End of an era" conversation:



Taken together, those four shots make up just over 5% of the film's running time. Which gets into the issue of just how much of your time watching the film is spent kind of settled back, taking in those long takes. (Another wish for cinemetrics - direct access to the raw data generated by the process.)

4. Good use of a two shot in the car scenes, to let us watch each character react to what the other says, without overemphasizing each reaction. Fine performances here as well.

5. A couple of other temporal markers:
- Credits end at just under 7 min. (note that this is on the above graph - there's about 20 seconds difference between it and the time on the DVD, since I didn't start the clock til the first shot.)
- Mark and Kurt reach the little campsite at 26 min, the morning after comes in at 35 min.
- They reach the Spring at about 48 min. (note the slope of the graph here)
- They head back at about 62 min.
- Mark drops off Kurt at about 67 min.

6. Don't know if I'd try to break this into 3 or 4 acts, but let's see:
I. 0-17 min. - "End of an era." - Mark heads out on a trip with old friend Kurt, leaves wife Tanya behind.
II. 17-35 min. - "I miss you." They hit the forest. Kurt gets them lost. Builds up to Kurt's confession by the campfire, and Daniel's reaction to it (at about 33 1/2 minutes on the graph)
III. 35-48 min. - "I never doubted you, man." The next morning, they make another go at finding the spring.
IV. 48-62 min. - "Sorrow is nothing but worn out joy." What happens at the Spring.
V. 62-71 min. - Epilogue. Mark and Kurt drive home, part ways.

Something like that, maybe. I guess you could also say there's a break at about 10 minutes, at the beginning of the drive, once they're out of town (more or less) and the talk radio cuts out.

7. This shot reminds me of a shot from Erik Gunneson's Milk Punch (2000):


Okay, that's all for that. Was going to do Eagle Pennell's Last Night at the Alamo next, but I want to catch a 9:15 of No Country, so that'll have to wait til later tonight, or tomorrow.

Cinema Report: Romero's Best Film

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.

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: