The Film Thread

This distinction seems kind of arbitrary to me. Doesn't it ultimately rely on a subjective aesthetic judgment? There's no logical reason why CGI shouldn't be considered movie magic, or why digital effects professionals aren't legitimate artists. Someone could take just as strong a stand against rear projection, filming on sets rather than real locations, or any element of the artifice that is inherent to most filmmaking.

But I already addressed this. Sets are filmed in front of a camera. Rear projection is movie magic made in front of a camera. CGI is you are looking at nothing in front of a camera. That's the distinction, and I disagree that it's arbitrary. I think it's everything. As Tarantino says, "getting it on the day." Getting that magic in front of the camera on the day of shooting. Stunts, sets, locations, puppets, whatever.

The argument against CGI reminds me a little of Scorsese's distinction between superhero movies and "cinema". I think most Marvel movies are bland and uninteresting, but they are surely cinema nonetheless, in that there is no definition of cinema you could provide which would exclude all comic-book movies but include all the genre films Scorsese loves. I agree with the spirit of his argument, but on a literal level find it indefensible. By the same token, I share many of your thoughts about modern cinema and CGI, but think writing off all digital effects is too absolutist.

That isn't Scorsese's point about those movies. His point is they are made to sell products as part of a mega corporation/franchise. Not that they use CGI. Scorsese uses CGI. He's saying, I guess, that the motivations for their existence is questionable compared to somebody making a movie because they want to tell a story they are passionate about. Note that I love many Marvel movies.


There are loads of instances of blatant CGI which I think look terrific. This is an obvious example perhaps, but I don't think that Gollum or the Balrog would work particularly well as stop-motion creatures or if they were played by men in costumes. The effects work isn't perfect, but it's far better than any alternative approach.

My issue has never been with how well the CGI looks, but I think Gollum looks pretty awful, like a video game, and hurts those movies. Why that couldn't be a man with makeup or etc is beyond me. Plenty of old fantasy movies with great practical creatures and goblins and effects that still hold up today. And here's the twist: when they don't hold up today, I find it utterly charming. I find CGI charmless.

When it comes to more mundane things like sunsets, I think there's an element of confirmation bias, in that we notice the effects that look phony but ignore that ones that actually are seamless. It's rather like how we all think we can spot a toupee or when somebody has had work done, because we simply don’t notice when such things are done well.

Like I said, seamless isn't factoring into my opinion here. I hate it even when we don't know it's there. I have noticed this retort to when I say my thoughts on CGI. People every time say I don't even notice great CGI. That's not my point.

My point is about the lessening of the magic and art of film because of the shortcuts (not for the CGI artists themselves, by the way) in deploying this "anything you want to happen can happen" machine rather than being crafty, clever, using your limitations, and blowing away the audience's mind by creating impossible things by hand. No charm at all.

I had this argument on Twitter once. I linked to a scene from a giallo horror movie I love where a woman is covered in snails. Real snails. The guy responds "yeah but with CGI I can make the snails do anything I want. Make one go up her nose, etc."

He completely missed the point. The point is that they covered a woman with fucking snails and that's an insane thing to film and show people. That's why horror movies are thrilling. Now they have totally gone to shit. CGI gore. Awful. Action movies too. CGI destroys genres, giving you no reason to see them. I mean even a stupid, bad action movie from the 80s or 90s will blow up some cars for real. Don't get me started on feature animation. What a tragedy.

Not sure I agree. If celluloid looks bad it's not the film stock's fault, it's the cinematography, and I'd argue even so the film stock layer itself is pulling just as much weight as it always does. Maybe this is subjective, but I can't imagine film stock being so bad that it doesn't at least add an organic and charming kind of noise. I mean, there's a reason that grindhouse films have an allure regardless of quality. Digital, though, at its default level, doesn't really add anything. That's not to say you can't make cinematography pull the weight and work with it and of course there are fantastic things shot digitally. But digital itself is a neutral layer.
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Correct. Even garbage horror direct to VHS movies from the 80s look absolutely beautiful and atmospheric and tangible to me compared to so much digital polished stuff today. We have lost something so wonderful. The only digital I like is totally crappy looking stuff like hi-8 cameras (which I shot a recent music video on) or like what Inland Empire looks like. Where it's such low quality that it becomes a strange new space.

I think there's something physically special about the way film works. How it uses light to capture images. It's chemicals. It's physical. I'm not saying nothing has been made digitally that looks cool. I am saying it is an artistic tragedy that film is practically an extinct medium.
 
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TBF, most blood and blood spatter in movies even when it was practical didn’t look much like real blood in terms of color or consistency. I get what you’re saying, though, that at least the manufactured stuff had a physical presence and heft.

Like I'm saying, it's not about the practical effect literally looking more realistic. I love models and matte paintings. I love janky puppets. It's about it being something filmed in front of a camera on the set that day. Super fake looking blood splatter looks fucking awesome. Get me two kids playing with ketchup, I don't care. CGI blood splatter is a massive disappointment every single time, and a clear mark of laziness and dispassionate filmmaking. Nothing takes me out of an action or horror (or even comedy these days) scene more than the CGI blood splatter.

Totally gutless stuff. I especially hate when "edgy" stuff like The Boys, Deadpool, whatever, utilizes it. Oooh, how edgy not wanting to get a little messy on set for a day.

Various animal rights groups have argued for using CGI animals in order to spare real ones the stress and risk of filmmaking. So that could be one good reason to use CGI there. I definitely would never take any cat of mine to a film set, it seems like torture.

There are people on set to make sure the animal feels safe and comfortable. This is standard practice. I've actually observed that myself on sets. I used my dog in a few TV shows and she loved it. She ate sandwiches all day and got to run and play in a park.

CGI animals in movies is such an incredible ripoff. You know they've made dog adventure movies where the dog is CGI? The entire point and joy of seeing an animal in a movie is...seeing an animal in a movie. There's so many layers to why it's fun (main one being the animal DOESN'T KNOW it's in a movie.) I know nobody saw Argo, but I did, and that cat could have actually been a cute thing to distract from the terrible movie if it had been real. It's amazing to watch pre-CGI movies with animals because you just wonder why everybody has become so lazy and uninterested in having an ADVENTURE on set. A story to tell about what it was like to work with a monkey or a bunch of rats or cockroaches or whatever.

We were watching the wonderful show Haunting of Hill House and there's a CGI spider on someone's arm. My god. Rent a spider, put it on someone's arm, is it THAT HARD? Thousands of movies did this before CGI. It took me totally out of the scene to have a cartoon spider in what's supposed to be a "gross" and "creepy" moment in a very serious, spooky show. And I have 10,000 stories like this since CGI became a thing. It's endless. Scully put a cricket in her mouth for real on X-Files. That became a great story told in a ton of interviews, etc. This is what's missing these days and so often neglected in favor of doing it in post.

That's my problem with CGI usage so much of the time. It misses the point of why we GO to the movies. We go to see things that were made to actually happen somehow.

Many of the Fincher shots are achieved practically and then enhanced, aren't they? The shots of the streets in Zodiac, for example. I don't believe that they could be bettered. Perhaps they would be different if done entirely practically, but not bettered. In the main fight in The Killer, I loved all the instances of CG assistance, such as the stuff zooming at the screen that made me duck--it all enhances the almost comical nature of the scene for me.

Well my main thing to say about that is one time I watched a youtube video showing how much of what's in Fincher's shots are fake. Like trees and buildings put in during post. The point of the video I think was to wow me, but it just made me feel kind of ripped off. Like oh he didn't go through the effort of finding cool locations and shooting them. It just made the movies feel more weightless to me. And made me appreciate people like Tarantino who are extremely committed to putting everything in front of the camera. I know he used a CGI cow once way in the background because the cow couldn't get delivered that day when they needed it.

It's such a wonderful feeling watching a movie knowing everything you're seeing was really there. (Yes, including matte paintings, rear projection, camera tricks, etc.) That's a big reason we mainly stick to older movies here.


There are also several heavily stylized films that depend on CGI come to mind as well. Sin City being a huge example. Avatar in its original 3D theatrical presentation. Gravity, for sure. There's Davey Jones in Pirates of the Carribean. Lord of the Rings is another obvious, older example.

Sin City I didn't think was great. I'd rather read the comic.

Avatar I think looks hideous. Probably the best example one could give of why CGI should be banned forever. I'm kind of joking, but not. How anyone could find those movies appealing to look at is incredible to me. Nightmares.

Gravity would have been so much cooler done practically and with models and old school FX like 2001: ASO. The CGI is one of my main problems with it.

My friend brings up Davey Jones too. Yeah he looks cool, but why can't those tentacles just be real? I don't get it. That's another great example of would have been better practically. It's notably BETTER CGI than usual because of the director being particularly obsessive. That's great. Uh, I'll allow it? But I still don't get why they can't just put some tentacles on a guy.

Lord of the Rings, I think all the CGI in it looks terrible. It's the worst part of those movies. I mean, they made fantasy movies before CGI. How cool does Labyrinth or Neverending Story look? You make a trade when you use CGI. Your movie in a superficial way looks bigger, you can have 10,000 goblins fighting, etc, but I really think, even subliminally, they feel smaller. This is at least my experience, and I suspect many others as well.

I'll just say this and from a previous conversation I know you disagree, but Twin Peaks Season 3 shot on film is not Twin Peaks Season 3. For what it's worth, there's an element of its digital presentation and use of CG that offers a necessary contrast to the original and reflects on themes in the work and its making. I know we'll never know whether this might have held true or how the thing would have changed if shot on film and used more practical effects. That I will concede. But I don't think you can better the way he used CG to surreally destabilize the narrative along with the popular use of the tool. So, I think his use of CG as well as digital very much adds to the value of the work.

I believe shooting digitally was a concession that had to be made and not really an artistic choice, though I don't doubt Lynch accustomed to it. And I think season 3 does suffer for it. A friend of mine finally got around to it and he texted me halfway through "why does it look so cheap???" I especially think the Red Room scenes suffer from not having film grain or texture. Thankfully Lynch cares about lighting so I find most of the season to look really great. BUT WOULD IT HAVE LOOKED BETTER ON FILM? That's the question. My answer is yes. Just look at Lynch's past films. Those look better to me than season 3. If season 3 actually looked like FWWM, etc? Wow.

I like Lynch's homemade weird digital FX partly because they look so shitty and weird. But do I like them more than if he had made those practically? My guess would be probably not. Do I think they really belong in a conversation about the devastation to cinema CGI has brought in the past two decades? I...really don't think so. That stuff is kind of neither here nor there. Neither fish nor fowl. It's Lynch on his own planet.

Not a movie, but the Smoke Monster on Lost likely couldn’t have been accomplished any other way.

I think it can. Older movies with supernatural elements like moving smoke, etc, figured out clever ways to do stuff like that. Reversing footage, etc. But yeah, it's not a movie, and the realities of pumping out a giant season of TV, I get why using digital FX makes sense. I get why vampires turning to dust on Buffy had to be (an apparently incredibly expensive) digital effect.

But again back to my question: is the effect PREFERABLE as CGI compared to if they achieved it practically, hypothetically? Can anybody really say yes? For any example ever? That's my main sticking point with CGI. Isn't it always the worse option? Because for me, practical has no downsides: if it looks great, then great. If it looks bad, I am totally charmed by it. CGI doesn't have this for me.
 
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@Jordan Cole It seems like the crux of what you’re asking is, in a hypothetical world where every director has limitless resources, time, and finances, would it be cooler if everything could be achieved practically? I think probably most of us would agree with you that, yes, that would be best. But that’s not the real world. Filmmaking has always been a medium dictated by schedule, budget, and constant compromise. In many cases, CGI permits a director to realize more of his or her vision than would otherwise be possible, and I can’t see how that’s a bad thing, even if the results are sometimes flawed. I also think that Gollum and Davy Jones are two of the all-time great screen creations, and there is no way that a suit or a puppet could have accomplished that same balance of showing us these creatures who feel totally alien in terms of physicality while still being so completely recognizably human (I know you disagree on Gollum). The nuance of an actor’s physical performance tends to be somewhat lost when they’re covered in a suit or heavy makeup, whereas the essence of the actor’s facial expressions and movements can be more fully preserved with motion capture and CGI.

I also find your heavy focus on achieving things in camera to be kind of reductionist, although I simultaneously admire how much of a purist you are. Film has always been about trickery and artifice, and using all the tools that technology will permit. Hell, editing in and of itself is a massive cheat! Filmmakers have used post-production composite shots since long before any of us were alive, and even Tarantino used digital compositing on Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. This idea that EVERYTHING has to be achieved in camera is a cool, enticing idea, but it really just hasn’t been the reality in well over half a century.

All of that being said…I can only speak for myself, but my sense is that almost everyone here agrees with your broader point. CGI is vastly overused, it’s used as a crutch, and it’s led to a lot of lazy filmmaking. I’d love to see a return to practical filmmaking, and I agree with LateReg that we likely will see an increasing resurgence in the next few years because the public is sick of CGI saturation.

I also agree with WorldFarAway that you’re being overly dismissive of the artistry involved in CGI animation and the work that these talented folks do. They’re animators and creators—some more talented than others, as in any field—but I can’t see how their work is any less “magic” just because they’re using pixels as opposed to latex. They’re creating something from nothing.

What I’d love to see from CGI is more use of it in truly creative ways that achieve things that literally couldn’t be done practically: for instance, the way Lynch used it during the Naido/Diane transformation, where it felt like one of his paintings or drawings come to life.
 
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I think my difficulty is that most of your argument consists of examples of CGI looking worse than practical effects, but when there is an instance of an effect that looks good or which you wouldn’t notice, you switch to saying that the issue isn’t about how the effects looks but about the pursuit of capturing images on camera. If it’s really about that then these instances of CGI looking bad are irrelevant, as even if they looked more realistic/charming than practical effects then you still wouldn’t like them. Personally, I think movies are ultimately about what we get on screen, so the process is really only artistically relevant in terms of what it ultimately leads to. I don’t think CGI will ever be able to replace much of what can be achieved through practical effects, but where they can then there’s no sensible reason to dismiss them. The whole thing about whether an image is technically captured on the day seems like a total red herring to me.
 
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Also, I’m not sure my point about Scorsese was clear - I wasn’t saying his issue with superhero films was to do with CGI, just that the strict delineation between Cinema and comic book escapism seemed similarly reductive to the arguments put forward by some practical effects purists.
 
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Also, I’m not sure my point about Scorsese was clear - I wasn’t saying his issue with superhero films was to do with CGI, just that the strict delineation between Cinema and comic book escapism seemed similarly reductive to the arguments put forward by some practical effects purists.
I caught that Jordan had misunderstood that and I get what you're saying, but I have to say that Jordan is nonetheless correct in his analysis of Scorsese's main point. This was the only thing I disagreed with in your otherwise excellent first post. Which is that when taken more literally, Scorsese's point becomes harder to argue with. And at its most literal, not focusing on what the elevated term "cinema" means to Scorsese since he clearly knows that the Marvel movies are made with a camera, script, actors, etc., Scorsese is focused on the literal how and why of the filmmaking and distribution: the less personal, more commercial, studio mandated nature of those movies, the amount of funding and resources that go into them at the expense of smaller, more personal projects, and especially the amount of cinema real estate they occupy that ends up disallowing smaller films to be shown and nets out to people and studios caring less about original films. All of this is different from the way that the old westerns and other genre films were churned out, which was comparatively quickly and more freely. Your inclusion of the word "genre" as a distinguishing characteristic is what makes your post so interesting and hard to argue with since comic book movies are the new genre film and Scorsese loves genre films, but there are still differences in how they were made and distributed. This is ultimately why his point is defensible at all costs.

Mr. Reindeer has pointed out that the Marvels are a logical progression of what Scorsese's peers began in the 70s, as well as of serials from long ago. Of course that's true. But there's still a difference in the personal, creator controlled nature of Jaws and Star Wars. There's a whole spectrum of analysis here and it's all a progression. I have personally argued in a different way altogether: Marvel movies are not cinema, but thanks to the addition of TV shows and lore that playfully interacts with knowledge of comics, rather have become their own medium entirely. But I'm loathe to go down these rabbit holes because obviously they are movies and movies are films and films are cinema etc. And obviously the people who worked on the films are passionate about them and they do at times meet Scorsese's criteria of spiritual or emotional revelation. Which is why it's best to just focus on the literal difference in how these films are made and how that differs from the films that Scorsese grew up on.
 
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But there's still a difference in the personal, creator controlled nature of Jaws and Star Wars. There's a whole spectrum of analysis here and it's all a progression.

I agree it’s a spectrum, but I just can’t see any reason why superhero movies would all land just beyond the edges of what we would consider “Cinema”, while other big-budget studio movies would stay within the line. If James Gunn says he is authentically expressing himself through his Guardians films, then what makes them different from than some of the John Carpenter films Scorsese has praised? Apart from subjective quality judgements of course!

I think the whole business of art and commerce is too complicated to allow for rigid definitions like this. A deeply personal vision can sometimes sneak through the most nakedly crass and commercial enterprise, and even something made entirely cynically can inadvertently express truth. I can’t see why simply saying that superhero films are typically uninteresting and impersonal cinema Isn’t a broad enough statement as it stands.

These sweeping categorisation just cause people to get caught up in semantic arguments, when the real issues (which you lay out very clearly) can be broadly agreed upon.
 
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Basically, I think that if it’s a moving picture and it’s meant sincerely, then it’s cinema. Even if it’s not meant sincerely but people perceive meaning from it, we might as well call that cinema too. Art is not an objective concept, and these definitions are ultimately made up. I just believe it makes sense to opt for the simplest definitions, and then add our own qualifiers rather than creating bespoke descriptions which are really just expressions of our taste. So I’ll happily call Meet the Spartans cinema or even art, but then add why I think that as a work of art it is soulless and ugly.
 
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There needs to be a separation between discussions about CGI and computer compositing. Computers can composite many different elements into an image seamlessly, sometimes putting items from different locations together. Watch the 'making of' documentary for Alejandro Amenábar's The Others, for example, and prepare to be astonished at how much greenscreen work went on. That aspect of computer imaging is widely used and accepted.

However, the problem we have now is a lot of bad CGI - as in images purely created in-computer and not drawn from a real-world source. The 1990s shifted to CGI way too early and much of that decade's CGI looks worse than 1980s modelwork. Had it been used primarily to augment modelwork, the evolutionary path to more acceptable, believable CGI could have been taken. Now, we have the ability to create incredible CGI, but the demand is so high and time so short, it's even worse than 1990s CGI. In the past, effects were physical and made by guys with names like 'Screaming Mad George', who locked themselves in workshops with latex and prosthetics. Some worked better than others, but they were integral to the production. Actors had to work with the effects guys, so everything was tangible.

Now effects are being created by offshored companies in different timezones on different continents in order to game the exchange rate. Instead of a mad, enthusiastic engineer in a baseball cap, covered in motor oil, working in a big mechanical workshop, we have room full of bored computer nerds disconnected from the production, underpaid and being expected to churn out ever more content at an ever faster rate. The frequent comparison made is to computer game cut scenes.

CGI is all too often used as an opportunity to be lazy or cut costs. Who wants to bother going outdoors when you can stay in a greenscreen studio and slap a Pond 5 image in the background? When making a horror film, when the monster's guts get slit open and maggots drop out, why buy maggots and put them in a latex balloon with fake blood that gets slit open on set when you can make the monster on a computer and have computer maggots and fake blood spew out?

Take the various Sony and MCU Spider-Man films. Look at the two Andrew Garfield films: New York is a proper location in them. Many of the effects shots even use actual New York as the basis of the image, then augment them with CGI. The actors are generally physically there. Then look at Tom Holland's films: much of the time, New York is a greenscreen job. There's a scene that sticks in my mind where Peter talks to Iron Man on a rooftop in one of the films. It's clearly shot on a virtual set. They could have gone to New York - or indeed any city - and shot Tom Holland on a rooftop and comped in Iron Man, but the philosophy is now to keep as much as possible on a greenscreen set or, at best, the Volume. So time is now being spent by CGI creators making images of cityscapes when someone could have simply taken the actor out on location. Inevitably, having to do all that extra work has led to increasingly poor effects by a workforce that feels increasingly exploited.

The consequence of poor CGI across the business is that live action movies are effectively becoming cartoons. The MCU, in particular, has become the byword for poor, unbelievable imagery. Compare the reasonably grounded original 2008 Iron Man film with what we have now. The other issue is that CGI allows characters to do 'stunts' not only unachievable by a humanoid, but also in defiance of all physical laws. Even a god wouldn't be able to alter the physical laws of the universe to do some of the crazy stunts in these films. So they simply aren't credible. The 'wow' factor historically came from 'how did they manage that??' When The Man with the Golden Gun had a stunt where a car drove off one side of a broken bridge, corkscrewed in midair and landed on the other side, some crazy stuntman actually drove that car off the bridge, corkscrewed it, landed on the other side and kept on driving. Now we never wonder 'how did they manage that?' because we know they didn't manage anything at all.

The other connected issue with CGI can be when it's too good: when you get a supposedly realistic shot, but you know subconsciously that there's no way someone could have achieved that shot. It pulls the viewer out of the action.

There's also the appropriateness of the use of CGI gimmickry. The Conjuring II has a scene that opens with a street shot in late 1970s Enfield, London. It's a typical suburban street in a tough era for the UK. Things were pretty run down. The jib takes the camera up from street level to the first floor of the house. That's fine. The camera moves towards the window and we see into the bedroom. Fine. Then we get a CGI ripple effect as the camera passes through the glass of the upstairs window into the bedroom.* And the viewer no longer buys that shot. That continuous shot isn't achievable without CGI, so it doesn't ring true. Moreover, the ripple as the camera passes through the glass calls out how artificial the image is and effectively says 'This is where we use CGI to move from the outdoors to the studio set. Aren't we clever?!' I could accept a horror film set in the present day perhaps using such a gimmick,, but in a period horror film that goes to the effort of getting clothing, decor and hairstyles right, a modern CGI gimmick feels out of place. So it was a piece of indulgence that was detrimental to that key word: verisimilitude. Had the camera passed through the glass without the ripple, it could have been an effective blend of the real and CGI.

Interestingly, the BBC is releasing the old dystopian science fiction adventure series Blake's 7 on Blu-ray in the next few weeks. Similar to the classic 1963-1989 Doctor Who Blu-rays, the SD series has been uprezzed to HD and there's an alternative special effects option. Some of Blake's 7's effects could be a bit ropey, due to time and limited budgets in the late 1970s. Interestingly, while the new effects do use CGI, they've built a new physical model of Blake's starship, the Liberator and some of the other spaceships. So while the backdrops might be CGI, there's a real model being used, effectively trying to create the impression of 1970s images if there had been more time and money.

Daren Dochterman, who worked on the effects for Star Trek: The Motion Picture Director's Edition has stated that he would like to get his hands on the original starship Enterprise model from the Smithsonian and spend a month or so reshooting all the exterior Enterprise shots in 4K for the (hopefully) inevitable 60th anniversary 4K release of the original Star Trek series. The mid-2000s Remastered series' all-CGI effects look very dated now, and as Daren pointed out, the original model is as much a character in the original series as the cast.

So, CGI is a very good tool when used wisely and sparingly, and thus to a very high standard. When it seemingly dominates every shot in an entire film and ignores the laws of physics and creates shots that defy credibility, the audience is easily pulled out of the drama. The verisimilitude disappears.

Just to show I'm not a complete curmudgeon, I watched Sunshine last night for the first time in 12 years and I thought the effects work held up really well and I found it delivered a real emotional gut punch. Cillian Murphy reaching out to the renewed Sun in those last moments was pretty awe-inspiring. But the CGI effects in Sunshine were used sparingly, mixed in with physical sets and excellent lighting, so that really helped.

* In the UK, we call the street-level storey of a building the 'ground floor' and the storey above the ground floor is called the 'first floor'. I know that can vary in some countries and they call the ground floor the 'first floor!' English: ain't it great?! ;)
 
I know nobody saw Argo, but I did, and that cat could have actually been a cute thing to distract from the terrible movie if it had been real. It's amazing to watch pre-CGI movies with animals because you just wonder why everybody has become so lazy and uninterested in having an ADVENTURE on set.

Oh my god, this is embarrassing. Argyle. Not Argo. There's no cartoon cat in Argo.
 
Oh my god, this is embarrassing. Argyle. Not Argo. There's no cartoon cat in Argo.
I always think of the awful CGI hyenas in Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist and Exorcist: The Beginning. Paul Schrader remarked that he could never understand why Renny Harlin's replacement prequel film kept them, because it was clear in Dominion that they looked awful!

When CGI artists are tied up creating elements that could have been shot on set or on location, that's time wasted that they could have been spending making another effect work better. I remember a low budget film I watched in the 1990s that had a flying robot in it. They decided to build a physical model and only use CGI to remove the wires in wide shots, because that was more convincing.

As ever, it's about when to use a tool. CGI has often become a lazy copout now, because risk-averse companies don't want to spend the money going on location.

A location shoot is set in stone. The background is part of the image, the lens choice, the lighting are forever meshed. Rotoscoping is expensive and mostly unconvincing, so if someone high up hates the shot, it will have to be redone.

Greenscreen means backdrops can be changed up to the last minute. It means no one has to make a decision on these hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars productions and the buck can be endlessly passed, all the way to a Bob Iger type, if necessary. No one has confidence in his own judgement anymore.

CGI has exposed the cowardice in the modern film business. Obviously we're David Lynch fans, so when we think of his feature films - Eraserhead to, say, Mulholland Dr - and his painterly compositions, the wonderful framing and lighting, that's an example of someone making a decision. He might have shot things in more than one way for leeway in the editing bay, but he had a vision. Alfred Hitchcock, who built his films on storyboards first, had a vision. Compare that with a modern production where everything is previsualised in a computer. Lighting is kept flat and low contrast so a colourist can radically alter a shot in the grade. Everything can be changed ad infinitum. And if everything in the shot is able to be changed right up until - and even after - release, there's no vision there.

Look at the great 1980s adventure films: they were made by confident teams with a vision for the films they wanted to make. That confidence and enthusiasm was infectious on the screen and audiences embraced it. The modern $300 million flops feel tentative, artificial, excessively focus-grouped. Audiences sense that and thus reject them. The reliance on CGI is simply the most obvious evidence of that tentativeness.
 
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Just to show I'm not a complete curmudgeon, I watched Sunshine last night for the first time in 12 years and I thought the effects work held up really well and I found it delivered a real emotional gut punch. Cillian Murphy reaching out to the renewed Sun in those last moments was pretty awe-inspiring. But the CGI effects in Sunshine were used sparingly, mixed in with physical sets and excellent lighting, so that really helped.

Interesting that you mention Sunshine, because I just saw this report about Danny Boyle shooting his latest film entirely on iPhone 15 pros, a fact which was apparently not meant to be revealed quite so soon:

 
Interesting that you mention Sunshine, because I just saw this report about Danny Boyle shooting his latest film entirely on iPhone 15 pros, a fact which was apparently not meant to be revealed quite so soon:

That's very interesting. Not surprised. I think the original film was shot on DV-Cam (Canon XL-1, if I remember correctly!)
 
That's very interesting. Not surprised. I think the original film was shot on DV-Cam (Canon XL-1, if I remember correctly!)
Well, it’s (probably) a good thing that filmmaking can be a bit more democratized, especially considering the state of the industry. It also might improve the odds of Lynch doing something at home, or somewhere, say an outdoor location, with whatever safety stipulations would make him comfortable. And if he if needs to direct from an electric wheelchair or something, that’s just fine.

That last little thought about the wheelchair led me to google image “all terrain wheelchair”, and I was unprepared for the resultant cornucopia of amazing selections. Wow! People have really got to see for themselves.

 
Gosh, I'm a bit out of the loop. I know Lynch has COPD. Is he that ill?!

The technology now is amazing. In 2005, it was a big deal for me to own a mini-DV camera and shoot my end-of-year project on it.

Now, I have a top-end consumer digital video camera that shoots 1080p at 50fps or 4K at 25fps. The picture is stunning. I have a good quality Røde boom microphone and pole, reflectors and tripod. All that for under £1,000! For maybe £200 more, I can buy some LED lights. A radio mic set up would be perhaps £200 more. That's crazy.

If I find some actors, I can make a film that would be more than passable, given today's standards. I want to do an MR James adaptation, although I found an amazing ghost story by another author that I'm determined to adapt.
 
Gosh, I'm a bit out of the loop. I know Lynch has COPD. Is he that ill?!

The technology now is amazing. In 2005, it was a big deal for me to own a mini-DV camera and shoot my end-of-year project on it.

Now, I have a top-end consumer digital video camera that shoots 1080p at 50fps or 4K at 25fps. The picture is stunning. I have a good quality Røde boom microphone and pole, reflectors and tripod. All that for under £1,000! For maybe £200 more, I can buy some LED lights. A radio mic set up would be perhaps £200 more. That's crazy.

If I find some actors, I can make a film that would be more than passable, given today's standards. I want to do an MR James adaptation, although I found an amazing ghost story by another author that I'm determined to adapt.

I don’t know if you missed anything, Dom, but I know that you’ve mentioned being very busy as of late, so just in case, I’ll quickly go over the basics.

First, here’s Variety reporting on the relevant bits from the Lynch Sight & Sound interview:

David Lynch revealed in a new interview that he was diagnosed with emphysema and can no longer “leave the house” due to fears of getting COVID.

“I’ve gotten emphysema from smoking for so long and so I’m homebound whether I like it or not. … And now, because of COVID, it would be very bad for me to get sick, even with a cold,” [and] “can only walk a short distance before” he runs “out of oxygen.”

[Lynch] added that it’s unlikely he will direct again — but if he does, he would not be on set. “I would try to do it remotely, if it comes to it,” Lynch said, admitting, “I wouldn’t like that so much.”


It had previously been revealed that Lynch was suffering from emphysema, but the extent of the problem only really became known from the Sight & Sound interview, and when said interview was published, the parts about Lynch’s health were picked up by many news outlets, and the topic was all over social media, so Lynch followed up with a statement on X:




Sabrina also added, right here on Tulpa:

Hi, I have no problem talking about this. His diagnosis was several years ago, so this is not news really as he continues to work fine. He is super healthy except for the emphysema, but that hasn’t really slowed him down much. He is just being careful and quit smoking. He would easily be able to direct anything and possibly will in the future as discussions have been made. Do not count him out of anything - he is not retired or anything close to it. He has just been enjoying working on his art and music lately. If wanted to start directing a project today, he could no problem. I am disappointed this magazine decided to highlight this part of David’s private private life rather than the amazing innovative album he and Chrystabell released recently which is why they were able to talk with him in the first place.


So, even if you know all of this, Dom, it was interesting for me to have a little refresher on the subject. (y)
 
I don’t know if you missed anything, Dom, but I know that you’ve mentioned being very busy as of late, so just in case, I’ll quickly go over the basics.

First, here’s Variety reporting on the relevant bits from the Lynch Sight & Sound interview:

It had previously been revealed that Lynch was suffering from emphysema, but the extent of the problem only really became known from the Sight & Sound interview, and when said interview was published, the parts about Lynch’s health were picked up by many news outlets, and the topic was all over social media, so Lynch followed up with a statement on X:

Sabrina also added, right here on Tulpa:

So, even if you know all of this, Dom, it was interesting for me to have a little refresher on the subject. (y)
Thanks. I didn't know the extent of his illness. It's a horrible one. The mother of one of my friends died of it eight years ago. Worse, my friend died three weeks later! In the modern world, it's possible to shoot with much smaller crews and no one's demanding feature films. In the YouTube age, even a five-minute short can gain traction.

I've had an insane three months on a graphics-heavy editing job. The hours were long and the breaks (usually for sorting my parents lunch and dinner) were few and far between. As I migraine sufferer, I probably spent half the weekends in bed, blindfolded and dosed to the nines with codeine-based painkillers and the other half looking after house, garden and parents!

I've just finished my second week without work. It's been bliss I've been able to read books (five Vince Flynn novels in a row!) and watch some movies. Blu-rays are available secondhand very cheaply in the UK and they're the hardest type of disc to damage, so a cheap, used Blu-ray is always worth a shot. So I've bought a bunch of films I haven't seen in years. and been working through them!! I watched Sunshine, Sin City and The Grandmaster over the last few days!

Anyway, I'll hopefully be back around a bit now. I've missed you folks!! :)
 
Not a review exactly, but some thoughts...

I watched Sin City 2: A Dame to Kill For last night. Really enjoyed the film, but unlike Frank Miller's fairly careful timeline in the comics, the way the two movies tie into each other is messed up, mainly because of the new stories created for the film.

Nancy Callahan's Last Dance doesn't fit into the timeline, no matter how you try to work it. If Marv wasn't in the story, it might fit, but given his role in the attack on the Roarks here, it doesn't quite chime with his reticence to go after Cardinal Roark in the first film. Jessica Alba still rates as perhaps the most beautiful woman I've ever seen and she's great in this. She manages to make sutured-up 'Dark Nancy' damn sexy. But Marv should be dead at this point. Seeing a spectral Bruce Willis provokes a wistful reaction now he's lost to us. I miss Bruce: when I was a young teenager, David Addison was one the coolest characters I'd ever seen and John McClane was a badass in the 1990s (I was too young to see Die Hard on release!)

Eva Green in the titular role in the film plays a role she was born to play. She resembles the book character almost perfectly. Moreso than the intended Angelina Jolie, in my opinion. The casting of Josh Brolin as Dwight in A Dame to Kill For is fine in terms of his acting, but this is supposed to be the original version of the surgically-altered character Clive Owen plays in the first film, which is set after this story. Brolin's head shape and facial structure in no way resemble that of Clive Owen, making the character's plastic surgery less than believable from the outset. Finishing up with Brolin wearing peculiar prosthetics and a wig to match Clive Owen's hairstyle in the first film looks very, very weird!

And that's perhaps the one of the major problems here: multiple recastings. Some, sadly are inevitable: Dennis Haysbert replaces Michael Clarke Duncan, who died between films. Why the character seems to die here after dying in the first film, which - again - is later in the timeline is damn peculiar, though. Jeremy Piven replaces Michael Madsen and I didn't twig that he was even the same character. Brittany Murphy's Shellie isn't recast after Murphy's tragically early death, but not having Shellie in the film when she, Dwight and Marv are the most frequently seen characters in the comics leaves an unfortunate gap. Shellie's kind of the heart of the series for me and is seen too little in the first film, with the promise of more to come. And little Miho, who was played by the most accurate-looking actress for a role imaginable in the first film, Devon Aoki, is now played by the extremely sexy Jamie Chung, but doesn't really resemble the character from the comics or the first film.

The biggest problem of all is that it took almost ten years for the second film to arrive, which is insane. That's bordering on 'legacy sequel' territory! In ten years, the industry changed, other films took inspiration from Sin City, some actors died and others' careers took off, making them unavailable. Devon Aoki was pregnant. I've always had the view that for most film series, ten years is the longest they'll function at their prime. Most series can manage a maximum of four movies before the quality nosedives or they become self-parodic, so sequels need to come out on average every two and a half years across the decade. The first sequel needs to be within two years. Any longer and the film's cultural imprint dies (there are obviously a few exceptions such as the Avatar films, but they are a cultural anomaly in that they make a ton of money, but no impact on the wider culture, vanishing as soon as their time in cinemas ends.) Star Trek (2009) for example, established a new film continuity, but the wait of four years for a lacklustre sequel lost any goodwill from the first film. The drawn-out production process and three-and-a-half-year wait for the third film killed the series for the audience as surely as the poor storytelling did.

It's a shame, because I really like both Sin City films. Had Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller got on with Sin City 2 and released it in 2007 with a third in 2010 and a final one by 2013, I reckon the films would have been well-regarded. As it stands, Sin City now sits as a curio and its sequel is maligned, although the sequel is a solid piece of work which would have been fine if it had come out eight years earlier. A common criticism is that it did nothing new. First sequels, if they turn up in good time, don't really need to: they need to build on the previous film and set things up for a third film that breaks the format a bit. In 2007, before the MCU destroyed the movie industry, Sin City 2 would have been a perfectly agreeable sequel, likely also featuring Michael Clarke Duncan, Brittany Murphy, Clive Owen and Devon Aoki. And in terms of stylistic development, a future adaptation of Hell and Back would certainly have provided some visual fireworks with its surreal colour sequences.

Watched over consecutive nights, I really enjoyed both the Sin City films, especially having just reread four Hard Case Crime graphic novels: Gun Honey 1 and 2, Heatseeker and Mickey Spillane's The Night I Died, which got me in the mood. The sequel arrived too late and after the culture had moved on. Perhaps time will treat the sequel more kindly. I'll still happily watch either film anytime. And I'd happily watch another sequel, even though no one else would! :D
 
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Not a review exactly, but some thoughts...

I watched Sin City 2: A Dame to Kill For last night. Really enjoyed the film, but unlike Frank Miller's fairly careful timeline in the comics, the way the two movies tie into each other is messed up, mainly because of the new stories created for the film.

Nancy Callahan's Last Dance doesn't fit into the timeline, no matter how you try to work it. If Marv wasn't in the story, it might fit, but given his role in the attack on the Roarks here, it doesn't quite chime with his reticence to go after Cardinal Roark in the first film. Jessica Alba still rates as perhaps the most beautiful woman I've ever seen and she's great in this. She manages to make sutured-up 'Dark Nancy' damn sexy. But Marv should be dead at this point. Seeing a spectral Bruce Willis provokes a wistful reaction now he's lost to us. I miss Bruce: when I was a young teenager, David Addison was one the coolest characters I'd ever seen and John McClane was a badass in the 1990s (I was too young to see Die Hard on release!)

Eva Green in the titular role in the film plays a role she was born to play. She resembles the book character almost perfectly. Moreso than the intended Angelina Jolie, in my opinion. The casting of Josh Brolin as Dwight in A Dame to Kill For is fine in terms of his acting, but this is supposed to be the original version of the surgically-altered character Clive Owen plays in the first film, which is set after this story. Brolin's head shape and facial structure in no way resemble that of Clive Owen, making the character's plastic surgery less than believable from the outset. Finishing up with Brolin wearing peculiar prosthetics and a wig to match Clive Owen's hairstyle in the first film looks very, very weird!

And that's perhaps the one of the major problems here: multiple recastings. Some, sadly are inevitable: Dennis Haysbert replaces Michael Clarke Duncan, who died between films. Why the character seems to die here after dying in the first film, which - again - is later in the timeline is damn peculiar, though. Jeremy Piven replaces Michael Madsen and I didn't twig that he was even the same character. Brittany Murphy's Shellie isn't recast after Murphy's tragically early death, but not having Shellie in the film when she, Dwight and Marv are the most frequently seen characters in the comics leaves an unfortunate gap. Shellie's kind of the heart of the series for me and is seen too little in the first film, with the promise of more to come. And little Miho, who was played by the most accurate-looking actress for a role imaginable in the first film, Devon Aoki, is now played by the extremely sexy Jamie Chung, but doesn't really resemble the character from the comics or the first film.

The biggest problem of all is that it took almost ten years for the second film to arrive, which is insane. That's bordering on 'legacy sequel' territory! In ten years, the industry changed, other films took inspiration from Sin City, some actors died and others' careers took off, making them unavailable. Devon Aoki was pregnant. I've always had the view that for most film series, ten years is the longest they'll function at their prime. Most series can manage a maximum of four movies before the quality nosedives or they become self-parodic, so sequels need to come out on average every two and a half years across the decade. The first sequel needs to be within two years. Any longer and the film's cultural imprint dies (there are obviously a few exceptions such as the Avatar films, but they are a cultural anomaly in that they make a ton of money, but no impact on the wider culture, vanishing as soon as their time in cinemas ends.) Star Trek (2009) for example, established a new film continuity, but the wait of four years for a lacklustre sequel lost any goodwill from the first film. The drawn-out production process and three-and-a-half-year wait for the third film killed the series for the audience as surely as the poor storytelling did.

It's a shame, because I really like both Sin City films. Had Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller got on with Sin City 2 and released it in 2007 with a third in 2010 and a final one by 2013, I reckon the films would have been well-regarded. As it stands, Sin City now sits as a curio and its sequel is maligned, although the sequel is a solid piece of work which would have been fine if it had come out eight years earlier. A common criticism is that it did nothing new. First sequels, if they turn up in good time, don't really need to: they need to build on the previous film and set things up for a third film that breaks the format a bit. In 2007, before the MCU destroyed the movie industry, Sin City 2 would have been a perfectly agreeable sequel, likely also featuring Michael Clarke Duncan, Brittany Murphy, Clive Owen and Devon Aoki. And in terms of stylistic development, a future adaptation of Hell and Back would certainly have provided some visual fireworks with its surreal colour sequences.

Watched over consecutive nights, I really enjoyed both the Sin City films, especially having just reread four Hard Case Crime graphic novels: Gun Honey 1 and 2, Heatseeker and Mickey Spillane's The Night I Died, which got me in the mood. The sequel arrived too late and after the culture had moved on. Perhaps time will treat the sequel more kindly. I'll still happily watch either film anytime. And I'd happily watch another sequel, even though no one else would! :D
Yeah, it's an enjoyable film but nowhere near as fun as the first one, and an absolute mess continuity-wise. As you say, Miller was so good with this stuff in the comics and how the stories all interlocked, so it's weird that he threw all that out the window. Even if we were to accept that "Last Dance" takes place before "The Hard Goodbye" (as it obviously has to), and Nancy's face has magically healed, it's bizarre that Marv in "Hard Goodbye" makes this huge deal about going up against the Roarks...when he's apparently already done that and lived! It totally robs his big story of its stakes. And "Hard Goodbye" in the movie also features a newspaper headline indicating that Senator Roark is still alive. Not to mention that in "Hard Goodbye," Marv mentions that he helped Nancy out when a frat boy roughed her up...but doesn't mention that he helped her kill a senator?!

The pre-existing story, "A Dame to Kill For," is by far the best part of the film, with Eva Green very much carrying it. (Ava. Damn.) And if nothing else, the two new stories are a terrific showcase for the late great Powers Boothe. It's too bad we never got Johnny Depp in "Hell and Back," which could have been a trippy frickin' movie! Miller is now working on two new SIn City comics. We'll see if they ever get made. One is a western set in the 19th century centering around the origins of Basin City.
 
Yeah, it's an enjoyable film but nowhere near as fun as the first one, and an absolute mess continuity-wise. As you say, Miller was so good with this stuff in the comics and how the stories all interlocked, so it's weird that he threw all that out the window. Even if we were to accept that "Last Dance" takes place before "The Hard Goodbye" (as it obviously has to), and Nancy's face has magically healed, it's bizarre that Marv in "Hard Goodbye" makes this huge deal about going up against the Roarks...when he's apparently already done that and lived! It totally robs his big story of its stakes. And "Hard Goodbye" in the movie also features a newspaper headline indicating that Senator Roark is still alive. Not to mention that in "Hard Goodbye," Marv mentions that he helped Nancy out when a frat boy roughed her up...but doesn't mention that he helped her kill a senator?!
Yes, it's weird. First time round, Nancy isn't the angry, vodka-sodden version from the second film at times she'd have to be. She seems sweet and pretty relaxed in the first film, when apparently she should be knocking back the sauce. I get the feeling the protracted development time just messed things up. The Joseph Gordon-Levitt segment was an enjoyable one, although his deliberately getting himself killed purely to make a point to his father didn't chime with his earlier optimism. A better ending would have been for him to make his little speech, walk away with his winnings, convinced his luck will keep him safe... only to be shot in the back.

The pre-existing story, "A Dame to Kill For," is by far the best part of the film, with Eva Green very much carrying it. (Ava. Damn.) And if nothing else, the two new stories are a terrific showcase for the late great Powers Boothe.
It's one of my favourite stories from the comics, which I read in the early 2000s, well before I saw the films. Powers Boothe was terrifying. His character's evil is felt throughout all the stories, even when he's off-screen. Great performance.

It's too bad we never got Johnny Depp in "Hell and Back," which could have been a trippy frickin' movie!
It's my biggest regret really. After the protracted development time, it might have been better to swap out one of the new stories for Hell and Back for the second film. A nine-year gap brings expectations for something more radical that a two-year gap wouldn't.

Miller is now working on two new SIn City comics. We'll see if they ever get made. One is a western set in the 19th century centering around the origins of Basin City.
I'll buy those day one! Presumably the Western will involve a member of the Roark clan and someone else's gold mine! :D
 
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