Movies that you enjoy just for how the director shoots the movie.

[Jim Kenney]

About CGI; CGI is pretty neat. It allows the telling of fantastic stories that couldn't be told as well in regular live action, for example Avatar. But when I watch CGI, I think to myself I'm watching a cartoon. It might be a good story, but it doesn't have the impact on me like an old fashioned live action epic film like Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, Spartacus, Ben Hur, etc. I guess I'm just more impressed with real spectacle, rather than computer generated spectacle even though both are a similar form of trickery.

 

[cantunamunch]

But when I watch CGI, I think to myself I'm watching a cartoon.

Does this include CGI backgrounds to live action, such as all the ship-external shots in Titanic? I'm guessing it definitely includes CGI backgrounds to live action such as is now done on an everyday basis in Asian (including Bollywood here as well as Chinese and Korean) fantasy, wuxia, and big-army type panoramas.

 

[Laurel Hill Crazie]

Lord of the Rings would not have been possible without CGI but on the whole, CGI is best when used as cantuna suggests. One example that comes to mind is the use of CGI in the Starz epic romance/action series Outlander. CGI was used in a scene to add buildings to a real seaport but when an 18th-century city scene was require, they went to an eastern European city that still looked the part.

 

[Jim Kenney]

Now I'm so conditioned that even when CGI is done tastefully and with sophistication, whenever I see a movie scene involving a big landscape or cityscape I immediately start thinking is all or part of that fake? Instead of being awed when I saw a desert scene in Lawrence or winterscape in Zhivago.

 

[cantunamunch]

they went to an eastern European city that still looked the part.

You have Prime, right? Check out a little culty movie called Viking Blood. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7718636/

The concept is absolute genius - Take the plot of Yojimbo (or A Fistful of Dollars), and set it in 10th century Denmark as a fight between old and new gods.

The production is rather an example of over-simplification though. Completely aside from Hungary looking nothing like Denmark, all they did was make a bunch of huts and wooden towers in a rural area and get a bunch of Scandi actors in period gear down there.
No effects, no real fight choreography, no fancy lenses, no fancy dolly shots, only the barest of mood lighting, it's Blair Witch does Yojimbo, except without the camera shake.

I can only take so much of that, personally. One movie in a month is about enough.

Back to thread topic: Zhang Yimou. The man who kneads your brain with colour.

 

[dbostedo]

...It was at the Uptown in Wash DC...

For those who don't know, the Uptown is an old theater, complete with a balcony, converted into a movie theater. It tends to get a lively younger crowd for the blockbuster type movies - at least it did in the early 2000's, when I would go occasionally. I've seen a couple of things there... the most fun one was seeing "The Day After Tomorrow" there. Lots of younger folks, lots of cheers and boos, a little heckling of sorts during the movie.

 

[cantunamunch]

For those who don't know, the Uptown is an old theater, complete with a balcony, converted into a movie theater. It tends to get a lively younger crowd for the blockbuster type movies - at least it did in the early 2000's, when I would go occasionally.

The big distinguishing feature of the Uptown as a movie theater back in the day was that it was the only 70mm projection venue in town - absolutely suited to big, panoramic epics. The curved screen could also do 35mm CinemaScope. And the space was HUGE by movie theater standards - which really worked well for the Dolby sound system when that was installed.

Their business model eventually became reliant on being the only or one of two venues for any given film. Again, worked extremely well for big movies. Not so great for tight intimate art films, but *shrug* them's the breaks.

And then they went digital...

There was another balcony theater up on MacArthur Blvd - nothing as big as the Uptown but totally romantic (and an absolute freezer on hot summer evenings). It's a CVS now.