Movie Week Extravaganza!

Ok so here at PV we’ve had our shoot week this week.. So while lots of my friends are enjoying fun in the sun I’m enjoying a week filled with assignments, papers and tests to study for =) I said enjoying! As part of this week, one of the assignments was to watch 3 movies and blog about them so here it goes.. (Oh and I also want to mention that I recently posted a little note on facebook saying how I’ve been noticing lately how people seem to be saying “extravaganza” after everything to make it sound more fun and how much I love it so I just wanna throw a little thanks to PV for keeping that alive!!)

For my first movie I chose to go to the DT room (with pop and chocolate in hand at 10am) and watch O Brother, Where Art Thou. It has to be said, you don’t have to twist my arm to get me to go see a movie with George Clooney in it. I really enjoyed the movie as a whole; the storyline is a little odd but in a very funny way. Having seen one of the special features (painting with pixels) before hand, I really enjoyed watching the colors and mood of each scene change. I thought it was cool that they shot the whole movie in color knowing they were going to scan “clean” film to a digital file. Once they scanned it to a digital file, they were able to desaturate however much of a scene they wanted to. This gave them full control and also allowed them to film certain scenes over a longer period of time as well as at different times of day.

The second movie I chose was I am Cuba. Now I don’t know if it was all that sugar I had in the morning or if I was getting a little sleepy but this movie was a little harder for me to follow. I think it was a great idea to have 4 short stories compiled to make one movie. I loved that they were showing 4 different (actually even more I would say) perspectives of what Cuba was like at the time. It felt like the camera was moving so much sometimes that you didn’t have time to see the scene, it felt chaotic(obviously the point). I love that the whole movie is in black and white, which definitely adds to the mood. There is also a lot of items that block or are banging into the camera throughout the movie. This is definitely one I will be watching again.

Last but definitely not least, I watched One Hour Photo. I have watched this one before and I love it. Robin Williams is so good at being creepy in this movie; it always takes me a few weeks to forgive him. I was excited to see this movie again because I knew we would get to watch a special feature on white balance, color and mood and I wanted to see how differently I would view it this time around. Watching the movie again, made me realize what an amazing effort and thought they put into every little detail from the color balance of each place (which remains the same throughout) to pauses and facial expressions or the tilt of a head. They had 3 different “main” sets in the movie: Savmart, Sy’s house and the family’s house. Savmart, where Sy (the photo guy) worked, was a very crisp white, Sy’s home had a greenish tint to it and the family’s house had a orange/yellow tint to it. I believe it was the director that referred to the differences in tone/color was a representation of Sy’s Heaven (the store), Hell (his home) and Purgatory (the family’s home). I thought that was really interesting and actually made me love this movie even more!!