This, from the indispensable Gin and Tacos, gazes into the lambent emerald fires of Green Lantern and despairs:
The other problem with CGI is that it's too easy. Consider the original King Kong compared to the christawful 2005 remake. In the first film every frame of the ape required hours of labor working with delicate sets and models, which in turn required dozens of hours of work to make. It encouraged the filmmakers to use the titular creature sparingly. If it's all digital, then why not have King Kong in every damn scene? Why not have him knock a few buildings down? Hell, it's all just clicks on a mouse. Another example, of course, is the new-vs-old Star Wars trilogies. If you have to build an enormous Imperial Cruiser model, you're probably going to shoot the scene with ONE Imperial Cruiser…because you don't want to build a second one unless it's absolutely necessary. So the original trilogy had a sense of economy. It was sparse. In the prequels, why have one ship when you could have…(*click click click*)…a hundred ships??? Isn't that way better? See how much it improves the experience to jam as much blinking, exploding shit as humanly possible into the frame?
Which resonates with my ongoing cogitation about real vs digital in various mediums. Maybe it really is that simple- a physical object represents a certain investment of effort and energy, lending the endevor sort of intrinsic value or gravity, while the potentially infinite stream of digital scat point-and-clicked into being lacks that ballast.
There's a Tim Gunn phrase from Project: Runway, usually deployed against a project that has too much on its plate- "you need to bring an editing eye to this."
Digital erodes the motivation to edit.
When Tolstoy wrote War & Peace he did it longhand with a quill pen. It's a long-ass book, but there is nothing extraneous in that text, nothing wasted. Now, everyone taps out pixels on a keyboard and the evidence of manuscript bloat clogs the shelves of your local bookstore (assuming you still have one).
Next up is old school critic David Denby in the New Yorker approaching the same topic from a different perspective.
I'm not really feeling his appeal to nostalgia/blame the teens angle- the corporate blockbuster mentality has been with us since Jaws/Star Wars and isn't going anywhere. And I'm a bit bemused that he sings the praises of The Matrix and then several column inches later asks the (rhetorical) question "Can you have a story that means anything halfway serious without gravity’s pull and the threat of mortality?"
But this bit is spot on-
Fantasy and spectacle, of course, have always been a big part of moviemaking, going back to Georges Méliès’s “Le Voyage dans la Lune” (1902). If the fantasy movies made now are just grander, wilder, and freer than those of decades ago, what could be the complaint against them? Hasn’t digital technology liberated imagination and created many forms of visual rapture? I would say, “Yes, but only some of the time.” C.G.I. has yielded sequences of great loveliness and shivery terror: the mercurial reconstituted beings in “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” (1991); the flying, floating, high-chic battles in “The Matrix” (1999). In 2009, we were engulfed by the purple-green floricultural lusciousness of “Avatar.” These are all digital triumphs. But one reason that C.G.I. has become so widespread is that it makes the fantastic available not just to the artists but to the unimaginative and the graceless as well.
Again, the democratizing factor of digital.
Although I'll point out that plenty of unimaginative, graceless types were churning out effects-heavy movies well before the advent of computers. Some of them even get nominated for Oscars-
There's definitely an element of "get those kids off my lawn!" in most anti-digital sentiment. But I also think the ubiquity and ease of digital has eroded something important in all the entertainment venues it's impacted.
I'm still puzzling out what exactly that is.
1 comment:
I could go on at length about how digital has impacted my own workplace, but I'll try to be concise. The upshot is that when you came into an edit suite where you were cutting film at $5,000 a day, you had to have your ideas pretty much prepared and locked down. Nowadays, with the advent of non-linear digital editing, folks come into the studio without much of a plan, and only a sketchy outline of a script. And we then explore every possible option, just to "see that it looks like." It's good and bad, in that we have loads more creative freedom, but we don't actually spend less time editing. We just churn out more options in the same amount of time.
Steve
(Some portions of this brought to you by dextramathorphan, so forgive incoherence.)
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