Saw The Following last night. ***SPOILERS***
I was really excited - British director, great trailer, great poster and a pretty good cast.
However it was truly awful and a real insult to film makers. In the credits there were so many development people, BFI, BBC, so many producers and so many different bodies I couldn't believe that something so weak could have been produced.
I was also amazed at the incredible repetition of cut away shots, the same shot of the moon three times, the same shot of the tree, all the cuts aways clearly shot on the same day at the same time and then the most feeble direction I have ever seen. No vision, no direction, no cinematography, shot like a TV movie, nothing we haven't seen here before.
It was clear that the director does not know where to put a camera to get the best shots, and the very weak framing shows that the cinematographer didn't have a clue OR was trying very hard to re-invent the wheel and give us a challenging window on the world. Oh please. This has been done to death since 1910.
Clearly they had struggled in the edit to make the story work from the scenes they had shot, and used ever GCSE film making cliché from 'flash frames' to cut away to shagging that I would expect 1st year students to use in 1972. Yet critics are saying it is brilliant "A new Auteur."
I think critic's lack of understanding of how a film is actually constructed, made and shot, leads them to see things that a real film maker would just say, "oh they have cut to that shot because they've lost focus on that shot, or the eye line is off, or they haven't got enough coverage, or this shot is dead."
The premise was so good, the concept sound, but the execution was truly dreadful the director/writer clearly did not know what to do with the source material and drew no conclusions and no interesting plot lines and the bit about incest was just terrible.
The fact that this is in the top 5000 films at the moment just shows what damage the critic and distributors do to cinema and cinema audiences.
If you speak to anyone who actually makes movies non of them will give this a high rating.
I try so hard to support British films, and this tries my patience so hard.
I was really excited - British director, great trailer, great poster and a pretty good cast.
However it was truly awful and a real insult to film makers. In the credits there were so many development people, BFI, BBC, so many producers and so many different bodies I couldn't believe that something so weak could have been produced.
I was also amazed at the incredible repetition of cut away shots, the same shot of the moon three times, the same shot of the tree, all the cuts aways clearly shot on the same day at the same time and then the most feeble direction I have ever seen. No vision, no direction, no cinematography, shot like a TV movie, nothing we haven't seen here before.
It was clear that the director does not know where to put a camera to get the best shots, and the very weak framing shows that the cinematographer didn't have a clue OR was trying very hard to re-invent the wheel and give us a challenging window on the world. Oh please. This has been done to death since 1910.
Clearly they had struggled in the edit to make the story work from the scenes they had shot, and used ever GCSE film making cliché from 'flash frames' to cut away to shagging that I would expect 1st year students to use in 1972. Yet critics are saying it is brilliant "A new Auteur."
I think critic's lack of understanding of how a film is actually constructed, made and shot, leads them to see things that a real film maker would just say, "oh they have cut to that shot because they've lost focus on that shot, or the eye line is off, or they haven't got enough coverage, or this shot is dead."
The premise was so good, the concept sound, but the execution was truly dreadful the director/writer clearly did not know what to do with the source material and drew no conclusions and no interesting plot lines and the bit about incest was just terrible.
The fact that this is in the top 5000 films at the moment just shows what damage the critic and distributors do to cinema and cinema audiences.
If you speak to anyone who actually makes movies non of them will give this a high rating.
I try so hard to support British films, and this tries my patience so hard.