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https://thenerdsofcolor.org/2020/01/20/hard-noc-life-podcast-on-infinite-earths/
It’s a Post-Crisis Hard NOC Life this week as Dominic and Keith break down the epic, five-episode crossover on The CW. http://traffic.libsyn.com/thenerdsofcolor/HNL176.mp3 Last week, The CW pulled off one of the most improbable events in recent memory. Mashing up five different superhero shows (six, counting Black Lightning), the annual crossover event not only tied all […]
There is something about Henry Cavill in Netflix’s The Witcher that just works, despite the wig and contacts. I think that Cavill works best in an environment where men wear either nothing or lace. Also, there’s something about leather and possibly having his British accent that’s crisper than the dollar bills being sent into the Biden campaign. As I watched The Witcher, I became nostalgic for the period drama looks of old that gave us prime Henry Cavill.
Stardust:
It’s a very minor role, but in the feature film Stardust, our Superman plays Humphrey, another gentleman fighting for the attention of Victoria against Tristan (Charlie Cox). He’s basically playing a bully and sporting blond hair, which will hopefully be the last time, because silver=yes, blond=run for the hills. This was the first time we collectively realized that Henry Cavill could, indeed, pull off a mustache.
Besides being an asshole in blue, he is best known, in this movie, for winking at Robert DeNiro in a very bisexual way during the final scene. I have provided the footage above. You are welcome.
The Count of Monte Cristo:
This is a very weak adaptation of the Alexandre Dumas novel, but at the same time, a very enjoyable movie. One of the most enjoyable parts is that they do a bit of wish fulfillment writing by making Edmond Dantès (Jim Caviezel) and Mercédès (Dagmara Domińczyk) have a kid. In the book, Albert is the child of Mercédès and the trifling shitbag Fernand Mondego (Guy Pearce), but they changed the daddy to Edmond, played by Henry Cavill, sporting a sweet baby face, looking like Laurie from Little Women.
Immortals:
One of the worst movies I have ever suffered in my life, Immortals should have been fire, but instead, it felt like a 300 ripoff. The film is supposed to be an adaptation of Theseus and the Minotaur and Titanomachy, but it bears little to no resemblance to either. I remember there is one scene where Athena asks Zeus, “Are we at war?” and I couldn’t help but go, “You’re the goddess of war. Should you know that?!” It was a mess.
Henry Cavill plays “Theseus” (allegedly), a man chosen by “the gods” to defeat the King Hyperion, who wants to kill the gods for letting his family die from famine. (Have you even met the Greek gods?) It’s very boring, but the cast is very handsome. We’ve got Henry Cavill, who looks slightly bronzed and is shirtless in almost every scene, Joseph Morgan as Lysander, Luke Evans as Zeus, Freida Pinto as Phaedra, and Kellan Lutz as Poseidon. It’s very 2011.
The Tudors:
Ahh, the masterpiece. For four seasons, Henry Cavill played Charles Brandon, 1st Duke of Suffolk, in a performance that once could call … orgasmic. Basically, he spends the entire first season sleeping with all the wrong women, and just exuding casual f*ckboy energy at every single moment. It’s amazing. It takes effort to be so effortless, terrible, and handsome at once, but man oh man, did Henry Cavill do it.
I truly thought he was one of the most gorgeous men on Earth during this series. I have no doubt this show is the reason he was Stephenie Meyer’s first pick for Edward Cullen. It certainly didn’t help that, even as the show needed him to play a 60-year-old-man it was basically just Henry Cavill with a grey beard. Somehow … it was even more attractive? Bless The Tudors for providing so many thirst traps.
And now we have The Witcher, serving Henry Cavill with a combination of his greatest hit: warrior, light hair, complicated paternity issues, perpetually dirty, and emotionally distant. Tossing a coin to my Witcher …
(image: Starz, Buena Vista Pictures, Relativity Media, Paramount Pictures)
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Are you ready to get f*cked up? Well, hopefully your answer was yes. Gille Klabin’s The Wave is hitting video on demand services and select theaters this weekend and it’s one of the trippiest, strangest, and sweetest explorations of humanity, morality, and psychedelics that we’ve seen in ages. To celebrate the release of the existential horror we asked the film’s star Justin Long about preparing for the unconventional role, the real life inspiration behind it, and the kind of high stakes performances that excite him as a performer.
The Wave follows a young insurance lawyer who is about to make the deal of his life–scamming a family out of their claim–when he ends up accidentally taking a mysterious drug. The idea of having to deal with your day to day life whilst on hallucinogens is horrific enough but Frank’s trip comes with some wild and uncontrollable powers which see him flung through time and space. It’s an unusual role that could easily lean into the comedic but is far more grounded and thoughtful than slapstick. For Long it was the juxtaposition of high-concept and humanity that appealed. “I really loved the story, it felt like it was a very personal story and yet fantastical, which is rare. It has this real heightened plot, and the things that happened to this guy are really extreme, but it felt like it came from a very personal place.”
Cruel and callous, Frank goes on a mind-bending journey offering an unexpectedly moving redemption arc. The Wave’s writer took inspiration from a real-life occurrence in which he tried his best to find humanity. “Carl Lucas wrote it about this experience he had, I think his cousin, unfortunately, passed away suddenly, and lawyers for the insurance company had found some loophole, and they were denying the claim to his family it was just this really shitty thing. In order to deal with it, Carl tried to humanize whoever was doing this, because when you’re dealing with these people, they’re just these, these nebulous entities, there aren’t any faces, or heartbeats that you can assign to these shitty things that are being done.”The actor continued. “I think this was his way of humanizing this experience. I didn’t know that story until after we finished filming but it all makes sense because when I read it there’s just something very truthful about it and, I liked the message, I liked what it said about this guy going on a journey of redemption and us discovering his own morality and his own mortality.”
Epic Pictures
With such an out there concept and execution Long is the much needed beating heart of The Wave and his passion for the part comes through, which makes sense as he was incredibly enthusiastic about taking on the unconventional role and all that came with it. “I love the challenge as an actor to play with stakes like that. Such high stakes so soon into a movie, it reminded me a lot of Marathon Man, which is one of my favorite movies and movies like Run Lola Run. I really just enjoyed those performances and wanted to try my hand at doing one… That’s my selfish actor answer.”
“I watched Marathon Man again, I’ve seen it so many times. Dustin Hoffman, any Dustin Hoffman, even Straw Dogs. Whenever a great actor like that is in life or death is in real peril. I studied performances like that, like Veronica Cartwright in Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Alien. She’s really good at playing characters like that, so authentic. It’s usually horror movies that you see those performances in Leland Orser, he was in Seven, he’s always so good at playing those real like high stakes scenes. There’s so many I love. I love movies like that. I think Sam Rockwell and Moon is this one to study, there’s just so many.”
The Wave has many impressive sequences. Though it was hard for Long to pick just one, he did share a favorite moment from shooting. “Well, there was one scene that we shot and this will also illustrate how much care they took to make sure it was the movie that they wanted to make, you know, they were very deliberate. They really stretched the budget that they had in order to accomplish their vision. It was a desert in New Mexico and about five hours from where we were all shooting in Albuquerque, it was you know it was a lot for a movie like a budget that size to travel everyone down there and to get equipment and of course get all the requisite you know passes and go the hoops they had to jump through to get all the permits and stuff.”
Long continued. “I think now when I see it, it was so worth it. It’s just really, really beautiful and it opens up the movie. And they’re so inventive how they did it. It’s a moment where I take as many drugs as I can consume and for those readers who haven’t seen it yet I’m like a rabid animal and I’m shot into this really trippy sequence and it was all done in camera! They’d a chair on a track and they’d set up all of these lights almost like a light tunnel that they were just going to push me down. None of that was done with was with CGI, I think they added some effects later but for the most part, they did as much as they could in camera including that one shot.”
Those practical effects, both in camera and post, are among the things that make The Wave stand out. For Long it’s something that can’t wait for audiences to experience for the first time. “A lot of the trippy hallucinogenic stuff when I’m, let’s just say, when I’m tripping and I started experiencing The Wave. They added almost all of that stuff by hand they added those after effects where everything becomes distorted and almost like that Richard Linklater movie Waking Life, but like a more heightened type of animation, a more realistic looking animation. They did all that by hand. These guys were really incredible. And I’m excited for people to see that.”
The Wave is available on VOD everywhere now!
The post Justin Long Talks Getting Trippy For THE WAVE appeared first on Nerdist.
Editing is a little bit like comic book lettering. It’s a complex and particular art form that, at its best, is often invisible. It is often far easier to notice bad editing than good editing in film, and often the best editing, even at its most noticeable, is intangible.
Describing it proves difficult despite the extent to which it contributes to the language of a film. There’s a reason it took Quentin Tarantino a couple of shots to fully get back on track after his longtime collaborator, editor Sally Menke, passed away. Menke contributed so greatly to the visual language of his filmography, that there’s a palpable difference between Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained. Despite being roughly the same length, Menke’s absence is largely why the latter feels so much longer and less cohesive. Because of this invisibility, editing is, too often, a thankless task.
However, if there’s an exception to this it’s action cinema. A great action setpiece is a rare opportunity for an editor to cut loose and show off their skill set in the most bombastic and kinetic fashion possible. Action is the genre that is made or broken by editing. Poor editing defuses tension and momentum. It takes away from the impact of a fistfight, or car chase, or shootout. It provides the necessary spacial context for a setpiece and balances character. There’s no genre in which editing is simultaneously this essential and so hard to pull off.
When it works, you’re enthralled by the action taking place in front of you and, perhaps more importantly, you can comprehend what’s going on clearly. When it fails, you likely don’t fully notice – but have you ever just kind of zoned out during an action sequence and waited for the next vital plot point to come along? It’s likely due to poor editing.
There’s no better indicator of what the difference between good and bad editing looks like than director Ryan Coogler’s 2015 film Creed and his 2018 MCU effort Black Panther. To be clear, these are both great movies (Creed recently made Geek’s Best Movies of the Decade list). But Marvel films at large often treat editing as an afterthought and as a result, their action sequences are far from the most engaging or compelling. It’s a shame as ostensibly massive superhero blockbusters should feature top-tier action setpieces. But more often than not, shoddy editing takes away from their potential impactfulness.
The above sequence is the climax of Creed. Editors Michael P. Shawver and Claudia Castello do some really special work here, first and foremost manifested in exhibiting their control over the impact of the punches landed. They linger on shots long enough for us to see the strikes connect in full and how each fighter responds to them. They also pull off the vital task of conveying space to the audience at all times. We’re aware of the size of the ring in which Apollo and Ricky are fighting, aware of how much space there is between them when they aren’t face-to-face throwing punches. It makes for an enthralling action sequence in which we feel the impact of every punch and are able to follow our protagonist as he navigates the space.
Conversely, bad editing drastically diminishes one of the early setpieces in Black Panther. Shawver returns to the editing room for this one, but this time he’s joined by Debbie Berman, a Marvel regular who’s responsible for Spider-Man: Homecoming and Captain Marvel as well. Notice how every time a punch or kick is landed in this scene, there’s almost instantly a cutaway to a new angle in which the character on the receiving end reacts. Editing like this quietly breaks the momentum of a fight sequence and makes us more aware of the fact that what we’re watching is stuntwork.
You want to talk about great action and great editing? Let’s talk Wick. John Wick, specifically. The boogeyman. The Baba Yaga. The defining action character of the 2010s. These movies have, as we addressed in our Best of the Decade feature, largely defined the aesthetics of action movies for a generation. You never tune out of the action in these movies – it’s the reason you show up, to begin with.
While there are some impressive cinematic techniques at play during these sequences in the form of lengthy oners and lush, neon cinematography, it’s the editing that ultimately makes them work so well. While watching a Wick movie you’re aware of just how much every punch, stab, and bullet wound hurts. You never lose track of where John is in a setpiece, even one as crowded as the shootout at the concert in John Wick: Chapter 2. This editing, however, always remains functional above all else – it’s never so distracting that you have to come out of the moment to appreciate it. It’s the glue that holds these tremendously special action movies together.
Your favorite movie in this franchise is likely a toss-up (there’s no wrong answer), but the impact of John Wick: Chapter 2 remains one of the more resonant moments in the legacy of the franchise. It’s when we realized that these movies were going to be a big deal – remember, the first became something of a word-of-mouth hit. John Wick: Chapter 2 is the moment it became a dominant cultural force – and it should be rewarded as such.
It Should Have Been Nominated for: Best Editing
John Wick: Chapter 2 came out in the relatively stacked year of 2017, which gave us Lady Bird, The Shape of Water, Dunkirk, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and countless other stone-cold masterpieces. This made the Oscars even more competitive than usual. Still, somehow the list of nominees for Best Editing feels half-baked.
At the very least, they got the winner right in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk. Rest assured, that win isn’t going to be argued here. Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver also secured a much-warranted nomination, both given how well it covers the car and foot chases featured in the film and for taking on the task of syncing the editing up to the music that plays throughout the movie. I, Tonya isn’t going to be studied any time soon, but it does feature a bevy of clever editorial tricks and feels worthy of the nomination it received. The Shape of Water and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri though? Cut them both, honestly. The former is a good movie with competent editing, but the latter hardly warrants any of its nominations, if we’re being honest.
One of these slots – likely that which went to Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri – should go to John Wick: Chapter 2 for its stellar competence in editing a movie roughly three-quarters of which is an extended action sequence (maybe give the other to Get Out).
Photo Credit: Niko Tavernise / Lionsgate
Editor Evan Schiff provides pacing and empathy through his work in the cutting room, guiding the audience through a series of increasingly complex action setpieces. We are never lost along the journey John traverses in this film and every action setpiece is anchored in stellar spacial awareness and a brutal refusal to cut away when a punch lands, when a knife sinks into skin. His editing (paired with Director of Photography Dan Laustsen’s airtight work) also allows the audience to take in the film’s multi-national surroundings, from Italy to New York City, without missing out on an action beat. In John Wick: Chapter 2, the streets of Rome are idyllic as ever, despite being set against nonstop violence.
There’s more Wick on the way, so maybe one of these days it’ll begin a long-deserved technical run during Oscar season. The Academy doesn’t tend to give movies like these much love though, so it’s hard to be optimistic about that. Still, at the rate these movies are improving and innovating, the fourth installment may prove to be something voters in the editing and technical craft bodies can’t overlook any longer. Just remember if that happens that it all started in 2017 with John Wick: Chapter 2.
More on Geek.com:
- It Should Have Been Nominated: ‘The Thing’
- The Best Drug Trips in Movie History
- Watch These Movies Before ‘Bad Boys For Life’