Toner_Low

Okay, now I have to see Brokeback Mountain so I can fire back with an opinion--I was hoping to avoid it. Two comments about this post: 1) If you didn't like the movie because it was boring, that might be a reason for me to see it. I'm really getting tired of the MTV editing and hyperactivity that every director now uses to turn inconsequential stories into sound-and-fury-fests. PULP FICTION was especially guilty of this (I somehow missed all the great dialogue that people were ranting about) and I'm a little unsure if I want to see KILL BILL. A camera that sits in one place, or a slow tracking shot, or even actors that hardly move, can sometimes come as a relief. That said, I'll never defend a piece of crap like THE WAR ZONE. As for 2), are the Academy Awards even relevant anymore? Who cares who gets the Oscar for Best Whatever, and who cares who they're wearing? I've been trying to avoid the whole thing ever since James Horner beat Philip Glass for Best Score, a night on which I swear to God I might have killed someone if my semiautomatic hadn't been in the shop.
 

The Academy Awards are, indeed, worthless. Yet, like Prom King and Queen, they obsess us. They rule our lives. And they often dictate career boosts and the direction cinema, whether they deserve to or not. The battlefield of cinema is littered with bodies of more deserving soldiers. I'm with you on that Philip Glass score Oscar. And let us not forget CITIZEN KANE, the great granddaddy of "shouldofbutdidn'tgetanoscars."

Fast editing has nothing to do with whether a movie is boring. I've seen slowly paced movies that were breathtakingly exciting. I've seen MTV-edited movies that were so dull that I'd rather eat Krystals than watch them again -- UNDERWORLD and CHARLIE'S ANGELS: FULL THROTTLE come to mind. But that doesn't mean anything.

As mohels say, it's not the length of the cut, but what you're slicing.

LOST IN TRANSLATION is a movie I can watch again and again. I just thought it was dandy. I just assumed everyone would love it. Long after it hit cable and DVD, I encountered a ton of teens who thought it was dull. That never entered my mind when I saw it.

So, I am not a pacing fetishist, either way. Ang Lee proved that he can edit like an overcaffeinated sombitch in HULK, which was almost as dull as BOREBACK. No, I was just amazed by BOREBACK's determination for me to not care about any of the characters. Are laconic loners dull? Not necessarily. Are closeted gay men, leading lives of quiet confusion, dull? No. But BOREBACK makes them so.

It's kind of like UNDERWORLD, which I admire. UNDERWORLD manages to take vampires, werewolves, occult mythology, high-tech weapons, kung-fu, gun-fu, wire-fu, and hot women in latex clothes AND STILL MAKES THEM BORING. They deserve a prize for that.

But there's always Robert Rodriguez, who makes very hyper-edited movies and always entertains.
 

>Ang Lee proved that he can edit like an overcaffeinated sombitch in HULK, which was almost as dull as BOREBACK.<

I couldn't agree more. However, I feel that the editing was the only rose in that pile of dung. The frames-within-frames that made the movie screen temporarily resemble a comic book before a major scene occurred was fascinating. It was visual construction I had never seen in a motion medium. Yet the story of the Hulk as so disappointing because they failed to obey one rule- In the comic book, it's action first, psychology second. The opposite is true in the movie, and thus the film is a dud. It is burdened further with poor acting from the entire cast, and some bizarre notion that it was okay to change the very character of the Hulk by having him get bigger as he gets angrier (so that he's a ridiculous 15 feet tall when battling the Hulk dogs). Oddly, I was more terrified of the Hulk in the new direct-to-video "Ultimate Avengers" movie that came out recently because the team involved stuck to the comic book Hulk. And the Hulk's only in the last 8 minutes of that production!