The Bourne What’s-Happening-acy redux
I know I’ve already blogged about how confusing I found The Bourne Supremacy, but here’s an email (slightly edited) I sent to Sam Allis at the Boston Globe today in response to his “Critic’s Notebook” that luxuriated in that movie racking up bigger grosses than either Collateral or The Manchurian Candidate, two movies he considers to be smug, predictable, and coasting on their star power:
Sam,
I enjoyed your piece today and am glad to see Damon get the credit he deserves. But one thing you said irked me enough to write to you, primarily because I just can’t figure out what the director and editor were thinking…or why apparently it worked for some viewers.
The very scenes you single out as examples of master craftsmanship I found indecipherable. For example, the long fight you admire has two guys dressed in black, filmed in such short and blurry bursts, frequently with their faces cropped outside the frame, that I couldn’t tell who was gouging whom. Likewise, the car chase was a sequence of blurs. Now, I understand that this was meant to convey the impression of speed and action, but…
Lest my befuddlement be attributed to old fogey-hood (I’m 53), my 13-yr-old son came out of the movie with a headache, declaring it to be the worst movie he’s ever seen because of the incoherence of the action sequences.
Compare the car chase scenes in Supremacy to the Bourne Identity. The latter was clear, exciting and ingenious. The former was none of those. It failed (IMO) at the basic level of telling the story. Or, compare Supremacy overall to Kill Bill I. In fact, compare it to all of Tarrantino’s work. Tarrantino knows how to tell a story, no matter how ridiculous. Uma is mowing down dozens of attackers, all identically dressed, but there isn’t a single “What’s happening?” moment.
And while I’m disagreeing with you (remembering that the overall context is that I enjoyed your article…really), I’d make a plea for Michael Mann’s considerable narrative skills. Even though the acting and the story were, in my opinion, inferior to Supremacy, I’d see Collateral again to watch his directorial technique. If I were to watch Supremacy again, it’d be just to try to figure out which blurry streak is supposed to be Damon’s car.
(I’ll probably blog this because, well, it’s what we bloggers do.)
Best,
David Weinberger
Categories: Uncategorized dw
Funny, the fight and chase scenes were the only redeemable aspects of the film, I thought. I found the fight choreography to be very realistic, when compared to standard filmic fare. Perhaps that’s the same reason you don’t like them. Kill Bill’s ultraviolence is beautiful, but very stylized. Certainly, the violence in Supremacy is also stylized, but much truer to what you would expect in a real situation.
The audience in my showing broke out laughing when Bourne rolled up a magazine to use as a weapon. This looks silly on film, but can be an effective improvised weapon. (Far sillier IMHO are fights in which people pound on each other with fists for three minutes without damage to their hands.) Maybe good fights just don’t make good film.
I don’t have a problem with the elements of the fight. My problem is that I couldn’t tell who was hitting whom. I suspect that if I were actually in a fight, that’s the one thing I’d know for sure.
I was warned not to sit too close to the screen (where “too close” seems to be the front half of the theater) and that seems to have helped keep the headaches away (the coworker that gave me the advice called it the “Bourne Witch Project”) but the fight scene was still incoherent, which was a shame. Said coworker also made the point that it was nice to see movie fight scenes where they actually looked like they were trying to hurt each other. I enjoyed the mercedes commercial^W^Wchase scene, though.
Greengrass seems to be consciously emulating Liman’s jumpy camerawork in the Bourne Identity, but evidently missed the fact (well, this is what I remember, so it’s misleading to label it as a fact, no matter how rhetorically satisfying) that the camera is only jumpy in the talking heads scenes, and rock-steady in the fight and chase scenes.
Well worth watching is Greengrass’ previous film, “Bloody Sunday”, which used the Blair Witch approach of handheld cameras and a blurred mockumentary style. I’ve never had a problem watching that kind of filmmaking, and his version of the Irish massacre is completely rivetting, plus you get a great live version of U2’s song over the credits.