From: SWILBERT® <nenslo@subgenius.com>
Newsgroups: alt.slack
Date: Fri, May 12, 2000 6:53 PM
Well, not really. But I went to the first showing of Battlefield Earth
at the biggest noisiest theatre in Oregon just to get it over with and I
will say that at least it wasn't as BORING as that Star Wars movie, but
just as stupid - which in itself is not necessarily bad. It's a story
written by an old white man, so females are incidental, at best, and a
hero named Johnnie saves the earth from ugly badguys. Befitting its
mentally-ill creator it is, like everything else he ever wrote, a
combination of pedestrian banality and over-the-top conception.
Potentially an enjoyably stupid big bad movie. I have seen hundreds,
even thousands, of movies, some by the very worst directors in history,
but never have I seen a movie so brutally crippled by its direction and
cinematography. 75% of it was closeups and 95% of it had the camera
canted over at some wacky angle with the feature of interest jammed over
on one side of the screen. Just to be stylish or something. Sets were
great, effects were great, props and costumes and makeup and gimmickery
were all great, what I could see of it after the obscuration of the
LOUSY film technique. I know I am just a relic of the 20th century when
movies were made just to tell a story, but what the hell is wrong with
simply pointing the camera at what you want the audience to see, and
then leaving it on screen long enough for them to tell what it is? I
could put up with ten times as much stupidity as this film had if I
could only be allowed to have my brain decode the goddamn scene
occasionally. Those old-fashioned "establishing shots" and "long shots"
and "medium shots" had an actual purpose - they helped you figure out
where you were and what was happening. Oh there were a dozen or so long
shots, but the object of interest was tucked away in a corner so by the
time I figured out where I was supposed to be looking (and sometimes I
didn't) the shot was over and it was another diagonal blue-lit
close-up. I would like to strap the director and cinematographer of
Battlefield Earth into the Clockwork Orange chair and show them the
entire works of Fritz Lang and Yasujiro Ozu (who only used two pan shots
in his entire career and thought he was being a bit wild at that), and
when they finally got the idea I would show them the complete works of
Tarkovski and Pasolini JUST TO BE MEAN. Well, just Pasolini's earlier
stuff, L'avventura, L'eclisse, and Red Desert.