Topic: I just watched A Good Day To Die Hard...
and if you are like me and avoid pre-screening exposure to movies, let me just strongly dissuade anyone from going to see this at the cinema, and making the mistake I made.
It is a lazy, soulless thing with a very poor script, of which 40% is nothing but quick quips back and forth that ultimately have no meaning whatsoever. The cinematography is pretty nice, but the camers operation is constantly jittering to the point where I would gladly have paid for a f*cking tripod with my own money if it had given me one steady shot. Editing pace is not Bourne 2/3 bad, but almost. Lenses used are also like Bourne almost only long tight shots (again, unstabilized) so the action scenes are completely unintelligible, which is exacerbated by the movie cutting between shots in ways where they do not even try to establish geography or situational awareness. They cut from inside car A to outside car B to again inside car A, which makes you think the 2nd shot was outside car A rather than car B. I guarantee if you even try to make sense of it your brain will just automatically zone out for a few seconds. For those of you who remember the car chase in the beginning of Quantum Of Solace, if you like me just cannot stand that, it's more of the same here.
Another weird thing was framing for many scenes was way off, and not entire reels, just some shots. The film was shot Super35, and matted to 2:35 in post. In 2-person shots where 2 people are standing facing the camera, the lower end of the screen cuts them off just by their hips, and the eyes of the 2 people are JUST under the top of the frame. For many closeups, it looks like the camera is trying to impress upon you that the mouth or nose of the person is the important part, because the eyes keep drifting up and almost out of the frame. The cinema I saw it in also does digital and 3D-projections, so it had to have been a digital screening, thus the projectionist could not have matted it too low. Also some scenes had an important item just at the bottom edge of the frame, which obviously would have been much higher if the projector was showing information too low in the frame.
At this point I almost put AGDTDH next to Taken 2 as some of the worst moviemaking I've seen recently. I wish I had seen the Rotten Tomatoes score beforehand.
If you've sen the film, please share your opinion, I'd love to hear some contrasting views.
EDIT: IMDB stated movie is indeed shot with intended 1.85 aspect ratio. What my cinema was doing I do not know...
Last edited by TechNoir (2013-02-16 22:09:51)
