If Shia was in Elysium, you would have got the apology during filming.

Watching Blade Runner again, I was thinking just how much floating stuff Ridley Scott has backlit in his oeuvre.

For the last act of Alien, a lot of Blade Runner, Legend, Black Rain, Black Hawk Down and Gladiator... he's filled the frame with backlit smoke, dust, steam, sand, fog, dandelion seeds, bubbles (yes, Legend contains screen-filled bubbles), rose-petals, snow, rain, and I'm sure I'm missing a few things.

Before Michael Bay, he's the original frame fucker.

http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/arts … 5022095549

That's a fair enough point. But then it's more akin to reportage rather than constructing a documentary compared with the other nominees.

Laura Poitras will probably get the Oscar (because it's such an important subject), but then again, I won't be the first person to disagree with an Academy decision. The list of Oscar losers is arguably more illustrious than the winners 

In Barry Lyndon, Alcott had months of pre-production testing, using those special f0.7 NASA lenses mounted on customized rear-projection cameras. The compositions are reminiscent of 18th C Gainsborough and Constable paintings. Everything is meticulously planned and choreographed.
Laura Poitras, on the other hand, just whipped out some video camera in a Hong Kong hotel room and pointed it at Snowden. I don't even know how one can compare the two!
The praise for CitizenFour is not the (lack of) cinematic style, it's the Snowden story. And that is something Poitras didn't bring to the documentary, it was already there.
It's analogous to a make-up artist claiming credit for making Barbara Pavlin look good.

Anyone can, because she's already beautiful. The real test of a make-up artist is to make someone mediocre look good. Likewise, the real test of a documentarian is to make an ordinary story interesting, not simply to be there at the right time at an already sensational story.
All I'm saying is the positive aspects of CitizenFour (Snowden's important allegations and his own bravery) are being conflated with, and credited to, Laura Poitras, who just had to point-and-shoot, something anyone could have done in that same situation.

Christ - I don't envy the writer who has to fit that baby into the existing canon, which is a dog's breakfast after everyone from Fox execs to Lindelof have had their way with it. Just reshoot this with aliens...

But not on a plane, ummm.... US Congress would be more satisfying. Or Newscorp. Or Wall Street.

I take your point about documentaries not being merely educational, and that they are 'cinema'. But that just underscores my point. The vérité style is not cinematic... just to leave one cheap camera locked off, pointing in one direction. Any one of us placed in that hotel room could have done a similar job. You don't have to think about camera angles, lighting, framing, grading, lenses, depth of field, and all the dozens of others aspects a cinematic director has to consider. John Maloof had to work hard to make a potential boring subject interesting (myriad time lapses, flying to Europe, archival research).
Poitras had an 'easy sell' because the Snowden story sells itself.

Imagine, you took your video camera in your Delorean to:
1. The trial of Socrates in Classical Athens
2. Assassination of Julius Caesar
3. Crucifixion of Christ
4. Shakespeare writing Hamlet.
5. Signing of the Declaration of Independence
6. Captain Cook's first contact with Polynesians / Australian Aborigines

These events are so momentous that you need to make very little effort to produce a sensational documentary. Your footage can be slightly blurry, unimaginatively composed, underlit, etc - but the events remain fascinating in their own right. Any bozo could do it, as that shit gonna sell itself.

Imagine, by contrast, you are working for the BBC Natural History Unit, and your boss tells you 'make a documentary about grass'. You're going to have to employ every iota of your documentarian skills to sell that mofo. You'll need to depict the molecular reactions that drive photosynthesis with cutting edge 3D modelling, have Stephen Fry narrate, get Zimmer to compose, travel globally to compare grass species, construct fancy time-lapse bullet-time sequences of grass growing, etc.

And in the end, it's never going to be as compelling as the shitty one-angle footage of Thomas Jefferson, but the skills to make grass growing even mildly interesting are going to be more worthy of a greater documentarian.

CITIZENFOUR

Important subject matter, but bland documentary. Any other subject matter, and this would have been boring. Why should Laura Poitras get the credit (Oscar, etc), because this subject sells itself. How do you tell the difference between Cinéma Vérité and laziness / incompetence?

If you compare it to Finding Vivian Maier (also in the running for Best Doco), you have the opposite situation: trivial subject matter (a weird nanny took good photos) but a brilliant documentary. My vote, if I had one, would go to John Maloof.

Anyway, if you're interested in the fact that the NSA if spying on you without your permission or official acknowledgement, I recommend the PBS Frontline doco: the United States of Secrets...
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline … f-secrets/

There's also a recent (last week) discussion of CitizenFour here (with Edward Snowden on Skype) here... hosted by David Carr (who died just hours later)....

http://timestalks.com/laura-poitras-gle … owden.html

THIRTEENTH FLOOR (1999)

Forgettable VR knock-off we've seen done better many times elsewhere (Tron, Matrix, Inception, etc). The visual style was channelling discount Blade Runner. It was like a pre-viz draft for a better movie still to be made with better actors. The love story was god-awful with zero-chemistry between zero-charisma leads. But always nice to see German actor Armin Mueller-Stahl, who did a bit of Hollywood in the late 90s. What happened to him?

The highlight was an appearance of Frank Lloyd Wright's Ennis House (channelling a Maya temple), which I hope to buy one day, and then you're all invited for a FIYH party.

Every Middle Earth adaptation (even the shitty ones) makes around a billion, so it'll be a test of the Tolkien Estate's principles when Warner Bros offer them a shipping container of cash just to think about it...

Kingsman: Secret Service

Cross between Men in Black, Wanted, Austin Powers, sending up the Bond franchise with self-referencing jokes such as "This ain't that kind of movie".

We've been here many times before. Poor deadshit from broken home gets selected into elite spy unit.

Tonally, all over the shop. It's a soft R rating, with comical exploding heads, a clunker of an anal sex joke, and some refreshing class argy-bargy.

I didn't laugh out loud, but it had some jaw-dropping action scenes for those of us used to the usual PG13 fare.

Rating: moderately recommended.