Brilliant directing flourishes

Cafe Society
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Oh, there are too many to mention - as I’m a true sucker for directorial and cinematography effects.

Here are a few that have not been mentioned before…some are a bit obscure perhaps! (and some may contain spoilers!)

Set it Off : The scene where they are driving the van through the shopping mall (?) and the camera cuts back and forth from within the van and outside the big store window through which they will eventually crash - all sound is muted in the outside shots making the crashing effect HUGE when they break through! Sticks with me after all these years.

American Beauty : The plastic bag scene. Pretentious? Yes. Beautiful? Indeed!

Donnie Darko : Just about everything!

Pleasantville : Virtually all scenes which are partially B&W and color; in particular I like the outdoor scenes when people are in the park around the lake; simply amazing!

Le Confessional : Contains some of the best transitions ever in movie history! The scene where the actions moves from the 1950s to now inside the church in one single (seemingly) shot is breathtaking!

Cop Land : Towards the end of the movie, when Stallone’s character has lost his hearing because of a gunshot, the sound is muted so the audience hears what he would hear - nice touch!

The Remains of the Day :There’s a shot through a swinging kitchen door with a round window in it which is absolutely marvelous. Can’t be described.

Mulholland Dr. : again… pretty much everything!

Out of Sight : I just love how the picture stops for a few fractions every now and again in certain key scenes.

The Sweet Hereafter : The whole movie - but in particular, the scenes where the story is blended in with the Pied Piper. Also, the accident scene itself, which we hardly see ourselves, mainly through the eyes of a watching parent.

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The Hulk. As a fan of comic books, I enjoyed the ‘panelled’ transitions immensely.

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The Big Combo - Former boss Brian Donlevy is about to get shot. He wears a hearing aid throughout the movie which is used for, amongst other things, torturing a cop. Just before he’s about to be shot his killer decides to make it easy on him, he turns the aid off. Cut to a shot of two guys blazing away with machine guns, in complete silence.
Night of the Hunter - The protective house mother sits on the porch with a gun in her lap, while the evil preacher stands outside the gate, she is in silouette, looking for all the world like Whistler’s Mother with a shotgun.

F Is For Fake - A mind bending flourish from begginning to end.

The Tracker - Rolf De Heer decides to stylise all violece in the film by using paintings instead of actual footage.

Hana-Bi - Another great use of paintings, as Takeshi chronicles the rehabilitation of the crippled cop.

American Splendor - After a long dialogue scene between Harvey and his nerdish friend, there’s a cut and we get to watch the real harvey and the real friend have their own conversation, while the actors watch on in the background.

Another vote for Titus. Particularly like the decision not to set it in a definable time.

Henvy V (Olivier) - The decision to begin the movie in the globe itself.
Hard Boiled - Back when it actually was cool to love all things Woo, when he used to excercise perfect control of his love for Slow-Mo. The long take in the hospital gun battle was brilliant.

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I think that was also an homage to Battleship Potempkin, what with the baby carriage and all. (However, I’m done with DePalma after wasting two hours watching Femme Fatale.)

In The Shining, there’s a scene where Nicholson looks down on a scale model of the hedge maze. You see what appears to be a view of the model, then after a moment realize it’s an aerial view of the actual maze, with his wife and son walking in it. Maybe it’s an overused technique, but I liked that scene.

At the very end of Unforgiven, as we see Clint Eastwood’s character back at his home, and a caption tells us how he moved on and wasn’t heard from again, his character simply fades away in a quick dissolve. I thought at the time that might be Eastwood’s way of saying it was his last Western.

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Or possibly even Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, rather than some previously unknown movie called Battleship Potempkin.

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I think Wes Anderson needs more of a mention here. Particularly there are a few things that make him a great director (and writer) in my mind:

  1. His use of dialogue to develop both plot and character. He does this in all of his movies but it is most evident in The Royal Tenenbaums. Almost every scene is a shot of two people standing beside one another having a conversation. By the climax of the story the viewer has a much deeper understanding of the emotions of the characters than if the story had developed using primarily action.

  2. His ability to convey so much emotional information by his mixture of popular music (and jazz) with short scenes without dialogue. Without any previous knowledge of Mr. Blume’s emotional state in Rushmore, Anderson shows Mr. Blume simply climb up a diving board and jump into his swimming pool while a the kinks song plays over the scene. That 30 second scene instantly tells the viewer everything about Mr. Blume’s emotional state.

And in The Royal Tenenbaums, when Margo steps off the green-line bus to come pick up her brother Ritche, the viewer has no hint of what either of the characters feel or what their relationship is like; then Anderson shows Margo step off the bus and walk toward Ritche while the song These Days plays over the scene. Instantly the viewer knows that the two are deeply in love with each other – all from a 30 second scene with no dialogue.

  1. In Anderson’s films there is always a very real and powerful emotional undercurrent, however, the strangeness of the characters and the comedy of their situations often allows the emotional development of the story to go unnoticed by the viewer. Then at the climax Anderson shocks the viewer into recognizing the deep emotional context that has been developing all along.

This occurs in Bottlerocket when:
Dignan strikes Anthony after they leave the motel.

in Rushmore when:
Ms. Cross confronts Max in the classroom on the day she resigns

in The Royal Tenenbaums when:

Ritchie slashes his wrists in Raleigh St. Clair’s bathroom.

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The three-way gunfight!

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The graphic match cut in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, from the examination of the severed ear (“it looks like it was cut… * with scissors*…”) to a big pair of scissors cutting through the yellow police tape around the discovery location.

In Notting Hill, the shorthand conveying of time’s passage in Hugh Grant’s stroll through the seasons on his street.

Much praise has been heaped (and justifiably so) on H.R. Giger for his disturbingly suggestive designs for the Alien movies. His “alien” species is a hyper-masculinized menace whose morphology fuses the humanoid and arthropod/reptilian, replete with psychologically loaded aspects: oversized phallic head (without visible eyes, no less!), long, menacing claws, plated barbed tail (both reptilian and demonic), a set of inner, uh, projectile jaws, with sharp, gnashing teeth, and a propensity to expel bodily fluids (drool, mucus, even acid blood).

But in the original Alien, all this was made more effective by the pervasive subtext of feminine and maternal imagery associated with the “mother” ship Nostromo (“Mother” being the female persona of the computer): the clinical, well-lit, calming hypersleep chamber (where the crew are slowly awaken (in effect, reborn, revived) by Mother; the deltoid-shaped doors (the shape of the female pudenda) in the living quarters of the ship; the dark, endlessly long yet confining, and often moist corridors where crew get picked off one by one (classic Freudian vagina dentata imagery; and doubtless other details. (Even Ripley, the sole survivor, is the only crew member shown to have a personal – i.e., maternal – relationship with the cat.) The overall effect is a symbolic landscape in which the female, maternal, domestic, human, and civilized is about to be thoroughly savaged (and penetrated, raped, consumed, and torn asunder) by the savage, mute, ruthless, and insatiable intruder. Significantly, the carnage begins with a symbolic rape (of a male crew member, no less) resulting in the “implantation” of the alien spawn in the thoracic body of its victim, who dies on a (delivery) table, when the baby alien thrusts his way out of the (newly invaginated, as it were) John Hurt…

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I’ll second Touch Of Evil. In addition to the opening sequence, there was quick scene in an elevator that I thought was neat.

The charachters arrive at a hotel (I think). Some of them get into the elevator along with the camera. Another charachter has to take the stairs. In an unbroken shot, we take the elevator ride and arrive at the next floor to find the person who took the stairs waiting for us.

Sure, it’s not the Copa scene in Goodfellas, but these little things make *Touch Of Evil * a fun experience. After all, the plot was pretty stupid.

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Trainspotting had a lot of great moments. Besides the baby-on-the-ceiling shot, and the “worst toilet in Scotland” scene, there’s Spud’s job interview. Not that it wouldn’t have been brilliant anyway, but the jump cuts between long shots, medium shots, and closeups, at random, much like his dialogue, are what really put it over the top.

And the scene where Renton ODs. He feels as if he’s sinking into the carpet, and the rest of the sequence is from his POV, deep inside a narrow, carpeted trench.

Later, while he’s detoxing, he has a lot of hallucinations. Most of them (the baby, Claire sitting on the end of his bed and singing, his parents on a game show) are pretty straightforward. But the one that really took my breath away was when he hides his head under the sheets, turns to his left…and there’s Begbie. Just like that. That had to have been timed to the millisecond.

And it should be borne in mind that this film was made with a skeletal budget. “Amazing,” I thought at the time (and still think). “So you don’t have to throw money at a production to have awesome effects. You just need to be [gasp] creative!”

[quote=Originally posted by ianzin Pulp Fiction: Tarantino’s decision not to explain what’s in Marcellus’s briefcase, or how Jules and Vince Vega ‘miraculously’ survive the hail of bullets when ambushed. That’s a brave and confident director.[/quote]

Similarly, Jim Jarmusch’s decision not to show how the three men got out of prison. Just, Benigni says, “I know a way out”; they contrive to let the guards let all three of them go to the exercise yard at once, and in the next scene, they’re running, with sirens going off in the background.

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The scene near the end of Immortal Beloved that starts when the playing of the ninth starts is a series of directorial flourishes that combine into a sort of meta-flourish and may be the best scene ever filmed. The matching of young Ludwigs running to the music is brilliant, the part where he falls into the lake, which turns into the sky is both beautiful and poignant. This culminates with an older Ludwig debuting the ninth on stage and we can’t hear the music just as he can’t. Then the sound of the audiences reaction slowly becomes audible. It is a scene that can bring tears to the eyes of a grizzled old man no matter how many times he sees it.

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Maybe not too realistic, but following a long literary tradition. In Lancelot of the Lake King Arthur stabs Mordred with a lance, and with the same blow “pierces breast and shadow” as a sunbeam passes through Mordred’s body. Sam Raimi is clearly a student of the classics.

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If we are going to discuss FARGO, then I have to mention the opening scene. Pure white screen, then we faintly notice some sort of thing flying around in the foreground. Very faint, but then the music kicks up and the headlights of a car comes into the scene. An incredibly subtle but smooth as hell opening scene.

But my favorite director’s flourish, one that will forever be hampered by the fact that nobody will ever see it in the theater, is Martin Scorsese’s final moment in THE LAST TEMPATION OF CHRIST.

Spoilers, I guess:
Jesus finally decides that he belonged on the cross for the salvation of the world. We cut to him on the cross, where he proclaims the famous “It is accomplished.” A chorus of ululating singers come up and the film GOES OFF THE REEL. My God (no pun intended. Okay, it was intended), but that was a wonderful trick. Too bad I saw it on DVD. (Of course, I was ten when the original movie came out and my parents sure as hell weren’t going to take me to see it.)

Still, that must have been something.

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Milos Forman, directing Amadeus: There are several occasions throughout the film when Salieri has an opportunity to sneak a peek at Mozart’s scores. I love the way Forman had Mozart’s music play over the ambient sounds of the scene, and we were treated to F. Murray Abraham’s physical reaction to the anguish that accompanied Salieri hearing in his mind what he saw on those pages. The scene where Costanze brings samples of Mozart’s work as an application for the tutoring position was particularly powerful.

John Madden, directing Shakespeare in Love: The balcony scene. Cutting back and forth between Will and Viola in the bedroom and Viola and Sam reading the scene on stage was wonderful, but Madden made it even more powerful (to me, at least) by panning across the rest of the play’s cast (including Fennyman, aka “the money”) who, while watching the scene unfold, clearly realized that they were witnessing something transcendent.

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Deep Cover. Casting the nerdy guy as Fishburne’d FBI handler was brilliant. Another small transition flourish: a man walks from the right to the left side of the screen, and as he walks the scene dissolves with each footstep to the next scene.

The Negotiator. Samuel L. Jackson gets a silent head-nod and brotherly handshake to wish him good luck from the only other black male in the room-- who just happens to be his hostage – before he faces the police. As I commented to someone I was watching the movie with, that small moment wouldn’t have happened in a film with a white director.

Malcolm X. Denzel’s final walk to the Audobon Ballroom with Sam Cooke’s “A Change Gone Come” soaring in the background, camera tight on Malcolm X’s face, underscoring his belief he was walking to his death – the one time Spike Lee’s famous dolly shot didn’t seem gratuituous.

Goodfellas. Lotsa good scenes. The one I liked was the uninterrupted camera shot of Henry Hill exiting car walking across the street to beat down the preppy guy in front of his friends, hold the friends back at gunpoint, then backed across the street to Karen’s and implore her to hide his gun. Also, the walk through the basement, kitchen, back halls of the club only to end up front stage of a Henny Youngman comedy bit – all to show Henry’s clout to avoid standing in line – was fun, too.

The Green Mile. All the trick photography to underscore and emphasize Michael Clarke Duncan’s size, weight and girth.

The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Lotsa good visuals here. I guess my favorite was the final scene, where it’s revealed The entire preceding movie had been just a tale told by the elder Baron that was so spellbinding the entire theater – the actors of the play performed about his life, the audience – is sucked into his story.

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Darn it, RadioWave, you stole my comment! I came to this thread specifically to mention that! :smiley: :smiley:

Hmmm, okay, I’ll pick a different Contact moment: the whole beginning, which I consider one of the best film openings ever. A CGI shot of the Earth slowly pulls outwards, journeying through the solar system. We then continue beyond through the Milky Way, which as we pull out becomes just one of hundreds of other galaxies, and on and on. During all this, the soundtrack goes on a sort of “aural time travel” journey mimicking the radio transmissions that are still broadcasting further and further from the Earth. We go from the Spice Girls to disco to “One small step for man…” to “I have a dream” to the 1936 Olympics to Morse Code/wireless. Finally, when we reach beyond the history of human transmissions, we are enveloped in the utter silence of space.

This kickass sequence never fails to fill me with awe. It also kinda spooks me out at the same time. :slight_smile:

While I’m at it, later in the film Zemeckis does some great mixing when … oh, I’d better spoiler this …

While travelling in the machine through a bunch of wormholes, Ellie experiences some strange effects of faster-than-light speed; for a second throughout this sequence, Jodie Foster’s face and voice are very subtlely merged with Jena Malone’s (the talented young actress playing 10-year-old Ellie). We also hear/see blurry snippets of dialogue that Ellie won’t say until a few moments later – a detail you’d probably only recognize after seeing the film more than once. And finally, something else that’s more likely to be noticed by repeat viewers is when Ellie arrives on the “beach” of the Vegan version of Pensacola. There’s a grouping of three palm trees in the distance, which exactly mimics the crayon drawing of palm trees that young Ellie made for her dad in the second scene of the film.

Switching films, there are also several good directorial moments in Curtis Hansen’s L.A. Confidential, but I’ll have to go with this one (MAJOR spoilers!!!):

[spoiler]When Jack (Kevin Spacey) is suddenly shot in the heart while sitting in his chair. He whispers his last two words and, in the long moment following, the camera stays tightly on his face as the life slowly fades from his eyes.

Admittedly a big part of the genius of this shot is an acting feat, since without apparently moving a muscle Spacey manages to take Jack’s eyes from “alive” to “dead.” Still, it’s the director’s choice to stay with the lengthy, unmoving shot of Jack’s dying/dead expression as we hear a voiceover of the touching eulogy that (unbeknownst to the colleagues listening) is being delivered by his killer. [/spoiler]