Another great example. Spielberg usually got it right, my example from Last Crusade notwithstanding.
I believe the over-done shaky-cam is a poorly realized attempt to introduce some imperfection and action to a scene to suggest a real event happening in real time, one that the cameraman is having difficulty capturing due to the excitement of it all.
The rebooted Battlestar Galactica did this lots with the FX scenes, but got carried away with it and had shaky-cam footage employed in more sedate scenes that would have been easy to photograph. It’s a fine line for sure.
Philip Kaufman’s 1983 film The Right Stuff has some great shots, including miniature airplanes filmed through a canopy of a real airplane on the miniature stage, complete with a deliberately captured reflection of the pilot’s helmet in the chase plane. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the film, but check it out in the Chuck Yeager sound barrier segment when he’s dropped from the B-29.
It’s so true that the fight scenes are overly edited in many modern films and leave me confused as to the geometry of the scene and what is really happening. As I said before, I quickly get bored with all the action and wander away. You captured it perfectly with your comment “Is Batman in this scene?”.
Even though there are a lot of cuts in that scene, they aren’t the rapid, visually disruptive cuts that you see in recent dance movies. The cuts move smoothly from one (incredibly perfect sexy) body to the next, with each dancer getting to complete his/her combination.
The opening scene of that movie with everyone auditioning is one of the greatest movie scenes of all time.
And good shaky-cam scenes are expertly realized attempts to “introduce some imperfection and action to a scene to suggest a real event happening in real time.”
Quite often, it isn’t as much about giving the impression of the camera operator “having difficulty capturing [the scene] due to the excitement of it all,” but about trying to show the scene as the character experiences it. Jason Bourne is confused, dizzy, swinging wildly, fighting for his life? Fine - then the camera should act all confused and dizzy, swinging wildly as if fighting for its life.
OK. I don’t really follow newer dance movies, but I think I once saw Ballroom Dancing with my mom and vaguely remember hating it.
Shaky-cam. Why bother filming something in focus when you can have shaky brief duration camera shots and rapid jump cuts to make it impossible to know what’s going on? If I know a film was done with that technique I won’t even bother watching it.
It’s not exactly a camera thing, but I tend to be annoyed by characters that have the superpower of editing. Often vampires have this, Angel could run fast, leap tall buildings and edit himself out of scenes. Another character would be talking to him, turn away to look at something in closeup, then when they turn back 2 seconds later he is gone. No door slam or curtain flapping in the wind, just silently apparated out of there. It is especially irritating when the character doing it isn’t even supposed to have superpowers.
The first time I remember noticing this was in 1990’s Pacific Heights, which is a great movie, but has several of those “spin around the actors” shots. I reckon the director was going for a “everything’s spinning out of the character’s control” sort of feeling, but the number of those shots was just distracting.
