I totally agree with I Am Legend, and it was the first thing we all mentioned coming out of the film. What the hell was the point of that? There’s countless examples of simple makeup effects that work much better. The female “zombie” on the table was just painfully poor.
Whereas the effects for the crew of the Flying Dutchman in the second and third Pirates of the Caribbean movies were absolutely necessary, and spectacularly done.
I think the computer imagery for Gollum was necessary for the LOTR films, but I can’t put my finger on why. I thought it was seamless and extremely well done, but I never really thought about whether it could have been done with “just” Andy Serkis and makeup. Would like to hear others’ thoughts on this.
The one in LOTR that got me wasn’t Gollum, it was Saruman walking down a flight of stairs. In the first film, there was a quick shot of Saruman talking to Gandalf in front of some stairs, and it simply did not look real. I don’t know if it was the angularness of the staircase, or the way the shot was framed or what, but I didn’t believe for a second that there was a real staircase.
What baffled me was that it couldn’t possibly cost that much to make one stupid staircase, you could even do it on a set, but the effect ruined the scene for me.
There’s a moment in the junky thriller What Lies Beneath where Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer are wrestling on the floor, and director Robert Zemeckis sends the camera zooming along at floor level toward them and suddenly drops below the floor to look up at them from underneath, as if they’re on glass. It’s a very strange moment: the camera move looks odd, and it’s not until the climactic move that you realize the oddness is because the carpeting (and maybe the whole room) had to be composited in later.
And the thing is: it adds nothing at all to the scene. Just the opposite, actually; it’s distracting and weird and takes you out of the movie for a few seconds.
It’s just Zemeckis, masturbating with his new toys, and offering a clue about the future direction of his career.
Not visual, but musical: I was just watching the original D.O.A. – a very good film. But in the early segments, Edmund O’Brien keeps ogling a bunch of beautiful women and every time he does, the music track goes with a big wooo wooo wolf whistle to countersink the point home. Once might have been cute (though not necessary), but multiple times is just plain bad.
Dimitry Tiomkin did the score, too. I assume he was told to do it, since he’s too skilled to resort to that.
I just watched Ocean’s Eleven (the George Clooney/Steven Soderbergh version) the other day with the director’s commentary. He mentioned two effects shots like that. When Rusty and Saul are talking at the dog track, he wanted one dog to come in a distant last, but they couldn’t get a real dog to slow down enough. And when Yen slides into the cart and then flips the bird, in the original shot his hand was turned a bit to the side and you couldn’t see it well enough.
One last bit about I am Legend (which really liked overall) – first glimpse we have of the infected, when they’re briefly illuminated by Neville’s flashlight in the bank building, is scary as hell and as far as I know didn’t require any CGI. So often, less is more.
I really don’t think CGI has been great for horror films. The 1981 movie An American Werewolf in London used innovative practical effects for its transformation scene. Some folks say they look cheesy now, but they sure worked at the time. When a sequel was done in 1997 (An American Werewolf in Paris), they used CGI for the transformation scenes, and it just makes no emotional impact at all. (Like with the aforementioned Blade 2: a fight scene begins with real action, then at some point it shifts and suddenly you realize you’re watching a cartoon; just takes you right out of the scene.)
Imagine John Carpenter’s movie The Thing done today; they’d use a ton of CGI, but could that have the same impact in the scene where a man’s chest opens up into a pair of jaws, with ribs for teeth, and bites off both arms of the doctor who’s trying to use a defibrillator on him? That was a practical effect, using an amputee wearing a latex version of the actor’s head and a pair of false arms. People in the theatre jumped out of their seats.
But both those instances seem like quite justifiable FX – those shots both fixed a problem, and someone watching the movie (probably) wouldn’t even be aware that it was CGI. OTOH, the second instance seems like something they could have just shot again – how hard is it to do a take with a guy jumping into a box, then flipping the bird? On the gripping hand, Brad was delivering lines during the take, so maybe its a more error prone shot getting the two actors to do the take correctly. Most likely, the “bad bird” wasn’t noticed until post.
?
Zemeckis has always been one to push the F/X envelope… well, at least since Roger Rabbit, that is. Not only RR but Death Becomes Her and Forrest Gump relied heavily on CGI effects. Probably Contact as well, come to think about it.
That’s almost exactly what I was thinking. Except the first time I saw it, without the commentary, something wasn’t quite right. Yen slides into the cart, ass-first and bent at the waist, and then when the arm comes out it reaches up way to high for where his shoulder must be.
For that matter, we never see him climb out of the box. I don’t care how limber you are, it’s got to be tough to pull yourself up from that position.
Interesting post about Spider-Man, ianzin. One thing in that movie never looked quite right to me. When Spider-Man is swinging from a web (he can do that, the song says so), he’s essentially a pendulum. There are rules for pendulums; the period of the swing is a function of the length. And shooting a web up to the cornice of a building is one long pendulum. Even accepting that he starts with some initial momentum, the swings were too fast; made it seem like there was no real weight or mass to his body. I know you said that totally natural effects don’t work, but I can’t help wondering what it would look like with the weight and gravity done strictly by the book.
In the latest edition of Cinefex is this quote:
Well, they did it by the book… by the comic book that is. 
Then I disagree with the director’s decision. I don’t think the zombie vampires needed superhuman quickness or wall-crawling ability to be scary. In fact, that aspect of the movie bugged me. The idea of a virus that turns its victims into wall-crawlers just seems silly.