5 Annoying Trends That Make Every Movie Look the Same
Hollywood: the dream factory, the place where joy is made and everybody craps rainbows and cocaine. But underneath the glitz is a bunch of working stiffs who are either just trying to get the job done, or hacks who get their original ideas by ripping off other hacks.
That's why these days...
#5.
Movies are Color-Coded by Genre
Have You Ever Noticed:
There's some unwritten rule that horror movies should be blue:
The Ring
Saw
The Nightmare on Elm Street reboot.
Meanwhile, apocalyptic movies are gray and washed out:
Then there are more subtle ones, for instance movies set in the desert tend to be yellow. And we don't mean when they're out in the sun and sand, either. Even when indoors it'll often look like it was filmed through a jar of urine:
Smokin' Aces (Las Vegas)
The Hills Have Eyes (rural Nevada)
Movies where reality is off-kilter will be green:
Fight Club
The Matrix films, aka The Greenest Movies Ever Made
Honestly, half the time you can guess the genre of the film based on one still from the trailer.
What's Going On?
It's called digital color correction. Back in the day, if you wanted your movie to have an artistic, stylish color palette, you had to go through the pain in the ass process of using filters on your lights and camera, or get the footage exposed just the right way. It was expensive, it was difficult and it was limited to people who really knew what they were doing. So if someone took the trouble, it meant they had a good reason, dammit.
Now? If you're a Hollywood director, with a few clicks of the mouse you can immediately look stylish and artsy by making the audience feel like they're watching your movie through a pair of novelty sunglasses. Hell, if you've got a Mac and a thousand bucks, you can get a color-correction program and give your home movie of a toddler farting on a cat an otherworldly green tint.
The Coen brothers didn't invent it, but Oh Brother, Where Art Thou was the first movie to heavily use digital color correction, to the point that every frame was digitally colored to give it that old-timey sepia tone.
But where the Coen Brothers were creating a unique and distinct look, other directors have realized these colors are a no-cost way to create atmosphere without, you know, having to write a good script or hire competent actors. These colors are a visual shorthand for various emotions and ideas (yellows seem hotter, blue makes a scene seem lit by spooky moonlight, washed-out grays are depressing). In other words: It's just laziness.
And while we're on color...
#4.
Everything Else is Teal and Orange
Have You Ever Noticed:
Just like an early 90s parachute pants designer, movies lately have decided the only two colors they need are teal and orange. As some very sharp-eyed bloggers have pointed out, it's usually unnaturally orange-tinted skin tones against blue skies:
Or against dimly-lit rooms with the bluish tint:
As others have noted, you don't even need to look beyond the posters:
What's Going On?
Not everybody wants to get fancy with that their digital coloring. But everybody wants to get lazy.
This is a color wheel:
You've almost certainly seen one before. Open up your image editing program, it'll have a version of it. It has all of the colors based on how close they are to each other in hue. Now the goal, if you're trying to shoot a nice-looking scene, is to get a good contrast with the colors. Since most movies are about humans, you simply find the closest thing to a human's skin tone on the wheel (somewhere on the upper right) and then make everything else the opposite, most contrasting color (that is, the color on the opposite side of the wheel, or lower left). Teal and orange.
From the beginning of color film, movies have been trying to set up shots to take advantage of this color combination whenever possible. But here in the era of easy digital color correction, they've taken this so far that you get that ridiculous two-color system, where every room is bathed in blue and every human looks like he has a bad spray-on douche-tan.
To be fair, it's not necessarily laziness per se. Your average colorist has to grade about two hours of movie, frame by frame sometimes, in the space of a couple of weeks. It doesn't take that many glances at the deadline bearing down on the calendar before you throw up your hands and say, "Fuck it. Everybody likes teal and orange!"
#3.
Ramping (aka, Everything Slows Down Then Speeds Up)
Have You Ever Noticed:
Modern action movies can't just show you the hero landing the final blow. Oh, no. They just have to sloooow it down and make really, really sure you understand that, yes, that is a punch to the face.
In Troy, we have to slow down Brad Pitt's flying dagger attack while he's in mid-air, as if he can stop time like the freaking Prince of Persia:
In Watchmen, we have to bring the action to a virtual dead stop when a fist meets flesh (or anything else significant happens in the fight), to freeze the moment in time to make absolutely extra sure that the audience saw it.
Or there's the 300 method, where the action slows waaaaay down right as the hero is about to do something badass...
...and then SPEED IT UP REALLY FAST WHEN HE STRIKES THE BLOW!
WHAP!
The new Sherlock Holmes movie actually turns this into a plot device, slowing down fight scenes to simulate how lightning-fast Holmes thinks on his feet.
What's Going On?
The film suddenly slowing down is done by a process called "ramping." Instead of film being shot at the normal 24 frames-per-second, it'll be shot at 48, or 72, or 96. The more frames per second, the slower the action.
Now, we've had slow motion since the beginning of film (if you wanted a slower shot back then, you just cranked the handle on the camera faster) but today's digital cameras just make what was already a simple process even easier. So where before you would have an entire shot in slow-motion, aka the bad guy slowly falling to the ground...
...now they can't get through one shot without building slow and fast motion into the same action. The hero draws back the sword at 96 frames-per-second, and drives it into the bad guy's eye at 24. They'll do it 10 times in the course of one action scene, as if it's suddenly boring to watch a couple of guys doing kung fu at normal kung fu speed.
We can lay the blame on two movies: The Matrix obviously played a part with bullet time (which proved you could move the camera around AND have slo-mo at the same time), and 300, which at normal speed is roughly 15 minutes long. Once again, a technique progresses from "innovative" to "standard procedure" to "OK, please stop doing that."
The teal/orange thing is an artistic technique. It's a part of the color theory, where you use contrasting colors. You see it in a lot of movies, but blue and orange are particularly attractive. It's about appearances.
ReplyI barely notice the 3-D half the time.
ReplyHow about since Blade every action hero lands their jumps in the exact same pose? Head down, one knee on the ground, etc...
ReplyCGI Animated films have no excuse to have poor 3D, since all it takes is rendering the scene with the "camera" at a slightly different angle, pretty much a few clicks and a press of a button at no extra cost with no conversion process. Of course Pixar's movies look fantastic in 3D.
ReplyI think apocalyptic movies should have a lifeless color to it. It would be weird if it was all brightly colored when the world is supposed to be full of waste and destruction.
ReplyI agree that most of these movie trends are annoying, but trends change. Both ramping and bullet-time were well used in 300 and The Matrix. It got annoying when every subsequent action film used them, but now when was the last time you heard anyone rave about bullet time?
ReplyThanks to Jonathon Demme, every drama for years after Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia had close-ups of actors staring directly into the camera for every revelation.
Trends change...
Before this article I thought I was the only one that find Zach Snyder and J. J. Abrams incredibly annoying directors because of all the slow motion and lens flare.
ReplyWith #1, I think that movies SPECIFICALLY made for 3D look, well good in 3D. Everything else looks like cardboard cut-outs.
ReplyThen there's the movies ( or tv shows ) with the clumsy fall followed by, " I'm o.k. " Although it's not a "technique" it gives a certain "sameness" to many .
ReplyI don't think he's denying that most of these things are valid techniques that have working examples, it seems more like he's saying that filmmakers need to ask themselves if they have a valid reason for using them beyond style or convenience. Directors tell a visual story; if they can't do that without the same friggin' software as everyone else has got, then what use are they that they can't be replaced by a film-bot?
ReplyBest fight scenes are from Bruce Lee films. No ramping, no quick cuts, very little slow-mo, just realistic fighting.
ReplyI had to laugh at the caption about Quantum of Solace... that is the first time I ever got motion sick from watching a movie. It was SO bad, the next few movies I saw at the theater also made me sick... it literally took months for the effects to wear off...
ReplyI'm torn about all these issues in film. There are perfectly valid reasons for using any one of them, but there's no discretion being exercised in their usage, making everything look the same.
ReplyAnd then there are modern directors like Paul Thomas Anderson, Wes Anderson, David Fincher, Nicolas Winding Refn, Terrence Malick, Woody Allen, Ridley Scott (for the most part), Danny Boyle, Paul Verhoeven, Quentin Tarantino, David Lynch, Sam Mendes, the Coen Brothers, etc, but sadly your normal person would be more familiar with Michael Bay.
ReplyLens filtering in Saving Private Ryan makes too many people believe that World War 2 American GI uniform was Khaki-Brown, not the actual Olive-Dark Green. They even reinforce that in Medal of Honor game, also produced by the same director. It seems people refer historical facts to Hollywood movies rather than more credible sources. And probably, there are more people who watch SPR than those who visits WW2 museums.
ReplyNevertheless, it was a good movie, and I like it.
Yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes. This is why life is too short to spend it watching anything by J.J. Abrams or Zack Snyder.
Reply#2 and #3 are why Haywire should have been more popular. It's an action movie in which you can actually see every punch and kick, and follow each one from thought to impact... all without slowing down the camera. I like that Steven Soderbergh basically exists to give the proverbial finger to overused movie trends like these.
Haywire! Loved Haywire.
But when I saw it, there were three or four twenty-something doofuses sitting behind who actually walked out because they thought it "sucked." I mean, this Carano girl is the real deal, kicking ass and not bothering to take names, but they were simply too conditioned to the Michael Bay style of WHOOSH! BOOM! and so on to even appreciate it.
I've learned to hate 3D. Gives me the most horrific headaches. I really hope 3D remains an 'optional extra' thing - both for me, the percentage of people who get motion sickness watching 3D, and my film buff father who, quote, 'will not wear glasses over my glasses, why aren't there fit-overs for this'. It's a great idea, don't get me wrong, but some of us just can't physically handle it (or at least not with a large handful of Advil beforehand).
Reply Hide All See All 4 RepliesI hope it always remains an option too, I can only see out of one eye :)
I never learned to hate 3-D, I always did. I'm of the opinion that cinema needs 3-D like books need pop-up pictures.
@tubething980: That's a good point, actually. What are people with impaired vision supposed to get out of 3-D? Still, I wouldn't worry; they've been trying to foist it onto the cinemagoing public since the '50's at least, and no-one's ever been interested.
My mom has vertigo, so she hates going to see 3D movies. I'm severely nearsighted so if I want to watch a 3D movie I have no option but to put the 3D glasses over my regular glasses, which is really annoying. Like you said, why don't they make fit-overs for them?
The Horror movie Madman Mars is so blue it's as if someone just filled up microsoft paint.
Replyhunger games was a big offender in the steady cam blurry action sequences
ReplyThe lens flare is a thing that JJ Abrams puts in nearly all his works. Seriously, Super 8 and the show Fringe both have them loads of times..
ReplySuper 8 was ment to have the lens flare because it was supposed to seem like a film made in the early 80s. The effects were to enforce the mood of the film.