Jittervision

Why is it that every movie that comes out of Hollywood nowadays seems to be shot in glorious wobblecam? Can they not afford tripods in LA? OK, so I understand that in an action flick with lots of fighting, chases, explosions and general chaos they use the hand-held camera to give an edgy sense of immediacy and realism to the action. I noticed it first in a film called Paycheck which hit Dubai a couple of years ago, and that was fine. The technique was fresh and interesting then. Now it’s just tiring. Action scenes that jumped around became the standard in every action film I saw until The Bourne Supremacy came out and took the jitters a step further—not just the fight scenes shook, but half the film was shot in a blur. And then Miami Vice came along a couple of weeks ago and hit an all-time jittervision low. Not only did the cameramen wriggle all over the set, but they kept switching to nasty, grainy video tape that they apparently shot with Dad’s old Sony Camcorder. I mean, what is up with Hollywood these days? Is St Vitus’ Dance suddenly endemic in American dolly grips? I came out of the cinema thoroughly nauseated.

I swore off watching action movies unless I was primed with Stugeron, and so went this evening to see The New World. Pocahontas meets John Smith: a little red vs. white tomahawk action maybe, but essentially a love story and therefore safe from wobblecam, right? Wrong.

The New World seems to want to be an art-house flick. There is very little dialogue and very little background music, but it’s dripping with atmosphere all the same: a lot of silence, lots of crickets and rustling trees; the natives don’t even get subtitled when they’re trying to communicate with the settlers. Very arty, with a drive toward realism – war paint, flies, filth, squalor, etc. Instead of dialogue it has voice-overs that perhaps are meant to represent what the two main characters were thinking but did not have the common language to express. That kind of arty. It’s a serious sort of film about the first settlers to go over the waves and colonize the new world. Except the whole damn film pitched and rolled like they shot it on board the Mayflower. And then they had the nerve to list the Steadicam operator in the credits! Don’t know what he actually did, but I hope they didn’t pay him much.