Samuel L. Jackson is an insurance salesman, recovering alcoholic, wife has taken the kids and plans to move to another state. Ben Affleck is an attorney, partner in his father-in-law's law firm, not above engaging in some questionable legal tactics to score big $$ for himself and the firm. Their paths cross when they have an auto accident. Jackson accidentally gets possession of an important legal file belonging to Affleck, loss of which will cost his father-in-law millions. On the surface the story is about Affleck's struggle to regain that file, but it's really about these 2 person's characters and how this incident changes them (and a whole lot happens in 1 day).

I liked it. Well-made and not predictable. All the actors did a very good job, although I still am not a big Ben Affleck fan. Lots of shaky hand-held camera work, kind of like a widescreen version of NYPD Blue. Also the action constantly cuts back and forth between the 2 main characters, who are following separate paths most of the time. I had trouble buying the ending though because after all the despicable things they do to each other, the "happy time" resolution seemed like too big a flip-flop for their characters.

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IMHO dp's use this when they think the movie is going to suck, and any camera trick, no matter how annoying, is deployed to keep it from looking bad on them.

Problem is, it IS annoying, and I hate it. It is detracting to anyone with more than 80 IQ, which is unfortunately less than 10 percent of our theater going public. Not that I think most patrons are only as smart as lab rats, but look at the drivel they keep paying to see, and why? Cause of the poster? The Trailer? Yep, cause they saw some candy and went running for it.

We end up getting forced to watch it for the most part. Thank god we only have to make sure the reels are in the right order.

An occasional oopsy is reasonable, I guess, but when one particular movie is full of them then there is cause for concern. And my number one bugbear? The patron blames the projectionist and I get a complaint!

I believe that this happens more often nowadays because less productions use film dailies because they have switched to video dailies instead. In several instances an actual answer print isn't struck until the picture is locked. Clearly, some deficiencies in focus cannot be detected on anything less than 35MM dailies.

One of the nice things about Baz Luhrmann is that he insists on film dailies and he also evaluates new film stock prior to production by making a one-light workprint of some test footage then taking it to a local cinema and playing it on a really large screen to see how it holds up. When you see his films, this care is obvious (although even 'Moulin Rouge' had *some* variation in focus quality, although nothing majorly bad).

'Training Day' is still one of the sharpest films I have seen for quite some time. That focus puller knows their job inside out! More like that, please...you couldn't get a customer complaint about that print even if you wanted to!

Now don't get me started on 'Gosford Park'...sheesh!

Depth of Field, just wait until Star Wars and watch the posts come in.

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Unfortunately, so true!

One of the recent active discussions on the Cinematographers Mailing List (Geoff Boyle's CML site) is about drifting focus on movies shot with digital cameras. Back focus of the lenses may be an issue, but much of it is likely that they don't really see a really big, sharply projected, screen image until the digital images are transferred to film. By then, focus-pulling errors and camera problems are too hard to correct.

In addition to "Moulin Rouge", "Thin Red Line" is another movie that showed how sharp 35mm "Film Done Right" could be.

Of course, 65mm/70mm still sets the standard --- look at the sharpness that could be achieved on a big screen decades ago with films like "Lawrence of Arabia" or "The Sound of Music", using slow EI 50 films that were only about 1/3 the sharpness of today's KODAK VISION camera negative films:
http://www.kodak.com/US/en/motion/products/negative/
http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/widescreen/loa1a.htm

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John P. Pytlak, Senior Technical Specialist
Worldwide Technical Services, Entertainment Imaging
Research Labs, Building 69, Room 7525A
Rochester, New York, 14650-1922 USA
Tel: +1 585 477 5325 Cell: +1 585 781 4036 Fax: +1 585 722 7243
E-Mail: john.pytlak@kodak.com
Web site: http://www.kodak.com/go/motion

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Brad et al, you seem to be right about the focusing. The scene where Samuel L. Jackson is sitting in the bar is a good example. This was a static shot, no excuse for the subject doing the talking to be fuzzy, but Jackson was indeed out of focus. Now to be fair, there were other shots in the movie where a handheld camera was being used and there would be an extreme closeup of someone's face, and it would be slightly fuzzy. This may be an artistic choice and not a mistake. Or maybe the actor was improvising and moving around more than they expected when the shot was being set up. Just speculating. But yep, bottom line is I counted a half-dozen or so shots where the character's face was out of focus for no apparent reason.

I didn't see any of those wavy, rolling bars this time though.

In any case, I enjoyed the movie quite a bit. It was well written and well acted. Nowhere near as dumb as the trailers made it out to be.

Like Aaron said, a lot of productions have attemted to do this, but none that I recall have pushed it as far as Changing Lanes. I think for many viewers their idea is going to backfire. Rather than making the film seem more "real," the shaky camera work and soft focus are going to serve as a constant reminder that you are watching a fictional film.