What is your favorite Brett Ratner movie?
- Thread starter Aragorn
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Let me get this straight: Jimmy Stewart annoys you but Tea Leoni doesn't?
The role of a director is yet again, misunderstood.
Even if a director is a hired gun on a project, a director can still make an incredible script into a shit movie, or even make a shit script an entertaining movie.
Ratner most definitely deserves to be criticized on everything he's been a hired gun on, because he's an incredibly boring, paint by numbers filmmaker regardless of the quality of the script. Here's an example;
In Manhunter, Dollarhyde take Reba to the vet so that she can experience the tranquilized tiger. In this movie, Michael Mann, who is a far better director than Ratner could ever hope to be, shoots the scene the way it should be, from the character's perspectives. Reba doesn't know where she is, and neither does the audience. The audience doesn't trust Dollarhyde and wonders where she's been taken. The audience does not see the tiger until Dollarhyde places Reba's hands on its side, and we slowly reveal the tiger as Reba revels in its textural beauty.
Ratner cuts into a wide shot of the room and we see everything. *facepalm*
A script doesn't tell a director how to shoot a movie. The director chooses that, sometimes with the help of a cinematographer. A bad director with no mind for the rules of photography or knowledge of how basic perceptual psychology works in the audience or how to create suspense through that knowledge, can destroy even the most amazing script.
And then to say Joel Schumacher deserves to be criticized for the exact same reason you say Ratner shouldn't be? Schumacher was a hired gun on the Batman films! Schumacher is a far more talented director than Ratner. He has made several brilliant films in his time. And yet people still give him shit because he hired himself out and followed the dogma laid down to him by the studio...make it fun, make it bright, camp it up, nothing too dark or freaky, but most of all, sell toys. And why did he do it? For the clout to make some more personal, artistically driven films that would never have been made otherwise, like Flawless and Tigerland.
His segment that he directed for New York, I Love You. I was genuinely surprised to see him as a director when the credits came up.
This is the almost exact same criticism I read in the review of "Red Dragon" I read that put down Ratner for being inferior to Jonathan Demme and I still don't agree with it. The guy went on this long rant about how brilliantly Demme shot Clarice's first meeting with Lecter by shooting it from her P.O.V. and gradually bringing the camera around to see him while Ratner just showed everything right away.
This is a valid criticism and it's true, these other directors definitely put more thought into how to set up shots and reveals but I don't care. It's impressive to people who want to analyze the look of movies clinically and all that, but as a casual viewer of these films, it makes no difference to me...it doesn't seriously impact my enjoyment of the movie.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a Schumacher hater just because his movies sank the Batman franchise. I loved "A Time to Kill", "Falling Down", "Phone Booth", "Tigerland", and even parts of "Batman Forever". But the changes he made to the tone and look of the Batman movies, whether they were the studio's choice or not, seriously affected the way those films came across for even the most passive movie fans, not just for those dissecting every frame. He has to take some responsibility for that (and he did on the DVD of "Batman and Robin").
I think that this is a very shortsighted view of the filmmaking medium. You really think the way a shot is set up only matters to people who analyze movies and that it never impacts your enjoyment? Why not just set up a camera in the corner of the room and have each scene just be one shot, then?
I think it's telling just to look at certain directors' careers and how their movies and more specifically the quality of their movies differ. T'Baio made the marvelous example of comparing and contrasting the same scene in Manhunter and Red Dragon.
It's not just that certain directors put more care or consideration into "reveals", it honestly goes much deeper than that. Look at the work of Michael Mann for example, who has made some truly extraordinary films (Heat, Collateral, Public Enemies) compared to Brett Ratner whose repertoire pales in comparison.
Those small analytical decisions really make a difference and can definitely affect a viewer's enjoyment of a film. They consciously make the film better and depending on your taste, can take a film from being truly mediocre to truly special. Directing is all about paying attention to the finer details and changing everything from the location of a prop to how a specific camera angle reveals a scene to the emotion of character to absolutely everything quintessential about the film.
It's not just that certain directors put more care or consideration into "reveals", it honestly goes much deeper than that. Look at the work of Michael Mann for example, who has made some truly extraordinary films (Heat, Collateral, Public Enemies) compared to Brett Ratner whose repertoire pales in comparison.
Those small analytical decisions really make a difference and can definitely affect a viewer's enjoyment of a film. They consciously make the film better and depending on your taste, can take a film from being truly mediocre to truly special. Directing is all about paying attention to the finer details and changing everything from the location of a prop to how a specific camera angle reveals a scene to the emotion of character to absolutely everything quintessential about the film.
I didn't say never, just not in all cases. In the case of comparing "Manhunter", "The Silence of the Lambs", "Red Dragon", though, I think getting so fixated on that is just nitpicking too much. Like I said, it didn't make much of a difference to me how differently these films were shot. There are definitely times when the choices that the director makes in terms of composition really impress and enthrall me and get me more heavily invested in the movie ("Night of the Hunter", for example), but not in this case. Also, I'm generally more interested in dialog and writing.
This is a movie I have to see.
The only one of these movie i've seen is The Family Man, and... meh.
This thread reminds me that I really have to see Manhunter.
Yeah, she's annoying in some other movies, but I thought she was charming in "The Family Man". Jimmy Stewart, on the other hand, drove me nuts in every movie I saw him and dragged many fine films down for me with his goofy persona.
Yeah, she's annoying in some other movies, but I thought she was charming in "The Family Man". Jimmy Stewart, on the other hand, drove me nuts in every movie I saw him and dragged many fine films down for me with his goofy persona.
Well. at least I agree with you about Night of the Hunter. An excellent movie.
X3. I don't give a fuck what anyone says, it was entertaining.
The director is the person with the most influence on the execution of the script. I agree that really bad director can destroy the script by his incompetence. I must still point out, if a bad or even mediocre director puts enough footage in the can, a skilled editor can still salvage the movie.
Also, a sufficiently emotive score can push the audience into an emotional response that doesn't come from the director's visualization of the scene. Sometimes it seems as though it really is true that all you need to do is cue the audience with the music and the rest will take care of itself.
But is it really true that the director can make a shit script an entertaining movie? "Entertaining" is such a vague word, like "like" is. I watched Star Trek and Dark Knight in theaters, and I didn't storm out. I only cringed in embarrassment a few moments, vaguely wished the hero would die and get the movie over with only a few times, but other times I laughed, felt sad, tensed with anticipation. Then I walked out and mostly felt no desire to even remember the movies, much less think about them.
I didn't feel exactly robbed but won't even bother to see them again free from the library. I didn't dislike them, how could I, I sat through them. So I must have liked them, they must have been entertaining. Right? But what kind of standard for artistic achievement does this set? Not much.
When pressed the defenders of the auteur theory will formally acknowledge that yes, the director is not the sole creator, and even may concede that sometimes not even the primary creator. But in practice, like this whole set of director's best movie threads, in practice as opposed to lip service, no one ever talks about the screenwriter, they talk about the director. This seems wrong to me.
That may be true for most people, but not for me. I always pay special attention to who the director and screenwriter of every movie are and think about how sometimes the movie turns out wrong despite one of them being generally dependable to deliver, in which case I blame the other one.
There are exceptions, though, if the writer has a strong enough voice. For example, I think most people think of the movies written by Charile Kaufman as Charlie Kaufman movies, even though most of them were directed by other directors who are talented in their own right.