Running Movie Fight Thread: PT Anderson v. Tarantino

Ford

He’s never fallen to direct to video status.

 

I have said this before, but that penultimate drug-deal-gone-bad scene at the end of Boogie Nights ...

... 'many, many people' have memory of being in a certain place at a certain time in a wayward youth, and thinking: "I've got to get the fuck out of here- like right now."

And the look on Wahlberg's face when he's beginning to sort this out is just great moviemaking.

 

https://youtu.be/fpV4dDBkSDQ

In the conversation for greatest tracking shot of all time.

This fucking thing had Heather Graham on roller skates skating through a crowd.

 

Scout, it was great no doubt, but it had already been done by Scorsese and Robert Altman.

Even the great Burt, during the shooting of the film, would say stuff like, "Does (Anderson) know these tracking shots are not original?"

 

Yep. It’s Dirk’s awakening from many years of many things. It’s one of the things that marked PTA as different. A lot of directors would have just killed Dirk.

 

That's a good point. It would have been so easy to kill him off.

There is a brutal deleted scene in that film where one of the porn actresses is nearly beaten to death by her husband.

Anderson had the good sense to leave it out but it revealed Dirk as a rescuer and true hero, and not just some dumb kid.

 

Orson Welles - Touch of Evil tracking shot (all off a crane).

 

Tracking shots were much harder before the invention of the Steadi-Cam (1975). People were stunned when they saw Bound for Glory in 1976. Haskell Wexler won the Academy Award for Cinematography that year. Which inspired Larry McConkey, fifteen years later the SteadiCam operator for Scorsese's tracking shot in 'Goodfellas.'

Steadicam Operator Larry McConkey on Filming the Goodfellas Copacabana Tracking Shot and The Early Days of Steadicam | Filmmaker Magazine

Tracking shots were also limited by the amount of film in the camera magazine. 8 minutes or so, maximum. There's obviously no such limit with digital video.

And a 35mm Panaflex camera with a lens and a viewfinder and 1000' magazine was bulky, heavy and awkward. And remember, before Jerry Lewis ca late 1950s, there was no reliable video assist either, so a director never knew absolutely what a shot looked like until dailies the next morning.

Nowadays any jughead with a smartphone can shoot the best-looking, most elaborate tracking shot in history if they so choose.

Which is what makes 'Touch of Evil' so cool.

 

Speaking of Paul Thomas Anderson, he shtupped Fiona Apple for awhile. Lucky dude.

But the funnier more bizarre tidbit in the story ...

Fiona Apple Quit Cocaine After a Night With Quentin Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson

Apple was also briefly involved with Louis C.K.; however, she was disappointed in his frictionless return to comedy, describing his jokes as a “smoke screen” for abusive behavior. She argued that if C.K. isn’t capable of greater self-scrutiny, he’s “useless.”

“I SHAKE when I have to think and write about myself,” Apple wrote of C.K. in a text to The New Yorker. “It’s scary to go there but I go there. He is so WEAK.”

​

How in the hell did CK get a piece of the Apple?

 

Maybe he went with his own version of "The Naked Man" from How I Met Your Mother and she thought it was a ballsy move.

Or maybe some women just like guys who can make them laugh.

 

New Fight: Better post Jerry Maguire career: Renee Zellweger or Regina King? Two Oscars, Four Golden Globes vs. one Oscar, Three Emmys, One Golden Globe.

 

Is this based on a premise that Fiona Apple is attractive?