The bad retake.
So I finally watched ‘Out of Africa’ (go ahead, gasp). And I gotta say, it’s incredible for a million reasons. Sure, I was heart broken because I didn’t get my happy ending, but, that’s the story, and I was just a greedy viewer, I wanted the people I fell in love with to have rewards for their pain.
I digress.
Watch the clip above but keep an eye on minute 4:30. First of all, all of those two shots of the actors on the plane are pick ups. And, for the 80’s, pretty bad, bad, 1960’s batman and robin climbing up the side of a wall to do the bat dance, pick ups. And I’m not knocking Pollack, by any means, I wish the guy was still alive and making films, I really admire the legacy of incredible work he left behind, but these pick ups have ‘studio executive’ written all over them. There’s also one at the beginning of the movie, where every shot has the characters with different make up on that is terrible. But, again, I don’t know the circumstances that the filmmakers and crew were put under, all I really wanted to say is that the film works, incredibly well. And I was crazy enough to rewatch it and skip over the pick ups, and the film still works without those awful shots. New technologies like the one below would have helped filmmakers like Pollack go from talented to some kind of freaky perfection. But all in all, this is more proof that some things work well without perfect pick ups, sometimes, even in the process of filmmaking, you can’t have a perfect ending.
If you MUST do pick ups, get lighting right, plain and simple. That’s 90% of what gives pick ups, and computer generated scenes, away. From the crossing of mountain ridges by the frodo/sam-less-fellowship in The Two Towers (where there are about 15 different light sources), to the above shots in Out of Africa, that go from having sunset like shadows to 10 different noon like light sources that make my brain say ‘hey, this isn’t what sunsets look like.’
For more on the subject watch ‘Burden of Dreams’ and watch Herzog kill people (literally) in his obsession with perfect pick ups.
Sydney, you were one in a million and the world misses your stories. If any of this came across as a knock, I apologize. It was a commentary about something that really threw my brain off when watching this incredible, moving piece.
PS: Is Brad Pitt the clone of Robert Redford? My girlfriend and I couldn’t tell them apart in this one. I will say that they definitely can’t clone talent. Zing! Zap!
