No sudden move cinematography8/31/2023 ![]() It's awful and disgusting, but at least unlike the panning shots, it didn't make my eyes water and turn a headache on like a light switch. But even when we're spared that sight, No Sudden Move is full of compositions where one character will be just to the side of the center of the frame, and the other character will be most of the way to the other side, and it feels like they're standing about 300 feet away from each other while gathered around the same table. ![]() Especially since Soderbergh seems so hellbent on making sure we notice it all the time, by filling his movie up with panning shots, the specific form of camera movement best-suited to calling attention to fish-eye lenses they create the feeling of the entire world sort of melting around the viewer in a huge parabolic curve with its point right square in the center of the frame. I don't know if every shot in No Sudden Move was filmed with a fish-eye lens but I wouldn't doubt it for a moment if I was told that was so. We are now in year four of Soderbergh's iPhone epoch, and while I'm fairly sure that No Sudden Move was shot on actual movie cameras, the director/cinematograpaher's discovery of extreme wide angle lenses has become really just quite insufferable at this point. Andrews really needs to get a good shaking. It's not going to change the way you think of editing or anything like that, but the film advances with crisp, sharp cuts that march us steadily through dense scenes of plot and dialogue without feeling rushed, and allows us to sink uncomfortably into the moments where the plot seems to bunch up and the characters are even more confused than we are. Bernard is in perfectly fine form this time around. Soderbergh, as he often does, works here as his own cinematographer and editor, appearing as usual under the names Peter Andrews and Mary Ann Bernard, respectively. But I will say that the thought of calling it that certainly did cross my mind.Īll of that being said, it's unfortunate, even maddening, that my knee-jerk response, one that always hovered at the top of my reaction no matter how much I was enjoying watching the actors navigate the plot turns, was "fuck my life, is it ever ugly". I'm not going to call it the best cast Soderbergh has ever worked with, since his filmography is particularly well-stocked with unreasonably impressive casts. ![]() And it has an even better ensemble cast, a seemingly unending flow of actors sidling into to an ever-messier human drama that wants to be arch and mannered twice over, first as a 1950s period film and second as a gravely snappy film noir pastiche, but also wants to have us believe in the emotions of the characters, and demands much of them if this is going to happen. Notwithstanding its title, one of the most acutely generic and forgettable (not to mention, inapt) I have encountered in an age, No Sudden Move is a triumph of writing, with a hell of a script by Ed Solomon that's as good as any that director Steven Soderbergh has worked with in a good ten or fifteen years.
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