Lilja

I always liked their take on 12 days of Christmas best .

Chula Vista

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Agree with everything here 100%. Deakins and Villeneuve are my two favorites working today. Some of the shots in this film were literally breathtaking.

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“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well,
on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away
and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”

Frownland

The part I saw before I passed out (not the movie's fault) in the theatre was pretty awesome.

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Studies show that when a given norm is changed in the face of the unchanging, the remaining contradictions will parallel the truth.

MicShazam

I'm not trying to be a contrarian, but I just can't see what Villeneuve really has going for him as a director. Give him a lot of money and the movie is of course gonna look like it cost a lot of money, but I don't really see the artist's tocuh. That eye for cinema. He's very bland to me. Arrival (the only Villeneuve film I've liked so far) felt like it survived on a fairly interesting script and good actors. The direction was working against the movie, if anything.

Frownland

It takes a lot more than money to make something look like it costs a lot of money. He's great at building suspense and conveying intricate plots. He's a little Spielberg-y in his camerawork though I guess.

__________________

Studies show that when a given norm is changed in the face of the unchanging, the remaining contradictions will parallel the truth.

MicShazam

I just though a lot of scenes in Arrival looked kind of dead and like an old TV series. The hamfisted use of color grading in that movie did a lot to make it visually bland.
(As mentioned a few pages ago, I did like the movie though.)

I can see the Spielberg comparison. Munich might as well have been directed by Villeneuve. Spielberg seemed to get worse with time, at least to me. His old 70's and 80's classics are way more visually vibrant than those movies he made in the 90's and up.

Villeneuve also kinda feels like Nolan light to me. A bit difficult to put into words exactly how. It's both visually and in terms of some of the more subtle sides of movie direction.

Frownland

Do you think that the plot demanded a more vibrant colour scheme?

Just as far as camerawork goes though. He has some canned pan shots and such, but they're pretty different as directors in most other senses.

__________________

Studies show that when a given norm is changed in the face of the unchanging, the remaining contradictions will parallel the truth.

MicShazam

Not necessarily, but I do find it annoying when all sorts of movies these days use fancy color schemes where natural colors would have worked better. The movie feels more grounded if it doesn't have those simplistic color gradings where everything has a yellow tint, or leans teal & orange, or whatever else has been popular. Arrival looked kinda like a cheap TV show or horror movie in some ways. I think it would have benefited, however slightly, from more natural colors. Even muted natural colors.

Camera work is one of those things I think I'm the leats attuned to noticing.
It's hard for me to explain why I feel like Villeneuve lies somewhere between Spielberg and Nolan, because a lot of it is down to intuitive experience and not something I can necessarily point out very specifically.

Frownland

I guess that's just preference since I'm cool with it. Have you seen Beasts of the Southern Wild? I was a big fan of how they use colour and tints in that.

__________________

Studies show that when a given norm is changed in the face of the unchanging, the remaining contradictions will parallel the truth.

MicShazam

No I haven't seen that. Is it good?

I googled some images and it looks like it has a more nuanced sort of approach to color. I'd probably think it looked great in motion. A lot of the movies that I think had the best visuals had subtle modulations of a natural looking color scheme. It's not like it's a rule, of course. Some movies pull off more extreme looks well. I just think a lot of color grading in movies ends up looking like cheapo horror film aesthetics with no feeling of place/groundedness.