Film What's Important.

Last night I walked out of a movie in a theater for the second time in my life: The Adjustment Bureau. (TAB, from now on)

Warning: this post contains movie spoilers - then again, I didn't see anything beyond the first hour or so.

What compelled me to walk out of the movie? For starters, I wasn't much in the mood for a second-movie-in-a-row (I had just watched 'Paul' 15 minutes earlier), and the movie was not only dis-interesting, the plot and dialogue became increasingly redundant after the first 40 minutes. If you don't know anything about the movie, to sum it up: Matt Damon (it's hard not to chuckle to myself after seeing Team America: World Police.. heh..) discovers that there's a group of men in trench coats who are watching, and supposedly controlling his thoughts and actions, ans keeping him 'steered' along the 'path' they have set out for him. The inciting incident:He meets the girl of his dreams (duh), and, of course, 'they' don't want them to be together. (no spoilers there, you'd get all that from the trailer).

Somewhat-Spoiler: These dudes in trench coats aren't really human (or are they?) - or, they have 'some' supernatural powers, which are negatively affected by water (Signs anyone?), and they apparently live a very long time. They keep records of everyone on the planet, and are constantly making plans for every person's life, and making 'adjustments' to peoples' 'paths' when they go astray. Oh, and they can also transform any door into a portal to any other door in the world. (this comes in handy in chase scenes).

I walked out not only because of my mood, and the fact that the movie was becoming preachy about the long-cliché plot about struggle about control over a protagonist's fate, and/or the nature of fate itself, but because the movie also wasn't shot very well.

Take cinematography and you'll learn certain conventions are used to tell a story visually: the rule of thirds, the 180-degree rule, rules for lighting and colour temperature, camera operation, cut-shots and pretty much everything you can imagine to do with a camera, lights, actors, and a film set.

But there's a overarching rule in narrative film: film what's important. If the most important thing in a part of a scene is emotions washing over a character, shoot a close-up of their face; it doesn't matter if the protagonist's belt matches his shoes if at that very moment he needs to make a difficult life-altering decision. If the scene's character enters or travels to a new destination, include a wide-shot to give the audience a better idea of where the person is, and how they fit into it. If someone picks up a small, important object off a table-top, and it's critical to the plot (see: the top in Inception), film a close-up of the object, and the character's hand reaching in to get it. It's principles like these that I even teach 9-year-olds when they're shooting short claymation movies in one of my camps, but apparently they're at a total loss to the director and/or cinematographer of TAB.

The whole idea that the men in trench coats having supernatural powers (being able to flick their hand to make a cup fall over across the room) wasn't clear, and the culprit was bad filming. In one scene, Matt Damon walks into and through his office building, only to completely miss that all the people he walks past are are completely still (frozen). But, again, the coverage was bad: If you're going to show that someone has been suspended in time, you'd better-well show a close-up of the person's inanimate face- to show lifelessness - but they didn't, and it wasn't clear. When the men in trench coats made a sudden move and something was caused to happen, they should have focused on the man's hand-action, and then cut to the effect on the distant object - but they didn't. UGH.

Maybe I'll watch it when later - when I can 'watch' it courtesy of TPB. Until then, not a big loss: I got free passes for the movie a few years ago for a birthday.