Vacuosity

Quick process

Caleb and I went to see "One Hour Photo" this evening. It was good; I liked it. It was a refreshing moment of quality in a glutted suspense film market. Slightly twisty, not ingeniously so, but enough to make it interesting.

One thing that was interesting about the film, as Caleb noted, was how much of the story was told by what you saw, rather than by what actually happened. The director followed the Hollywood mantra "Show, don't tell" in its purest sense, by crediting the audience with the intelligence not to need to be hand-held through it.

It was a carefully crafted film visually, for the sake of the story, which is rare. Often film makers are caught up in what happens, the characters and the story, the action sequence or the dialogue. Or sometimes the director focuses so much on imagery that the plot is almost irrelevant, or at best a poorly constructed vehicle for assembling the images (the movie Dark City comes to mind). But here, the director used the medium to its fullest potential as a storytelling mechanism.

That being said, it wasn't a terribly good-looking film. No high-budget crane shots, or helicopter pans. Not a lot of interesting shots to speak of at all, except where they related to the story.

A decent performance by Robin Williams makes it worth your while, too. But don't feel bad if you've missed your chance already (I caught it at the local second run theatre), you won't lose anything by watching it on DVD.

posted by David @ 12:17 a.m.