Wednesday, January 18, 2012

From Haywire To Horror And Back Again

.
There was a moment during Haywire where I found my mind wandering. Which is not in itself a bad thing - your mind is allowed to wander during a movie sometimes without that obliterating the film's worth. A great work of art (not that Haywire is a great work of art) can even encourage such a thing. Anyway my mind wandered and I found myself, and I'm not sure why, remembering a time recently where I was watching a horror movie (I can't even remember what one) and getting really frustrated with it. Every scare was telegraphed ten steps ahead - there was no excitement. It was simply plodding through the motions. No thought was put into mixing up the way anything was shot - you knew right where the scares were going to come from. 

And then there was this one moment in that horror movie where I thought they were going to show me something I hadn't seen before - the protagonist was moving through an incredibly dark room from the right side of the frame to the left where there was a door, and because we've been trained so well by scary movies we know when they get to the left side where the door is that's when the scare will come. They will open the door and "Boo! Gotcha!" But the movement from right to left was really drawn out and I was bored with knowing what was coming so I stopped looking where I was trained to look and suddenly noticed that in the distance, past the character moving right to left in the foreground, there was all this darkness behind them. And it hit me that something totally needed to come straight at the camera out of that darkness. It wouldn't even have to be quick - the shot was moving so slowly that even a slow reveal of something in the background, in the direction we're not trained to be looking, would have made for a terrific scare. Our eyes and expectations were set up for one motion - the terror would come from that being upended.



Anyway the stupid horror movie didn't do it. But for some reason right there while watching Haywire I thought of that. And then Soderbergh did it! He literally did what I was hoping that horror movie would do about ten seconds after my mind had wandered to thinking about it. A character's moving from one side of the frame to the other when zoom something comes at us from background to foreground - Soderbergh draws it out too, so we see it coming, and coming -  and it's a humdinger of a shot. Probably the one people will most remember after seeing the film. It even got a comment during the Q&A. This being an action film and not a horror film it's used differently - it's not meant to terrify but to ramp us up instead - but the wowza factor is all the same.

Maybe Soderbergh transmitted something subliminally to me with all the obvious fun he was having shooting the film - the camerawork is just beautiful here. Steady and classic and elegant, but as lively as can be. Or maybe I am just incredible. That's basically my point, I think - I thought up a cool thing, and then, as if by my decree, Steven Soderbergh did it for me. Thanks, Steven!

Back tot he word fun though - Haywire is a helluva lot of fun. Leading lady Gina Carano is a little bit stiff - this is her first time acting ever, so we'll cut her some slack - but Soderbergh knows how to work with that and make it work for the character. And he surrounds her with an army of talented sexy men, and then he lets her punch all of them in the head over and over and over again. What's not to like? The action is choreographed beautifully, and the camera lives with it, embraces it - it loves to watch these bodies in motion, and the love is infectious. And somebody is gonna be sketching really bitching pictures of Carano in cornrows and a wetsuit in their notebook 50 years from now.
.

No comments: