One of the big things I noticed with my students was that while you could definitely teach people to notice when stuff went "wrong"--ie, the boom was in the shot; bad dubbing/weird synch; that shot wasn't flipped correctly and/or crosses the axis; look at those hats, those hats are whack--it was really difficult to teach them to register when things went right and what, exactly, those things were.
I was thinking about that earlier today, looking at a couple of sequences from Gangs of New York on our new Blu-Ray (yes, we broke down), like the "Fighting Over Fires" one in which Scorsese intercuts two things which possibly cannot be happening in parallel time and links them mainly through music and narration/dialogue: Yes, Bill went to see Boss Tweed and agreed to a sort of alliance, but was it on the same night when "the Irish Brigade marched through the streets" and fireworks were being let off to mark the abolition of slavery, therefore starting a fire in the Five Points that led to a muss between the Black Joke and Americus Fire Brigades? And was that the evening of the same day Amsterdam met Johnny Sirocco, or was that later on?
The sequence totally works for me, mainly because its energy is plot point- and character revelation-driven, but my students used to glitch on it something hard, just like they always used to complain about Scorsese dubbing in dialogue from off-camera to supposedly cover Leonardo DiCaprio's and Cameron Diaz's "bad" acting. The idea that he might've done this stuff deliberately was alien to their Spot the Gaffe mindset.
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I was thinking about that earlier today, looking at a couple of sequences from Gangs of New York on our new Blu-Ray (yes, we broke down), like the "Fighting Over Fires" one in which Scorsese intercuts two things which possibly cannot be happening in parallel time and links them mainly through music and narration/dialogue: Yes, Bill went to see Boss Tweed and agreed to a sort of alliance, but was it on the same night when "the Irish Brigade marched through the streets" and fireworks were being let off to mark the abolition of slavery, therefore starting a fire in the Five Points that led to a muss between the Black Joke and Americus Fire Brigades? And was that the evening of the same day Amsterdam met Johnny Sirocco, or was that later on?
The sequence totally works for me, mainly because its energy is plot point- and character revelation-driven, but my students used to glitch on it something hard, just like they always used to complain about Scorsese dubbing in dialogue from off-camera to supposedly cover Leonardo DiCaprio's and Cameron Diaz's "bad" acting. The idea that he might've done this stuff deliberately was alien to their Spot the Gaffe mindset.