PULP & POPCORN

Page 7
And while I think Life Of Pi is a dazzling display of film craft, I find the
storytelling itself infuriating. He made the best possible movie out of a book that I
don’t like at all, and the film angered me in the exact same ways that the book did.
That’s a successful adaptation, I suppose.
When I first heard about Bi!y Lynn’s Long Hal"ime Walk, it was over a long
lunch with Stacey, one of Sony’s delightful publicists at the time. My editor-in-chief
Richard Rushfield was also at the lunch, and the entire point was for Sony to lay out
the films they had coming for the next year and offer up some information about
each of them. Stacey told us about how Lee was shooting his new film in 3D using
120 frames-per-second cameras, and when I asked her why, she just shrugged. “He’s
Ang. He wants to try it.”
To some degree, my entire viewing experience with Bi!y Lynn’s Long Hal"ime
Walk was like watching a demo reel. It almost didn’t matter what happened in the
film. What I was looking at for almost the entire running time was the visual quality
itself. I tried to disconnect myself from that, but it didn’t work. It was so different, so
new, so utterly unlike film that I found myself wondering if there will ever be any
kind of major industry using this process for narrative storytelling. I’m not sure I
believe it. It’s so unlike film that it feels like it should be called something completely
different. It’s not live theater, either, although the feeling I got sitting in the
Cinerama Dome was much more akin to that than it was like typical film-going.
Instead of pretending like everyone who reads this will know exactly what I’m
talking about, a quick explanation. Film is typically shot and projected at 24 frames
per second. That was arrived at after much experimentation in the early days of film,
where anything from 16 to 24 fps was in play. Thomas Edison pushed towards the 50
fps end of things. It was sound that made the industry agree to a standard speed for
shooting and projection, though, because those shifts in frame rate would be more
noticeable in audio that was either sped up or slowed down. You can read about the
nuts and bolts of this stuff if you’re really curious, but the short version is that higher
frame rates in film begin to create some pretty profound differences, and those
differences are going to divide filmmakers pretty hotly.