Changeling

Clint Eastwood is the best kind of director - always willing to try something new, someone who believes in their projects, and someone who delivers, if not a masterpiece, than, at least, a competent and enjoyable film. I feel like Changeling is such a film - not a masterpiece, but a competent, well made, and enjoyable film.

Changeling is the story of Christine Collins, a single mother in late-twenties Los Angeles, who works for the phone company while raising her you son, Walter. One day, when Christine is called into work to fill in for an ailing co-worker, she makes the mistake of leaving you Walter alone, and when she gets back, he's gone. After months of searching for the boy, the LAPD says that DeKalb, Illinois police have found Walter and are sending him back to Los Angeles. When the boy shows up, though, it's not Walter, though the police convince her to tell the press it is. This starts a domino effect that causes Christine to have her very sanity questioned, as the chances of finding the real Walter become slimmer by the moment.

Angelina Jolie, who plays Collins, does a good job in the film, as do pretty much all of the actors, but the real standout is Jeffrey Donovan (Burn Notice) as the slimy Captain J.J. Jones. Donovan inhabits the skin of the abusive and completely out of touch Jones with stunning accuracy. He made me want to hit him! Amy Ryan (Gone, Baby, Gone and The Office), who has been garnering some great minor roles the last few years, also does a great job as Collins' only confidant in the LA County Hospital's Psych ward. There was also a good performance by Eddie Alderson, who played Sanford Clark, the young boy who Gordon Northcott got to help him with his abductions and murders.

Why did the film not impress me? Don't know. I can't really put my finger on... It just didn't pop like Mystic River or Flags Of Our Fathers. It had an almost procedural feel at times, and I feel like the most interesting part of the film, the story of Gordon Northcott, wasn't given the precedence it should have had, nor was the dramatic interpretation taken to the kind of level it could have been. While the story was about Christine Collins, and her battle with the LAPD, I honestly feel like Eastwood did a disservice to the film by not making Collins' story and Northcott's story gel a little more. Don't take that the wrong way, though. I enjoyed Changeling, but, ultimately, it would not be something I would probably see again.

Wanted

Choose your destiny.

Yeah, right.

Wanted is one of those films that tries to make fun of you, the audience member, for being the kind of person who simply accepts who you are as a person, when, if you just made the effort, you could unleash unbelievable power within yourself. Power, for instance, that can curve a bullet, slow time, allow you to hit harder, run faster, and, on occasion, even fly (sort of). In fact, the films main character, Wesley Gibson, goes so far as to, in no uncertain terms, call you a schlub (through the power of voice over narration), at various points in the film, and, after he starts to become proficient at all of the skills that this film tells you you should be able to unlock (if you just try), keeps reminding you of how big of a loser you are.

Wanted centers around Gibson, played by James McAvoy, a schlub himself, who works in a New York City accounting firm for an overly cliche fat, ugly, bitch of a boss. When the overly cliche Fox, played by Angelina Jolie (you see how they did that? They gave the Angelina's character the name Fox? Cause she's a fox? clever...), comes to "rescue" Gibson from his boring life, he learns that the dad he thought was dead, was actually only killed the day before, and was one of the world's greatest assassins. Fox (one name only, the whole movie) takes Wesley to meet Sloan (played by a horribly cast Morgan Freeman), to introduce him to the clan of assassins that his father was a member of, and see if he wants to join up. Oh, yeah, and Wesley is also being hunted by this random assassin guy named Cross.

Wanted is just ridiculous. It is. There are some of these movies you look at and say - "Oh, well that'll be fun", but Wanted is just stupid. It feels like it was written by some screenwriter when they were fourteen, and then they found it ten or fifteen years later and said "Hey, I could polish this up and sell it!". Who came up with this? And did everyone sign up for this for the paycheck? There's nothing redeeming about any of the roles. Jolie and Freeman are already stars, so its not like this is going to make them any more of a star, and McAvoy doesn't seem to really fit into the whole "action star" category. Don't get me wrong, he's leading man material, but he's NOT Bruce Willis.

I wish I could make some really academic response to this film, but, for me, it just comes down to one thing - Wanted is stupid. The only redeeming thing about this film is that Angelina Jolie is exceptionally hot in it. Hmmm... So, if you think about it, Wanted is kind of like Beowulf. Weird.

You know what, just save your hard earned dollars. Here you go, here's the best part of the movie - 

"Wanted" RED footage pulled before release?

According to Jim Jannard, head of the Red camera project, in a post to Reduser.net -

"There seems to be some confusion about RED on "Wanted" even though I posted the following a couple of weeks ago.

During production, we were told that some RED footage (from pre-production prototypes) would be used in the movie so we added "Wanted" to "Shot on RED" on red.com. As soon as we heard that would not be the case, we pulled "Wanted" from our website. "

This is odd, considering that one user points out a comment by Jon Farhat, the film's VFX supervisor, that speaks highly of the Red footage -

"RED

1. The camera crew thought it would be telling to take the early RED prototype and point it directly into lights, bright windows behind our subjects, etc. Jim and Jarred, (and even myself then) were cringing. We were shocked when we analyzed the takes, (instantly I might add) and there was an amazing amount of detail in the windows and sky. More than the 5218. We had to clip the RED a bit to match.

2. The blue record on the RED images is quite amazing. Even a major improvement since we shot in Prague. The cameras we used later in Chicago sported a greater dynamic range and an even more improved blue record. In both cases, we needed to add some contrast and throw some data away to match the film response.

3. Pulling mattes from green screen using RED is much easier than film and frankly any other digital image and works much better than the Genesis system for instance. For a couple years people have been been saying that pulling keys from Genesis is easy. True, but only for the body of the key. The sharper edges means that when you do have a problem with an edge, it's real ugly. Instead, RED's 4k resolution defines the properties of an edge without the need of sharpening. The keys AND EDGES are stunning.

4. Ahhh. The grain. Do we add grain to RED images to be intercut? Or rely on the output stock? We did both. Pre-grain helped. However, I might add that if I were shooting a movie entirely RED, and the delivery was film, I would forget the idea of post grain and go straight to film.

Having said all that, film has been our standard. But now, we are seeing that we might actually be able to over-sample to achieve the 'film look'."

Sounds like everything was going pretty well, so, it makes me wonder why they would have, eventually, pulled the footage if it looked so good?