Monday October 26, 2009
The visual edge
By JASON LIM
If your eyes like what they see on the big screen, feast away.
Visual feast is an often-used phrase in the film critic’s handbook to describe films with stunning scenes either visually elaborate or technically unlike anything we have seen before. As a regular film-goer matures and becomes increasingly difficult to stun and astound, it is often only films that are visual feasts which can satiate the more seasoned palate.
Sci-fi’s seem to do it best, with the original Star Wars and later the Matrix challenging our perceptions of space and reality through the medium of film. We have the wizards behind Industrial Light and Magic (George Lucas’s visual effects studio) and the creators of bullet time (the technique used to film some of the Matrix’s most memorable action sequences) to thank for that.
The fantasy genre also subsists mainly on its visual production budget and ingenuity. For instance, the Lord Of The Rings trilogy would have been a huge flop without Weta Workshop’s (Peter Jackson’s closely associated visual effects company) wonder-inducing work. Pity that their follow up work on the Narnia series never quite matched up.
Visual feasts have also been cooked up in other less obvious film genres such as serial killer thrillers like Tarsem Singh’s The Cell starring Jennifer Lopez in one of her more underrated performances. The film takes her (and the audience) through the mind of a serial killer with hugely elaborate sets and painstakingly put together scenes. The effect is a mix of fear and wonder that makes the film more chilling than mere script and score can muster.
Romance films have also benefited from being made over-the-top visually. Baz Luhrman is a keen proponent of using visual exaggerations to portray passion, longing and other romantic notions in his films. In his Moulin Rouge and Romeo + Juliet, familiar love stories are turned into delectable cinematic eye candy by the images he conjures.
New life form: Actor Sam Worthington, who portrays the character Jake, getting a first look at his avatar, a human-alien hybrid bred from Jake’s own DNA, in James Cameron’s Avatar. Whilst we sample success stories of visual feasts done well, just like too much rich food, there is also the danger of audiences reacting negatively. This could be the case if too heavy an assault is laid on the senses or if too much emphasis is placed on the visuals and too little on the overall pacing and plot.
This is probably why some films which have been labelled as visual feasts have actually flopped in the box-office. Sad examples of these are films like What Dreams May Come starring Robin Williams in an ambitious imagining of heaven and hell that failed to appeal to mainstream audiences; The Fall, Tarsem Singh’s sophomore effort; and The Fountain by Darren Aronofsky.
Perhaps the relatively bad box-office performance of these films was also due to the bleak subject topics of suicide and mourning they focused on.
Bad or good, when it comes to films of such high visual standards it is often enough just to feast with the eyes and you would have got your ticket fare’s worth of value. Even a poorly pieced together tapestry of visual imagination is better than no imagination at all.
If your appetite’s been stoked by the films I’ve been referencing here, what should you next look out for?
Obviously one movie film visual gluttons around the world are anxiously waiting for is James Cameron’s Avatar. Due to be released in December, the film had to go through years of waiting for technology to catch up with the director’s story-telling visual demands.
The result – you can see for yourself if you catch the trailer for a glimpse of a new alien species and planet shown in a way you’ve never seen before.
Other upcoming films that may whet your appetite for imaginative visuals are Tim Burton’s Alice In Wonderland and The Imaginarium Of Dr Parnassus. The former is by a director famous for his dark visual imagination and the latter is a film famously known as Heath Ledger’s last.
Screening around March 2010 and year end respectively, The Imaginarium Of Dr Parnassus may be something of a hit and miss, if initial British critic reception is anything to go by.
In any case, don’t worry too much about what food snobs and film snobs think. If your eyes like what they see on the big screen, feast away.
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