Where the Wild Thing is...

Michael Kera

This time I’m going to start out with Michael’s Miscellaneous. For this post we need to talk about lens, focus, camera distance, camera angle and camera movement. I want to start off with movement. When was there nota camera move? From what I saw the camera was always moving, even when locked down on a tripod. With the tripod shots there would sometimes be a slight pan, normally you wouldn’t be able to tell, but parts of the background were moving out of frame. There were a few times the camera was still and when it was, it was jarring. So much of the movie was hand-held it felt like a documentary, and Chris/Alexander only broke the 4^th wall once when he was eating the apple in the montage. The documentary effect was cool and I feel effective, because we are following Chris/Alexander on a journey and when chronicling a journey, you would most likely go hand-held.

Now we know most of the shots were hand-held with some tripod use. But hand-held is a loose term in my opinion; they probably used a steady-cam, otherwise you’d want to vomit. I want to say there were a lot of long shots andmedium shots. Extreme Long Shots and Long Shots were used more for the “pure nature” scenes and Medium Shots for the people. Even the close-ups seemed farther away from the people. I think towards the end after he ate the poison plant the D.P. started using close-ups. They also used close-ups when he was writing in his journal. The shots made me feel not intimate with the story. It felt like Chris/Alexander was pushing his whole world away, including the viewer. Then again if the whole movie was close ups it would have felt awkward and too intimate.

The angles felt kind of blah. There were a lot of eye level shots.

There were a few high and low angles but none really suggested the visual dominance. It felt like more of a composition decision like our actor is up in a barn loft and we’re down here next to the man pissing on the ground. I may be reading too much into it, but except for the montages the shots were pretty boring. I remember the montages more than the actual movie like the apple montage and the typical “I have climbed a large mountain and now I will stand with my arms out while the camera spins around me.” I also remember the canted/Dutch angel because of how jarring it was. I usually love canted/Dutch angels but this shot looked like something someone learning how to use a video camera would do. It screamed look at this and how artistic it is.

Now for a wrap up of Michael’s Miscellaneous. I enjoyed the shots of the movie, especially in the very beginning, but I hate how it was told. Every so often the movie pulled me in and then spit me back out. During the apple montage when he broke the 4^th wall, I couldn’t stop thinking, “is this a narrative or a documentary?” This thought came back to mind when he was dying, couldn’t his “hypothetical” crew help him if he knew they were there? Also there were a lot of zooms, it felt like 90% of the movie was zooms. Now I like a good zoom every now and then, but it got annoying because in my mind zooms go along with documentary style. Too many zooms remind me of home movies. To end on a lighter note, the fly over during the graduation scene gave me chill because I liked it so much. Here is a cool shot to end with. Close up and slight extreme close-up of his eye.