Week 75: Socials Roundup
Posts from 10 June - 16 June 2024
Week 75 posts include shots from Straight Up (2019); Big Mood (2024-TBD); Terms of Endearment (1983); comparing Silo (2023-current) to Agnes Varda’s La Pointe Courte (1955); and Doctor Who (14th season of NuWho; 2005-current).
Straight Up
One of the things about the rules of split diopter use . . . you can break any rules!
Often people hide the 'blur' in the middle of split diopter shots; with the edge of a wall, a long thin prop, or just making sure there's a blank wall or bit of space.
Straight Up goes the opposite direction, with not only the lamp shining through, but Todd holding his wine glass smack in the middle of it. Fun! Odd! Representative of the movie!
Big Mood
Love how this scene from #BigMood 1.04 "The Middle" subverts our expectations by exploiting what we implicitly (even if sometimes subconsciously) know know about film grammar and 'apparition sightings.'
When Maggie (Nicola Coughlan) looks across the street, the camera cuts to show a young child 'apparition' being passed by two women. When it cuts back to Maggie, we see her eyes dart from following the women back to centre frame where the child was.
Typical 'apparition' sequences mean we expect that on the cut back across the street, the apparition will have disappeared while Maggie glanced away, so the street would be empty . . .
Instead it's staring right back at her, which is actually more scary, as it indicates the child is not a momentary passing figment of drunken imagination, but (in keeping with where the show is going) a persistent manifestation of how Maggie's mental condition is exacerbating.
Terms of Endearment
Terms of Endearment dedicates an entire, quick scene to this spit-take.
Emma (Debra Winger) is mad because people are tiptoeing around her on eggshells since her cancer diagnoses, but when an acquaintance takes her 'need to talk about it' TOO far, it causes her friend Patsy to cough up an hors d'oeuvre which lands in Emma's lap.
The scene is essentially a oner, but broken up with a medium shot of the actual spit-take; note how Patsy's frame is the same size as Emma's frame, with Patsy far left and Emma far right, so part of the comedy is how far the hors d'oeuvre is *implied* to have flown, whereas seeing it actually cross the room might read as too absurd (not to mention quite hard for an actress to accurately launch in the middle of a oner).
The icing and cherry are the dramatic lead-in which sets it up, and mundane scene following which is funny by stark contrast.
Silo
Love this shot from Silo 1.06 "Relic" with Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson) and George (Ferdinand Kingsley)
arranged like highly recognisable classical frames from (among others) Agnes Varda's "La Pointe Courte".
Doctor Who
just Ncuti Gatwa flawlessly executing a plot-point-slash-joke:
Music is a constant background noise in TV shows, so though "The Devil's Chord" revolves around Maestro taking all music from the world, we may not notice it's still present.
So when Maestro appears to take Ruby and the Doctor gasps "I thought that was non-diagetic" it's a meta-nod to the fact he, like us, assumed it was a score playing 'underneath' the TV show, not an in-world portent of Maestro's approach.
On a second watch you really notice Ruby looking up and around even in the recording booth reflection, and can hear the music is mixed to sound echo-y and not completely 'clean' like a score.
*claps*