Improvisational Acting: Not for Actors
I watched a movie called Timecode today. Jared had to watch it for his Visual Literacy class, so I figured I'd watch it with him. I mean, if it's good enough to be required viewing in a class where you have to read comics, it must be good, right?
Right?
The whole gimmick is that the movie is one long take, with four cameras recording from different locations at all times. These four cameras are all shown at once, each one in a different quadrant of the television screen. Sometimes they show the same scene from different angles, but more often they follow characters to other places. There's also not a script. There was apparently a loose idea of the plot, and the actors improvised the rest.
The end result is that you get to effectively experience four really terrible movies at the same time, but furthermore, any of these four terrible movies feels like it could, in the blink of an eye, become a pornography. There are several reasons for this. The first you will notice is that Salma Hayek does not wear a bra. After you've come to grips with this, you realize that due to the restraints of having to work with four cameras in one continuous scene, no real effort can be put into lighting each scene properly. As a result, everything has that type of cinematography commonly seen in low budget porn films. You know, the type where a man in a van convinces a woman on the side of the road to get in said van and help them with a "documentary." Even further, the fact that all of the dialog is very poorly improvised, and most of the time is downright awkward, lends to this general feeling. Did I mention that pretty much every female character makes out with every other female character over the course of this film? Because that happens too. Oh, and it basically ends with a snuff film.
High class!
Mike Figgis, the director, also directed something called The Battle of Ogreave, which I really hope is some crazy ogre battle movie, but there's not really any information about it.
Addendum:
I am both illiterate and uncultured. The movie is called The Battle of Orgreave, (note the bold R!) and it's a documentary, and it's about a dispute between British police and picketers during the UK miners' strike. The more you know!