morgenstern

I thought a lot about it last night, yeah i know, but hear me out. It’s loud, very loud in the mix, and coupled with the distinct lack of background music cues it makes the whole sound of the show quite unique to say the least.

Maybe you never noticed, I guess since I did that job for some movies it kind of jumps at me more, but I find it rather unnerving. I thought that if it was that noticeable it would be off putting and not realistic at all right? You can almost hear phasing at times, and not even with headphones, that’s how bad it is.

Especially in the quieter scenes, you hear the background noise creep up and get very loud. Which, you know, is a thing that may happen, usually happens, as you record the live take audio and then try to balance it in post production the quieter lines will need more gain applied to them thus bringing up the noise floor embedded within.

On a live take there’s always going to be background sound and noises recorded alongside the voices, no matter how well or how close the mics are placed.

There are tricks of course to handle it, but no work around is perfect, and this is mainly why a lot of things end up being redubbed and spliced in.

Except, you know, here’s the a-ha moment i had, a lot of mad men background noise isn’t even real. There’s no typewriters or telephones actually going off in the fake offices when they record. As there’s no traffic and old school car horns when they cross the road. It is all foley probably, as it should actually, but that means they really went the extra mile to re-create the ‘dirty live recorded sound take’ aesthetic with effects.

I think they may be overdoing it a little, and it’s not totally realistic in the sense that is naturalistic, but it’s ‘realistic’ trying to mimick the way it would have sounded had it really been recorded live, on location, 50 years ago. It’s mockumentarish, if such a thing makes sense, it’s the audio equivalent of the shaky cam panning instead of cutting to get a reaction shot ala the office.

it’s too long. i know there’s a lot of cool moments here and cutting one of them is a hard decision for me, but i’m not a great director and storyteller after all, it’s not on me to figure this shit out, know what i mean?

but still, we love imperfect right? we do, so thank god weird movies like these still get made and there’s this kind of creative liberty floating around.

But really long. I remember when Kill Bill came out i used to think that the whole split in two thing was a marketing stunt, that the two halves didnt even feel like parts of the same thing and so on and so forth. In retrospect though, judging at where tarantino went with his career I have to admit I might have been wrong on my assumption.

A lot of movies have scary, thrillery moments, yet nobody does it like Tarantino, they’re all just that much more bland and lazy than him. It usually involves people drawing guns at each other and being very literal with their threats. Tarantino still has dialogue with subtext and can make dessert terrifiying. It’s awesome, even for dietary reasons.

On the other hand he needs to stop with all those superimposed text, chapters, weird title cards here and there. It’s kind of childish you know, especially when it’s totally random like in Django, it’s kind of unbecoming. I’ll still cut him slack for the music because it feels like digging, it’s so golden age hip hop, but I understand if somebody gets annoyed by that.

Maybe it’s because i’m european, but I felt like Inglorious Basterds was more meaningful, and probably his most accomplished film to date. Entertaining, but really told a point you know? And how weird that some movies get praised for ‘celebrating film’ like the Artist or Hugo and some others like Basterds or Be Kind Rewind don’t.

The movie really loses a lot when a couple of the characters die, because they had all the best lines.

But all the final sequence was very powerful, on a story level. You had to have that. Because Django unchains himself, and really shows he’s changed and become something else. He might have needed a hand to get free the first time around, but he’s able to overcome now on his own.

It’s just this movie is all over the place really, no two ways about it.

Samuel L Jackson man, that is his most way way over the top movie role and ludicrous lines in years, and he delivers in spades.