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intrepidhero | 3 years ago

As fun as the nitpickings are, Bret posted some criticisms of RoP to his twitter that I thought even more illuminating regarding the director using the storytelling medium to just lie to the audience. It rings true to me. All the "clever misdirection" just felt clumsy.

https://nitter.cutelab.space/BretDevereaux/status/1617645693... https://nitter.cutelab.space/BretDevereaux/status/1618083297...

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yamtaddle|3 years ago

The lying-soundtrack thing is indeed cheap as hell.

Re: the missed opportunity of soundtrack in the Star Wars sequel trilogy, later in that string of posts—that's, unfortunately, a hallmark of modern film-making. They've cheaped out by shoving soundtrack development to a part of the process that makes other things easier, but also means the soundtrack tends to get neglected. The Every Frame a Painting channel (RIP) on Youtube has a video about this that does a good job of covering what's gone wrong and why, and at one point explains not only how a particular scene in (IIRC) Captain America 2 could have used its soundtrack better, but then demonstrates that the existing soundtrack is so very bad that the scene plays obviously-better and its emotional beats hit harder if you remove the music entirely.

[EDIT] LOL, whoops, I got that Cap 2 bit mixed up (it was other Marvel scenes where the channel demonstrated that removing the soundtrack often had, at worst, no effect on the quality of a scene)—in that one, it was actually a case of the music being basically OK but so little attention being paid to the overall effect of all the audio that they slapped a prominent, totally pointless voice-over on it, such that in that case the scene's actually far better if you leave the music but cut out all the other sound.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vfqkvwW2fs

That's the video, coverage of the process-related causes of soundtracks being a forgettable after-thought in most modern "blockbusters" starts around 5:50. There are other videos on Youtube that go even deeper into the "how" and "why" of that, too.

[EDIT 2] I think an especially telling line comes in one of the clips of the composers sitting around together, where they're all talking about the effects of extensive use of placeholder music: the guy says something like "you look at the edit without the music, and it's wrong"—I don't think he means wrong for new music (which can be molded to fit the scene), I think he means it looks like it obviously could have been edited better and wasn't only because the editor got fixated on trying to make the edit fit the placeholder music.