Killing Verisimilitude and Suspension of Disbelief

One thing I hate in movies is over-production and absolutely stupid direction that manufactures such absolutely stupid physical business that anyone with more active brain cells than are found in a used Kleenex will experience a complete dissolution of suspension of disbelief.

I saw a video (yeh, a pirated video of a TV pilot for s show that didn’t make it past the pilot *shrugs* Good/bad: interesting concept, well-acted, poorly directed and overly post-produced) recently that threw me off in just about every third scene.

Scene: “burglar” (gal “sneaking” her mom’s home late at night) but post production added excessive shoe noises, overly loud openings and closings of doors, etc. I mean, even just walking around normally on our hardwood floors, I can’t MAKE myself walk that noisily, and no normal door opens and closes (latches, hinges and door itself) as noisily as the post-production sounds made those doors seem to. Just stupid.

Then: protagonist shadowing a hit man driving a glaring puke yellow muscle car. OK, that’s jarring. But… the protagonist is driving an almost fluorescent green car. And stakes out the hit man overnight in that “LOOK AT ME!” color car. The hit man does an obvious 360 sweep checking for suspicious activity both before settling in for the night and before entering his car the next morning AND MISSES THE FLUORESCENT GREEN CAR (which he has seen WITH the protagonist before) WHICH IS PARKED ALMOST DIRECTLY ACROSS FROM HIS OWN!!!

*sigh*

And I’ll just bet you that most folks who did actually see the thing when it aired (and flopped) weren’t affected at all by such things.

BTW, despite the bad directing and bad post-production effects (good direction would have required a fix of the script and props, etc., and KILLED the crappy post production shiite), the concept, casting and acting in general carried this particular example to “low-to-moderately-enjoyable” range.

But examples of stupid directing and post-production abound, nowadays, and make it into even main stream movies. *sigh* I’m at about 50% on the Amazon instant videos I check out. About half of them don’t last past the 15-20-minute mark because of crap like this.

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