[Weekly Update] Movie as Virtual Tourism

Who knew making a video on Chinese geography would make me crave a vacation.

CHANNEL UPDATE

Women Playing Men
By "playing" I mean acting. This will be our next video, talking about actresses who play male roles in film. Editing is close to completion after 4 days of grinding away. I don't know why I'm working so slowly for this video in particular. I did manage to include a good variety of films from both the 1960s and the modern era. I look forward to introducing them to you.

Chinese Geography
The video after will be a part one of our geography series, in which we show cities and provinces of China through the lens of Cinema. The first video will be about the Yunnan Province, the unseen side of Beijing, and the city of Chongqing. Covering geography of China is definitely more controversial than history. Hopefully I can walk the tight rope with grace and make the video fun to watch.

Bonus Video
For this month's bonus video, I'm thinking of Conan the Barbarian. I can't believe it took me this long to cover this film. I guess I just assumed I've already talked about it, since it's one of my favourite films of all time. The stunning landscape and the dreamlike progression of story gives a kind of charm that's impossible to find in today's movie.

Speaking of which.

MEDIA TALK

One thing I absolutely love about older movies is the film's willingness to spend time on nothing but the world: The landscape, the view, the movement of the wind.

The shot of Conan riding his horse across an open landscape is one of my favorite shots ever. Just a beautiful shot of the world. And Arnold, the biggest star on Earth, is but a small part of the image.

Movies used to have this kind of shots all the time. Think all the epic New Zealand landscape in Lord of the Rings, or Mrs Eisley from Star Wars. It doesn't have to be a fictional location either. Spy movies often travel the world, and showcases a wide variety of places beyond New York, Paris, and Moscow.

No idea why Paris keeps showing up in spy movies but whatever.

Another one of my favourite, and one where I posted social media, is the Chris Reeve Superman.

The location is supposed to be Kansas, but the film was shot in Alberta. Either way, what a shot, right? It looks almost like a painting.

Cinema used to be a place you go to the visit the world, the escape into another realm. It's not just a place about stories. Today's films are often so cramped with dialogues, there is no space for this kind of slow showcase of the world. And that's a shame. I still remember watching Inside Out 2, and timed the longest silence in the film.

It was 30 seconds, iirc. The whole movie, and the longest stretch without music or dialogue is 30 seconds.

A widely speculated reason for this shift is due to streaming. Now that streaming become the main way people consume home media, the accessibility and availability has turned movies into a form of background noise. The reason Netflix movies have that specific quality is because they have to embrace it. If the movie suddenly goes quiet, and stops explaining itself, viewers will simply stop following the plot, and maybe even switch to something else. And now, theatrical releases are also embracing this.

Another speculated reason has to do with the popularity of smart phones. Producers may want movies to look good on the big screen and on the smart phone. The two shots I've shown would look awful on a phone. And so, modern movies generally don't have this kind of super wide shots.

A cynical part of me also think this has to do with film school educations. Older directors often seem to have a background in painting, or were educated with classical art. Directors of my generation however, started with modern art and film history. At least, that's my experience with film school.

Anyway, that's the update of the week! The video should go live in a few days. I'll see you soon!