Hollywood’s Whispering Act

A couple of days ago, I’d gone to watch Blade Runner 2049 in the theatres. There’s a lot of things to like about the movie, from visuals that just ooze style and beauty, to a great story, to an amazing score composed as an homage to Vangelis’ music in the 1982 original film. The whole film, in fact, is heavily inspired by Blade Runner, with themes and ideas that are a clear echo from its prequel.

But there was something that was lost somewhere along the way in the 35 years between that movie’s release and this one’s. Something that isn’t really aesthetic or even cosmetic in nature, something that used to be the realm of purely ‘artsy’ films but has pervaded mainstream Hollywood films, too. Clear, intelligible dialogue.

This might sound like a strange thing to complain about, but this is an issue that I’ve found myself having to deal with increasingly often these days. As a person who speaks mostly English and has had more than his fair share of exposure to American and British accents, I’ve always had a keen ear for dialogue. As a cinema-lover, movie dialogues have especially been important to me both as an effective method of storytelling and as a strong metaphor for a character’s nature.

Contemporary cinema has no dearth for quality drama and realistic, powerful dialogues. Some of the most iconic cinematic moments ever captured on camera are dialogues or monologues. But a rather frustrating trend I’ve seen movies following in the past several years is the low-spoken, often whispered, conversations between characters.

I just don’t get it. Whether it’s the need to make the scene more ‘realistic’ or ‘grittier,’ filmmakers seem to be making a concerted effort to make their dialogues harder to understand. Sometimes the characters speak softly, or sometimes they just have a hard, raspy voice that’s just difficult to understand in the first place. And now with Blade Runner 2049 comes a new sort of annoyance — characters talking in large, empty rooms so their voices echo ever so slightly.

I will admit that this gives some aesthetic value to the scene — there’s a sense of enigma, of an ineffable otherworldliness to watch two characters in a massive room surrounded by a moat of sparkling water, soft voices just glancing off the walls to create mirrors of themselves that last only a second longer. But I’ll be damned if it doesn’t make it that much harder to understand. Jared Leto’s character, the psychotic Niander Wallace, is especially guilty of this, because most of his scenes are in that room. To make matters worse, Leto, in his insatiable quest to creep audiences out with weirder and weirder characters, affects a trance-like appearance and speaks in a soft, whispery voice that makes him look just a bit ridiculous.

At the start of 2049, the protagonist K (Ryan Gosling) pays a visit to Sapper Morton (Dave Bautista). Without going into any unnecessary details, the two of them have a conversation in Morton’s house. A quiet setting, with no background noise to disturb the scene. But I’m still struggling to understand what they’re saying. Both Gosling and Bautista seem hell-bent on giving me a hard time by speaking in hushed tones, only leaving the pauses in between for me to try and figure what they just said. And in a movie with smart, nuanced dialogue like this one, it just ends up being twice as much work for me as I try to follow what characters are saying, understand them and unwrap the layers surrounding more important lines of dialogue.

Why do we have HD clarity pictures, music and sound effects, but not HD dialogue?

Somehow, this doesn’t seem to affect anyone else on the internet, so either I’m going deaf or I need people in the comments telling me they get my pain. But I really doubt it’s the first one, because I really didn’t have the same problem watching the original Blade Runner right before watching the sequel. Dialogue was crisp, clear and I honestly didn’t need subtitles for any of it. Well, almost all of it.

But 2049, along with lots of movies that have come out lately have had me wishing all Hollywood films in Indian theatres had subtitles. Some do these days, so it really does help.

So here’s my plea to all Hollywood film studios: please, please, for the love of God, make your dialogues more clear. It doesn’t make it less realistic to make dialogue more audible, and not every villain needs to be as impossible to understand as Bane from The Dark Knight Rises. So please put those several million dollars you spend on your fancy new big-budget action flicks to good use and invest in a functioning boom mike, will ya?

Kingsman: The Golden Circle Movie Review

When Kingsman: The Secret Service came out in 2014, we knew we had something special on our hands. A stylish, high-budget parody of sorts poking fun at all the common tropes of spy thrillers and was hilariously self-aware (making some pretty great on-the-nose references to Bond films), it burst onto the scene with public and critical adulation thrown at it like confetti.

There was something simply mesmerising about it — the way it unabashedly took on the all-too familiar conventions of every spy movie, exaggerating their not-so-subtle subtle aspects and turning the entire genre into a self-deprecating joke. The movie revelled in its own absurdities, a positively inane plot serving larger-than-life characters like Valentine, Gazelle, and our charming young hero, good old Eggsy.

Meta humour is the best humour

And of course, it gave us the iconic Kingsman password, ’Oxfords, Not Brogues’, which gave this blog its name.

It’s 2017 now, and about damn time for a sequel and a generous dollop of that classic Kingsman camp and humour. Kingsman: The Golden Circle takes off soon after the events of the first film. Eggsy, the new Agent Galahad, has grown comfortably into his agent boots and we see the confidence he exudes in everything he does. He’s every bit the man Colin Firth’s Harry trained him to be.

Taron Egerton’s grown into his role in these films, making Eggsy truly his own character. He was born for this role, and I can’t think of anyone else who could play the part as well as he does. So when the movie starts off with him thrown into a high-octane action sequence, you can’t help but root for the guy.

 

There are about three full-length action sequences in this film and several smaller ones, and they’re all honestly pretty mind-blowing. There’s an insane new arsenal of gadgets we’ve never seen before, each of them more ridiculous than the last, and it’s just so much fun watching one of the agents turn a London taxi into a missile launcher or a villain shoot a rocket-powered metal arm at them.

The movie being what it is, the fights are more like a dance, with the agents dodging gunfire by a hair’s breadth, darting effortlessly from one enemy to the next, dispatching them with a fluid grace that’s only possible in a movie utterly unconcerned with realism. The fight scenes are gloriously intense and fast-paced, and there were moments when I was positively awe-struck by what I was seeing.

And that’s the beauty of Kingsman: it doesn’t give a shit. You watch these movies for how exquisitely well-choreographed the fight scenes are, not for their gritty realism. Because only a Kingsman can down two dozen armed guards without ruining his perfectly tailored suit. It’s a spectacle to behold.

Julianne Moore plays the villain, the deranged drug lord Poppy Adams, who does insanely f..ked up things to her enemies, all with a psychopathic sweet smile on face. Her hideout is yet another signature Kingsman ostentation, as is the entire plot itself. Though not an ideological conflict like the first Kingsman villain brought to the table, it nevertheless encompasses people all around the world, and the Kingsmen have yet again the task of saving millions before it’s too late.

Joining them this time are the Kingsmen’s American counterparts, the Statesmen. With characters played by Channing Tatum, Pedro Pascal, Halle Berry and Jeff Bridges, the motley crew make for a bigger cast than last time, and they’re all equally entertaining to watch. Colin Firth makes a reappearance as Harry, too, but I won’t say anything and spoil it for you, save for the fact that he’s awesome.

Hello there

The movie’s a lot bigger and more explosive this time around, with more elaborate action sequences and much bigger set pieces than in the first film. But there’s something about this new Kingsman that feels different in spirit somehow. A lot of the appeal of the first film lay in the sheer novelty of the concept. It was in the feeling of awe and a bit of glee the moment Harry spoke the password and the doors opened to something none of us had seen before. Unsurprisingly, that novelty’s worn off now, and the film has to compensate for it by pumping the gas on everything else.

And that brings me to my main problem with this film: by having a sequel Kingsman has left its anti-mainstream persona behind and turned into a franchise, it suffers from having to take itself a little seriously sometimes. To paraphrase YouTuber Jeremy Jahns, Kingsman has lost that feeling of purity and sheer audacity that the first film had by turning it into a movie series. And that’s why so many of us loved Kingsman in the first place.

Don’t expect to feel that exact same rush of wonder and newness that made the original so special. But that isn’t to say Kingsman: The Golden Circle is any less entertaining for it. It’s absolutely one of the must-watch films of 2017, especially for fans of the first one. And don’t go late for the movie and ruin it for other people.

Because manners. Maketh. Man.

Hey guys! Aneesh Bhargav here. If you like my work, please follow my blog and share it with all your friends! Let me know what you think in the comments! Hit me up on Twitter: @aneeshbhargav