Cinematic Trainwreck – The Snowman: A Vlog

so I just got back from the Snowman cinematic trainwreck cinematic trainwreck 2017 the Snowman this one is definitely a candidate for a future art of editing video it's I don't want to say I don't know where to start because I do know where to start with this one so so this is an incomplete movie that's sort of the first thing to say about it it is incomplete I already know that they didn't finish making the movie and it shows like it it shows dramatically they were only able to shoot from what from what they've said they you know they're obviously they're gonna try to downplay it when you end up in a situation like that so the the director is trying to play it as it's like oh well you know 10 15 percent I'm gonna say they they probably failed to shoot about 20 percent or 20 percent of the movie maybe like 10 percent of the script but definitely like 20 percent of the planned shots did not get shot and so that's kind of the baseline that we're starting from here is that there we have a clear story for why the editing is so awful and it is because the movie isn't done it it shows like there are sections of the movie that are better than others that work better than others but for the most part it's just it it is chaos just from looking at it I'm gonna guess that the the reason why it's incomplete almost entirely comes down to mismanagement like just the there's something about the composition of it that really says that it was not well planned it wasn't just like it wasn't well executed and it wasn't well executed because it wasn't properly planned there's there's this one scene very early on that's just a it's just a back and forth it's like you know shot reverse shot but each each of the shots is on a slider but every line that a character says starts from the same point in the move so it's if you've got this pillar in the background that you're using is kind of a landmark reference point you know every time it cuts back to character a Atlas at the head of the line at the head of that line the pillar is back in the same place every single time it cuts back so it kind of you know it it tells me that what they were doing on set is is they were faffing about constantly resetting and basically shooting the movie like lion byline like that scene would have taken forever to shoot that way and it looks awful it cuts terribly because it's doing it for both sides of this so it's like this once you know it goes mmm every single time and the other shot goes the other direction and both of them so it's you know there's probably 1015 cuts in this conversation as a whole because it just cuts on you know character says align finish character line line line line it just cuts back and forth like that and because it's doing this every single time it forms this really really stupid rhythm that does not look good it doesn't feel good it doesn't serve anything but it would have taken forever to shoot and there's a lot of other big scenes like they spend a lot of time on a techno crane they spend a lot of time on a dolly they spend like every shot is not every shot but like there there's a lot of movements that would have taken a long time to set up so they knew that they had a limited schedule that they had to move very fast on this shoot that they only had I think it was a pretty compressed shoot I want to say it was something like 30 shoot days I would need to I would need to check that but it was a it was a very compressed shoot that they they had and they had no wiggle room for for going over and knowing that they still chose to try to shoot every single scene in in a complex way and the problem there is that it's going to take so much time and particularly like after the first couple of days if you're not making your day if you're not getting everything that you need in the day then you need to change the way that you're approaching it you can't just keep going you're gonna slip farther and farther and farther behind and then you're not going to have a finished movie at the end and that's the situation that they wound up and they didn't have a finished movie because they you know they weren't making their days and so even the scenes that are done you know don't feel complete like they feel like they're they're missing coverage they're missing endings they're they're missing dialogue like there are numerous numerous moments in this movie where scenes have basically been created out of b-roll so there's a where you know there's a misdirect and and the characters are driving away from a crime scene and then they've got to turn around and go back because they get a call you know and that moment doesn't hat like it doesn't take us inside the car at all we don't actually see the characters it's just a shot of a car driving down the highway and the two characters talking overtop of it and the best part is that when they say they've got to turn around like the car doesn't turn around they didn't have a shot of the car turning around they just had a shot of a car driving down the highway and so they used that and then put voiceover overtop of it to try to create this to try to create this scene and now having that is better than nothing but then there's so many scenes where they just have nothing there's a lot of jump cuts there's a lot of oh oh just really really not not well padded scenes the entire intro which is supposed to be like the the killer's backstory like you know their formative moment it moves at such a choppy pace that there there is no there's no setup there's no suspense there's no sense of what characters are thinking it's just there's a couple shots where like clearly you know there's a there's a stunt that clearly they only got one of and it wasn't a very good take but it's all they had so they have to cut like really early into the action and you it ends up not it ends up feeling incomplete alright quick quick kind of plot synopsis so the Snowman is a suspense thriller murder mystery movie about Harry Hole now I don't know this is this is apparently based off of a very popular book series you know long-running long-running book series that I am completely unfamiliar with I'm not familiar with the source material at all I can't comment on it the best I know is that it's kind of a you know airport reading type book like really you know newsstand kind of pulpy suspense novels you know and I I don't know if it adheres to it at all but it very clearly wants you to kind of already know something about these characters or have some investment in the main character named Harry hole which saying it out loud is is is chronically absurd the movie is itself is absurd in in a lot of ways but it takes itself deadly serious it probably could have used a little bit of levity given that it's really kind of a nonsense of mystery like you're you're talking about a serial killer who who builds snowmen as his calling card and yeah it's it's not very satisfying on the whole the the the killer is revealed ended I don't want to say it makes sense because it's dumb it's one of these movies where they didn't actually have a well-constructed mystery and so they end up just throwing like tons and tons of misdirects at you so one of those movies were about like about two-thirds of the way through you would believe anyone is the killer because they have tried to implicate basically everyone but none of them would make any sense at all because the killer just doesn't make sense in the first place so it's like oh well it could they they could turn out to be any of these characters but which one's it going to be like there isn't actually one that that really makes you go like oh man yeah it all makes sense now cuz none of them makes sense none of them it's it's the kind of killer who has who has super powers you know can can just get in and out of places completely invisibly can you know lock rooms from the inside and and escape without leaving any trace and none of its ever explained at all and so it's the kind spend so much time kind of mired in a you know dull droning kind of reality really undercuts all of that because it's like your tone is so you know everybody talking in kind of these these you know low whispers about like okay well we're gonna what we're gonna do we're gonna we're gonna have to we're gonna have to find him and we're gonna stop on it's the last thing we do you know it's that kind of a that kind of a movie but you have this really absurd premise and a lot of really absurd things is going on that definitely could have been glossed over a lot better if the movie just felt a little bit more fanciful if it felt a little bit more fantastic so it's not a it's not a good mix of tone and scope the the ending just because this is fresh on my mind the ending like the final the final moments the like the last like three minutes of the movie are hilarious in how incomplete they are the the killer is stopped and that's almost it like basically Harry goes and rescue like so The Killers stopped Harry goes and rescues the hostages and there's there's no wrap-up of really any kind it just cuts to this really weird sets where there's a whole bunch of people sitting in like you know those those chairs that have the have the pull up desks so they're they're sitting in those but they're just kind of scattered haphazardly around the room like there's there's no order to it it's not like there ain't you know they're not in a semicircle they're not in lines or rows they're just all pointed random directions and it's not clear what's going on and then you know camera kind of weaves through it and someone's talking like droning overtop of this and it's really hard to hear them because it's it's like that you know it's that voice processing effect that they do when it's like you know someone got hit in the head and everything sounds super distant and quiet you know it's like the audio is really far away and so you got this kind of just like droning voice off in the distance and then you know reveals Harry and he puts up his hand and says I'll take it and it's supposed to be sequel bait it's supposed to be like it wasn't until after that so Harry says I'll take it and then hard cut to to black and a roll credits and that's supposed to be you know setting up like oh he's he's gonna tackle more cases in the future but because because what was being said was so dulled out you weren't really processing yet and you're you're wandering through this room that is it makes no sense it's like wait where are we what's going on like this does not so I pieced it together as the credits were rolling that it's like oh wait that's supposed to be like the briefing room and they're the the that was you know whoever's in charge like reading out the details of a case for the detectives to decide to take but it it didn't it didn't look like that at all it it looked like some classroom just it I don't know Val Kilmer is in this and this is a little bit this is a little bit tragic so I know that Val Kilmer has he I understand that he has had some health problems recently I don't know the details of it but it has impacted his his mouth and face and throat in in some way and you can see it like that his his cheeks are very very swollen he's having trouble like moving his lips and it's I understand that maybe his enunciation is probably not the best of these days I think they still should have rolled with it like if if he was able to deliver anything resembling a good performance they should have just kept it they should have used his performance because what they decided to do instead was they they dub over him all the way through so how they try to deal with it at first for the first scene that he's in he has about five lines and four of them are off-camera so it'll do you know standard shot reverse shot but like over the shoulder reverse shot but all of his lines are looking like all of his characters lines are looking at the other character like it's the back of his head and it becomes so obvious afterwards like what they're doing when you know it's the fourth time that they've done it and everything else is cut normally but it's like when it comes time for his for his lines back of his head you're looking at the back of his head and then they've got one line where he's on camera and it it really does not match up at all and they use that technique like a lot through the a lot through the movie like they find basically as many excuses as they can to have him not be on camera when he's talking and when he is on camera it the the the voice does not match up with the mouth you know he clearly sounds like someone who's gonna who's gonna have kind of a a really rough voice like this is this is what you would expect them to sound like something closer to this and they should have just rolled with it they should have they should have let it be because even if it would have been maybe a little weird on its own it would have at least looked right and it would have cut better and they would have been able to do more with the scenes and it would look it would just be less weird it would be a lot less weird what do we have Oh Harry just wanders around and stares at people for the first 10 minutes yeah so after the after the killers backstory we're introduced to Harry by which I mean we're not introduced to him at all it's just a really poorly cut montage of him like walking up to windows and looking at people and yeah that's that strange really strange product placement they so beats by dre pays a pretty decent amount to be placed in basically any movie that will take their money and so there's a really really weird product placement where Harry travels all the way up to to like northern Norway and goes to like a fish packing plant and randomly the dude that he's talking to is sitting there wearing beats by dre headphones in this fish packing plant it is it is a really really mismatched bit of set dressing of costuming but hey you got to get your product placement dollar somewhere I guess they couldn't decide what to do with the title back to the beginning of the movie it this really threw me off is that there's all of these moments where so like a car drives into into a tunnel and it smashes to black and then holds black for a good like two seconds and then later on there's a scene where it's like something happens and the camera pans up and it's just looking out over over this frozen lake and the mountains and holds there for a couple seconds and then a few seconds after like after that it cuts to black and holds there for a few seconds and then goes into the next scene and it's like so there's like these three moments where it was like clearly kind of planned at some point this like oh well you know here's where we're gonna put the titles that it's like okay camera pans up over this gorgeous this gorgeous frozen lake and you're expecting the snow man to to come up on screen or when the car drives into the tunnel or when it goes to black after that but then it's like a few beats after all of these moments that then it just kind of comes up in like the bottom left corner as as Harry's like waking up on a bench and yeah yeah so there's there's more it's not very good a lot of people are gonna ask like okay well how does it compare to to book of Henry and it really doesn't in in a lot of ways like book of Henry is a very different kind of bad and chaotic sort of sort of filmmaking it's it's it's also it's a completely different kind of bad versus Suicide Squad suicide squads problem was that they had way too much footage that they had you know the they just overshot because they over wrote everything and then they needed to try to trim it down into him into a presentable package this is the opposite problem they had a story that you know I don't know I I honestly just looking at it like the script was probably not super great to begin with but it was probably a lot you know better than the the final product makes it look so they probably had they had a middle in quality murder-mystery script and and they didn't finish shooting it you know they they got eighty percent of what they needed and then just tried to cut around all of the holes and cut around the lack of coverage and cut around the bad takes and and I mean I I still think it would have been pretty middling otherwise like there are definitely some script problems and there were definitely problems in how they approached shooting even the parts of the script that they had like I more footage was not going to make up for the fact that like the characters never talk to each other about the case that they're working on like that there there are scenes where you know the conversation starts and then someone just gets like really angry and and walks away and it's like you're you're like what what do you you know so story wise there's there we're definitely I think some core some core issues there that were certainly not improved by a lack of footage so yeah I I would say expect a art of editing and the snowman sometime in the future

Channel: Folding Ideas

Views: 282,537

Keywords: Criticism, The snowman, editing, bad movies

Id: B3IdwW2bmU4

Length: 22min 29sec (1349 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 25 2017