Changes on "House"?

I've enjoyed House since I started watching it midway through the first season.  I like the medical mysteries and the way they use those to structure a show that's really about the characters (unlike, say, Law & Order, which really IS about the case each week, or even CSI which is more of a balance but seems to skew heavy toward the cases).  Hugh Laurie has won some well-deserved accolades for the show and he is surrounded by a talented supporting cast that keeps things interesting.

As those thoughts might indicate, the show's foundation is its strong writing and acting.  But that doesn't mean the other elements are poorly done - quite to the contrary, it's always been well-directed and shot, and some of the cinematography is quite striking.

Which is why the major shift in the show's visual style over the past two weeks has been so disruptive.  I don't know if it's a by-product of a change in directors or DPs, or a conscious choice by the show-runners, but the way the past two episodes of House have been shot is markedly different than what we're used to.  The patient interactions haven't changed much, but the shots dealing with the principal characters, whether they're involved in general conversation or conducting a "differential diagnosis" around a conference table, have all gotten noticeably closer and tighter.  Gone are the wide shots of a whole room, two- and three-shots of small groups, and even medium close singles.  In their place are increasing number of solo shots, with tight facial framings - close-ups of House himself are the worst offenders, as it appears there is now some law that no shot of him can be wider than the top of his head to the bottom of his chin.  In the 11/16 episode in particular, this excessive use of close singles at times made it difficult to tell who was talking to whom, and where people were in the space (one scene at the conference table was particularly confusing, since no two people were ever shown in the same shot).  I had thought maybe this was an anomaly, but last night's episode offered more of the same...

In general, I'm not opposed to tight framings or the fragmentation of space - as I've written in some of my scholarly work (including my upcoming book Beyond Dolby - shameless plug), these are common trends in the cinema tied to a number of factors including surround sound, movement of crew between television and film, etc.  What I don't understand here is the logic behind messing with what had been a very effective, if not necessarily "in-your-face," approach to a successful show - for no apparent reason.  I simply don't think the new style is as good a fit for House as the old one, since it overemphasizes faces and the characters and upsets the show's careful balance of medical mystery with character drama (one might argue that the heavy use of single shots in the 11/16 episode was to emphasize the emotional distance between all the characters at the time.  Fair enough, but that doesn't explain why this strategy was continued, or what that had to do with the ridiculously tight CUs of House in that episode or the next - certainly characters can be split up through framing even in medium shots).

Here's hoping the makers of House get this out of their system and return to what works:  keep the cranky title character, snappy dialogue, and bizarre cases - just stop showing all that stuff from quite so close.

Fight Club on Blu-Ray

Just a quick post:  had the chance to checkout the new 10th anniversary Blu-Ray release of Fight Club (one of a slew of amazing films from 1999 that are on my favorites list).  Transfer and sound look good - picture in particular has a lot of detail, and you can see how grainy the original film was (note this is not video noise, but rather the film grain itself).

This disc has a really cool idea for a feature - there's a section on the sound design (nice interview with Ren Klyce) that lets you change the mixing on a couple short segments of the movie.  Specifically, you can change the relative mix of "real-world" and "Jack's POV" sounds, as well as the relative volume of the various 5.1 channels.  The problem is that this would be a great idea on a computer where you can click a mouse in various areas to change things, but simply doesn't offer a very user-friendly experience with a standard Blu-Ray player remote - which of course is what most people will access this with.  It's exciting to be in the "expansion" phase of a new media form like this one, where people are coming up with new ways to use it - but this example also highlights the fact that those developing content for new media need to be cognizant not just of what those media can do, but also of how people actually use them.  In this case, while I like the idea in the abstract, I'm not sure a format accessed primarily with a DVD player remote is the right venue for it.

The Police on Glee

I'm a longtime huge fan of The Police - having unfortunately not gotten into them until after their breakup in the 80s, I was waiting seemingly forever for the chance to hear them perform, and finally got my wish last year when I had the chance to see them on their reunion tour.  They were amazing, found just the right way to keep the familiarity of the songs we all know but change them up enough to make it a different experience hearing the live performances.  Stewart Copeland in particular was a great performer, running around, up and down levels of the stage playing all manner of percussion instruments.  The only downer was the audience - particularly the group of idiots all around us who talked the whole time and literally couldn't as a group spend more than 2 minutes all in their seats without someone leaving to get more beers or use the restroom.  I had sort of gotten used to that sort of inconsiderate behavior living in Dallas, but it was really distracting when I was finally having the chance to see a band I had waited literally decades to see.  But I digress....


All this is a roundabout way to getting to saying that I eagerly awaited hearing "Don't Stand So Close to Me" (my favorite song by The Police) in this week's Glee after it was played up in the promos, and it didn't disappoint.  A little uncertain about the mash-up at the start, but it ended up working for me, even if I would've liked to hear a little more of the song (though I'm not sure the lyrics were quite what Schu wanted to say - since in the full song the teacher actually DOES seem to have a relationship with the girl).  Well performed, and I even liked the way they changed up the chorus melody a bit.


Overall I think this was one of the best episodes since the pilot, with well-integrated songs (and a lot of them!) and storyline.  I was especially happy to see Emma return - albeit in a relatively small way - given that she had been minimal the past few episodes (and completely MIA in last week's) and is probably my favorite character.  This show keeps surprising me, and I mean that in a good way - it's always a joy to watch (and hear!) and the better we know the characters the more engaging it gets (since it has taken awhile to really start developing ALL the characters in the large ensemble).  My one beef is with the Quinn character, who is wildly inconsistent based on the needs of any particular story arc:  let's get her personality straightened out some, please?

"2012" is just what you'd expect it to be.

Caught the new pic from Roland Emmerich at a matinee on Friday.  Yes, it's as ridiculous as you'd guess, but if you're going to see this movie you'll get what you wanted from it.  It's bloated at two-and-a-half-plus hours, and its woeful attempts to address "serious" issues fail miserably (Really?  You're going to put in a big speech at the end about how everyone - rich or poor, powerful politician or average citizen - is worth saving, AFTER spending two hours telling us only to care about a few select characters, and treating the thousands of deaths around them as a background effect to impress us?).  On the other hand, I found myself surprisingly unconcerned about this blatant philosophical disconnect, since the movie is as much a cartoon as anything else.  When you have a limo cornering like a Ferrari, and the heroes always literally seconds ahead of impending doom (as my mind wandered, I found myself wondering if there would have even been a movie had Cusack woken two minutes earlier at the start of the movie, since then he would have had a comfortable two minute lead on the various phenomena he was outracing the rest of themovie).


Yet the effects are impressive, and if you go in looking for nothing more than seeing the world blow up, it's pretty cool.  I like the choice of John Cusack - a talented actor but not an A-list star - as the hero; he plays the role perfectly well, and the filmmakers recognize that we're going to this movie to see the effects, not the actors.  The scipt... well, not so much, it's treated as a necessary evil.  And boy IS it evil - while I'm not quite sure it's "necessary." I suggest next time that Emmerich forgo a plot entirely:  he's good at destroying stuff, not so good at emotion or character.  Instead of giving us 150 minutes where half of it is painful to even try to watch, how about a solid 80 minutes of great effects and then let us out of the theater before our butts hurt from sitting too long?



Oh, and one last note:  I'm pretty sure that however big solar flares got, this would not be enough to change the fundamental nature of elementary particles like neutrinos.  I'll add this to The Saint and Chain Reaction on the "most ludicrous attempts to justify crazy plots with pseudo-science" list.