I see a lot of movies every year. A
ton. But this year I’ve decided I don’t see enough movies, so one of my
New Year Resolutions was to simply see more. And to write about them.
See, that’s the other half of the equation: I see a ton of movies, but
I write about comparatively few of them. There are a lot of reasons,
but they mainly boil down to the fact that I feel the need to do long
form reviews, and sometimes – like in the midst of Sundance – I just
don’t have the time.
And
so was born this new blog! I aim to make an entry for every single
movie I see in 2010. Some entries may be very short, some may be
lengthy. Entries may take a couple of days to be posted. Let’s see how
long this lasts.
One
last thing: one of my main objectives this year is to rewatch more
movies. I know this sounds like a strange goal, but there are films I
haven’t seen since high school, which means it’s been almost a lifetime
since I saw them. Recently I rewatched Black Christmas for the first
time since the 1980s, and I might as well have been seeing the movie
for the first time. I’m interested in getting a look at some movies I
loved or hated twenty or even ten years ago and seeing how I feel about
them now.
Let’s begin…
#51
Green Zone
2010
d. Paul Greengrass
You can read my actual review of the movie right here.
This was my second time seeing Green Zone; I had seen it in March or so of 2009, but surprisingly little had changed. What had changed was that all the CGI was finished.
Shockingly, there’s a ton of CGI in the movie. The scene where Matt Damon talks to Amy Ryan in front of the pool at Saddam’s old palace? She’s standing in front of a green screen on all her close ups. At the airport in the beginning there were no planes, just wire frame models. Many of the scenes of people driving through the city were them in an alley of some sort surrounded by green screens.
It’s remarkable how many FX are in the film, and how seamless they are. That, to me, is the amazing use of CGI, not the creation of phony looking characters. It’s all about maintaining a subtle illusion.