RNL
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Posts: 6,624
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Post by RNL on Dec 15, 2005 19:10:31 GMT
Sam Raimi (1959- )
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Post by Driver on Dec 16, 2005 20:29:25 GMT
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Post by Vercetti on Dec 16, 2005 20:50:09 GMT
Spiderman
Spiderman 2
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RNL
Global Moderator
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Post by RNL on Dec 17, 2005 0:50:47 GMT
Jodorowsky, when he was asked why hasn't made a film in over 15 years, made a comment on Raimi that I sort of agree with. He said something along the lines of, "Look at Sam Raimi, he was a genius when he made Evil Dead 2, now to see him doing Spider-Man is so sad to me. That's what happens. No, once every decade or so is enough for me."
Evil Dead 2 is amazing, and it is a shame that he spent the whole of the 90s helming generic studio pictures. He lost it, and you can see the marked decline in invention and vision in Army of Darkness (inexplicably many people's favourite of the trilogy).
With the Spider-Man films he seems to have found a project he really cares about, and I think both films are good. They're the best of the recent spate of Marvel adaptations. Though Ang Lee's Hulk is more visually innovative, these capture everything that's great about the characters and the tone of the Spider-Man comics.
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Capo
Administrator
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Post by Capo on Dec 17, 2005 21:11:21 GMT
1. Spider-Man 2002  2. The Quick and the Dead 1995 |
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Post by Driver on Jan 10, 2006 20:35:26 GMT
Capo get a shift on & watch Spider-man 2  |
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Capo
Administrator
Posts: 7,847
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Post by Capo on Jan 10, 2006 20:56:27 GMT
I bought both Spider-Man films recently, with the intention of watching both over the same weekend or night or whatever. Soon...
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jrod
Ghost writer
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Post by jrod on Jan 20, 2006 3:48:54 GMT
Spiderman Spiderman 2  |
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Post by svsg on Jan 20, 2006 4:28:09 GMT
spider man |
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Post by mikola on Apr 30, 2006 14:03:45 GMT
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Boz
Published writer
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Post by Boz on Aug 17, 2006 17:59:18 GMT
Spider-man (2002) Spider-man 2 (2004) The best superhero movies of any kind.
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RNL
Global Moderator
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Post by RNL on May 1, 2007 22:24:23 GMT
>>> timeout.com
Sam Raimi established his hyperkinetic style with 1981's tongue-in-cheek horror pic, 'The Evil Dead', starring his schoolfriend Bruce Campbell. The critically acclaimed succès de scandale was followed by two sequels as well as 'Crimewave' (a collaboration with the Coen brothers) and 1990's 'Darkman', with Liam Neeson as a superpowered outlaw scientist. Following the ultra-stylised western 'The Quick and the Dead' (1995), Raimi made the quiet smalltown crime tragedy 'A Simple Plan' and the sports drama 'For Love of the Game' before returning to the supernatural with 'The Gift' (2000). The third instalment of his terrifically successful series of 'Spider-Man' movies is out this Friday.
I've always been interested in the camera and the effects of it – that's what drew me to film in the first place. My father would take home movies of the family and play them back and I was always amazed that you could capture reality and replay it. Backwards motion was incredibly cool. So the camera as a recording device was the thing that first thrilled me. Then I got interested in the moving camera. How does it affect an audience when a camera moves? What does the audience think when two shots are put together? And the pace of those shots, one after another, changing – how does that affect an audience? These are the questions I was interested in.
As I began making my feature films, it was a great adventure. It was about constructing something I saw in my head or I had designed on storyboards and capturing that on film. But even once you storyboard something, you didn't know the effect of it as a moving picture, of the camera moving, how the lens would change the image, or the effect of music and sound effects.
The making of 'The Evil Dead' was very down and dirty. The fact that it was 16mm, because we couldn't afford 35mm, was a great plus in that I could move the camera in very dynamic ways without having a very heavy camera to move. We had different versions of the 'shakycam': sometimes it was fixed to a long board with two guys on either end; sometimes I had it just in my hands on a very small board; sometimes I would strap it to the underside of my hand so that I could manipulate it in curves that conventional dollys couldn't achieve, swoop over things and dip down low. It was quite painful, though – even 16mm gets to be heavy after a time.
After 'Evil Dead', when we got a little bit of financing coming our way, I wanted to explore how to work with cranes and some of the tools I had seen being used on other films, but mostly I had more ways to achieve shots that I had dreamed up. I was able to make a special motorised rig to put Bruce Campbell on, to spin his body end-over-end while this device travelled through the woods and could ram him into trees and branches, which was quite refreshing. Whereas in the past I just had to hit him with sticks and slam the camera into him, now I had a whole device that could slam him into things. Money opens up wonderful worlds of possibilities.
Then with 'Darkman' I could hang people from helicopters and dip them into traffic. That was more a question of whether we could make a film that would pass as a studio film. I had never worked with a lot of Hollywood elements that were in that film. We had a guy who was a gun man, who simply provided guns and blanks. Before, we just had a real gun and we'd use it to blow holes in things. Every picture has been a learning opportunity for me.
With 'The Quick and the Dead' I tried to stay very close in the confines of the script. The camera there was just a tool to try and dramatise the gunfights in the most visually exciting and melodramatic way possible, making the audience feel the thrills and chills of the different moments in different ways. One was to let them ride the bullets, like a joyride. One fight, I wanted to see if I could use the technique Hitchcock had used in 'Vertigo' – zooming in and dollying back at the same time – to build a sequence of ever-increasing zooms and dollies to build suspense leading up to the moment of gunfire. I was experimenting in a hundred different ways.
Because I had done everything I could to make those gunfights as different as possible, I left 'The Quick and the Dead' feeling incredibly empty – like if that's all I'm doing, I don't want to do it anymore. So I stopped making films for several years after that. Then I realised I could still grow and learn new things if I began to focus on the actors in front of the camera – things that I had just moved around like pawns before because I was ignorant of the things they could bring to the picture. Now I became very interested in stories and emotion and actors and performance, to the point where, when I made 'A Simple Plan', I tried not to move the camera at all. I tried to allow the actors in the frame to tell the story, and I was very satisfied with that. That reinvigorated my appetite, and it still does to this day.
When I was trying to get the job of making 'Spider-Man', I just thought that I really understood the character and the heart of it, what made it work. I feel now that if I can understand the character I know how to direct the picture. I've got to know what he wants, what he's afraid of, what his weaknesses are, how he thinks – then I can direct it great. If I don't know those things, I can't even fake it.
Now I'm reaching a point with the 'Spider-Man' movies where I'm becoming re-interested in the camera again, especially with the possibilities of computer-generated imagery. I remember on the first movie, I was trying to figure out how we were going to make Spider-Man come to life and [special effects supervisor] John Dykstra was saying 'we could pull it off as a CGI character'. I said 'I don't think that we can, I've never seen a satisfying CGI character'. When, after a lot of tests and re-shooting and manipulation, we finally reached the threshold where I did believe it was possible, that was one of those moments where I was amazed and awed at what a computer could do.
Only on 'Spider-Man 3' did I think about a sequence that couldn't exist without the computer: the birth of Sandman. It starts under the microscope and it's about a living scultpure taking place, as if you could watch a piece of stone be sculpted by the wind over thousands of years. It's nothing I would have attempted or even thought possible without these six years of working with the computer animators. Now I feel the camera is another tool to help tell the story – not the only tool, as I originally thought it was, nor a tool to be abandoned, as I later attempted to do, but something to embrace in the right measure. I'm trying to find a synthesis of performance, story and camera all telling the story together.
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Pherdy
Ghost writer
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Post by Pherdy on May 2, 2007 20:11:21 GMT
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RNL
Global Moderator
Posts: 6,624
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Post by RNL on May 2, 2007 21:21:25 GMT
The Evil Dead  The Evil Dead II Madness! |
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Pherdy
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Post by Pherdy on May 5, 2007 12:41:06 GMT
maybe I'll try again sometime. I own the first one on DVD. the thing is, I never was much a horror/zombie/undead film fan. it took a fantastic-film-festival (a week of zombie films ) to get me excited, but once I started seeing the classics of the genre in the relative soberness of my own room instead of the exciting theatre with loads of geeks and fanboys shouting and screaming at the screen, these movies failed to bother me as much. Evil Dead II, supposedly better than the first, was even more dissapointing in a way because it isn't that different, storywise, from the first. I understand the camp and cult that surrounds these films, but it's hardly my thing. maybe on a rewatch. I never bothered to watch the third film, even. |
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RNL
Global Moderator
Posts: 6,624
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Post by RNL on May 5, 2007 13:22:55 GMT
Evil Dead II, supposedly better than the first, was even more dissapointing in a way because it isn't that different, storywise, from the first. Well, to be fair, neither film really has a story, so much as a rough premise from which to launch into the grotesque lunacy. The 'sequel' apparently ignores all the events of the first film and starts again with two characters instead of five (and a bigger budget and more of an overt sense of humour). The third film kind of follows the second, and has a story. Actually, it's a little reminiscent of The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. It's a lot of people's favourite of the trilogy, so it's probably worth your time - I think having the more involved story is what drags it down, but the various set-pieces along the way are superb (and by this time Bruce Campbell was a cult icon and the series had become complete comedy). |
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Blib
Ghost writer
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Post by Blib on Dec 23, 2007 6:28:11 GMT
A Simple Plan (1998) -  Spider-Man (2002) - The Evil Dead (1981) - Spider-Man 2 (2004) - Evil Dead II (1987) - Army of Darkness (1992) - The Quick and the Dead (1995) - Spider-Man 3 (2007) -
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Post by Anasazie on Nov 20, 2008 8:01:42 GMT
1. A Simple Plan (1998) 5/10
2. Spider-Man (2002) 5/10
3. The Evil Dead (1981) 4/10
4. The Gift (2000) 3/10
5. Evil Dead II 3/10
6. Spider-Man 2 (2004) 2/10
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Post by svsg on Nov 25, 2008 4:39:26 GMT
spider man Spiderman 2 Spiderman 3 Evil dead |
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Post by Anasazie on Aug 13, 2009 12:06:10 GMT
Hey wetdog....what do you find so interesting about the Evil Dead films? I'm considering watching them, but don't think they'll be cup of green tea, so looking for more of a reason than just a film buff that tries to check most stuff out reason.
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