Dan Bradley, the stunt coordinator and second unit director (hee hee, "unit" director) of the two Bourne sequels has been brought on to handle the stunt work on Bond 22.  

Now, I guarantee every other movie blogger on the web is going to be sporting boner-filled sweatpants over this news, but I'm not.  And that's because I like the action sequences in Casino Royale infinitely more than the shakey cam crap in Bourne.  Bourne seems to do what Batman Begins did (loved the movie, hated the way they shot the action sequences), and that's cut from blurry, shakey closeup to blurry, shakey closeup.  Transformers did it too, especially so in the Optimus Prime fight.  I don't get it.  Why spend millions on character design and choreography if you're just going to show us eight split-second closeups of blurry shit in succession that we don't have time to process anyway? How many closeups of Bourne's hand shifting do we see in this scene?  And I'm willing to bet that's just the same shot, repeated. 

If a guy gets his head chopped off in a scene, I don't want to see a closeup of the guy's eyes, then a blur, then a closeup of a bead of sweat, then a blur of the guy's lapel, then a closeup of the sword blade, then the guy's head: I want to see the guy get his goddamned head chopped off.  Quick-cut, shakey cam, blurry garbage cheats us out of experiencing the beauty of the actual fight choreography.

When you see a well-shot fight sequence – Kill Bill, some of the older Jackie Chan stuff, the advance clips from Shoot 'Em Up, Braveheart (I don't care if some of the guys are wearing watches and playing paddy cake in the background, that shit still looks better than Gladiator) – you immediately notice the difference.  The directors have confidence in the way their scenes play out, so they can show it to you, without shaking the camera like a crying baby and using jarring cuts to create artificial tension.  

Guh.  < /rant > 

Higher res version here.

Directed by Paul Haggis…

”In the Valley of Elah” tells the story of a war veteran (Tommy Lee Jones), his wife (Susan Sarandon) and the search for their son, a soldier who recently returned from Iraq but has mysteriously gone missing, and the police detective (Charlize Theron) who helps in the investigation.

I like Tommy Lee Jones as an actor, so I'm glad he's working more these days.  I guess it's only natural – when a guy looks like he's taken a load of buckshot to the face and lived to tell about it, you listen to what he has to say.  It's one of my rules to live by, like, never fight a guy with cauliflower ears.  

As for Paul Haggis, the guy's definitely done some good stuff, but he's also responsible for two of the crappiest, most inexplicably critically acclaimed movies in recent history, Crash and Letters From Iwo Jima.  Every critic acted like you were going to learn some profound life lesson from Letters From Iwo Jima.  You know what I learned?  War is long.  Two three hours of Japanese soldiers killing themselves filmed almost in black and white?  Yes, I know that actually happened; I knew that going in.  Why not film three hours of Jews getting gassed?  Because that would really drive the message home, that the holocaust was bad.  And Crash is to drama as Love Actually is to Romantic Comedy – it's one of those movies with cartoonishly unrealistic events and characters filmed in a realistic style, that uses cheap gimmicks to manipulate the audience's emotions (to elicit tears in Crash, a warm heart in Love Actually).

Nothing against cartoons, but if I'm going to watch a cartoon, it better at least have otters from space or schoolgirls having sex with octopi.