The camera moves at an uncanny speed, faster than a human, slower than a car, and the score-noir horns over a driving rhythm, briefly drowned out by the sound of the basketball game-makes the whole thing even more ominous. And yet the sensation evoked is nothing like the “Wow! They pulled it off!” feeling most stunt shots of this sort aim for. After that 10-minute close-up, the very next shot is a five-minute-long roller coaster that starts on Fay lighting a cigarette outside her office, swoops inches above the ground across half the town to the high school, cuts through the parking lot, the gym, and the basketball game in progress, leaps through a window, glides through the other half of the town, picks up Everett lighting a cigarette outside the radio station, and ends on the phone on his desk as it begins ringing. Viewers who prefer a more aggressive kind of showboating are also in luck. Like the audio-only section, it’s a reminder that an actor’s face, too, can be more than enough to tell a story. But that shot, a slow push-in on Fay working the switchboard as the calls coming in start getting weirder, is absolutely riveting. … Watch the clock now, 10 minutes,” Horowitz says in the midst of a shot that lasts for (nearly) 10 minutes. He isn’t above calling attention to what he’s doing, either: “Don’t call me for 10 minutes. That kind of intrusive directorial voice can descend into showboating, especially when a director is doing too much instead of too little, and there are times when The Vast of Night feels a little like Patterson’s sample reel: a catalog of the things he can do with film, made primarily for the benefit of other people who might wish to pay him to do them in the future. Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ Great New Comedy Is the Kind You Don’t See Anymore The Best Movies and TV Shows Coming to Netflix, (HBO) Max, Amazon Prime, and Hulu in June Now We Have the Finest Example Yet.įlounder Is Not a Flounder, and Other Things You Notice Watching The Little Mermaid if You’re a Fish Person It’d be incredibly pretentious if it weren’t incredibly effective. ![]() ![]() Later, Patterson takes this strategy much further: During a scene where a caller to Everett’s radio show is telling a story about a secret military project, Patterson fades to black and lets the audio do all the work. ![]() Although the conversation between them doesn’t slow down, it becomes manageable without the surrounding distractions, and the audience shares the characters’ relief at leaving the hot, sweaty crowd for a cool, quiet night. Once these characters leave the gym, though, Patterson’s camera clears away the clutter, giving us a couple of exceptionally long tracking shots following the protagonists walking down a country road at night. The opening, which follows Horowitz and McCormick’s characters Everett and Fay as they wander through a high school gym on the night of a big basketball game, is deliberately overwhelming: The dialogue is faster than a screwball comedy, the frame is packed with people in motion, the context clues are few and far between, and the entire scene is punctuated by the sound of rubber soles on hardwood. Mostly, The Vast of Night works by carefully controlling the information the audience receives-not in terms of withholding secrets and supplying plot twists but in the volume of information on-screen at any one point.
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