Hit Me With Your Best Shot: Under the Skin (2014)

(Written for The Film Experience's Hit Me With Your Best Shot series. Thanks, Nathaniel! So nice to have an excuse to actually write.)

Choosing a "best shot" from Under the Skin's tableaux challenged me not only because they are as gorgeous as they are diverse, but also because it's difficult to do them justice with only one still image. Conceptually the film's visual language is often powerful, if a little obvious at times; in motion it's true art, bounding between gloss and low-lit murkiness, dim shabby shacks and vibrant cosmic sunbursts, without ever seeming garish or inconsistent.

Initially I wanted to pick a shot from Johansson's touching "revelation" scene, in which she first contemplates the grandiosity of the humans around her in a montage of their moving gold-filtered figures, layered continually over each other, with her face eventually emerging in the center like a black hole. I found it too hard to get a screen capture that adequately captured the clash between its alien heroine's fundamental emptiness and her new sense of wonder. See below for an approximation:

Still kinda cool, although the effect clearly doesn't translate.

Instead, I chose a shot that, though perhaps not as meaningful as the rest of the film's loud composition, is subtle and fun while remaining expressive: 

What do I love about this shot? The cake ScarJo orders essentially matches her costume's color scheme.

The big cluster of red berries (shirt and lipstick), the single black one (eyes), and the creamy off-white frosting (that delicate complexion) are all garnishes to the dark chocolate filling, a choice with a meaning that shifts from metaphorical to literal as our understanding of this creature changes.

I love the way the diagonal lines of the napkin, offset at equilateral angles by the diagonal lines of the fork, point directly to that one fateful bite of cake. I love the three concentric circles that ensconce it. As if Jonathan Glazer was concerned that we might miss the significance of this scene, the moment at which ScarJo realizes that the pleasures of our species are unattainable for her, he uses every element of the mise-en-scene to put a laser focus on the subject of this long, deliberate close-up.

And I mean, it's cake. How can you not love it?

Oh. :(

Hit Me With Your Best Shot: Goldfinger (1964)

(Written for The Film Experience's Hit Me With Your Best Shot series. Thanks, Nathaniel!)

At their best, the early Bond movies make exceptional use of vertical space. The franchise's most striking visual qualities - its lavish set design and architecture, its bombastic aerial shots, the frequent use of picturesque international geography - are highlighted by expansive multi-layered compositions, often swallowing Bond whole. Refer to the dizzying use of crane during a rooftop brawl in You Only Live Twice (which, despite a certain Soderbergh's insistence, is easily the best Bond for my money), or The Spy Who Loved Me's immediately iconic cold open, in which Roger Moore rides that Union Jack parachute all the way down a snowy mountain into white nothingness. Roger Deakins even gets at this pattern in Skyfall, shooting a brief but beautiful fight sequence amidst the skyscrapers of Shanghai where frame after frame is filled with callbacks to the series' vertiginous tendencies: glass panels with clear vertical edges but indefinite bodies, screen images of jellyfish drifting upwards, and of course a long drop for Bond's would-be assassin.

Goldfinger is no exception. It isn't my favorite Bond movie from this decade, but it's definitely the one that set the visual standard for future installations. The foundations of this house style are most apparent in the Switzerland chapter of the film, as demonstrated by Deborah; Ted Moore stuffs his characters into those rolling green hills as often as possible, even mirroring that iconic sniper shot not five minutes after we first see it.

But my favorite shot in Goldfinger employs these principles while at the same time inverting them, stuffing Bond's unconscious body into a cramped space that nonetheless is full of detail:

So many reflective surfaces! So much light! The little gold dots on that stove in the foreground are an especially charming touch. And the way Oddjob's shadow looms dead-center is so menacing. Considering this shot is meant to represent four or five feet of vertical space at most, the composition is unexpectedly busy. Bond occupies little of the frame here, a counterpoint to the equally robust but far more expansive frames he's typically placed in. He's absurdly prone, the first of numerous situations in Goldfinger where he's given the shitty end of the stick and asked to work his way out of bondage/imprisonment/ineffectuality. Perhaps his incompetence in this film is meant to foreshadow his fears of inadequacy in follow-up film Thunderball, expressed through this scene of him ambushed in a highly emasculatory way by recurring terrorist cell SPECTRE:

Nearly naked and being killed by what looks like an out-of-control buttsex machine? The worst possible way to go for a virile superspy.