Timecode

This film has been sat on my Sky+ box for a while waiting for me to watch it and last night I finally did. It's a bit of tricky film to describe. Four 90 minute single takes all shown together on a screen split into quarters in real time. Have a look at the trailer if you don't get what I mean. I enjoyed it a lot. It's a brilliant technical achievement with the cameras, actors and stories all interweaving. It must have been quite a feat of organization, direction and choreography to arrange. Apparently they shot the film 15 times and choose the best one at the end. It's just a shame that the actual story itself gets a bit boring at times otherwise it would received a lot more recognition. Now it's just an interesting experiment.

When I started watching I knew about the quarter screen aspect from the EPG description but I didn't know about the real time single take part. Once I realised the editor in me started looking for places where they could have put in a sneaky edit without people noticing. There were a couple of points with fade or a whip pan which could have been used. I don't know if they were and I guess only director Mike Figgis will know for sure.

When I saw the name Mike Figgis I thought he sounded famous to me. I'm not really sure why that is as it turns out the only other film I've ever seen by him is Leaving Las Vegas but he has been nominated for 2 Oscars. It was cool to see Kyle MacLachlan in it. He always pops up in the oddest places but he'll always be Paul Atreides to me. Julian Sands too is another actor who pops up in a wide variety of roles, from Stargate & Smallville to Arachnophobia & Naked Lunch. In this he was really funny.

If you have any interest the process of making films you should have probably watched this at least once, otherwise you're not missing much.