The Shot

I have done some pretty amazing things in my life. I have showered for 8 straight days, I have given a wedgie to the Queen of England, I have out dried a dryer, but none of these things compare to what I saw this weekend.


Every year me and the luckiest lady go to watch the all Best Picture Nominees the weekend of the Oscars. It is 12 hours of sitting in a theater that begins to smell like rotten farts after hour six (Seriously people. If your stomach cannot handle that many Whatchamacallits, run out and grab an apple between movies! No one is going to judge you. Well, except me, but I judged your way before you started breaking wind.). After the event each year I am so brain dead that I am only able to have a conversation with a blender, because at that point, it is my intellectual equal. This year, in spite of being clinical stupid by the end (And you can be declared medically stupid. Fact. I diagnose people with this all the time. And I wear a stethoscope and have a name tag that says “Dr. Sexypants”, so, you know, I know what I’m talking about.) I was left mulling over one shot.

Out of the 720 minutes of being in that theater there was a 4.5 minute sequence that left me speechless It is totally worth seeing ‘Atonement’ for this I went into ‘Atonement’ expecting to be satisfied but not really enjoy it Kind of like meatloaf but I was wrong The entire movie was great but at about the midway point I was left in awe A four and a half minute tracking shot through an army of British soldiers on a beach in France No cuts Beautiful Through this shot we transition into several backgrounds giving the illusion of cuts without actually cutting We follow several different characters as they travel the beach before entering a bar I was blown away I actually believe I started to giggle at about the minute three mark fully aware of the genius I was watching Kind of like you are laughing as you read this run-on no cut sentence fully aware that I am a linguistic genius(Or I haven’t fully grasped the concept of grammar and punctuation taught to third graders, but I say, “genius.”)

There have been several shots that have left me speechless with their impact. There was the tracking shot from ‘400 Blows’, the wide shot in ‘Duck You Sucker’ (Leone’s underrated masterpiece if you ask me, and I know you were.), Michael Jordan’s buzzer beater to beat the Cavs, and now this.This is the shot I will be using as a measuring sticking for all future shots. A sexy measuring stick. OW!

-Brandin

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