Category Archives: Movies

Moving pictures for snappers

Roger Deakins

Movies, Photographers

Cinematographer.

Like the movie composer Ennio Morricone, Roger Deakins had to wait decades for his Oscar, beaten out by lesser talents unknown today. Ennio got it for a haunting score for Tarantino’s so-so ‘The Hateful Eight’, and Roger’s award came for a so-so movie with great cinematography – his.

For most movie goers I suspect the appeal is that of a particular star or, for the better informed, the work of a favorite director. For me, as often as not, it’s to see the art of the cinematographer and if you tell me that Roger Deakins did the work, I’m off to the theater, cash in hand.

I was reminded of this logic the other day when another huge Deakins fan suggested I watch ‘Sicario’, a movie about the nefarious bumblings of the CIA on the tunnel-ridden Mexican border with Texas and Arizona. You know, the one where we are making ladder and shovel manufacturers rich by building a wall. That fan was no other than my son and when I asked what prompted him to watch the movie his reply was simple: Roger Deakins.

Here are some favorite images from Roger Deakins’s movies. The lighting is invariably simple, the camera moves little, and in backlit scenes Deakins will often expose for the highlights, leaving the viewer straining to make out faces, to great effect:



The Hudsucker Proxy. Paul Newman and Tim Robbins yuck it up.


The chilling ‘Barton Fink’ gave Deakins free rein.


‘The Man Who Wasn’t There. A cinematographic masterpiece.


‘The Big Lebowski’. Julianne Moore and Jeff Bridges relive Busby Berkeley.


007 in ‘Skyfall. An awful movie saved by great lens work.


The chilling opening of ‘Fargo’.


Another from Fargo, towards the end. How do you improve on this?


‘The Assassination of Jesse James’. Forget whether you like Westerns. This is all about gorgeous imagery. Casey Affleck and Brad Pitt.


Deakins at his quietest and most terrifying. Javier Bardem won the Oscar thanks to the camera work in ‘No Country for Old Men’.


Another from ‘No Country’, and unforgettable at that. Lighting as simple as it gets, exposure for the highlights.


Tim Robbins again, in ‘The Shawshank Redemption’.


The cabin scene in ‘True Grit’. Jeff Bridges deserved the Oscar for this one, but had to wait a while longer.


‘Oh! Brother, Where Art Thou?’ Cop as demon. Deakins’s lens captures the fires of hell in the policeman’s glasses.


In ‘Sicario’ the CIA enters the drug smugglers’ tunnel. Exposure once again for the highlights.


Although sci-fi strikes me as a genre for two year-olds, ‘Blade Runner 2049’ finally earned Deakins the Oscar he so richly deserved.


Eight of the thirteen movies above were made by the Coen brothers. Quality attracts quality.

Try and catch a few of Roger Deakins’s movies if you care about great images. For a complete listing of the master’s work, click here.

Update May 10, 2023:

Unsurprisingly, Deakins is also an adept photographer, favoring the street photography genre. Click here for more.

Big small storage

Computing, Mac Pro, Movies

2.5″ spinning hard drives.


Dual 2.5″ drive enclosure compared to 4 bay 3.5″ behemoths. As the yellow label discloses, this Mac Pro runs a speedy 3.33GHz CPU.

As my movie collection grows, not helped by the 25GB size of ripped BluRay discs (compared with but 4GB for regular DVDs), so does the need for storage space.

Heretofore I have used Mediasonic 4-bay 3.5″ drive enclosures at $100 for the 4-bay version, and they have performed flawlessly for over 5 years now, loaded with Western Digital Red 4TB hard drives. The drives now retail for $135, which is a lot more than I paid years ago. The blue tape on these which you can just make out in the picture is to blank off the obnoxiously bright flashing LEDs on the fascia.

With traditional spinning disk technology refusing to die, and SSD prices still far too high for bulk storage, the much more compact 2.5″ hard drives have made huge leaps. 4TB capacities are now readily available in the smaller drive size. Seagate makes 4TB 15mm thick drives for $130 and two of these fit an inexpensive $40 enclosure. There are many versions available; just make sure the one you order will accommodate 15mm drives, which are a good deal thicker than the typical notebook drive. So the cost per 4TB of 2.5″ storage figures to $150, compared with $160 for the older tech 3.5″ drives, with great savings in space and, as importantly, far lower power draw. The enclosure of choice used here supports USB3 (though USB2 is perfectly adequate for movies) and comes with both USB2 and USB3 cables, as well as a power supply. I have added USB3 – having run out of USB2 sockets – using an Inateck USB3 PCIe card; the Mac Pro comes with USB2 native ports only and I happened to have a spare card lying around. USB3 is not a requirement here. The price of this card appears to have more than doubled since I bought mine.

A 4TB drive (the second drive is a back-up clone) will store some 160 BluRay disks, so this big little addition should see me happy for another year or two. The cost of storage per movie, along with the backup clone, figures at just $1.88.

Streets of Fire revisited

Movies

Still as good as movie making gets.

In a piece titled ‘Still movies‘ some dozen years ago I extolled the exceptional cinematography in Walter Hill’s ‘Streets of Fire’.

The film was a huge flop when it was introduced, poor publicity and strong competition from another tedious, puerile Star Trek movie damning it quickly.

Since that time in 1984 ‘Streets of Fire’ has rightly acquired cult status and – finally! – has been released in BluRay format.

Few movies can hold a candle to Andrew Laszlo’s photography or William Hill’s direction, and most of those were made by Stanley Kubrick or David Lean.

Here are a few more images from this visual and musical masterpiece:



The atmosphere of late-50s industrial America is perfectly captured.


A perfect fade, reminiscent of the Russian cinema.


Beautiful Diane Lane was just 18 when the movie was made. Her pouty performance is perfect.


As Raven Shaddock, leader of the biker gang, Willem Dafoe stars in one of his first roles.
Hopefully he will get the Oscar he so deserves this year.


Nearly all the cars are Studebakers. Here the cops’ gets trashed.


The dynamism of the cinematography and the performances in the final concert number remain stunning.


The back-up group, The Sorels, mime their music like everyone else.
The beautiful number ‘I Can Dream About You’ was written and performed by Don Hartman.


As the tough good guy Michael Paré gives a splendid low key performance.
Here he is shooting up the bad guys’ Harleys in The Battery, a rough after hours joint.


Chicago’s El serves as backdrop in this rain soaked scene.


Some of my closest friends.


Dafoe does not know how to act badly, raven haircut and all.
His sidekick is Lee Ving, who is best known as the frontman for the L.A. hardcore punk band Fear.


In one of the best fight scenes ever staged, Raven Shaddock meets his match in Tom Cody.


Amazon has the movie in the BluRay version. Snap it up before Universal does something as dumb as its roll out of the movie over 30 years ago and pulls it from distribution.