Scanners
Jim Emerson
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2011-02-28
Take a look at all that's going on in the image above. Who is talking? What are the relationships between the characters? How much is packed into this one frame?
Since it came out last fall, I'd almost forgotten what an exhilarating information-overload experience David Fincher's "The Social Network" is. Cut and composed and performed with breathless, jittery speed, it's a movie that consists of virtually nothing but conversations in rooms (the attempted, missed, short-circuited, coded connections that struck me when I first saw it). It's action-packed -- enough to give you whiplash, watching all the elements interacting within the 2.40:1 widescreen frame -- even though there are no "action sequences" (car chases, shootouts, fist fights, acrobatic stunts, etc.); the filmmaking is charged with energy without falling back on today's routinely frenetic, handheld run-and-gun/snatch-and-grab camerawork (the camera is generally mounted on a tripod; when it moves, it's on a crane or a dolly -- often for establishing shots or a shift in perspective that brings a new element into the frame). Smart, quick, efficient.
The crunchy guitar riff starts over the Columbia Pictures logo and then the crowd noise comes up, the music drops down, and before the logo fades to black and the first image appears, we hear Mark (Jesse Eisenberg) speaking the movie's opening line -- a question that's also a challenge: "Did you know there are more people with genius IQs living in China than there are people of any kind living in the United States?" What follows is a blisteringly fast-paced screwball comedy exchange ("His Girl Friday" through a 64-bit dual-core processor) between Mark and his girlfriend (not for very much longer ) Erica in which nearly every line is a misunderstanding (intentional or unintentional), a sarcastic jab, a leap of logic, a block, an interruption, a feint, an abrupt shift in the angle of attack, a diversion, a retreat, a refinement, a recapitulation (I'm sure there are many fencing terms that apply to the various conversational strategies employed here)...