It was a little startling to hear that Mad Max swept the B-level Academy Awards last night. Much as I love the series, the last episode was kind of dumb and forgettable. Well, at least no one was nuts enough to hand it any awards for things like directing, screenplay, or acting, and it's fair enough to say that its costumes and make-up and so on were well crafted. (But sound editing? Seriously? Do they throw darts for that award, simply treat it as a consolation prize, or are there judges who genuinely pay attention to the technical aspects of sound editing?)
On the other hand I have to admit it's the only movie on the entire Oscars roster I've actually seen, so it's not as though I had my finger on the pulse.
I thought Mad Max was amazing. It's one of the most tightly-edited, intense movies I've ever seen. It's amazing to me that they were able to maintain that pace through the movie with only one short break most of the way through without exhausting the audience. And it pushed the Heavy Metal line between hardcore and ridiculous as far as you could go without crossing it, which is a real feat in itself. It deserved some sort of award.
ReplyDeleteI don't know enough about the technical details of sound editing, though, to know what would go into an award on that point.
It may be my long abused ears, but my main complaint with sound, at least with TV programs, and in particular British TV programs, is the background music/noise can be so annoyingly loud as to make difficult to hear the dialoge. I "get it" that to be realistic, you want some street noise and bar noise etc, but it is a movie, not real life, and if the actors are unintelligible, the story is lost.
ReplyDelete( the corollary to this is that REALLY loud noises, are attenuated to mildness-I don't think any of the sound people ever heard a gunshot.)
Must be all turtles going down.
ReplyDeleteRaven, the Japanese tend to have the reverse method for sound mixing. Their dialogue is louder and clearer, while the music and sfx really are in the background. I chalk it up to aesthetics being a mirror of the soul of the people, as well as being formed from politics which is formed from ethics, epistemology, metaphysics.
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