Almost every post says something to the effect of: 'I've seen it too. Whenever I see a contra-zoom in a film it makes me die a little inside. Think about it, what effect does a contra-zoom have on an audience? When I see it I always think am I supposed to be feeling vertigo now? Is the character experience vertigo? Why is the character experiencing vertigo when he's just realised there's a shark in the water?Īnyway, since then it has become synonymous with bad film-making and is a staple of student films across the world. It has the effect of telling the audience absolutely nothing and utterly confusing them. He decided it was a smart idea to take a cinematic technique that truly shows does give an impression of vertigo and use it when the protagonist first realises there is a shark in the water. It was made famous though by Spielberg in Jaws. It is done by zooming into an scene while tracking out at the same speed (or the other way round, I always forget). A fucking contra-zoom.Ī contra-zoom is an incredibly clever technique that Hitchcock invented as a way of showing vertigo. The guy who directed this doesn't, he just wanted to make a referential film that says nothing about anything except his ego.Īnd on top of all this, the director decided to use a contra-zoom. But at least Tarantino has something interesting to say. The cliche characters and situations also make the film verge on racism, and the idea that this film in any way represents Paris or Parisian life is much the same as saying a Tarantino film represents anything about America. This is basically a scene from a Disney film and speaks clearly of the intellectual level of this film. There is a sequence wherein the characters wax-lyrical about the Eiffel Tower always having its lights on and that it's the antithesis of their lives (or some bullshit like that) and then, and get this, as soon as they walk away the lights go off.
It is shot in black-and-white because, you know, then it's, like, powerful and deep and stuff. It is the product of a film geek who has complided a list of characters, situations and themes from a list of pretty bloody awful gangster films and thrown them together in the hope of it meaning something.