Tuesday, May 23, 2017

The Grandfather of all lens flares

Ah, the lens flare.

An exciting effect, a beautiful image, now reduced to another keystroke in a suite of special effects in the digital cinematography platform.

I was watching a routine, earnest film called “Denial,” when, near the end of the movie, the director Mick Jackson and his cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos, all of a sudden seemed to have discovered the lens flare. None appeared in the first 100 minutes of the movie, but in a few scenes in the last 10 minutes? Blue and golden horizontal streaks suddenly appear. It was as though they had just watched a 'Star Trek' reboot. (A better title for this earnest melodrama would have been 'Denied!')