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Showing posts from October, 2020

Process is Protagonist in Greyhound

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It was in the closing seconds of the 2020 movie Greyhound , as we pan out to a shot of the wide ocean and the battle-weary remnants of a convoy of Allied destroyers, that I wondered for the first time in roughly an hour and a half, "was this shot on a boat or a set?" And that's because Greyhound is one of those movies that makes you forget you're watching a movie for a while. With its meticulous realism, and a whole bunch of close-ups of an underplayed and very effective performance by Tom Hanks, this movie reminds me of some of the more intense war scenes from Band of Brothers and Saving Private Ryan . Except, the whole movie is the intense war scene.  Paradoxically given it's expansive ocean setting, this movie unfolds in a very small space- with a few small exceptions, the human perfomances in this movie take place in the chart house, the plotting room and the pilot house (and the decks to its port and starboard) of a Fletcher-class WW2 destroyer. Three opera