Word: staticity
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...opening and closing shots of "Germinal," considered in isolation, suggest quite a different trajectory than what which the film actually takes. The first shot would give the static impression of a painting depicting a mine at the deal of night, except for the constantly reconfiguring shapes of the fires set to dissipate some of the darkness. We see Le Voreux, the mine around which much of the film's action revolves, from the vantage point of Etienne (Renaud), a newcomer who also looks at the scene for the first time...
...techno, The Downward Spiral is a 14-song, 65-minute howl of somebody falling into the void. What keeps it from being just another nauseating exercise in shock rock is the intelligence and creative force behind its dire sound. On March of the Pigs, for example, layers of shifting static are suddenly broken by a lyrical piano riff that blooms like a flower through cracked pavement before the wall of noise crushes it again...
...bird, zooming and swooping in toward an animated Paris. This perspective is realistic enough to make the viewer slightly queasy, but, sadly, seems to have eaten up most of the film's budget--the rest of the movie is nowhere near as technically advanced. The backgrounds are largely static, with the animated characters looking out of place moving over them, as is especially evident in the musical number "Thumbelina" which introduces us to the title character. The coordination of dialogue and the characters' movements is also somewhat choppy and distracting, though it seems to improve as the movie progresses...
Liat Kaplan's direction creates a slick synchronicity between characters, keeping the emotion at a dramatic rather than melodramatic level. In places, this results in woodenness, but it is kept to a minimum even in the potentially static second and third acts. Even in the most turgid moments of the plot the emphasis on appropriateness and refinement does not give way to the hackneyed and postured acting that has labeled opera in the minds of many as a dramatic dead...
...Since the number of spots at medical schoolsis static, it makes things tougher," Bianchi says...