Sunday, July 4, 2010

Daybreakers - The King of Teal and Orange!


Ding! Ding! Ding!
We have a winner!!


 I just saw Daybreakers and it is by far the most extreme version of Teal and Orange ever!  It wins by way of knockout over the former title holder, Transformers 2.


Now, the interesting thing is that even though every single scene is drenched in shades of teal and orange (ok, and the occasional RED too), I can actually accept it for this movie because it makes sense within the context of the story - a world in which vampires are the norm and humans are an ever-dwindling endangered race.
(Ethan Hawke - Yawny McYawn)

As to the movie itself... well I wish they had spent as much budget on character development as they did on art direction.  The main problem is the characters, especially the lead, Ethan Hawke, are incredibly flat and boring.  You really don't care what happens to any of them - stay vampire, turn back human, die, blow up - I really couldn't be bothered.

(ok - Willem Dafoe isn't bad.  If the whole movie had a bunch of Dafoes running around, it wouldn't entirely suck)

Also, the story really isn't a horror film at all - it is more a corporate/political thriller that happens to be set in a world of vampires in business suits.


The vampire mythos is about sex, seduction and eternal life - not cornering the market on near-blood.

Yawn.

3 comments:

  1. Have moviemakers come upon this color scheme as the magic formula for making video look like film?
    It's turning up everywhere now. Most commercials are adopting O'n'T as the new "look" and I'm sure very few of those are still shooting 35.
    The vid-to-film-look list used to be: 24p, Neutral Density, Shallow DOF, proper lighting, and the "film look" would magically appear.
    Now it's "add the peach, add the teal, and don't forget to oversaturate" and suddenly it's film.
    I just can't see joining the herd of film-look-seekers; there's millions of colors in my camera and computer, and I'm going to use them.

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  2. I thought it was because Pantone picked a teal ('majolica blue') as the color of the year, and orange was having a 'second coming'...but I think those both occurred because of the color grading/DI you mentioned....

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  3. Reminds me of the relentless green color scheme of The Panic Room, which I jokingly refer to as The Green Room.

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