Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: The Good Shepherd

This is topic The Good Shepherd in forum Film Handlers' Movie Reviews at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.

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Posted by Will Kutler (Member # 770) on 12-27-2006, 12:38 PM:

YAWN! Long, boring and way, way too much underdevelopment in both character and historic background. The few action sequences were completely covered in the trailers. Too much focus on Yale's Skull and Bones.

For example, it is a well known fact that both the Jewish and Italian underworlds were mostly responsible for breaking up the German-American Bund and that US Intelligence approached Charlie Luciano via Meyer Lansky for assistance in patrolling the N.Y Waterfront and also for assistance with the U.S. invasion of Sicily.

The Godfather Part II does a much, much better job of explaining the Mafia's involvement with Batista and Cuban Gambling and Batist's curruption which lead to the rise of Castro.

And there have been other films that have been much more successful in discussing the Cuban Missile Crisis as well as the recruitment of former Nazi War Criminals and Scientists by the US Intelligence Community post WWII.

For me, this film was a real disappointment!!

K

Posted by Mark Lensenmayer (Member # 134) on 12-28-2006, 07:33 PM:

Too slow and not very interesting. Matt Damon's expression never changed...why didn't he age over the 25 years of the film? Ms. Jolie very mis-cast...she does not look like a woman from the 50's at all. Too many characters and too much jumping around in time.

Not awful, just not entertaining.

Very disappointing...C--.

Posted by Richard Greco (Member # 2032) on 12-28-2006, 10:21 PM:

Wasn't too bad. Really forced me to use my brain...I hurt after that one...

It wasn't as action packed as I thought.

I really got annoyed at the son...what an UGLY motherfu#$@e!

Posted by Paul Burt (Member # 3743) on 01-13-2007, 11:32 AM:

I thought this was quite good. It showed the human price of a life in the spy community, even for someone who had the barest hint of humanity in the first place. The political context was sketchy, but these guys seem far less influenced by political concerns than they are by their own secret agendas (for which the Skull and Bones seems to be the main power source). And if you're interested in the ugly bits about the recruitment of the Nazi rocket scientists after WWII, go see The Good German. That is one of the main plot points of that film.

Posted by Scott Norwood (Member # 30) on 01-28-2007, 09:30 PM:

I liked it, too. Most of the reviewers disliked it and I can see why some thought it was slow (it could have been tightened and the running time reduced by at least twenty minutes). I can't speak to the accuracy of it, but I found the film entertaining and thought-provoking.

Too bad the digital intermediate looked pretty shitty. [thumbsdown]

Posted by Christian Appelt (Member # 1067) on 03-07-2007, 11:12 AM:

quote: Mark Lensenmayer
Matt Damon's expression never changed...why didn't he age over the 25 years of the film?

If you keep stone faced like Damon's character, you don't get wrinkles and look like 29 for the next 25 years. [Smile]

Saw it on a 65 ft. screen yesterday, projection was fine. Print quality was awful, absolutely no detail & sharpness in the long shots, little grain but often a smeary effect that one always finds in Technicolor's D.I.s. Super 35 done wrong, although I suspect that the original image has been mishandled even more in international dupe/release printing.

I hope there is a hell for studio people who dare to offer shitty prints (THE GOOD SHITHEAP might have been appropiate) like these to a paying audience. Watching THE GOOD SHEPHERD was painful to my eyes.

A very slow film, some OK acting, but personally, I lost interest at the 90 minute mark and had to fight sleepiness until the end. Those neverending bluish images and melancholic piano music sent me into a depressed mood when I left the theatre. Even Angelina Jolie's presence didn't help... [Wink]

The good thing was that it made me remember DeNiros directorial debut A BRONX TALE which has a well-told story, good acting and wonderful cinematography. Have to get the DVD soon.

Posted by Michael Brown (Member # 890) on 03-07-2007, 06:38 PM:

Reasonably good film, not a great film but a good one and I didn't find the time to drag, I've seen 90 minutes films that felt longer.

I hung around watching the end credits and expected to see that 'Panavision Genesis' logo. The whole movie looked as if it was shot digitally. Also I noticed some weird stuff going on with the motion at some points. There were a couple of close-ups of actor's faces (one at the start and another at the end) where it look as the action had been slowed down. But it didn't look like an obvious effect that should have been there.
(I wonder if that is the "smeary effect" that Christian talks about in the post above)

Posted by Christian Appelt (Member # 1067) on 03-08-2007, 11:02 AM:

It has been discussed on cinematography.com recently. Two opinions that made sense to me:

quote:
It reminds me of broadcast digital TV compression. See the movie and judge for yourself. When a face is sort of smooth, featureless, and front-lit in a low-key environment, it looks sort of degrained and when it moves, the solid block of skintone seems to lag behind itself. It's subtle though, not as bad as TV compression, but I've seen it in other TDI D.I.'s ("Seabiscuit", "Aviator", "Kill Bill" -- but I'm only guessing that Technicolor did this D.I., I didn't sit through the credits). Rougher skin with a lot of pores & lines doesn't seem to have that problem -- it's more visible when it's a more solid patch of skintone.

(David Mullen, ASC)

and from Max Jacoby, DP from UK/Luxembourg:

quote:
I saw the film last week and it definitely was an overuse of grain-reduction, courtesy of our NR-happy friends at TDI.
Another disturbing side effect of the NR beside the laggy color was that whenever a face in CU was static, it was sharp, but as soon as there was a tiny bit of movement, it looked immediately soft. I am not talking about motion-blur, but noise reduction obviously works best (or least worst should I say) when there is no movement. As soon as there is even the slightest movement it redices the overall sharpness of the image.