Hacker Cinema
Panic Room
2002 · Film · 111 min
Directed by David Fincher
Trapped in their New York brownstone's panic room, a hidden chamber built as a sanctuary in the event of break-ins, newly divorced Meg Altman and her young daughter Sarah play a deadly game of cat-and-mouse with three intruders - Burnham, Raoul and Junior - during a brutal home invasion. But the room itself is the focal point because what the intruders really want is inside it.
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4 comments on Hacker News
I stopped going sometime mid-2000s, not because of the cost or the quality of movies, but because of the quality of my fellow movie watchers, who were pretty awful to be honest (at least in Silicon Valley at the time):
- Lord of the Rings: a family came in after the movie started with a cluster of helium balloons, each of which eventually got loose and floated around the theatre. A small balloon creates an outsized shadow on the screen when it floats in front of the projector (e.g., sometimes a third of the picture would disappear).
- A Beautiful Mind: Several guys, in different spots in the theatre, would wait for a quiet moment in the movie and say loudly "Oh my beautiful mind". One guy had a squeaky seat, so each time he said his bit, he would squeak his chair 5 times.
- Panic Room: Two people directly behind us just laughed hysterically at seemingly every line in the movie.
Also, the advertisements went on too long (20 minutes maybe?) and were also rock-concert loud.
Last night, I watched Wolfs (Apple TV) in my living room with my spouse and we enjoyed it. It's not a great movie, but it's good, there are no ear-splitting advertisements, and the audience is well behaved.
Edit: Later in the 2000s I did see a few Coen brothers films in the theatre, and those were good experiences, but I still avoided the theatre for the most part.
> The camera moved at the same speed as Affleck, gliding with unvarying smoothness, which is exactly how Fincher likes his shots to behave.
I appreciate this so much. There’s a lot of shaky cam out there and it often gives me motion sickness or confuses my understanding of the scene. It also feels like a cheap trick directors use to create faux excitement, or to cover up sloppy filmmaking.
Fincher movies are easy to watch and understand visually. He does a lot of wide shots and long shots without sloppy cuts. In Panic Room he did a single shot (although CGI) that lasted several minutes and showed the viewer around the entire set in a single uninterrupted view. It was glorious.
I wish this approach was more common. Although I expect it’s not because it’s hard to accomplish.
Here are two of the worst abuses of fast cut, shaky cam scenes out there:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCKhktcbfQM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNlmRId2FVQ
Oh, Panic Room.
The movie in which a child has a severe low blood sugar, on the edge of death, and her mother administers here a large shot of... insulin! I could not believe it when I saw it. The treatment given in the movie would have killed her in no time.
For future reference, in case anyone comes across a diabetic experiencing a seizure. Do not give insulin in this case. This will lower blood sugar further. What they need is to consume anything with sugar, if conscious. If not, they need a glucagon injection. These typically come in a clunky red container, containing a large needle filled with saline and a vile containing a white powder. Shoot the saline into the vile, shake up the vile, extract the solution, then shoot the solution into the affected person's leg ASAP. Do not give anyone insulin under any circumstances. If you give someone glucagon with a high blood sugar, they will probably be ok. If you give someone insulin with a low blood sugar, they will likely be dead. /PSA
What amazes me about the coverage of this film is that David Fincher is getting totally overshadowed by his subject. Case in point, Techcrunch doesn't even mention that Fincher is the director, even crediting the film to Aaron Sorkin who just worked on the script.
Why is this an oversight? Fincher is one of the smartest directors in contemporary American film. Seven was a brilliant critique of how visual media feeds social violence. Fight Club turned a stylish but shallow nihilist novella into a meta-recursive critique of nihilism itself. Zodiac was a narrative masterpiece created out of nothing. The Game was an ambitious attempt to turn The Magus into a film that succeeded so well no-one seemed to notice. And even his lesser works, Panic Room and Benjamin Button, were still films that tried for something and are worth watching.
Yet not a single mention. Amazing.