If you have never watched The Paper stop what you're doing and watch it! I had never heard of it (I was living in Japan when it came out) until this interview. Just finished it. What a great movie!!
Is Ron Howard possibly the most underrated director of today? Yes. But it won't become apparent for a while. He's about dramas, bio-real or bio-adjacent character tales. Cinderella Man is one, for example. Souped up and corny fight film? Fair enough. But maybe some meaningful look back on how folks managed life in the depression, the unpretty boxing industry, and a topnotch film score. All filmed excellently. And oh, BTW, folks like Paul Giamatti, Russell Crowe and Rene Zellweger. Seems to me some appreciation due here, as viewed in totality.
If we ever get out of the era of shock, CGI, cut to the chase short memory preferences, we'll see he usually told a good story. Stories: things we used to like, and find in books. His appreciation will come when we've matured and bored out of whatever today's lingering fast food appetites in entertainment are. It may take a while, but he'll receive his due. IMHO.
I'd say he's a skilled journeyman. He probably peaked with Apollo 13 thirty years ago, and for decades before and after he's reliably been giving us okay-to-pretty-good pictures, mostly. So I'm hard-pressed to consider him underrated. He gets consistent work, he's got a backlog of beloved and popular movies, he's been hired for extremely popular IP like Dan Brown and was brought in to salvage a Star War (though I'd love to see what Lord/Miller's film would have looked like) -- what more can a guy ask ask?
Some strengths:
- Very good at maintaining clarity in chaotic action, e.g. the land race scene in Far and Away or the battles in Willow or any number of other examples
- Agreed on actors. He's one of the few people to give Paxton high billing in a prestige flick. Val Kilmer to me will always be Madmartigan.
- He tends to get great, great scores from some of the best in the business: Horner, Williams, Zimmer, Powell.
I will say, having recently explored some of his earlier work, I find some of it has really not aged well in the male-gazey way, for instance a whole lot of Splash, or Gutenberg's character in Cocoon.
Has anyone studied whether or not the soap opera effect depends on a person's age? I'm old, and I can't see it. High frame rate and 24 fps literally looks exactly the same to me. Every time my son-in-law comes to visit, he readjusts all of the settings on my TV.
Probably correlates to age among other things. Just like some people can't tell the difference between DVD and BD and some can't hear the difference between a 128kbps mp3 and a CD. Some people have sharper or faster eyes or ears and those things tend to lose resolution and temporal resolution as we get older.
For my part, I sometimes get motion sick with hfr or frame interpolation, and even when I don't it's extraordinarily distracting. My eyes are so accustomed to cinematic frame rates that interpolating frames can make it feel like the movie's playing at 1.5x or 2x speed. Very disorienting.
Actors and directors need to support the citizens that enriched them by boycotting all new projects. Any fat cats stacking cash in this era of growing American fascism are complicit in Trump’s authoritarian takeover.
Can we accept that a director may not need to be an author in the way film scholars seem to hope for. Howard makes excellent movies that are not archly anything. I stil think of Apollo 13 - and fully knowing the story, the suspense was still present.
We actually discuss this a bit in the episode: I tend to agree that I don't think he has a visual sensiblity (a la Kubrick or Spielberg or Mann or whoever), but there's a thematic throughline, for sure.
If you have never watched The Paper stop what you're doing and watch it! I had never heard of it (I was living in Japan when it came out) until this interview. Just finished it. What a great movie!!
Is Ron Howard possibly the most underrated director of today? Yes. But it won't become apparent for a while. He's about dramas, bio-real or bio-adjacent character tales. Cinderella Man is one, for example. Souped up and corny fight film? Fair enough. But maybe some meaningful look back on how folks managed life in the depression, the unpretty boxing industry, and a topnotch film score. All filmed excellently. And oh, BTW, folks like Paul Giamatti, Russell Crowe and Rene Zellweger. Seems to me some appreciation due here, as viewed in totality.
If we ever get out of the era of shock, CGI, cut to the chase short memory preferences, we'll see he usually told a good story. Stories: things we used to like, and find in books. His appreciation will come when we've matured and bored out of whatever today's lingering fast food appetites in entertainment are. It may take a while, but he'll receive his due. IMHO.
I liked Ron Howard as Opie and Richie. I think as a director he is completely focused on men. Kind of boring to me. Oh look, another film about men.
Ron Howard may be the most regular guy, everyman as a director.
For a man who grew up in the industry, he lacks pomposity , arrogance , and ostentatiousness ( is that a word?)
Maybe because he is not flashy and does not seek the limelight makes him underrated?
Maybe because he grew up in the industry he's not infatuated with it.
I'd say he's a skilled journeyman. He probably peaked with Apollo 13 thirty years ago, and for decades before and after he's reliably been giving us okay-to-pretty-good pictures, mostly. So I'm hard-pressed to consider him underrated. He gets consistent work, he's got a backlog of beloved and popular movies, he's been hired for extremely popular IP like Dan Brown and was brought in to salvage a Star War (though I'd love to see what Lord/Miller's film would have looked like) -- what more can a guy ask ask?
Some strengths:
- Very good at maintaining clarity in chaotic action, e.g. the land race scene in Far and Away or the battles in Willow or any number of other examples
- Agreed on actors. He's one of the few people to give Paxton high billing in a prestige flick. Val Kilmer to me will always be Madmartigan.
- He tends to get great, great scores from some of the best in the business: Horner, Williams, Zimmer, Powell.
I will say, having recently explored some of his earlier work, I find some of it has really not aged well in the male-gazey way, for instance a whole lot of Splash, or Gutenberg's character in Cocoon.
Has anyone studied whether or not the soap opera effect depends on a person's age? I'm old, and I can't see it. High frame rate and 24 fps literally looks exactly the same to me. Every time my son-in-law comes to visit, he readjusts all of the settings on my TV.
Probably correlates to age among other things. Just like some people can't tell the difference between DVD and BD and some can't hear the difference between a 128kbps mp3 and a CD. Some people have sharper or faster eyes or ears and those things tend to lose resolution and temporal resolution as we get older.
For my part, I sometimes get motion sick with hfr or frame interpolation, and even when I don't it's extraordinarily distracting. My eyes are so accustomed to cinematic frame rates that interpolating frames can make it feel like the movie's playing at 1.5x or 2x speed. Very disorienting.
Actors and directors need to support the citizens that enriched them by boycotting all new projects. Any fat cats stacking cash in this era of growing American fascism are complicit in Trump’s authoritarian takeover.
This is correct. I'll listen later but this headline is 100% correct.
It feels obviously correct!
Can we accept that a director may not need to be an author in the way film scholars seem to hope for. Howard makes excellent movies that are not archly anything. I stil think of Apollo 13 - and fully knowing the story, the suspense was still present.
We actually discuss this a bit in the episode: I tend to agree that I don't think he has a visual sensiblity (a la Kubrick or Spielberg or Mann or whoever), but there's a thematic throughline, for sure.