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Author
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Topic: Jaw Droppers
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Paul Adsett
Film God
Posts: 5003
From: USA
Registered: Jun 2003
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posted September 10, 2008 09:25 AM
Over the years there have been many films with astonishing spectacles, scenes that grab you in shear disbelief at what you are watching. With the advent of CGI most modern action/adventure films now fall into this category, with such examples as Jurassic Park coming to mind. But we know its not real, its all done on a computer, so as great as these types of scenes are, they lose some of their impact.
For true jaw dropping films we have to go back to Hollywoods golden age, when what you saw was real. My personal all time jaw dropping favourite is from a musical film, The Great Ziegfeld filmed in 1936. This is actually a pretty awful film, but it is redeemed by one monumental sequence -the 'Pretty Girl is Like a Melody' number. This whole 11 minute scene is filmed around a huge rotating wedding cake, with 150 performers, in one continuous take. The jaw drop occurs right at the end when the camera cranes back and you see the shear scale and enormity of the whole thing, with Virginia Bruce perched at the top looking like she must be 80 feet in the air! This one number cost $220,000 in 1936, more than most complete films did at that time!
Hollywood at its golden peak.
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Osi Osgood
Film God
Posts: 10204
From: Mountian Home, ID.
Registered: Jul 2005
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posted September 10, 2008 09:42 AM
Upon reading your post, a stunt that came to my mind, was thr drop out of a high rise building in the film "Sharkey's Machine" (a
better than average Burt Reynolds action film), in which the bad guy gets blown out the window and just falls and falls, I mean, it's a long fall, and that wasn't CGI, that was an actual stuntman falling that far!
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"All these moments will be lost in time, just like ... tears, in the rain. "
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