SEPT 27 — I read an interview with Steven Soderbergh (director of the Ocean’s trilogy, Out Of Sight and loads more) where he said that directing films is a matter of taste more than anything else. For a long time I’ve pondered about that statement of his, knowing full well that it takes more than just ‘taste’ to make a good film director; technical knowledge and an ability to see the bigger picture being some of the other requirements.
Still, I tried to look hard at films by all sorts of directors to see what he meant. Based on what I’ve managed to observe, bad directors are usually bad simply because they lack what film critics would call “mastery of film language.” They move their cameras without any thought to what that particular camera move might mean. They cut to a close-up without understanding the kind of psychological effect a close-up will have on viewers. And most film directors don’t even use lighting as an expressive tool.
In short, I didn’t manage to find a film director who has clearly mastered (or at the very least gifted with a natural talent for) the nooks and crannies and film language, and yet still makes pretty “bad” films because of a lack of good taste. I didn’t, that is, until I stumbled upon, and naturally decided to explore the filmmaking exploits of Isaac Florentine.
An Israeli martial artist who moved to the US to further his filmmaking career by first working as a fight choreographer and then as second unit director, I was a late inductee into the Isaac Florentine fan club as I only started to take notice of his name when the whole debate about “‘vulgar auteurism” started to raise its head a few years back. By then he had already made Undisputed 2: Last Man Standing, Ninja and Undisputed 3: Redemption, all 3 receiving wildly enthusiastic props from the vulgar auteurist critics, especially for the two Undisputed sequels.
To be perfectly honest, a director who mostly makes direct-to-video (DTV) films for Nu Image (a company that makes films with titles like Cyborg Cop, Terminator Woman and Lethal Ninja) doesn’t really sound like a very appetizing subject for further research, does it? It took me a while to finally get around to sampling his Undisputed films, but when I did I was simply floored by their magnificence.
Make no mistake, they are first and foremost all-out fight flicks, so don’t come in expecting Shakespearean high drama. Imagine then, my surprise to find in Undisputed 2 the sort of poetic beauty (both emotional and visual) that you normally wouldn’t expect from an action film.
These are minor elements, of course, in a film chock full of amazingly performed fights that are shot with the kind of finesse that will make most A-list Hollywood action directors turn green with envy.
And he just gets better and better with every film, culminating in what is surely one of the best DTV movies ever made in Ninja 2: Shadow Of A Tear, rivaled only by Universal Soldier: Regeneration for that crown. In fact, I’d say that Ninja 2 is one of 2014’s most thrilling films so far, and will probably end up on my list of favourite films of 2014 come the end of the year.
Yes folks, it’s that good of an action film, with around 70 minutes of its 90 minute running time devoted to staging and executing some of the most exciting fight scenes you’ll see this or any other year.
It’s on the back of all this excellence that I braved myself to explore Florentine’s back catalogue, which consists of unpromising-sounding DTV titles like US Seals II, Special Forces, Assassin’s Bullet and Bridge Of Dragons, and it’s from savouring these movies that I finally realized what Soderbergh meant with his statement in that interview.
Even in a movie as early as Bridge Of Dragons, Florentine has displayed an understanding of film language that marks him as a good and naturally skilled director. He knows exactly the right moment a zoom-in would have maximum impact, and his camera movements always seem to make sense and have a reason behind them. In short, he’s got the visual storytelling aspect of filmmaking down pat already.
What seems to peg these early films is really just a matter of taste. For some reason he puts in some sort of “whoosh” sound effect to underline almost every single movement that his characters make, which is as cheesy as cheese gets. Those slick camera movements, close-ups and zoom-ins were clearly made to make a point – but the points they’re trying to make are simply lame.
With age and experience, Florentine has clearly refined his taste, and that better refined taste combined with his technical mastery has now made his later films (post-Undisputed 2) shining examples of how to properly do action films. Even though there’s no accounting for taste, when it comes to filmmakers, it really does count for something. Florentine is living proof of that.
*This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
