Red/Che

I've not posted much about the Red One as it seems far above the league of most true independent/no budget filmmakers (after all, Alex Cox made a whole feature for about the cost of three properly kitted out units.) Fitting with this, on the website, a lot of the interviews and promotional material is aimed at/comes from big budget filmmakers (Steven Soderberg, Doug Liman, some other full time Hollywood artists/craftspeople) so rather than a revolution, it seems the camera is more likely to cause something more akin to a cabinet reshuffle.

However it is interesting to note that while the first work is in on Soderberg's Che Guevara Biopic(s) which had it's (their) première at Cannes, very little if any commented on the digital production (e.g. from Salon.com, the New York Times, Village Voice, and the Guardian). Only one review I found, from Variety, even mentions Red, and only to describe the look as "highly promising", a couple of others, another from Variety and this from Cinematical simply mention that it's HD, though cinematical does add "Che doesn't merely look wonderful; it also delivers on the long-promised but rarely delivered potential DV [sic] offers real artists..."

This could be down to Soderberg's publicity department not mentioning it; David Bordwell points out that a lot of the discussion by critics of the digital look of movies like Collateral, Miami Vice or Apocalypto would have been because the publicity packs they received would have pointed it out exhaustively. So this means that either critics really aren't interested in the visual look of a film unless a publicist points it out for them, or the Red cameras really do look as good as the same as film.

Which is great, but so much for the revolution: Meet the New Boss, same as the Old Boss!