Burnwinter wrote:
Found BOARDWALK EMPIRE basically unwatchable. Part of that was the terrible "vintage" colour grading but it was all pretty nothing, just couldn't keep my eyes on the screen.
It definitely suffered from that terrible trend too, yeah. It felt like it was made by people who wanted it to look stylish, something that was trying to look like it belonged not just to a particular time period but to a particular time in cinema history, but never understood how and why media looked and felt like it did back in the day.
You see it in a lot of modern retro games too that are trying to imitate the 8- and 16-bit eras but without imposing the same limitations on the technology when it comes to drawing sprites or using palettes. A cinematic example would be the Mank movie, where Fincher wanted it to look similar to Kane but decided against things like shooting in 4:3 format or using real black-and-white cameras "because a modern audience wouldn't like it". And instead the movie turns into a weird artefact that is neither a time piece nor a good recreation. And of course the cinematic discoveries from Citizen Kane, in terms of how it toys with the physical scene to add or detract emotional distance between characters, etc, are never used in Mank either. It would have added a nice touch to it otherwise, but Fincher is just not that clever. To him the movie itself is just a vehicle to film his father's screenplay.
That's Boardwalk Empire in a nutshell too: something that is trying to look like it belongs to a particular era of cinema, but it is completely devoid of the inventions and techniques that made that period compelling. They tried to get some cred by inviting Scorsese to direct the pilot but it's pretty obvious that it was just a paid one-time thing for him.
