Here is something that you don\u2019t see every day: a documentary that gets its facts wrong.<\/p>\n
Viewers with little knowledge on the history of sound technology in filmmaking are advised to stay away from Midge Costin\u2019s feature, which gives a cockamamie overview of the audio aspects of the cinematic experience. Costin appears to be under the impression that movies were completely silent between Edison\u2019s failed sound film experiments of the late 1890s and the Warner Bros. releases of \u201cDon Juan\u201d and \u201cThe Jazz Singer\u201d in the late 1920s \u2013 in reality, there were numerous experiments taking place to create the so-called \u201ctalkies,\u201d and many of these works still survive and are widely available for review.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Costin oddly seems to bestow credit for the industry\u2019s embrace of stereophonic sound in film exhibition on (of all things) the misguided Barbra Streisand version of \u201cA Star is Born\u201d \u2013 never mind that Walt Disney pioneered the technology with his Oscar-winning Fantasound technology in the 1940 release of \u201cFantasia.\u201d The film cites \u201cKing Kong\u201d as a breakthrough in sound effects recording and editing while ignoring the more subtle use of sound in other films of the early 1930s, including \u201cVampyr\u201d and \u201cWhite Zombie,\u201d not to mention the merry audio madness that populated the Three Stooges\u2019 soundtracks.<\/p>\n
While \u201cMaking Waves\u201d is infatuated with the sound editing and mixing in 1970s-era films by Coppola, Lucas and Spielberg, it forgets the sophisticated efforts in \u201cFrom Here to Eternity\u201d (the Pearl Harbor attack) \u201cBen-Hur\u201d (the chariot race) \u201cHow the West Was Won\u201d (the buffalo stampede) and \u201cIt\u2019s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World\u201d (the gas station and the fireworks in the basement) into sound effects classics. Even stranger is the decision to offer black-and-white clips of Technicolor classics of \u201cGone with the Wind\u201d and \u201cSinging in the Rain.\u201d<\/p>\n
Despite a starry line-up on camera \u2013 including Streisand, Lucas, Spielberg, David Lynch, Ang Lee and Peter Weir \u2013 \u201cMaking Waves\u201d is just a lot of misguided noise.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Here is something that you don\u2019t see every day: a documentary that gets its facts wrong. Viewers with little knowledge on the history of sound technology in filmmaking are advised to stay away from Midge Costin\u2019s feature, which gives a cockamamie overview of the audio aspects of the cinematic experience. Costin appears to be under […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":32372,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[292,2359,2361,2360],"class_list":["post-32371","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movie-reviews","tag-documentary","tag-making-waves","tag-midge-costin","tag-sound-recording"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32371","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32371"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32371\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32380,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32371\/revisions\/32380"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32372"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32371"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32371"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32371"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}