Another 47 Cuts

I'm guessing this is pure coincidence, or maybe it was some latent memory, as I had some vague recollections of seeing Ronin before, but in the middle of this movie they tell the story of 47 Ronin who after getting some sort of revenge all commit seppuku. Ah! 47 Abdominal Cuts, I thought.

This movie has a terrific cast (De Niro and Reno work well together), keeps moving from start to finish, and though sometimes rather silly (there's about a 3-4 minute car chase where two cars chase each other the wrong way down a freeway...) , is well worth a watch if your looking for a good caper flick (which for some reason are hard to find these days...).

47 Cuts

I'm not 100% sure of the count, but I'm sitting here watching Ronin and they're having this little scheme hatching scene that has lasted approx 5-6 minutes, and I was struck by the fact that over that period of time there were these constant little shifts in camera angles, so I decided to stop and replay and count... It was something like 47 different camera angles over the 5 minutes. A number were single instance, very brief, a few were repeated 2 or 3 times but only a handful.

For some reason this brought to mind the movie Passenger 57, where there was one scene that only last a minute or so but the camera kept switching back and forth between 2 angles. When Wesley Snipes was talking it was on him; when the other guy was talking it was on him... I remember when I saw it, I couldn't help but think how uninventive the director was.