Image copyright © by Marcus Trahan

Four Brothers

(2005)

Same old story, starts out good, gets stupid at the end. Most impressive scene: a car chase in the snow on icy streets. This was shot in Detroit and Canada, and the Trivia section at the IMDb informs me that the temperature never rose above 24 degrees during shooting, and that all the snow, including the falling snow, was real. I’m dubious. If it’s snowing when you do your master shot, and not snowing when you do your pick-ups, close shots, and angles, or the next day when you reshoot some scenes, you’re in big trouble if you don’t have a snow machine handy. Lee and I once saw seven gigantic rain machines, each bigger than a railroad tank car, tucked under the Hawthorne Bridge in Portland to provide pressurized water to pipes strung the entire length of the bridge for a scene on top of a hurtling streetcar (which was a bus with a false shell, since there are no streetcar tracks on the bridge) in the movie The Hunted. If you can’t rely on rain in Portland, you can’t count on snow in Toronto.

Since I’ve witnessed the obsessiveness and the pitfalls of making a motion picture, I notice these things. Since I’ve stood out all night in 15-degree weather watching a scene being shot outside Toronto and feeling my toes ice over, I felt bad for the crew setting up all these shots while the stars were toasty in their Winnies. Still … if these are the main things I’m wondering about in a movie, I know the movie is in trouble.