I happened upon Patrick Tomasso's YouTube film Why Don't Movies Look Like *Movies* Anymore? and interestingly he cited this one, photographed by Dean Cundey, as a great example of when movies did look like *movies*, for a variety of reasons. One was that it was simply a great cinematographer who took the time to light it carefully - there's a couple of thoughts around this, that with green screen filming it's necessary to have the humans shot blandly as you don't know what the background will be. Also, to save time, the set is lit and then all scenes are covered by that lighting scheme so you don't have to keep relighting every shot - which even I know is not the way you do it. Also that digital is making things too detailed and cameramen are forgetting about things like contrast, and also that films are now shot 'raw' so they can be colorised later, which I have experience with and is a nightmare.
Anyway it made me want to rewatch this film for that reason, which is just as well, because The Parent Trap is arrant nonsense and always will be, and this version has particularly retchy moments, especially those involving butler Simon Kunz. Still, you can't help going 'Ahh' at times and it's mindlessly enjoyable.
It's also so smoothly edited by Steve Rotter, so that's another plus.
There seems to be bits of My Favourite Wife and some Hudson-Day movie in it too, And yes, it really suffers from too much music throughout. There's only about ten minutes of it in total that don't have any. The script also neglects to explain what drove Mr & Mrs apart. The special effects / post production process however is quite remarkable.
So, over to Mr Cundey:
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