5. Put It On The Tripod!
Just as The Coolest Man To Ever Live, Dean Martin, sang A hats not a hat till its tilted, in the 1964 Rat Pack extravaganza Robin And The 7 Hoods, for Danny Boyle a shots not a shot till its skew-whiff. Traditionally in German Expressionism, the camera being tilted to one side at an oblique angle was commonly used to denote a characters madness, their sense of alienation, their paranoia, the fragility of their state of mind. It doesnt help that at times Trance appears to have been edited by a meth-head bonobo with a razor blade but obviously the ker-razy camera angles are a visual representation of hapless amnesiac Simons (James McAvoy) fractured sense of reality. Right? Well, maybe. But Trance is so visually off-kilter, practically every shot so canted at an angle, that you could be forgiven for thinking that maybe Danny Boyle just has one leg significantly shorter than the other; maybe he genuinely sees the world at a slightly wonky angle. Either way, itd just be nice if maybe occasionally hed just stick the camera on a tripod and shoot a scene where the camera isnt yawing like a drunken sailor.