Amy left up this wonderful list of the Top 20 Greatest Extended Takes which I have found myself absorbed by.
Extended takes (many people, myself included, mistakenly call them tracking shots) are sometimes a bit of a wank-job by a movie director who is showing off. But sometimes they are integral to the movie themselves, and they can be a virtuoso move that takes a film up a significant notch.
Some of the movies in the list I was familiar with, others I wasn’t. One of my favourite extended takes is on there — the eight-minute opening of Robert Altman’s “The Player”:
As one YouTube commenter notes:
Love how it’s peppered with little comments and encounters that set up the entire plot – the pushy screenwriter who somehow got past security, the upcoming pressure on Griffin to perform in a time of “rolling heads”, mistaken identity, interchangeability of personalities (replacing Julia Roberts with Goldie Hawn in the same breath), and finally the notion that in political thrillers someone always dies – and what else is a Hollywood studio but a huge political pinball machine? Brilliant.
Siskel and Ebert loved it too:
Grant Hamilton
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