Your comment, on the other hand, is pure gold. I'm sure I speak for everyone who's read it when I say I'm glad you wasted your time writing it.

No offense taken. In this case, though, think it's not "plugging," so much as a legitimate explanation of an in-joke that might also be of interest to people who read this column. I mean, did you know about my eye-lasers yet? Don't you want to?

Agreed. I'm less interested in the directorial pissing-contest that is the long take and more interested in the effect the appearance of a long take has — it builds suspense, trapping the audience in a single perspective, making the scene feel claustrophobic. Cauron had a few nice ones in the hospital scenes of the…

I really enjoy these articles and I don't want to pile on the author (sorry SEK), but I agree with you here.

That would be my go-to Halloween costume for the past eight or so years.

There's a difference between little lies and the Big Lie, is what I was pointing out — perhaps inadequately, I admit — and Fukunaga did a damn fine job of differentiating between the two.

Except you've been made to trust Cohle by a few hours of medium close-ups, as I noted. It's more than dramatic irony — it's the cumulative effect of a deliberate shot selection that's altered, in spectacular fashion, in the fifth episode.

That's because this isn't a third year undergrad English course, and doesn't need to be. Plus, unreliable narrators apply to the relationship between the narrator and the reader/viewer, and in this case, only the narration to the interrogating detectives was unreliable — the visuals weren't. So saying its narrators…

It's nice to know that trolls are portable. Will you be stalking us anywhere else, good sir, or only in and to these environs?

For those of you who have no idea what we're talking about:

The next installment is about the season premier of Game of Thrones. Have no fear, you'll get your fill of lasers.

And just so no one thinks I'm engaging in false humility here: https://twitter.com/mtsw/st…

I didn't dislike those shots, but for the record, one of the reasons those shots created such a sense of isolation is the contrast Jonze created between the close-ups I describe and the wider shots we both appreciate.

For the record, the same is true of me. In fact, after this got posted to Twitter, a guy with fairly substantial credentials called "bullshit" on this entire piece, even though he walked it back a bit later.

I should ask something, given some of the conversations below, that I discussed on Facebook when I saw the film:

If techniques are obvious enough to be noticed, they're not going to be the sort of thing I'm interested in. I mean, yes, Scorsese's long-takes are legendary, but they also take you out of the film, because you're not thinking about the characters anymore, you're thinking about what the director's doing.

It's an overreach to think that directors — who have to plan out sequences that cost tens of thousands of dollars to shoot — put fore-thought into how those sequences work and what effect they'll have on the audience?

I say this in the nicest way possible, but if you don't want to understand how directors and editors manipulate audiences, maybe this feature isn't for you.

It's not an extremely extreme close-up, but since the working definition is anything that focuses on a single element in a way that chops off part of the whole — an image of a thumb that cuts off the rest of the hand, etc. — the fact that the top of his head is missing made me go with "extreme" to be safe. But the…

The easiest way to quantify movement in a still frame. I could've reverse-engineered the distance in feet, but I didn't think that would add to the analysis. Knowing that each image was 700 pixels, I felt this was a good way to approximate how the frame shifted.