OK, admit it, the first time you saw Fight CLub, and the film 'jumped' when Brad Pitt was making his "You are not your ••••••• khakis" speech, you thought something was wrong with the projector at first didn't you? Well I didn't cause I wathcing it on Starz! HA! Anyway, I thought this was a brilliatn Stylistic chocie on David Fincher's part. However, it is also tehcnically a nit, the kind of nit that become inevitable when one 'breaks the fourth wall'.
My question to you is this; Should stylistic choices, such as the lesser quality of film in the flashback scenes in A Better Place, be treated as nits?
It seems to me that a nit means that something does not make sense within the framework of the movie. Even background music is a styalistic choice. So are voice overs (who are they supposed to be talking to?) If a movie (or TV show) is set up where people break the 4th wall their is no problem with that (Ferris Bueler). If a movie is setup where people do not break the 4th wall and all of a sudden they face the camera and start addressing the audience we have a nit. For example in Resident Evil if after the flashback Milla had said "OK now that the flashback's out of the way" we would have a nit because the movie has not been setup as that kind of flick.
My question to you is this; Should stylistic choices, such as the lesser quality of film in the flashback scenes in A Better Place, be treated as nits?
Those kind of choices are made in every movie to some degree or another. In every shot the director & DP have to decide what kid of lens to use. Some lenses can keep everything in focus, others can keep only a very narrow area in focus. If a director is trying to focus your attention on somehting he/she may use a lens that keeps only the main actors in focus and blurs out the background to some degree. This is not a nit because at some other point he used a lens with more depth.
BTW Fight club has another of those styalistic gags. At the begining Tyler takes the gun out of the narrator's mouth and asks if he has any thing to say.
Narrator:
"I can't think of anything".
Than he flashes back to the rest of the movie. When they get back to that point.
Narrator (Voice Over):
I think we came in right about here.
Tyler:
Do you have anything to say?
Narrator:
I still can't think of anything.
Tyler:
Cute, flashback humor.
OK, but how about Sunset Boulevard? The narrator is dead in the very first scene, and then goes on to narrate the entire movie in flashback! I know it's a stylistic, film noir-type choice, but it makes so little sense that I was half-convinced I hadn't seen things right at the beginning.
Seeing as nearly every one of the world's major religions believes some kind of soul or spirit that lives on after death(in some form or another) I don't see the nit.