I watched All the King’s Men this afternoon. It was okay, but I wouldn’t go so far as to recommend you watch it.

The most noteworthy aspect of the film is that it has a scene with the absolute worst bokeh I’ve ever seen in a major motion picture. Check it out:

What a freaking disaster! It looks like bacteria through a microscope.

The Wikipedia defines bokeh as:

In photography, bokeh is the blur, or the aesthetic quality of the blur, in out-of-focus areas of an image, or “the way the lens renders out-of-focus points of light.” Differences in lens aberrations and aperture shape cause some lens designs to blur the image in a way that is pleasing to the eye, while others produce blurring that is unpleasant or distracting — “good” or “bad” bokeh, respectively. Bokeh occurs for parts of the scene that lie outside the depth of field. Photographers sometimes deliberately use a shallow focus technique to create images with prominent out-of-focus regions.

Good bokeh has a creamy smoothness to it that does not distract. The trees in the background are not smoothly out of focus. There’s a linear pattern to the blur that traces the tree branches. It is ridiculously distracting once you recognize good bokeh.

With a $50 million budget they couldn’t rent a single good quality fast lens?


Screen capture ©2006 Film & Entertainment VIP Medienfonds 3A GmbH & Co.