The Hangover
Upon the opening scenes of the movie, the director uses establishing shots of the area to have the audience know a wedding is going to occur. They had an establishing shot of the workers bringing flowers to the hall from the van, the wedding cake, the wedding dress, a pan of the alter etc. As the scene went on, the bride calls one of the main character, which the director uses a medium shot, then cuts to a conversation to her mother and goes back and forth into medium shot, then a wide shot of the room, then when the father speaks, it uses a medium shot as well. As the main character picks up the call, that too is a medium shot, and he said, “We fucked up,” which goes to a extreme close up for that line, and the bride with a worried face, it goes to a close up. The opening is over.
The director uses these shot in this direction to have the audience know what is going on. With the establishing shots, it gives the audience a sense of a wedding event. With the medium shots, it looks for the posture of the characters. And when the bad news breaks out, it goes to close of the characters to see how serious they are, and changes the whole mood of the story.
The pace of the opening began slowly because of the wedding theme. It was really subtle and had slow motion implemented to capture that subtlety of it. But when the bad news came up, the pace became faster as it cuts to the wedding, then to the main character in Vegas back and forth.
The opening scene used the “Its now or never” soundtrack when establishing the wedding. It’s a subtle slow paced song that matches the wedding theme and the overall of the movie.
With this opening scene, we can assume that there will be a worried bride, and a bunch of dudes who are, and will get, in trouble.
After watching the opening scene, I can tell that we are in for a fun and awesome ride, since right of the bat, we already know that there is a big problem.
