Digital intermediate and documentary aren't two words that you find together, but director James Longley's Iraq in Fragments uses a digital grade to great effect. A triptych about life in Iraq, Longley uses a brash over-saturation of color and other dramatic uses of color and density to create super-real and surreal looks for portions of his cinema verite documentary that takes place in Baghdad, southern Iraq and among the Kurds. Love it or hate it, the manipulated palette sacrifices truth in imagery but creates a powerful experience of the shock of violence and the ever-present tension of war that carries its own truth.
The racing sequences in Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby hum and thrum with sharp, saturated excitement, a perfect example of a fairly aggressive DI strategy that pays off with a colorful, contemporary style that suits a bright and brash tale of the NASCAR circuit. The imagery pops off the screen, rivalling that other 2006 car-race spoof, Pixar's CARS. The hard-edged DI look is a little less welcome in the film's long midsection that takes place off the track – the super-rich colors and accented film grain haven't been dialed down completely and give those scenes an unnatural tone. That's still OK, because subtlety of emotion is definitely not what the filmmakers are going for here.