So yesterday I attended a marathon showing of the five Best Picture nominees. Apparently this is something that the AMC theatre chain does annually, or at least has started doing annually.
Some people might wonder, "Five films in a row? Several of them longer than two hours? Surely that's madness!" I respond, of course, that it's Sparta, and kick them down a well.
It sounds like it would be more than you could handle, but I tell you what, I loved it. Definitely called for stretch/bathroom breaks in between, but otherwise it was a wonderful experience to just set aside a day and let all these different films wash over me.
But what did I think of the films? I'll give you a brief rundown in the order in which they were screened:
MICHAEL CLAYTON
Maybe it's because it was the first one screened, and therefore the others had to be measured against it, but I have to admit, Michael Clayton was easily my favorite of the group.
It's what my friend Brian called an "intellectual thriller", and I think that's an apt description. It's a fairly slow movie, with a lot of dialogue -- but the dialogue is good and it's very well-delivered. There were very few lines of dialogue that stood out to me as being particularly well-written (aside from "I am Shiva the God of Death"), but none stood out as poorly-written, either. It was all very natural and believable, and I think that's an achievement in itself.
There's not a lot of action or suspenseful moments, but when there is suspense, it's pretty tense. Some great moments of directing -- almost all of these films have a long shot or two, with varying degrees of complexity or success, and in this film there's an "assassination" sequence that all plays out in one shot. Although the "cool" factor is one thing, the choice to do the action in a single shot is also a powerful narrative tool, demonstrating how quick and ruthless the process is. It happens without cuts and it's still over in just a couple minutes.
I've become a fan of George Clooney, which I resisted in the ER/Batman and Robin days. I don't think the "hot young man" thing was ever right for him, but the "self-assured and sexy middle-aged man" thing is in his favor. Probably the salt-and-pepper hair is what makes that difference.
His performance is mostly restrained. He has a few moments of the smarmy sarcasm he displays in the Ocean's series, but in the context of the film I think they're earned and he pulls them off well. For a tense socio-political thriller, the film had some good laughs, and many of them were Clooney. That said, I think he's going to lose out his Best Actor statue to Daniel Day-Lewis (There Will Be Blood).
Tom Wilkinson turns in a phenomenal performance as the brilliant manic-depressive Arthur, and I do think he's got a good shot at the statue, although Casey Affleck and Javier Bardem (No Country for Old Men) have a decent shot as well.
Oh, and shout-out to Tilda Swinton, who never really plays an outright villainess, but a more subtle "person who makes bad decisions for their own sake". She plays that same role here but she does it so well, and across such a range of characters through her career, that you can hardly call her typecast.
The score is fine, some of the more intense moments were ratcheted up yet another notch with James Newton Howard's pumping score, but for the most part the music sat in the background and just added color to the world, which is as it should be. It is nominated for best score, and it's not bad, but there are other scores on the block that have a better shot at it.
THERE WILL BE BLOOD
Apparently this is a really intense movie that "grabs you by the balls and shakes you around," to quote my eminently quote-able friend Travis. I must not be watching the same movie.
As usual for P.T. Anderson, the film is too goddamn long and self-indulgent. This film does not need to be the three hours that it is. Part of this is his penchant for long, unbroken shots, but unlike Michael Clayton, they feel unmotivated.
Some of them make sense, like the long shot of the workers working the pipeline when Daniel gets his son back, it's very old-style Kurosawa tableau type stuff.
But in other cases, it's like P.T.A. shot a bunch of coverage and decided not to edit most of it. I suppose he was going for a more "real" performance, but it really just looks like the actors are holding position expecting a cut, not getting it, and moving on to the next line. Just cutting out the unnecessary dead space in dialogue would have trimmed the movie by half an hour.
The movie has very little intensity, aside from a few strong scenes, but it tries to make itself more intense through the music, which is awful. The whole thing is overlaid with totally unmotivated tense string chords that would be more appropriate to a direct-to-DVD slasher pic than an oil-drilling film. The movie takes place in the deserts of California and I still expected someone to get eaten by a shark at some point. It's a cheap trick that only makes it more obvious that the film has no intensity on its own (the most intense parts of the film were the few parts with no music at all).
Aside from the deafened son, there was almost no character development at all, and ultimately I didn't really understand what the point of the film was. Characters would appear in the film and then disappear for an hour or more, only to show up later and act like they were important to the story.
Daniel Day-Lewis and Paul Dano are the stand-out performances here and the only thing that made this film worth watching. Dano's faith healing exorcism of a woman's arthritis is, as Day-Lewis' character remarks, "One goddamn hell of a show." Dano's an actor with guts, willing to get crazy when the character needs it, and it's frightening and awe-inspiring.
Day-Lewis' turn as the shrewd businessman is extraordinary and, as I said above, I can see him getting the Oscar. I wasn't as impressed with "I drink your milkshake" as everyone else was, but it's one hell of a weird line and he delivers it with vigor. I really enjoyed his performance, and the scenes with Day-Lewis and Dano together are the great parts of the movie. The highlight for me was the baptism scene. It was tense and dark and funny all at once. If the whole movie could have kept the same energy and meaning, that would have been something.
ATONEMENT
Fuck this movie. Seriously. For all the Oscar buzz and nominations this has been getting, this movie is an absolute mess. Stylistically it jumps all over the place, becoming a different movie entirely every fifteen minutes or so. The perspective in time jumps back and forth, and the performances are dull and predictable.
The cinematography is nominated for an Oscar and if it wins, I think I might be sick. The "look" of the film -- whether by grading or in-camera filtration -- was way overdone pretty much all the way through. We discover towards the end that the movie is, essentially, a book that the character of Briony has written, so I guess that makes the filtration bit more forgivable, but still, it all felt like a jumble of stuff that makes a film Oscar-y. Take some World War II, throw in an unrequited love, a bit of sexual aberrancy, and heavy sepia-like filtration, and voila! Oscar buzz.
The one good part about the film is the score, which does a great job of dovetailing from sound effects to music and back again, often bridging the gap between scenes or sequences. The long shot in the film of the British evacuation is a phenomenal technical achievement, and I'm especially impressed by how they managed to work a singing choir onscreen into the musical score; the timing was impeccable. I can see this winning for best score and not being too put-out by it.
The conceit of the film -- that the happy parts are Briony's eponymous atonement for what she did -- makes for an interesting theoretical discussion: real life is like this, the happy version is like that. And in a movie, since both cases are made up, isn't it better to let the characters have their happiness?
An interesting point, but as an actual act of "atonement", it's horseshit. Briony ruined two peoples' lives and I have no sympathy for her. She never told the truth to anyone that mattered, and doing it now is a cowardly cop-out. Fuck her, and fuck the movie for thinking that would work.
JUNO
I've seen this before, but it was part of the package. As much as I like it, I don't really understand why it was nominated for Best Picture. It's good, but the BEST of last year? Even in the RUNNING? I dunno about that. Then again, I can't think of a lot of other good stuff from last year, so there you go.
As a drama, it's pretty strong stuff, if fairly standard indie fare. I will admit that the moment when Vanessa first holds her new baby, and they look each other in the eyes, I start to tear up like the bitch I am. As a comedy, it has a tendency to skirt the edge of Mean Girls-type humor -- which is not a bad thing. If anything I kind of wish Tina Fey had punched up the script a little if they wanted to go in that direction.
Ellen Page does a great turn as Juno, she's got a great balance of smart maturity and childlike immaturity that I really haven't seen in any other young actress, and I hope she wins the Oscar. But like Little Miss Sunshine last year, I kind of see this more as a token indie-nod than a real runner when it comes to best picture.
NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN
It's funny. Everyone tells me "It's not the best, but come on, it's the Coen Brothers, you have to see it."
I'm going to go further and say "It's not the best, and it's the Coen Brothers, so you've already seen it."
Pop quiz: a small-town man gets embroiled way over his head over a whole crapload of money, while the small-town sheriff puts the pieces together with a kind of backwoods brilliance and rural wit, nonetheless arriving too late to stop the bloodbath.
Quiz question one: Did I just describe No Country for Old Men, or Fargo?
Yeah.
No Country was basically Fargo in Texas, with less personality. Interestingly, I think you could have swapped the titles of There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men and both titles would have fit better.
Some good dialogue, mostly Tommy Lee Jones' character, and mostly standard Texas Sheriff wit. (Example: "This is a hell of a mess, ain't it Sheriff?" "Yeeup. And if it ain't, it'll do 'til the mess gets here.")
The film is probably the most intense of the lot, and does it without relying on stupid music tricks, so points there. And Javier Bardem's combination of deep voice, exotic accent, and sociopathic attitude make him a great villain. The Coens handle the action fairly well, making interesting and mostly good choices about when to show something in all its gruesome detail and when to leave it to the imagination.
The misstep they take is in leaving the climax completely to the imagination, and the film goes downhill from there with a bunch of seemingly unrelated scenes that never really tie together, including an apparently-obligatory car-gets-T-boned-by-another-car-through-an-intersection scene. The way it's shot it's so obvious what's coming that I just roll my eyes waiting for it to be over, and when it is over, nothing's really been accomplished by the scene story-wise.
And really, that was my feeling the last half-hour of the film. Of all the films I saw yesterday, only No Country made me fidget and want it to end. And it wasn't because it was the last film of the night and I wanted to go home. I could've watched more films because I was really enjoying myself. It was just boring.
MY PICK
My vote for Best Picture, of the five, goes to Michael Clayton. I could live with Juno getting it. But I doubt either will. It will either go to Atonement or No Country, is my guess.
I'm also rooting for Transformers to take the VFX Oscar.
Anyway, I will not be holding a running commentary on my blog here, so don't worry about checking it and just enjoy the show!
Showing posts with label story. Show all posts
Showing posts with label story. Show all posts
Sunday, February 24, 2008
Thursday, January 24, 2008
For Real This Time: Cloverfield Review
In the 9 years since The Blair Witch Project, I've talked to a lot of people who hated the movie. They didn't get what the hype was about, they thought it was boring and not scary at all.
My question to them is always "Did you see it in theatres?" Their answer is always "No."
I don't mean to get all David Lynch on your ass, but if you didn't see The Blair Witch Project in theatres, you didn't really see The Blair Witch Project. There's a huge difference between watching a movie on your dinky television set, in the comfort of your living room, with your roommate or significant other making popcorn in the kitchen, knowing you could pause the movie or turn up the lights at any time, and watching it on a big screen, in a dark theatre, surrounded by strangers, with the experience totally out of your control. At home you're really only half-paying attention1; in the theatre you're totally enveloped.
So I'm going to say: if you don't see Cloverfield in theatres, you'll never see Cloverfield properly.
Now, I've wanted to see someone take the Blair Witch found footage/documentary horror ball and run with it for almost ten years. I wrote a couple of outlines for those kinds of films -- one of a group of people on a camping trip that gets caught up in an alien abduction/invasion, one of a group of college "ghost hunters" that get in over their head in a real haunted house -- but Cloverfield takes it to the epic level straight out of the gate.
Like Blair Witch, Cloverfield's marketing campaign was primarily viral.2 The "found footage" aesthetic lent itself well to the post-YouTube world; this is, in many ways, a YouTube monster movie. But unlike Blair Witch (a movie which some people I meet still believe was real), Cloverfield never attempted to pass itself off as real footage from a real event. Instead, it is an "IF this were to happen, here's how it would go down" hypothetical, with enough verisimilitude to make O.J. Simpson proud.
One thing I love about Cloverfield, just from a conceptual standpoint, is that there's another movie taking place off-screen. Somewhere else is the movie where the retired army guy is pulled back into service to stop the creature that has attacked his city, and he's throwing out one-liners the whole ride. Somewhere else the scientist and/or the hacker are figuring out where this thing came from and (maybe) how to bring it down. Somewhere else the President is facing the tough calls of sending the military into Manhattan and, sir, a localized nuclear strike may be our only chance of containment but we have to act NOW. But we don't see any of that. And that's okay, because we've seen that movie. Cloverfield is the movie we haven't seen, the one that turns the body count into characters we connect with.
Because let's face it: when you go to see a monster movie, you're kind of rooting for the monster. It's almost a given that the humans are going to win, so you're really just looking to see the monster wreak as much havoc as it can before that happens. That means you want to see the really gruesome, brutal kills; you want to see the damn STAKES get raised.
But while that other movie I mentioned will show the President grimacing as he watches someone die brutally in a military video or whatever, Cloverfield makes you one of the victims, watching your friends die and hearing your other friends scream and mourn as it happens. Cloverfield makes you a part of the event.
My first impression of Cloverfield was that some parts were pretty predictable. For example, there's a scene in a dark tunnel where you can only see about five feet in any direction from the camera. They hear a sound -- what was that? All the rats are running away from it. Oh hold on, the camera has night vision. Let me, the main character, step in front of the camera to turn it on.
If you don't see where this is going, you're one of the lucky ones and you should skip this paragraph to avoid spoilers. For the rest of us, we know that as soon as the night vision comes on, we're going to get a VERY clear look at what's making that sound, because it'll be right behind the main character, and it will wait until it's sure you've seen it clearly before it attacks. And so it goes.
Now, I initially faulted Cloverfield slightly for this, but I asked myself: how would I have handled that moment differently? And to be honest, I probably wouldn't have. It's highly effective and after the attack sequence the entire audience applauded spontaneously because it was a damn good piece of immersive filmmaking. So maybe it was only "predictable" because it's exactly what I would have done.3
At any rate, it doesn't really matter that you can see what's coming a mile away based on the tropes of horror and monster movies (in no case, ever, is loss of blood the only thing you need to worry about if a monster bites you). The point is not what is happening, the point is that it's happening, essentially, to you, and you're powerless against it. The film is not afraid to kill its characters, and when it does, it often happens in the blink of an eye, in a moment so chaotic that you, like the characters, have no chance to even really process what just happened until some time later. I've had nightmares like Cloverfield, that played out in similar ways. The filmmakers did a great job of tapping into that.
The characters themselves are generally well-realized. Most of them are Dawson's Creek stereotypes of some kind or another, but their performances are solid. A lot of the film sounds improvised -- which, in a movie of this scale, seems unlikely, so it's a testament to the actors that they make everything they say believable and genuine in the moment. My favorite character by far is the cameraman, the person through whose point of view we experience most of the film, appropriately named Hud.
Hud is the main character's best friend, and he's the kind of guy everyone knows -- kind of dumb, a little bit too literal about things sometimes, but fiercely loyal to his friends. He'd never be the leader, but he'd follow them anywhere, and he does as he's told which makes him the perfect cameraman.
You never question why on earth this guy is still running the camera, because at the beginning of the movie he's told to record the events of the night, and we all know this kind of guy well enough to know that that's exactly what he's going to do, no matter what, until the battery dies or he does. He's also the comic relief character, and giving that kind of personality to the camera is an inspired choice.
As the monster goes, I will say that you do see it. Personally I thought it might be cooler to never actually get a clear look at it, but the movie puts the characters in the middle of everything4, and so you do see the monster quite up-close and personal. But what it is, where it comes from, what it wants are never explained.
Ultimately, this movie is a character drama in a monster-movie world. They used a device that the events of the movie are being recorded over another tape from a much different time in the characters' lives, and the occasional "timecode break" drops us into that other footage. The juxtaposition is powerful, and I really like that the filmmakers took advantage of their "found footage" structure to tell a story more intimate than the monster attack. I know a lot of people will hate it, but I thought it was great.
What it comes down to, though, is that you need to see this movie in theatres, with other people around you, if you're going to have any chance of appreciating it fully. This is the kind of movie that you can't just watch, you have to experience it.
My question to them is always "Did you see it in theatres?" Their answer is always "No."
I don't mean to get all David Lynch on your ass, but if you didn't see The Blair Witch Project in theatres, you didn't really see The Blair Witch Project. There's a huge difference between watching a movie on your dinky television set, in the comfort of your living room, with your roommate or significant other making popcorn in the kitchen, knowing you could pause the movie or turn up the lights at any time, and watching it on a big screen, in a dark theatre, surrounded by strangers, with the experience totally out of your control. At home you're really only half-paying attention1; in the theatre you're totally enveloped.
So I'm going to say: if you don't see Cloverfield in theatres, you'll never see Cloverfield properly.
Now, I've wanted to see someone take the Blair Witch found footage/documentary horror ball and run with it for almost ten years. I wrote a couple of outlines for those kinds of films -- one of a group of people on a camping trip that gets caught up in an alien abduction/invasion, one of a group of college "ghost hunters" that get in over their head in a real haunted house -- but Cloverfield takes it to the epic level straight out of the gate.
Like Blair Witch, Cloverfield's marketing campaign was primarily viral.2 The "found footage" aesthetic lent itself well to the post-YouTube world; this is, in many ways, a YouTube monster movie. But unlike Blair Witch (a movie which some people I meet still believe was real), Cloverfield never attempted to pass itself off as real footage from a real event. Instead, it is an "IF this were to happen, here's how it would go down" hypothetical, with enough verisimilitude to make O.J. Simpson proud.
One thing I love about Cloverfield, just from a conceptual standpoint, is that there's another movie taking place off-screen. Somewhere else is the movie where the retired army guy is pulled back into service to stop the creature that has attacked his city, and he's throwing out one-liners the whole ride. Somewhere else the scientist and/or the hacker are figuring out where this thing came from and (maybe) how to bring it down. Somewhere else the President is facing the tough calls of sending the military into Manhattan and, sir, a localized nuclear strike may be our only chance of containment but we have to act NOW. But we don't see any of that. And that's okay, because we've seen that movie. Cloverfield is the movie we haven't seen, the one that turns the body count into characters we connect with.
Because let's face it: when you go to see a monster movie, you're kind of rooting for the monster. It's almost a given that the humans are going to win, so you're really just looking to see the monster wreak as much havoc as it can before that happens. That means you want to see the really gruesome, brutal kills; you want to see the damn STAKES get raised.
But while that other movie I mentioned will show the President grimacing as he watches someone die brutally in a military video or whatever, Cloverfield makes you one of the victims, watching your friends die and hearing your other friends scream and mourn as it happens. Cloverfield makes you a part of the event.
My first impression of Cloverfield was that some parts were pretty predictable. For example, there's a scene in a dark tunnel where you can only see about five feet in any direction from the camera. They hear a sound -- what was that? All the rats are running away from it. Oh hold on, the camera has night vision. Let me, the main character, step in front of the camera to turn it on.
If you don't see where this is going, you're one of the lucky ones and you should skip this paragraph to avoid spoilers. For the rest of us, we know that as soon as the night vision comes on, we're going to get a VERY clear look at what's making that sound, because it'll be right behind the main character, and it will wait until it's sure you've seen it clearly before it attacks. And so it goes.
Now, I initially faulted Cloverfield slightly for this, but I asked myself: how would I have handled that moment differently? And to be honest, I probably wouldn't have. It's highly effective and after the attack sequence the entire audience applauded spontaneously because it was a damn good piece of immersive filmmaking. So maybe it was only "predictable" because it's exactly what I would have done.3
At any rate, it doesn't really matter that you can see what's coming a mile away based on the tropes of horror and monster movies (in no case, ever, is loss of blood the only thing you need to worry about if a monster bites you). The point is not what is happening, the point is that it's happening, essentially, to you, and you're powerless against it. The film is not afraid to kill its characters, and when it does, it often happens in the blink of an eye, in a moment so chaotic that you, like the characters, have no chance to even really process what just happened until some time later. I've had nightmares like Cloverfield, that played out in similar ways. The filmmakers did a great job of tapping into that.
The characters themselves are generally well-realized. Most of them are Dawson's Creek stereotypes of some kind or another, but their performances are solid. A lot of the film sounds improvised -- which, in a movie of this scale, seems unlikely, so it's a testament to the actors that they make everything they say believable and genuine in the moment. My favorite character by far is the cameraman, the person through whose point of view we experience most of the film, appropriately named Hud.
Hud is the main character's best friend, and he's the kind of guy everyone knows -- kind of dumb, a little bit too literal about things sometimes, but fiercely loyal to his friends. He'd never be the leader, but he'd follow them anywhere, and he does as he's told which makes him the perfect cameraman.
You never question why on earth this guy is still running the camera, because at the beginning of the movie he's told to record the events of the night, and we all know this kind of guy well enough to know that that's exactly what he's going to do, no matter what, until the battery dies or he does. He's also the comic relief character, and giving that kind of personality to the camera is an inspired choice.
As the monster goes, I will say that you do see it. Personally I thought it might be cooler to never actually get a clear look at it, but the movie puts the characters in the middle of everything4, and so you do see the monster quite up-close and personal. But what it is, where it comes from, what it wants are never explained.
Ultimately, this movie is a character drama in a monster-movie world. They used a device that the events of the movie are being recorded over another tape from a much different time in the characters' lives, and the occasional "timecode break" drops us into that other footage. The juxtaposition is powerful, and I really like that the filmmakers took advantage of their "found footage" structure to tell a story more intimate than the monster attack. I know a lot of people will hate it, but I thought it was great.
What it comes down to, though, is that you need to see this movie in theatres, with other people around you, if you're going to have any chance of appreciating it fully. This is the kind of movie that you can't just watch, you have to experience it.
- I know a lot of people who didn't get the ending because the set-up was so subtle and they missed it; if you saw the set-up, the ending was amazing.↩
- Blair Witch, of course, practically invented the viral marketing campaign singlehandedly.↩
- Although John Rogers makes a great point: if a thousand rats are running away from something, you don't stop to find out what it is, you outrun those fucking rats. I probably would have handled THAT differently.↩
- Admittedly it does sometimes stretch the limit of the suspension of disbelief, that they should have such poor luck as to always be right where something significant happens, when it happens. ↩
Monday, December 03, 2007
The Storyteller's Responsibility
Recently, there's been talk of a new Knight Rider series. This is not the first, nor probably the last, old-school TV series to be re-booted, reimagined, or remade in the new millennium. On one of the many message boards I frequent, there was a recent discussion about the Knight Rider re-imagining, and re-imaginings in general.
Putting aside, for the moment, the fact that the "argument" at hand was pure idiocy -- someone was insisting that the new KITT doesn't look enough like the old KITT and therefore the new show was worthless and an insult to the fans, even though a) the KITT design is not endemic to the storyline and perfectly sensible to update to a newer model of car, or even a concept car, and b) the official new KITT design hasn't been released, so the argument was actually regarding a fan rendering which, much like the person making the argument, has no grounding in reality -- the point raised was interesting, especially given the side I found myself arguing.
The argument, at its core, was that re-imagined versions of a story are often so distantly related to the original concept that, with a few changes, it could have been its own, "original" concept, instead of "pissing on" the nostalgia and "alienating the fans of the original". Ignoring, again, how ludicrous it is to imply that because KITT is not a 1982 TransAm nor does it (theoretically, mind) have a similar silhouette, the entire enterprise is a wash, we'll go with another example that was brought up: the new Battlestar Galactica.
I do not watch Battlestar, so I can't really talk too much about the story beyond my cursory knowledge of the basics. It's not that I have anything against it, I just haven't jumped in yet. And since the next season has been announced to be its last, I figure I might as well hold off until they wrap it up and hear from Ryan, who DOES watch it, whether the journey is worth it. But I don't need to watch the new Battlestar (nBSG) to know that the argument that it has replaced the original series (oBSG) is, to use a word I can't use on that particular board, utter horseshit. The original series is still there. You can still watch it, it hasn't been changed or erased. The new series is something else. End of story.
To argue that the new series shouldn't be named Battlestar Galactica if it's not going to be the original series is also absurd. The BASIC story is the same, and that's the story that they want to use as their foundation.
Before I get into that too much, though, I just want to point out a seeming contradiction in my thinking, which I realized during this argument; it was my determination to resolve the contradiction, either by forcing myself to accept that I can't have it both ways and to drop one side of my contradictory argument, or by understanding how there was, in actual fact, no contradiction.
I often take filmmakers like George Lucas and the Wachowski Brothers to task for screwing up the story in their series. My first post in this string was a mini-essay on how Lucas had no right to change Star Wars the way he did, in terms of the originals, and I barely touched on how horribly he mangled the telling of the prequels AND cut the legs out of the originals in the process. It is his responsibility, I argued, to stay true to the zeitgeist and the cultural impact by allowing the story to be what it is, and what it has become.
But at the same time, I found myself arguing that the makers of the new Knight Rider, and nBSG, and all other series reboots, have no responsibility to the nostalgia of the original fans, particularly when said nostalgia is so blinkered that the smallest change might as well render the whole thing meaningless in their eyes.
So which is it? Does the storyteller have a responsibility to his audience and their nostalgia, especially when the story is an established part of the cultural fabric, or is it his open prerogative to create a new story at his whim, nostalgia and fan-loyalty be damned?
Well, I had to think about this pretty hard before I realized the truth of the matter: putting it that way, it's a trick question, and a false dichotomy. Putting it that way, the answer is "neither". The storyteller's responsibility is not to his audience's love of the minutae incidental to the telling of the story. Nor is it to his own whims in a given moment, to changing the story just because it's in his power to change it.
The storyteller's responsibility is to the story, to the world and the characters necessary to tell the story. Always, and only.
The storyteller's only responsibility to the audience is to provide them with enough believable detail (take careful note that the word I used is quite intentionally not "realistic", but "believable") to accommodate the suspension of disbelief the audience will need to make. A greater suspension usually requires proportionately greater detail.
The storyteller's only responsibility to himself is to make sure the story is told to his satisfaction. BUT, his satisfaction must at all times derive from a sense of the truth of the story, of the reason the story deserves to be told.
In "first-run" versions of the story, that means being true to the source. The Matrix sequels and Star Wars prequels fail because they were not true to the stories that they had begun to tell and which they were, ostensibly, continuing.
The Harry Potter stories deserve to be told in as faithful a way as possible, because they have never been brought to the screen and therefore the story has not yet been told in that medium.1
But, if a story must be RE-told, I would go so far as to say they had BETTER make some radical changes from the last time, to give it a new relevance and purpose. Otherwise why should you tell that story again?
For example, I've often thought of how cool it would be to make a new Wizard of Oz film, using the visual effects techniques unheard of 70 years ago. Think of the flying monkey effects! Think of the powers of the Witch of the West!
But then I think: why in the hell would I do such a thing? What could be added to The Wizard of Oz that wasn't accomplished the first time, story-wise, to warrant using new techniques to tell the story?2 I could never answer that question, and always abandoned the notion.3
Why do a Battlestar Galactica today about the future that the 80s envisioned? We need a Battlestar Galactica about the future as it appears to us.4
Some stories have NOT been properly translated to the screen. The recent Beowulf is an example of a film that I think was worth making, even though it was not a reimagining. To the contrary, it was the first film to treat the material faithfully, directly. But still with a purpose, of telling the story and wrestling with the material in a new way. Instead of just telling the story of a man who kills monsters, it tells the story of a man who epitomizes the Neitzchian concept of a man who fights monsters becoming a monster himself, and tells us that the people we revere as heroes are still, in the end, human beings.
Beowulf has been told before, with varying degrees of faithfulness to the events of the story. But it is only Zemeckis' version that has found a PURPOSE in re-telling the story, a truth that the events of the plot (altered somewhat from the ancient manuscript, arguably to their improvement) can help to express.
This isn't to say that everything a storyteller writes or makes is going to be gold. I somehow doubt that Knight Rider is going to be brilliant, no matter what the car looks like. It'll probably be silly fun and hopefully it'll have the sense not to take itself too seriously. And the design of the car will undoubtedly be dictated less by nostalgia and more by whichever car company is the highest bidder for what is, ultimately, a weekly hour-long commercial for their product.5
But hey, it could be brilliant. It really could, and what will only emphasize its brilliance is that no one in the world will really expect it to be so.
Jaws was just supposed to be (and expected to be) a B-movie adaptation of a bestselling book. The ONLY reason they gave it to a relatively inexperienced director was because of its bestselling pedigree: there was no way he could screw it up too badly. What Spielberg delivered was an astonishing film capturing the reality of the human characters within the world of the story.
The PLOT was about a giant shark eating people, and there was plenty of that. But the STORY was about how different people deal with fear in different ways. Denial, horror, anger, helplessness, or a powerful resolution to set things right.6
As in real life, the heroes aren't heroes to us because they killed the shark; they're heroes to us because they even ATTEMPTED to kill the shark when they were positively scared to death.7 The fact that they succeed lets you leave the theatre elated, but you're on their side and cheering them on well before that resolution comes.
A lesser filmmaker than Spielberg would have made a film about a shark killing people. No subtext, no real story. People die and then the shark dies the end. You can see many of these lesser films on the shelves of your local Blockbuster Video.8 I count the sequels to Jaws among these lesser films, where the monster shark becomes a gimmick for adrenaline and scares, but there's no STORY being told.
Spielberg saw the opportunity to do more. He did more, and Jaws was a success that defined the term "blockbuster" and that the studios are still trying to replicate today.
No matter what the PLOT of your film is, the specific events of your film or your novel or short story or whatever, make sure that the events tell a STORY -- a human story -- worth the effort.
Fuck nostalgia, fuck expectations, and fuck you and your ego. None of that matters. What matters is: is it a story worth telling, about characters worth knowing, and are you doing it justice? The story is what matters, and the second you put it on paper or on a screen it doesn't belong to you anymore, so you'd better get it told and then get the hell out of its way.
That's your responsibility as a storyteller.
Putting aside, for the moment, the fact that the "argument" at hand was pure idiocy -- someone was insisting that the new KITT doesn't look enough like the old KITT and therefore the new show was worthless and an insult to the fans, even though a) the KITT design is not endemic to the storyline and perfectly sensible to update to a newer model of car, or even a concept car, and b) the official new KITT design hasn't been released, so the argument was actually regarding a fan rendering which, much like the person making the argument, has no grounding in reality -- the point raised was interesting, especially given the side I found myself arguing.
The argument, at its core, was that re-imagined versions of a story are often so distantly related to the original concept that, with a few changes, it could have been its own, "original" concept, instead of "pissing on" the nostalgia and "alienating the fans of the original". Ignoring, again, how ludicrous it is to imply that because KITT is not a 1982 TransAm nor does it (theoretically, mind) have a similar silhouette, the entire enterprise is a wash, we'll go with another example that was brought up: the new Battlestar Galactica.
I do not watch Battlestar, so I can't really talk too much about the story beyond my cursory knowledge of the basics. It's not that I have anything against it, I just haven't jumped in yet. And since the next season has been announced to be its last, I figure I might as well hold off until they wrap it up and hear from Ryan, who DOES watch it, whether the journey is worth it. But I don't need to watch the new Battlestar (nBSG) to know that the argument that it has replaced the original series (oBSG) is, to use a word I can't use on that particular board, utter horseshit. The original series is still there. You can still watch it, it hasn't been changed or erased. The new series is something else. End of story.
To argue that the new series shouldn't be named Battlestar Galactica if it's not going to be the original series is also absurd. The BASIC story is the same, and that's the story that they want to use as their foundation.
Before I get into that too much, though, I just want to point out a seeming contradiction in my thinking, which I realized during this argument; it was my determination to resolve the contradiction, either by forcing myself to accept that I can't have it both ways and to drop one side of my contradictory argument, or by understanding how there was, in actual fact, no contradiction.
I often take filmmakers like George Lucas and the Wachowski Brothers to task for screwing up the story in their series. My first post in this string was a mini-essay on how Lucas had no right to change Star Wars the way he did, in terms of the originals, and I barely touched on how horribly he mangled the telling of the prequels AND cut the legs out of the originals in the process. It is his responsibility, I argued, to stay true to the zeitgeist and the cultural impact by allowing the story to be what it is, and what it has become.
But at the same time, I found myself arguing that the makers of the new Knight Rider, and nBSG, and all other series reboots, have no responsibility to the nostalgia of the original fans, particularly when said nostalgia is so blinkered that the smallest change might as well render the whole thing meaningless in their eyes.
So which is it? Does the storyteller have a responsibility to his audience and their nostalgia, especially when the story is an established part of the cultural fabric, or is it his open prerogative to create a new story at his whim, nostalgia and fan-loyalty be damned?
Well, I had to think about this pretty hard before I realized the truth of the matter: putting it that way, it's a trick question, and a false dichotomy. Putting it that way, the answer is "neither". The storyteller's responsibility is not to his audience's love of the minutae incidental to the telling of the story. Nor is it to his own whims in a given moment, to changing the story just because it's in his power to change it.
The storyteller's responsibility is to the story, to the world and the characters necessary to tell the story. Always, and only.
The storyteller's only responsibility to the audience is to provide them with enough believable detail (take careful note that the word I used is quite intentionally not "realistic", but "believable") to accommodate the suspension of disbelief the audience will need to make. A greater suspension usually requires proportionately greater detail.
The storyteller's only responsibility to himself is to make sure the story is told to his satisfaction. BUT, his satisfaction must at all times derive from a sense of the truth of the story, of the reason the story deserves to be told.
In "first-run" versions of the story, that means being true to the source. The Matrix sequels and Star Wars prequels fail because they were not true to the stories that they had begun to tell and which they were, ostensibly, continuing.
The Harry Potter stories deserve to be told in as faithful a way as possible, because they have never been brought to the screen and therefore the story has not yet been told in that medium.1
But, if a story must be RE-told, I would go so far as to say they had BETTER make some radical changes from the last time, to give it a new relevance and purpose. Otherwise why should you tell that story again?
For example, I've often thought of how cool it would be to make a new Wizard of Oz film, using the visual effects techniques unheard of 70 years ago. Think of the flying monkey effects! Think of the powers of the Witch of the West!
But then I think: why in the hell would I do such a thing? What could be added to The Wizard of Oz that wasn't accomplished the first time, story-wise, to warrant using new techniques to tell the story?2 I could never answer that question, and always abandoned the notion.3
Why do a Battlestar Galactica today about the future that the 80s envisioned? We need a Battlestar Galactica about the future as it appears to us.4
Some stories have NOT been properly translated to the screen. The recent Beowulf is an example of a film that I think was worth making, even though it was not a reimagining. To the contrary, it was the first film to treat the material faithfully, directly. But still with a purpose, of telling the story and wrestling with the material in a new way. Instead of just telling the story of a man who kills monsters, it tells the story of a man who epitomizes the Neitzchian concept of a man who fights monsters becoming a monster himself, and tells us that the people we revere as heroes are still, in the end, human beings.
Beowulf has been told before, with varying degrees of faithfulness to the events of the story. But it is only Zemeckis' version that has found a PURPOSE in re-telling the story, a truth that the events of the plot (altered somewhat from the ancient manuscript, arguably to their improvement) can help to express.
This isn't to say that everything a storyteller writes or makes is going to be gold. I somehow doubt that Knight Rider is going to be brilliant, no matter what the car looks like. It'll probably be silly fun and hopefully it'll have the sense not to take itself too seriously. And the design of the car will undoubtedly be dictated less by nostalgia and more by whichever car company is the highest bidder for what is, ultimately, a weekly hour-long commercial for their product.5
But hey, it could be brilliant. It really could, and what will only emphasize its brilliance is that no one in the world will really expect it to be so.
Jaws was just supposed to be (and expected to be) a B-movie adaptation of a bestselling book. The ONLY reason they gave it to a relatively inexperienced director was because of its bestselling pedigree: there was no way he could screw it up too badly. What Spielberg delivered was an astonishing film capturing the reality of the human characters within the world of the story.
The PLOT was about a giant shark eating people, and there was plenty of that. But the STORY was about how different people deal with fear in different ways. Denial, horror, anger, helplessness, or a powerful resolution to set things right.6
As in real life, the heroes aren't heroes to us because they killed the shark; they're heroes to us because they even ATTEMPTED to kill the shark when they were positively scared to death.7 The fact that they succeed lets you leave the theatre elated, but you're on their side and cheering them on well before that resolution comes.
A lesser filmmaker than Spielberg would have made a film about a shark killing people. No subtext, no real story. People die and then the shark dies the end. You can see many of these lesser films on the shelves of your local Blockbuster Video.8 I count the sequels to Jaws among these lesser films, where the monster shark becomes a gimmick for adrenaline and scares, but there's no STORY being told.
Spielberg saw the opportunity to do more. He did more, and Jaws was a success that defined the term "blockbuster" and that the studios are still trying to replicate today.
No matter what the PLOT of your film is, the specific events of your film or your novel or short story or whatever, make sure that the events tell a STORY -- a human story -- worth the effort.
Fuck nostalgia, fuck expectations, and fuck you and your ego. None of that matters. What matters is: is it a story worth telling, about characters worth knowing, and are you doing it justice? The story is what matters, and the second you put it on paper or on a screen it doesn't belong to you anymore, so you'd better get it told and then get the hell out of its way.
That's your responsibility as a storyteller.
- To Rowling's credit, and by contrast to The Dark Tower, she managed to stay completely true to her story and to her style, despite various changes in her life such has marriage, children, and becoming the richest woman in Europe.↩
- One could argue that a film could be made that skewed closer, plot-wise to the original short novel by L. Frank Baum, but ultimately that still doesn't answer the question: what more is there to the story that was present in the novel -- not the plot, but the story being told -- which could warrant such an exercise? Having read The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, I can't personally say there was anything that they really lost out on story-wise, even if plot-wise they left out the part about mice saving Dorothy from the poppies.↩
- It should be noted that, just because I couldn't think of a worthwhile new way to tell the story, doesn't mean such an endeavor was impossible. The Sci-Fi miniseries premiering this last weekend, Tin Man accomplished just that, taking the concepts presented in the original story, such as a man with no brain, and an evil witch, and re-seating it into a much different tapestry and interpretation of Oz mythology. Whether or not the re-imagining is to be judged "successful" is, I admit, purely subjective (I have the first episode TIVO'd but unwatched), but I think most viewers would rather see a "bold reimagining" of a well-known story, than a tepid rehashing of a story that was already told in cinematic form, completely and competently, almost a century ago.
To say nothing of "Wicked", the best-selling book and its generally sold-out Broadway adaptation both. Author Gregory Maguire has built his career on re-imagining classic children's stories, usually from the "villain's" point of view.
↩ - This gets into the theory of what sci-fi is all about in the first place, which is not to try to predict the future, but to extend the problems and fears of TODAY to their extremes, and wrestle with today by holding up a mirror we call "tomorrow". But that's a topic for a future post.↩
- And a sure-fire successful one, too; I don't even know what it looks like but I'll tell you right now, if I had the money, I'd fucking buy a KITT car at the drop of a hat. And I'm not even into cars. Slap those red running lights on the front of any shiny black car and I'm sold.↩
- Frank Darabont's recently released film version of The Mist, which I also remember reading about on Coming Soon as much as a decade ago, happens to tell the same story. Although it takes the decidedly more cynical view that fear drives the majority of people to madness and violence. Not a feel-good movie, that one.↩
- Yes, even Quint. The reason the fisherman is so angry and hateful, especially towards the shark, is because he's so terrified of its power, the way it can make him helpless and destroy him without fear or remorse of their own. He wants to destroy the shark so he can conquer this fear that rules his entire life. All of the characters have this kind of depth throughout. And this was supposed to be a low-budget schlock film. Is it any wonder Spielberg has the reputation -- and the track record -- he does? He refused to settle when anyone else would have.
Now try to read that kind of depth into the characters of one of the Resident Evil movies. I dare you.↩ - I once decided, years back, that I wanted to have a "shark day" where I rent all of the non-Jaws shark movies in Blockbuster and watch them in a marathon. Since then I've had to amend the plan to being a "shark week". There are so fucking many of these movies.↩
Sunday, December 02, 2007
Childe Stephen to the Dark Tower fumbled
Stephen King spent more than 20 years writing a fantasy series he called The Dark Tower. He only just completed the 7-book cycle in 2004. The series technically began and ended his career, although Carrie was published before The Gunslinger, and he has continued to write and publish since "retiring" with the release of the final volume, simply called The Dark Tower.
There are three things I would change about the series: Book 5, Book 6, and Book 7.
In 1999, King suffered a near-fatal accident when he was hit by a van during a morning jog. Understandably, it fucked him up something mean. Not just physically, although after he managed to not die he was still confined to a wheelchair for almost two years after the accident. But psychologically, emotionally. 1
The first thing he wrote post-accident was non-fiction, a book on writing cleverly titled On Writing. It took nearly three years to get back on the horse with Book 5 of The Dark Tower, Wolves of the Calla, in 2003. The previous volume, Wizard and Glass, had been published in 1996.
The bitterness about his experience was clear even in unrelated projects. 2 When King wrote the teleplays for the miniseries "Kingdom Hospital" in 2004, which was a remake of Danish series "Riget (The Kingdom)", he added a painter character as the main character, who was admitted to the eponymous hospital after...getting hit by a van during a morning jog. Unsurprisingly, the man driving the van is not cast in a sympathetic light.
But the bitterness was not only directed toward the man who caused his pain; it's present in his feelings towards his fans, who were not as sympathetic as perhaps he deserved. When he got back to writing The Dark Tower, he spoke in interviews about how fans at book signings, etc, would come up to him and tell him that they were glad he didn't die -- not for his own sake, but because if he had, the Dark Tower series would have been left unfinished.
It seems to me that this attitude -- which was, he implied, not the minority -- engendered in him a resentment towards the story and towards his so-called "fans", with the painful realization that none of them really cared about HIM, only about the work.
I personally believe it was this that prevented him setting back to work on the series for a few more years. I think he spent some time wondering if he even should. "Fuck me? Fuck you, guy. Fuck all of you. You're not going to get the end anyway, how do you like that?"
But then he got back onto it. And when he did, he wrote FAST, turning the final three books of the series out within 18 months.
So what changed?
Well, he realized that, even though he created the story, it was bigger than him now. He had a responsibility to the story whether he liked it or not. The unfortunate part is, he decided to write that into the story.
It is established in the first three books -- the very first, in fact -- that the world of the Dark Tower has a close, direct link to our own. It's also established that many of his works tie into the Dark Tower mythos, with references to other stories or DT terminology. But in Wolves of the Calla he takes it further. The book includes a priest character, Father Callahan, from his novel 'Salem's Lot, and throughout the book they travel between the two worlds, ours and theirs. At the end, they bring back a book from our world that Callahan finds upsetting -- 'Salem's Lot, by Stephen King.
It just goes on from there. Basically the main characters discover and accept that King is their author, their creator, but he has stopped writing their story and they will fail in their quest to reach the Tower unless they get him going again. So in Book 6 they actually pay King a visit and demand that he finish the story. The book you're reading is about the characters telling the author to write the book you're reading. And in Book 7, they intervene in his accident, making what would have been a fatal accident into a near-fatal one instead.
Metafiction, huh? Good times. As someone with a degree in English, I can appreciate the fact that he basically wrote an essay to the reader. A "this is how it is. The story commands me now. This story, and its need to be told, ultimately saved my life." But unfortunately, and ironically, he sacrificed the story in order to tell us how important the story is.
It's like meta-metafiction. He managed to take the power back from the story, by telling the story of the story telling him to tell the story, and all I wanted was the story itself goddammit, and that managed to go mostly UNTOLD!
Fuck.
I get upset.
Anyway, I'll get to the actual point of all this in my next post. For real.
There are three things I would change about the series: Book 5, Book 6, and Book 7.
In 1999, King suffered a near-fatal accident when he was hit by a van during a morning jog. Understandably, it fucked him up something mean. Not just physically, although after he managed to not die he was still confined to a wheelchair for almost two years after the accident. But psychologically, emotionally. 1
The first thing he wrote post-accident was non-fiction, a book on writing cleverly titled On Writing. It took nearly three years to get back on the horse with Book 5 of The Dark Tower, Wolves of the Calla, in 2003. The previous volume, Wizard and Glass, had been published in 1996.
The bitterness about his experience was clear even in unrelated projects. 2 When King wrote the teleplays for the miniseries "Kingdom Hospital" in 2004, which was a remake of Danish series "Riget (The Kingdom)", he added a painter character as the main character, who was admitted to the eponymous hospital after...getting hit by a van during a morning jog. Unsurprisingly, the man driving the van is not cast in a sympathetic light.
But the bitterness was not only directed toward the man who caused his pain; it's present in his feelings towards his fans, who were not as sympathetic as perhaps he deserved. When he got back to writing The Dark Tower, he spoke in interviews about how fans at book signings, etc, would come up to him and tell him that they were glad he didn't die -- not for his own sake, but because if he had, the Dark Tower series would have been left unfinished.
It seems to me that this attitude -- which was, he implied, not the minority -- engendered in him a resentment towards the story and towards his so-called "fans", with the painful realization that none of them really cared about HIM, only about the work.
I personally believe it was this that prevented him setting back to work on the series for a few more years. I think he spent some time wondering if he even should. "Fuck me? Fuck you, guy. Fuck all of you. You're not going to get the end anyway, how do you like that?"
But then he got back onto it. And when he did, he wrote FAST, turning the final three books of the series out within 18 months.
So what changed?
Well, he realized that, even though he created the story, it was bigger than him now. He had a responsibility to the story whether he liked it or not. The unfortunate part is, he decided to write that into the story.
It is established in the first three books -- the very first, in fact -- that the world of the Dark Tower has a close, direct link to our own. It's also established that many of his works tie into the Dark Tower mythos, with references to other stories or DT terminology. But in Wolves of the Calla he takes it further. The book includes a priest character, Father Callahan, from his novel 'Salem's Lot, and throughout the book they travel between the two worlds, ours and theirs. At the end, they bring back a book from our world that Callahan finds upsetting -- 'Salem's Lot, by Stephen King.
It just goes on from there. Basically the main characters discover and accept that King is their author, their creator, but he has stopped writing their story and they will fail in their quest to reach the Tower unless they get him going again. So in Book 6 they actually pay King a visit and demand that he finish the story. The book you're reading is about the characters telling the author to write the book you're reading. And in Book 7, they intervene in his accident, making what would have been a fatal accident into a near-fatal one instead.
Metafiction, huh? Good times. As someone with a degree in English, I can appreciate the fact that he basically wrote an essay to the reader. A "this is how it is. The story commands me now. This story, and its need to be told, ultimately saved my life." But unfortunately, and ironically, he sacrificed the story in order to tell us how important the story is.
It's like meta-metafiction. He managed to take the power back from the story, by telling the story of the story telling him to tell the story, and all I wanted was the story itself goddammit, and that managed to go mostly UNTOLD!
Fuck.
I get upset.
Anyway, I'll get to the actual point of all this in my next post. For real.
- You would, perhaps, think that someone like Stephen King would already be about as fucked up as it was possible to be without actually going out and eating peoples' intestines. But not so. Storytellers and creative types in general do tend to be a little bit fucked-up by their nature, that's what makes their work powerful. But people who write horror fiction are, for the most part, surprisingly well-adjusted. They do, after all, get to vent their inner psychotic safely, and on a regular basis.↩
- Although, when speaking of King and the Dark Tower, one can make the argument that very few of his projects are "unrelated".↩
Friday, November 30, 2007
The Red-Headed Step-Prequel
So I've been doing a lot of thinking lately with regards to the responsibility of a storyteller. To what extent are they responsible to the story, the audience, and themselves? Where is the balance?
As anyone reading this knows by now, I can take a while to form my argument when it comes to this kind of thing, so I'm going to break it up over a few days so it's more bite-sized. I will also attempt to think of clever titles for each installment so as not to get boring, but no promises.
Anyway, to begin:
George Lucas, and his supporters, like to point out that Star Wars was Lucas' story, and so it is his prerogative to do anything he wants with it.
Greedo shoots first? Done.
Hayden Christensen in Return of the Jedi? It's in.
Midichlorians? Shit, why not.
The fact that the specific reference in my second link is lost in the PAGES of changes listed should finish making my point. If not, see also the pages for A New Hope (which wasn't even originally called that), and The Empire Strikes Back.
In terms of intellectual property, Star Wars belongs to Lucas. He can do whatever he wants to monetize it -- and he does. But as a STORY, as a MYTHOLOGY and a CULTURE, I think it's out of Lucas' hands. Legally he may have the right to alter it in whatever way his whims dictate, but he is violating the purity and the impact of the story every time he does so.
Aside from the fact that George Lucas is a prime example of someone who NEEDS a guy on set to go "George, that's a stupid idea," the story doesn't belong to him anymore. As soon as you make it part of the fabric of culture, part of the language of the zeitgeist, you have to be ready to let it go and find a life of its own.
Storytellers call their stories their "babies", their "children." Star Wars was Lucas' firstborn, and he didn't know quite what to do with it. The "child" wound up getting reared by a huge team of people, producers and executives who all had their input and influence on making it the film it was. They're like the teachers and friends a child makes in school. Then the film went out into the world and took on its own life.
If it were a child, it would be acceptable and expected that George let it go. But what he did, instead, was give up his next two children for adoption. Then he later kidnapped his adult firstborn, medicated it heavily, and then locked it in the attic for good measure. He also invoked his rights as the biological father of the other two to steal them away from the families that REALLY raised them, brought them under his roof against their will and then forced them to live under his rules.
And then 30 years later, he had three more kids, but THIS time he sheltered and homeschooled them to make sure that they had all the values and beliefs he wanted. I think we've all met the weird homeschooled kid. (Don't get me wrong, there are cool homeschooled kids too, but they're pretty rare and typically not strictly "homeschooled" so much as privately schooled by a group of parents.)
If George Lucas did to his real kids what he did to the original trilogy, child services would SO have had his ass. And there's nothing to be done for the prequels but to shake your head, just like when you meet the socially maladjusted homeschooled kids. "It's not their fault," you say, "their parents made them that way. They probably would have been cool if they'd been let out to play once in a while."
Now, don't get me wrong. There is NO question that legally, Star Wars is George Lucas' property, and I and many of my colleagues owe him gratitude for being progressive, and not suing the bloodstained zombie Christ out of us for playing in his backyard. But that doesn't mean I have to be okay with the way he mistreated his films.
Just because you created something, doesn't mean you control it forever. A storyteller should treat his "babies" like his babies. You have to have responsibility without demanding control.
More in my next post.
As anyone reading this knows by now, I can take a while to form my argument when it comes to this kind of thing, so I'm going to break it up over a few days so it's more bite-sized. I will also attempt to think of clever titles for each installment so as not to get boring, but no promises.
Anyway, to begin:
George Lucas, and his supporters, like to point out that Star Wars was Lucas' story, and so it is his prerogative to do anything he wants with it.
Greedo shoots first? Done.
Hayden Christensen in Return of the Jedi? It's in.
Midichlorians? Shit, why not.
The fact that the specific reference in my second link is lost in the PAGES of changes listed should finish making my point. If not, see also the pages for A New Hope (which wasn't even originally called that), and The Empire Strikes Back.
In terms of intellectual property, Star Wars belongs to Lucas. He can do whatever he wants to monetize it -- and he does. But as a STORY, as a MYTHOLOGY and a CULTURE, I think it's out of Lucas' hands. Legally he may have the right to alter it in whatever way his whims dictate, but he is violating the purity and the impact of the story every time he does so.
Aside from the fact that George Lucas is a prime example of someone who NEEDS a guy on set to go "George, that's a stupid idea," the story doesn't belong to him anymore. As soon as you make it part of the fabric of culture, part of the language of the zeitgeist, you have to be ready to let it go and find a life of its own.
Storytellers call their stories their "babies", their "children." Star Wars was Lucas' firstborn, and he didn't know quite what to do with it. The "child" wound up getting reared by a huge team of people, producers and executives who all had their input and influence on making it the film it was. They're like the teachers and friends a child makes in school. Then the film went out into the world and took on its own life.
If it were a child, it would be acceptable and expected that George let it go. But what he did, instead, was give up his next two children for adoption. Then he later kidnapped his adult firstborn, medicated it heavily, and then locked it in the attic for good measure. He also invoked his rights as the biological father of the other two to steal them away from the families that REALLY raised them, brought them under his roof against their will and then forced them to live under his rules.
And then 30 years later, he had three more kids, but THIS time he sheltered and homeschooled them to make sure that they had all the values and beliefs he wanted. I think we've all met the weird homeschooled kid. (Don't get me wrong, there are cool homeschooled kids too, but they're pretty rare and typically not strictly "homeschooled" so much as privately schooled by a group of parents.)
If George Lucas did to his real kids what he did to the original trilogy, child services would SO have had his ass. And there's nothing to be done for the prequels but to shake your head, just like when you meet the socially maladjusted homeschooled kids. "It's not their fault," you say, "their parents made them that way. They probably would have been cool if they'd been let out to play once in a while."
Now, don't get me wrong. There is NO question that legally, Star Wars is George Lucas' property, and I and many of my colleagues owe him gratitude for being progressive, and not suing the bloodstained zombie Christ out of us for playing in his backyard. But that doesn't mean I have to be okay with the way he mistreated his films.
Just because you created something, doesn't mean you control it forever. A storyteller should treat his "babies" like his babies. You have to have responsibility without demanding control.
More in my next post.
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
Talent vs. Skill
I spend a lot of time on various internet message boards (way more than I ought to), and I see a lot of people asking, essentially, whether it is possible to teach talent. Often this is part of a discussion on film school (which I'll save for another post), but the question is general enough: can you teach talent?
To me, the answer is a definite no. I believe that, like many other things, talent is inborn. You have a certain amount of it and you can't get any more talented over time, because talent is a natural thing. One might APPEAR to become more talented in something, but that is in fact a development of skill.
As I see it, talent is your capacity to achieve something. In artistic endeavors, the word most frequently used is vision. In physical pursuits, like sports, a person is said to be or have "natural talent", which I'm arguing here is redundant -- although I think "raw talent" is still valid.
The example is most easily illustrated by continuing with a physical example. Pick a sport, any sport. If you take two people who have never played the sport before, and teach them both the same way at the same time, and chances are one of them is going to be better at it than the other. He will learn faster, understand more quickly, and surpass his "peer", sometimes almost effortlessly.
Another example. You take two people who can't draw, and you teach them. Or some other artistic pursuit -- painting, 3D animation, whatever. Teach them all the same information, and test them to ensure that they both possess the same knowledge with their tools and the attendant skillset. Then ask them to create something. One of them may bring back something absolutely astonishing, while the other will bring back something straight out of his lessons, or similar to it.
The one who made something astounding didn't gain talent from his training, he just learned the skills necessary to express his talent using the given tools. Talent is the ability to create art, skills are the physical or mental processes to facilitate that art.
In film, it is perfectly possible to be a highly-skilled filmmaker without being particularly talented. An example I always use is Chris Columbus. Columbus is a very skillful filmmaker. He knows where to put the camera, he knows how to cover a scene, he knows how to put the world of the film in front of the lens. He puts the page, on the screen. His productions are well-made technically, but they are not art. He's got all the skills a filmmaker needs, but not the talent/vision to make his films soar. They simply get the job done.
The reason I like to use Chris Columbus is because I can then compare him to Alfonso Cuaron, as they both made films in the Harry Potter series. Comparing the first two films to the third is completely night and day. Cuaron took more license with the story, but still got all the major beats across and managed to make the world feel like it existed, not like a storybook land. I could gush about Cuaron's use of the camera for hours (especially if we bring Children of Men into it), but the point is that I'm not sure that there's any technical knowledge Cuaron has that Columbus doesn't. Cuaron just has a vision of what he wants to do with it, whereas Columbus has a sense of where it's "supposed" to go.
Everyone has a talent, and everyone's talent is different. And even if you learn the skills for something, without talent you'll be mediocre; above-average at best.
Personal example: I enjoy music. I was in the band in high school and I think I have the capacity to learn all the skills I would need to be a composer. But the problem is, I lack the talent. I could learn HOW to write music, but no one could teach me WHAT to write. A true composer (several of which I have the good fortune to know and work with) hears music all the time, and the skills are merely employed to get it from his head into a form that others can understand and appreciate. I can't be a composer because I don't hear the music.
All that being said, I've left out one important component, the one I'll argue is MOST important: passion. Remember that vague sports analogy above? Well, no matter how much talent the one guy has, if the other guy has more passion, he might be a better player, because he cares more. It's the whole point of the story of the Tortoise and the Hare. No matter how talented you are at something, it's worth nothing if you don't put your all into it.
I know a few people who I think are ridiculously talented, but they either lack the skills to fully explore their talent, or the passion to bother. It drives me up the wall, because if I had the talent they did, I'd never stop. It's difficult to be passionate about something, but not have the talent, and see someone with all the talent you wish you had and none of the passion.
On the flip side, even if you have the talent for something, why do it if it's going to make you miserable? Isn't it better to do something you may not be the best at, as long as you love it? Here's where I give the resounding yes. Because you know what? You'll never be the best at whatever you're doing. Someone will always be better. You might as well have a reason to get up in the morning.
So between the three, the most important thing to have is passion. Learn all the skills you'll need, and if you happen to be lucky enough to have talent, too, you'll rise to the top. And even if not, with the right passion and skills, you can have a long and satisfying career doing what you love.
To me, the answer is a definite no. I believe that, like many other things, talent is inborn. You have a certain amount of it and you can't get any more talented over time, because talent is a natural thing. One might APPEAR to become more talented in something, but that is in fact a development of skill.
As I see it, talent is your capacity to achieve something. In artistic endeavors, the word most frequently used is vision. In physical pursuits, like sports, a person is said to be or have "natural talent", which I'm arguing here is redundant -- although I think "raw talent" is still valid.
The example is most easily illustrated by continuing with a physical example. Pick a sport, any sport. If you take two people who have never played the sport before, and teach them both the same way at the same time, and chances are one of them is going to be better at it than the other. He will learn faster, understand more quickly, and surpass his "peer", sometimes almost effortlessly.
Another example. You take two people who can't draw, and you teach them. Or some other artistic pursuit -- painting, 3D animation, whatever. Teach them all the same information, and test them to ensure that they both possess the same knowledge with their tools and the attendant skillset. Then ask them to create something. One of them may bring back something absolutely astonishing, while the other will bring back something straight out of his lessons, or similar to it.
The one who made something astounding didn't gain talent from his training, he just learned the skills necessary to express his talent using the given tools. Talent is the ability to create art, skills are the physical or mental processes to facilitate that art.
In film, it is perfectly possible to be a highly-skilled filmmaker without being particularly talented. An example I always use is Chris Columbus. Columbus is a very skillful filmmaker. He knows where to put the camera, he knows how to cover a scene, he knows how to put the world of the film in front of the lens. He puts the page, on the screen. His productions are well-made technically, but they are not art. He's got all the skills a filmmaker needs, but not the talent/vision to make his films soar. They simply get the job done.
The reason I like to use Chris Columbus is because I can then compare him to Alfonso Cuaron, as they both made films in the Harry Potter series. Comparing the first two films to the third is completely night and day. Cuaron took more license with the story, but still got all the major beats across and managed to make the world feel like it existed, not like a storybook land. I could gush about Cuaron's use of the camera for hours (especially if we bring Children of Men into it), but the point is that I'm not sure that there's any technical knowledge Cuaron has that Columbus doesn't. Cuaron just has a vision of what he wants to do with it, whereas Columbus has a sense of where it's "supposed" to go.
Everyone has a talent, and everyone's talent is different. And even if you learn the skills for something, without talent you'll be mediocre; above-average at best.
Personal example: I enjoy music. I was in the band in high school and I think I have the capacity to learn all the skills I would need to be a composer. But the problem is, I lack the talent. I could learn HOW to write music, but no one could teach me WHAT to write. A true composer (several of which I have the good fortune to know and work with) hears music all the time, and the skills are merely employed to get it from his head into a form that others can understand and appreciate. I can't be a composer because I don't hear the music.
All that being said, I've left out one important component, the one I'll argue is MOST important: passion. Remember that vague sports analogy above? Well, no matter how much talent the one guy has, if the other guy has more passion, he might be a better player, because he cares more. It's the whole point of the story of the Tortoise and the Hare. No matter how talented you are at something, it's worth nothing if you don't put your all into it.
I know a few people who I think are ridiculously talented, but they either lack the skills to fully explore their talent, or the passion to bother. It drives me up the wall, because if I had the talent they did, I'd never stop. It's difficult to be passionate about something, but not have the talent, and see someone with all the talent you wish you had and none of the passion.
On the flip side, even if you have the talent for something, why do it if it's going to make you miserable? Isn't it better to do something you may not be the best at, as long as you love it? Here's where I give the resounding yes. Because you know what? You'll never be the best at whatever you're doing. Someone will always be better. You might as well have a reason to get up in the morning.
So between the three, the most important thing to have is passion. Learn all the skills you'll need, and if you happen to be lucky enough to have talent, too, you'll rise to the top. And even if not, with the right passion and skills, you can have a long and satisfying career doing what you love.
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Movie Review: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Apparently this film, starring Brad Pitt as Jesse James and Casey Affleck as Robert Ford, was put out into limited release this last week. I had heard the title before (it's not a title you're likely to forget) and it's been getting raves on Rotten Tomatoes. So, having little else to do late Sunday, Ryan and I trotted out to the local theatre for a showing.
Let me put this out there first: I don't like biopics, as a rule. Life is messy, and biopics by their nature are, therefore, also messy. Things don't get tied up in a little bow with much frequency, and maybe it's the nihilist in me (or in the biopic filmmakers), but usually I come out of a biopic less sure of why I should care about the person's life than when I went in. I'm one of the few people I know who positively loathed The Aviator, just in the sense that it didn't GO anywhere. The guy got richer and crazier and the movie ended with him filthy rich and hygiene-crazy. Very skillful filmmaking, sure, but I'd rather talk about the implications of the film towards the human experience, than the two-strip color timing effect used in the first half.
But I digress. This is a review of The Assassination of Yada-Yada. I'm not sure that Assassination necessarily counts as a "biopic" in the strictest sense, but it details the important sections of the lives of its two eponymous characters, and it also suffers from the usual problems that a biopic suffers. It details the decline of these two men, and doesn't really seem to have anything to say ABOUT it other than the fact that it happened.
I was always taught in English class not to summarize, but to analyse, but as a review for people who haven't seen the film, some summary is first in order. There will be spoilers (although given that the climax is in the title, I hardly think they're significant):
The James gang (Jesse, and his older brother Frank) are pulling the final heist of their careers. Most of the original "gang" is dead or imprisoned, so the Brothers James have hired some of the local hillbillies to help them pull of their heist. Among them is another pair of brothers, Charlie and Robert Ford. Our introduction to Charlie is his attempt to approach Frank, asking him to take him on as a kind of protege in the glamorous world of banditry. Frank doesn't like the kid, tells him so, and that's the end of that.
They pull off the train heist and everyone goes their separate ways. Robert stays with Jesse for a brief while, helping him move his family under cover of night to a town where his crimes will be unlikely to catch him. It becomes evident that Robert idolizes Jesse, and has grown up on a diet of Jesse James pulp novels and urban legends. We've all known that kid who lacks social skills in general, and kind of creeps everybody out; Robert Ford is that kid, and working with Jesse James he is just about working with his own personal Jesus Christ. To his dismay, Jesse does not return the adoration. In fact he really loathes Robert, and the attention Robert gives him, and actively seeks to hurt Robert emotionally by ridiculing his obsession with The Jesse James just about every time he's within earshot.
Steadily disillusioned with his hero, Robert eventually turns on him, deciding to hand him over to the police for the big reward. The stakes in this decision are raised and established by several scenes in which Jesse roots out treachery within the band of compatriots who helped with the job, and one by one takes them down before they can take him down. Apparently there's a guy named Sam Cummings (I think that's what it was) who is Jesse's nemesis; several of the people he kills he first accuses of being in cahoots with Cummings, and he beats a young boy mercilessly for the crime of being related to Cummings.
These and other scenes are also used to establish that the cheese is starting to slide off Jesse's cracker. There are a number of scenes where he almost kills Robert Ford "in jest". He's depressed, paranoid, and frightened of himself (and for a man who's killed as many as Jesse claims to, that's pretty frightening to the people around him). By the time Jesse and Robert are alone together (well, Charlie is in the room), the man is really having a problem. Jesse knows Robert has turned on him, Robert knows Jesse is going to kill him. Yet Jesse takes off his gun belts, proclaims "that picture's awful dusty" about a picture without a speck of dust on it, and proceeds to clean the picture with his back to the Ford brothers. Robert takes the opportunity and kills Jesse.
He triumphantly announces it to the world, is paid well for it, and somewhat inexplicably his act becomes branded as an act of betrayal and cowardice. People write songs about how great Jesse was and how shitty Ford's actions were (in Ford's presence). Charlie Ford kills himself, unable to bear the burden of his betrayal, and Robert Ford's life is taken by a half-crazed vigilante who blows his head off with a shotgun in retribution. The end.
Now, if you're like me, your reaction to the third act is summarized by three letters: WTF.
Part of the problem, almost certainly, is that I know absolutely nothing of the historical or legendary elements that make up the story of Jesse James. My assumption is that Robert Ford has spent the last century or so being vilified as a coward and a traitor, and that the movie's intention was to show how Ford acted in a way that any of us would have done in the same situation, and indeed, seemed to be acting in accordance with Jesse James' own wishes. Jesse establishes early on that he "never takes off his gunbelts"; it's that explicit. The man cocks a gun in his sleep when he hears stirring in the bed next to him. He wanted Ford to take the opportunity, and made it as open as possible.
So, I guess the idea is that we know this story of the Great Jesse James and how he was betrayed and murdered, and we see the truth behind it, we experience Robert Ford's disillusionment with him, and when the time comes, we understand and have discovered a new perspective on the old legend.
The problem is, again, I didn't know the story of the Great Jesse James, and so besides the creepy stalker vibe he gives off, Robert Ford's actions seem like exactly what any sensible person would do. There's no real conflict there, and the behavior of the rest of the world when they hear about Jesse's death is, as I said above, rather inexplicable.
The Old West just isn't the romantic obsession it used to be. I really doubt that most people of my generation could tell you about Jesse James, or Davy Crockett (beyond his theme song and racoon hat), at the length that kids from previous generations could. Outlaws aren't the zeitgeist anymore, so it's difficult to look back and understand the way that an outlaw like Jesse James captured peoples' imaginations. It's hard to understand why people hated Robert Ford so much, and why even he is said, at one point after the assassination, to "miss the man [Jesse]". WHAT?! He killed more than a dozen people, was going to kill you, and did nothing but make the people around him live in fear.
What is really meant by that line, I think, is that he misses the LEGEND of the man. I think where the movie could have been improved -- or at least, the experience could have been improved for people like me -- would be to take the opportunity to briefly show the importance of Jesse James to the common folk. What he meant to them, and why. We see that Robert is obsessed with him, and that his obsession is fueled by dimestore paperbacks he's been reading all his life, but I would have liked to understand what the legend is, how much the world loves him. Is he their Robin Hood? Then show me that, and THEN dive with Robert Ford into the ugly, crushing reality of what your idol is probably really like.
Now, I said a lot about the central problems I had with the film. When I walked out, I really didn't know why I'd spent two hours and forty minutes watching what I did. But there are a lot of good things to be said from a filmmaking standpoint as well.
The performances are phenomenal. The world is utterly immersive and you really get an unromanticized Old West. Brad Pitt is good, although when Jesse starts to get really unhinged I saw a bit too much Tyler Durden in his mad laughter, and it distracted me and pulled me out of the movie. Casey Affleck does a great job as the creepy stalker-ish fanboy of Jesse James (unless Affleck is, in fact, creepy and stalker-ish; I prefer to think it's a performance), and Sam Rockwell is brilliant. He's great at comedy, great at drama, and probably doesn't get as much credit as he ought to for that.
The dialogue is well-written for the most part, generally not too on the nose and very evocative of that time. It's the kind of writing where you hear it and go "Man, I would never have thought to use that archaic term, but that's EXACTLY what they would have said back then." Good stuff.
The directing is quite something, if a little uneven. The sequence where they rob the train has a surreality to it that makes some of the shots look literally like moving paintings, without any kind of overt digital tweaking that gives movies like 300 the same effect.
The movie is very still, for the most part. There is some great work in building tension when someone is lying to Jesse and he's rooting it out. The camera will hold on them...and hold...and keep holding, way longer than you feel it ought to, and you see the characters' discomfort by being held accountable under the unblinking eye, you watch them fidget and struggle with their composure. We feel the discomfort too, we feel like it REALLY OUGHT TO CUT but it just doesn't. Through the camera we become Jesse, staring them down. We see what he sees, we root out the lying as he does from their glances and fidgets, and there are some moments of truth in the awkwardness, for the actors and for the audience, that a lot of films these days wouldn't get to.
Would I recommend the movie? Academically, I think so. I think this is a film that's a slow burn. It's not going to be the cause of a major upheaval in cinema, but there's a lot going on, a lot of craft at work in front of and behind the camera. As a piece of entertainment, no, I don't think this is one to watch. It's one to study, instead.
Let me put this out there first: I don't like biopics, as a rule. Life is messy, and biopics by their nature are, therefore, also messy. Things don't get tied up in a little bow with much frequency, and maybe it's the nihilist in me (or in the biopic filmmakers), but usually I come out of a biopic less sure of why I should care about the person's life than when I went in. I'm one of the few people I know who positively loathed The Aviator, just in the sense that it didn't GO anywhere. The guy got richer and crazier and the movie ended with him filthy rich and hygiene-crazy. Very skillful filmmaking, sure, but I'd rather talk about the implications of the film towards the human experience, than the two-strip color timing effect used in the first half.
But I digress. This is a review of The Assassination of Yada-Yada. I'm not sure that Assassination necessarily counts as a "biopic" in the strictest sense, but it details the important sections of the lives of its two eponymous characters, and it also suffers from the usual problems that a biopic suffers. It details the decline of these two men, and doesn't really seem to have anything to say ABOUT it other than the fact that it happened.
I was always taught in English class not to summarize, but to analyse, but as a review for people who haven't seen the film, some summary is first in order. There will be spoilers (although given that the climax is in the title, I hardly think they're significant):
The James gang (Jesse, and his older brother Frank) are pulling the final heist of their careers. Most of the original "gang" is dead or imprisoned, so the Brothers James have hired some of the local hillbillies to help them pull of their heist. Among them is another pair of brothers, Charlie and Robert Ford. Our introduction to Charlie is his attempt to approach Frank, asking him to take him on as a kind of protege in the glamorous world of banditry. Frank doesn't like the kid, tells him so, and that's the end of that.
They pull off the train heist and everyone goes their separate ways. Robert stays with Jesse for a brief while, helping him move his family under cover of night to a town where his crimes will be unlikely to catch him. It becomes evident that Robert idolizes Jesse, and has grown up on a diet of Jesse James pulp novels and urban legends. We've all known that kid who lacks social skills in general, and kind of creeps everybody out; Robert Ford is that kid, and working with Jesse James he is just about working with his own personal Jesus Christ. To his dismay, Jesse does not return the adoration. In fact he really loathes Robert, and the attention Robert gives him, and actively seeks to hurt Robert emotionally by ridiculing his obsession with The Jesse James just about every time he's within earshot.
Steadily disillusioned with his hero, Robert eventually turns on him, deciding to hand him over to the police for the big reward. The stakes in this decision are raised and established by several scenes in which Jesse roots out treachery within the band of compatriots who helped with the job, and one by one takes them down before they can take him down. Apparently there's a guy named Sam Cummings (I think that's what it was) who is Jesse's nemesis; several of the people he kills he first accuses of being in cahoots with Cummings, and he beats a young boy mercilessly for the crime of being related to Cummings.
These and other scenes are also used to establish that the cheese is starting to slide off Jesse's cracker. There are a number of scenes where he almost kills Robert Ford "in jest". He's depressed, paranoid, and frightened of himself (and for a man who's killed as many as Jesse claims to, that's pretty frightening to the people around him). By the time Jesse and Robert are alone together (well, Charlie is in the room), the man is really having a problem. Jesse knows Robert has turned on him, Robert knows Jesse is going to kill him. Yet Jesse takes off his gun belts, proclaims "that picture's awful dusty" about a picture without a speck of dust on it, and proceeds to clean the picture with his back to the Ford brothers. Robert takes the opportunity and kills Jesse.
He triumphantly announces it to the world, is paid well for it, and somewhat inexplicably his act becomes branded as an act of betrayal and cowardice. People write songs about how great Jesse was and how shitty Ford's actions were (in Ford's presence). Charlie Ford kills himself, unable to bear the burden of his betrayal, and Robert Ford's life is taken by a half-crazed vigilante who blows his head off with a shotgun in retribution. The end.
Now, if you're like me, your reaction to the third act is summarized by three letters: WTF.
Part of the problem, almost certainly, is that I know absolutely nothing of the historical or legendary elements that make up the story of Jesse James. My assumption is that Robert Ford has spent the last century or so being vilified as a coward and a traitor, and that the movie's intention was to show how Ford acted in a way that any of us would have done in the same situation, and indeed, seemed to be acting in accordance with Jesse James' own wishes. Jesse establishes early on that he "never takes off his gunbelts"; it's that explicit. The man cocks a gun in his sleep when he hears stirring in the bed next to him. He wanted Ford to take the opportunity, and made it as open as possible.
So, I guess the idea is that we know this story of the Great Jesse James and how he was betrayed and murdered, and we see the truth behind it, we experience Robert Ford's disillusionment with him, and when the time comes, we understand and have discovered a new perspective on the old legend.
The problem is, again, I didn't know the story of the Great Jesse James, and so besides the creepy stalker vibe he gives off, Robert Ford's actions seem like exactly what any sensible person would do. There's no real conflict there, and the behavior of the rest of the world when they hear about Jesse's death is, as I said above, rather inexplicable.
The Old West just isn't the romantic obsession it used to be. I really doubt that most people of my generation could tell you about Jesse James, or Davy Crockett (beyond his theme song and racoon hat), at the length that kids from previous generations could. Outlaws aren't the zeitgeist anymore, so it's difficult to look back and understand the way that an outlaw like Jesse James captured peoples' imaginations. It's hard to understand why people hated Robert Ford so much, and why even he is said, at one point after the assassination, to "miss the man [Jesse]". WHAT?! He killed more than a dozen people, was going to kill you, and did nothing but make the people around him live in fear.
What is really meant by that line, I think, is that he misses the LEGEND of the man. I think where the movie could have been improved -- or at least, the experience could have been improved for people like me -- would be to take the opportunity to briefly show the importance of Jesse James to the common folk. What he meant to them, and why. We see that Robert is obsessed with him, and that his obsession is fueled by dimestore paperbacks he's been reading all his life, but I would have liked to understand what the legend is, how much the world loves him. Is he their Robin Hood? Then show me that, and THEN dive with Robert Ford into the ugly, crushing reality of what your idol is probably really like.
Now, I said a lot about the central problems I had with the film. When I walked out, I really didn't know why I'd spent two hours and forty minutes watching what I did. But there are a lot of good things to be said from a filmmaking standpoint as well.
The performances are phenomenal. The world is utterly immersive and you really get an unromanticized Old West. Brad Pitt is good, although when Jesse starts to get really unhinged I saw a bit too much Tyler Durden in his mad laughter, and it distracted me and pulled me out of the movie. Casey Affleck does a great job as the creepy stalker-ish fanboy of Jesse James (unless Affleck is, in fact, creepy and stalker-ish; I prefer to think it's a performance), and Sam Rockwell is brilliant. He's great at comedy, great at drama, and probably doesn't get as much credit as he ought to for that.
The dialogue is well-written for the most part, generally not too on the nose and very evocative of that time. It's the kind of writing where you hear it and go "Man, I would never have thought to use that archaic term, but that's EXACTLY what they would have said back then." Good stuff.
The directing is quite something, if a little uneven. The sequence where they rob the train has a surreality to it that makes some of the shots look literally like moving paintings, without any kind of overt digital tweaking that gives movies like 300 the same effect.
The movie is very still, for the most part. There is some great work in building tension when someone is lying to Jesse and he's rooting it out. The camera will hold on them...and hold...and keep holding, way longer than you feel it ought to, and you see the characters' discomfort by being held accountable under the unblinking eye, you watch them fidget and struggle with their composure. We feel the discomfort too, we feel like it REALLY OUGHT TO CUT but it just doesn't. Through the camera we become Jesse, staring them down. We see what he sees, we root out the lying as he does from their glances and fidgets, and there are some moments of truth in the awkwardness, for the actors and for the audience, that a lot of films these days wouldn't get to.
Would I recommend the movie? Academically, I think so. I think this is a film that's a slow burn. It's not going to be the cause of a major upheaval in cinema, but there's a lot going on, a lot of craft at work in front of and behind the camera. As a piece of entertainment, no, I don't think this is one to watch. It's one to study, instead.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)