Eccentric Flower:201101/Film Comment
From Eccentric Flower
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Film Comment
I'd have put this in the Shrunken Cinema but you wouldn't read it. I may copy it there at some point in the future; that's where it really belongs.
- I don't generally go for structural analysis of a film, because all I am interested in when I watch a film is whether it entertains/interests me, and I find that it is pointless to dissect the camera work or the quality of the script; if the film worked for me, it worked for me, and I don't much care why. (This is the same rule that says why I never, never analyze poetry.)
- However, like all other cases of tool transparency, when something doesn't work in a film - or when it suddenly stops working - it immediately grinds against your teeth. I don't think most of us consciously notice good film craftsmanship, but bad film craftsmanship is almost always intrusive and distracting.
- I liked Inception. But there were points that became intrusive. This article covers most of them, and is worth your reading time if film is one of your interests, but the key problem distills to (I quote):
- A.D. Jameson's second article on Inception expands this, by comparison to some other directors he doesn't care much for (forgive the long quote, but it's vital):
- I was with Jameson until that last paragraph. Well, mostly. Let's take it in two parts.
- While, as a not-stupid person, I resent being forced to watch films which are constructed on the premise that the audience is stupid, there is a cynical, bottom-line-focused part of me which sits in that mental Hollywood boardroom and is forced to reluctantly admit that the audience is kinda stupid.
- I mean, yes, I think that Inception over-explains everything and would be a far more intriguing film if it left the audience to connect the dots more on their own. But on the other hand, I heard people leaving the theatre who still honestly couldn't figure out what the hell had been happening in the film, even with everything explained three times. So who is right? The person who makes a film that makes the audience work for it, which pleases five percent of the viewers? Or the person who makes a film where absolutely nothing is left un-spelled-out, which makes money?
- In a related story, I have noticed that one of the large disconnects I have with film critics is that they are judging films as Art, and I am judging them as Entertainment and/or Business. I have no pride and no shame here. The author must eat. If I could choose between writing fifty stories a year which satisfied me artistically but which no one would buy, or one story a year which actually made me some cash, I would always unhesitatingly choose the latter.
- You will note that this does not prevent me from stumping for better craft, and I want to stress that because it's important: Saying "it is okay to make crowd-pleasing, mass-consumption films" is NOT the same thing as saying "it is okay to make shoddy films." Shoddiness is the main thing I am calling out Nolan for here. The problem with Lucas to me is not that he is a pandering, commercial filmmaker, but that he's not actually very good at it.
- I disagree - in fact I think I disagree pretty strongly - with Jameson about shot length and his wail that it is a sign of the decline of film artistry. Now, I will be the first to admit that I have a pretty short attention span. On the other hand, I can remain riveted to a single topic or book or what-have-you for hours. I would say as I always do: It depends on the material.
- The longer you stay with a single shot, the more fascinating the subject of that shot has to be. If it's a shot of someone monologuing, the monologue had better damned well be the most interesting monologue ever. Even films of stand-up comedians - where it really is all about hearing the guy talk for two hours - have to move their cameras occasionally, just to keep our eyes from freezing in place.
- Short shots are safer. They can be used to conceal laziness, I admit, but they also are insurance. If you're not quite convinced you can make a long-duration shot compelling, breaking it into a lot of short shots reduces the risk you will lose the audience. You have to be an extremely good director indeed to make a lot of long-duration shots work - and when I say extremely good director here, I will indicate how high the bar is by saying that I don't feel Scorsese pulled it off nearly as often as he (or his fans) think he did.
Jameson quotes film critics David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson:
* The slam in this paragraph has become a standard recognition call of the Old Crufty Critic. Those are the same ones who refuse to admit that the success of a film now is strongly postulated on that film's being viewable in a variety of other display formats, because that's the way most people are going to end up seeing it. They hate when you point that out.
- The alternate explanation is that Scorsese may finally have realized that he now has the ability, with the improvements in editing technology, to plan and put together a lot of short shots and thus doesn't have to take quite as big a gamble that he can make movies as well as he used to - something I suspect he is very unsure of. (Granted, he has a lot of reputation to live up to, even if I think that reputation is largely undeserved.)
- I admit readily I have not watched much Scorsese, but that's for a reason: Every time I try to watch one of his films, it bores the hell out of me. (Mean Streets is not as good as people think it is; Taxi Driver is, but that's De Niro's doing and not Scorsese's; and King of Comedy, a cult film among many of my peers, is actually excruciating to watch.)
- There is a relatively minor Scorsese film called After Hours which is supposed to be a cross between a screwball comedy and a film noir - it is late at night and strange adventures and threats keep entangling our reluctant anti-hero, who really just wants to go home and try to sleep and stay out of it all. There is also a John Landis film called Into the Night, which - while the calamities are wholly different - has essentially the same structure.
- Scorsese's film does not work, and it doesn't work because the man has absolutely no idea how to pace a film that is supposed to be a brisk, always slightly off-balance black comedy. He doesn't understand brisk - or at least he didn't at the time. The film kills itself under its own ponderousness. Meanwhile, the Landis film - while undeniably less well-filmed, and perhaps less well-acted* - works, because it knows that in a film like this the first and foremost responsibility of the filmmaker is to keep the film moving forward, keep the pace up, at all costs. It is a sign of a horrible misfire when someone like Scorsese can be outplayed by a career hack like Landis. But Landis makes films to entertain and - well, I've never been entirely sure why Scorsese makes films.
* I have some issues judging the acting quality here because I simply cannot abide Griffin Dunne. I've never seen him play any role where I didn't want to punch him in the face as soon as I saw him.
- If Scorsese has learned how to make his films move fast enough to appear to have some sort of forward motion, and some film critic somewhere is calling him out on this as pandering to the short attention span, who do you think I am going to think is talking out of their ass in this case?
- You may call me a Philistine if you like, but please do remember that purity of art isn't everything; in fact it's not even in the top ten. I am tired of great directors being hailed as great for making movies that make me want to walk out of the theatre, or take a nap; and I'm defensive about people getting called out for the alleged crimes of making their movies more interesting to watch.
- I dispute that short cuts and rapid-fire pacing are signs that a film is dumbing down. As I hope I made it clear above, I am opposed to films dumbing down, even as I cynically admit it probably helps them sell. But as far as I'm concerned, the very lightning-like pace that Jameson despises is, in fact, our Last Best Hope - that this is the tool that will enable films to stay visually interesting to a larger audience without having to also dumb down their content. This is the tool by which films can bring in new audiences and yet not dumb down.
- Even the crassest sixteen-year-old, I maintain, will be willing to try to figure out some of the plot points and unconnected dots on his own - as long as you can hold his attention long enough to get him to the point where he cares enough to do so. But I can't in good conscience recommend to that kid that he sit through several minutes of typical Scorsese characters rambling to each other about nothing in particular in the way they do, not when I couldn't abide to sit through that myself.
- I do not necessarily always advocate the plot-centric film. Some films are about how it happens more than what happens, and that's fine. Some films are more about the characters it happens to. Some films can even get away with it being about how the characters talk to one another while it happens. But something must always happen - and it must happen in some way that presents an inexorable drive, a desire in the audience to find out what happens next. A film does not have to be plot-centric to be good, but it must always be plot-driven.
- We saw Elevator to the Gallows in theatrical re-release a few years ago. It is a Louis Malle film (strike one!) and it has a lot of existentialist young French people (strike two!) talking through a great deal of the picture about nothing I really cared to hear them talk about (strike three!) Ordinarily I would not touch this film with a thirty-nine-and-a-half-foot pole. But it has a happening - there is a crime, there is a cover-up for the crime, complications ensue - that not only keeps the film moving, but all of a sudden makes you more interested in these characters and the things you have to say.
- Were I to pitch this to a sixteen-year-old, what do you think I would stress? The famous director, whom they will not have heard of? The French film-noir sensibility, which has always seemed to me rather less vital than its American cousin? The presence of Jeanne Moreau, whom they will not have heard of? The importance of the film as part of the history of the French New Wave, which they will not have heard of? The score by Miles Davis, whom they will not have heard of? Or a love affair and a murder meant to look like a suicide and the killer trapped in the elevator of the building where the murder has taken place?
- But why should we base our designs in film around the tastes of the average sixteen-year-old? I hear you cry. Well, because you were sixteen once. And because the answer to the decline of quality in film is not to make crasser and shoddier movies "because that's what sixteen-year-olds see," but to improve the quality of the movie that you can get a sixteen-year-old to watch; because the answer is to train sixteen-year-olds to know quality when they see it (it is possible), and that respecting their tastes is not the same as pandering to them; it just seems like that because a lot of Hollywood (and much of the audience) is too lazy to make the distinction.
Gordon-Levitt was the only one who emerged from that movie with style and looking like he had enjoyed himself. I had never noticed him much before that. I will notice him in the future.
-- 21:16, 7 January 2011 (GMT)
Do notice him, he's an excellent actor and super smart, I think we'll see him doing very interesting things in the future. You might try "The Lookout" for a great performance in a solid suspense film. I don't really recommend "(500) Days of Summer" though.
-- 21:43, 7 January 2011 (GMT)
i'm really tired of critics whining about shot length, as if they were complaining that films now had sound or were in colour. i've also yet to see one make a convincing argument that "short shot length" actually equals "dumb". it's just a technique and it's gotten a hell of a lot easier to do with today's equipment, if that's what you want to do, which is probably one reason why it's more common.
i have avoided enough Scorsese to be exempt from the rest of your post. :)
also, add "Brick" to your Joseph Gordon-Levitt list.
-- 22:07, 7 January 2011 (GMT)
I just woke Len up snickering at the bit of that article about the deleted scenes of ticking clocks. I'm blaming his interrupted nap on you.
Also, re: Gordon-Levitt - I highly recommend "Mysterious Skin." If you think that you know and dislike Gregg Araki as a director, which is an entirely valid viewpoint, don't write off Mysterious Skin. It's very different from his usual work, and quite good.
I'm a big fan of his. If there were a cut of "Inception" that were just his scenes, I'd buy it. Along with my imaginary "Julie & Julia" cut without the Julie.
-- 22:56, 7 January 2011 (GMT)
I could argue with you about plenty of points here, but I've got stuff that needs doing so I'll just hit you with a drive-by: I think you're really off-base about Scorsese, especially your appraisal of After Hours.
That movie is not supposed to be breezy. Breezy would ruin it. It's supposed to be a very dark comedy/horror movie, a fussy 1980s yuppie's descent into a baffling, urban hell. It's supposed to feel like a kind of waking nightmare, where we follow this hapless guy as he keeps wandering into situations where he is threatened and humiliated and everybody he meets seems to have some secret agenda.
I can't understand really despising Dunne, he doesn't seem like the kind of actor anybody would have really strong feelings about. He has a certain fidgety smugness, I guess, but that's really sort of ideal for his role here as the bored, kind of pampered everyman who goes looking for a little excitement but winds up tumbling down the rabbit hole into a very grungy NY wonderland.
The King of Comedy is one of the films that pioneered a kind of excruciating dark comedy that you're not going to enjoy, no matter how well done it may be. I think this is a case where your own biases are preventing you from appreciating something really, really well-done. Hey, I can't make myself sit through "Cars" because I hate Larry the Cable Guy that freaking much. Everybody's got their something.
-- 01:07, 8 January 2011 (GMT)
Also: I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I don't think Jackson was short of cash when he made the LOTR movies. I think those movies were a huge gamble for New Line, they spent a gazillion bucks and crossed their fingers.
I think his LOTR pictures were no fun for the very same reasons a lot of hardcore Tolkien fans loved them: Jackson always erred on the side of cramming in more plot (and BATTLESS!) over character stuff. The films worked when they stuck with Frodo, Sam and Gollum, but we kept wandering away for 20 minutes of CGI scenes with 6 thousand tiny orcs scrambling over digital battlements like ants invading a flowerpot.
-- 01:15, 8 January 2011 (GMT)
Mel:
I don't want to read that whole long article not just because it's tl;dr but because I liked Inception and I'd just as soon keep liking it, thank you. (Also I'm wondering if it's a coincidence that you wrote this the day after I said on LJ that Inception was the best movie I saw last year.)
I liked "After Hours" when first I saw it (I think I was one of the six people who saw it when it first came out) but I haven't seen it in so long that I don't know if I would feel the same way about it now. Back then it seemed like something that hadn't been done before - now, not so much. I'm not much of a Scorsese fan, in general - I don't even like Taxi Driver much. (I liked some of his recent movies more.)
I loved the first one and a half LOTR movies, more or less, and then I just completely lost interest. I think part of the problem is that Jackson couldn't make up his mind about the whole "be true to the books" problem - on the whole I thought the movies were better when he DID stick with Tolkien. It was when he went haring off in some completely made-up direction that they really sucked.
(Ursula, if you hadn't corrected yourself I would've just read that as "battleses" and thought you were channelling Gollum.)
-- 02:26, 8 January 2011 (GMT)
Ursula re LOTR films: Whereas the third one is the one I now rewatch only half of, because it's like, "Oh, here's Frodo, he's gonna bitch and whine and moan some more and Gollum's gonna do schtick, let's fast forward to the next scene that has humans, wizards, or elves in it." But then, I have that problem with the book of Return of the King as well. All Frodo does in that book is whine and suffer. It's like Tolkien felt he had an obligation to keep coming back to that story. "Not at the volcano yet?" "No, not yet." "Let's go look at something interesting then." "Not at the volcano yet?" "No, not yet." ...
That said, I thought the script could have done better with characterization in general. When I first saw the films I thought, "Well, Gandalf and Saruman are well handled, the writers must know how to handle wizards better than other characters," and then I realized, no, everybody got equally crappy treatment, it's just that McKellen and Lee are Old Pros who can act circles around the others in the cast. Practically everyone else except Mortenson was not well-served by their scripts, I think. (Here I think the problem is that they tried to be too literal with Tolkien. Dialogue which reads well on a page does not necessarily play well in a film.)
Mel: I liked Inception, as I say. Liked it a great deal. But it definitely had problems, and I suspect when you see it a second time and you're not distracted with the cool shiny objects and dream nesting, you'll see just how very verbose and poor the script is.
-- 03:40, 8 January 2011 (GMT)
Agree with Ursula about After Hours. I'd add that the anxiety in it (and the comedy created by it) felt Very True. This may be a picture that speaks to New Yorkers much more than to anyone else. Particularly back in the '80s, If you were an Upper West or East Sider (I was the former), going below 14th St. had a frisson of danger. It was grungy, narrow, often dark, and the streets had no rhyme or reason to them -- why do West 4th and West 10th intersect??? -- but with your $20 bill, you had your Eject Button because you could always jump in a cab and get home. To lose that escape -- I tell you honestly, the thought still gives me a chill.
I also really like Gordon-Leavitt, but Clare and I couldn't make it through 20 minutes of Brick. I really wanted to like it, and it was just unwatchable. Have you watched any Third Rock? He started there as just a kid and was able to hold his comedic own with kings of farce John Lithgow and French Stewart.
-- 07:23, 8 January 2011 (GMT)
I've never made it through the LOTR books, I bogged down in The Hobbit. Tolkien is just not my guy, although I can see why other people like him. So to me the Frodo, Sam and Gollum character stuff in the movies really stood out in the middle of all the endless battles, and when they just kind of disappeared in the third film I assumed Jackson was neglecting their story in favor of more boring fighty stuff. It sounds like he was doing us a favor, if nothing really happened with those three in the books. But I don't know, Gollum's ever-shifting loyalties, Frodo losing his brains and poor Sam trying to make this shit work... As a relative newcomer to the story, that all just seemed a lot more dramatic than all of the human and wizard stuff. Three very flawed, (literally) tiny people on a very dangerous journey... Now THAT's a movie!
K is a big Tolkien nut, and she told me that the movies actually included some battles that were like a paragraph in the books. That made me wanna give Jackson a slap on the back of the head. "You directed Heavenly Creatures, you silly man! You know how to make real movies, so make one!"
-- 11:10, 8 January 2011 (GMT)
Mel:
(500) Days of Summer is watchable enough, I thought, especially if you're just watching for JG-L. I need to go back and watch some Third Rock, myself, I only ever saw a handful of episodes, but I remember that I always thought he was good.
Col: I did see Inception twice, as a matter of fact. Maybe it would have taken me a third viewing for the flaws to start leaping up and bothering me. I'm not denying that they're there, they just didn't concern me, particularly. (I will probably be seeing it again soon, since I ordered Rob a copy for his birthday. I will report back if my opinion changes.)
-- 07:49, 9 January 2011 (GMT)
Jette:
Heh, Jameson forgot one thing on his Crimes of Peter Jackson list: "5. Excessive plummeting." (He even managed to sneak a plummet into "The Lovely Bones," a movie that made me sad because it was not a quarter as good as "Heavenly Creatures." Which I believe is from the pre-plummet Jackson years.)
"The longer you stay with a single shot, the more fascinating the subject of that shot has to be." Years ago, I heard Guillermo del Toro talk about how he likes to keep a shot running long just to build tension or to make the audience feel a little uncomfortable in horror movies. I can't tell you if he's done that in his last few films because *I am too busy enjoying them to pay attention to things like shot length.*
I don't judge films as Art, I tend to judge them on Storytelling and Entertainment. The exception is a film that is obviously made for a small audience with the intention of being more art than entertainment, and the only example of that I can think of is "Southland Tales," which works if you watch it as an interesting museum exhibit and not as an entertainment.
I get disgusted quickly with films that treat the audience like we are stupid. You had better be doing this in a very smart way so I don't notice it, or else I'm not buying it. Kids' films are of course the worst offenders, which just makes me sad (I was going to say except for Pixar, but then I remembered "Cars").
I'm not fond of Scorsese as a rule but I really liked the Hitchcock riffs in "Shutter Island," a movie that is way better to watch the second time (obviously I am not a Kael acolyte). "The Departed" was fine but honestly, I can hardly remember it.
I was overhyped on "Inception" and therefore underwhelmed. Beautiful film, great concept ... and nothing much happened. At least I enjoyed the cool images and the delightful Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
-- 21:00, 7 January 2011 (GMT)