Visible conflict

Perhaps one definitional difference between genre and art is that genre is content with the depiction of conflict and its resolution for its own sake. "Art" could be defined as the reaction to such conflict and its working out, whether the reaction is that of individual characters, a society or both. In such a manner, art can conveniently be built on the foundations of genre, without disturbing it.

The delight and trap for genre pieces is that, being rooted in depictions of the same conflicts being played out in the same way, court a stifling uniformity. (Another perspective would focus on the ceremonial quality of such depictions, especially relevant with films from more ceremonial cultures than our own.) Ip Man 2 (2010) addresses the problem of potential monotony head on and frames its conflict in purely visual terms to an extent that would delight Hitchcock.

The film's conflict is that of East versus West; the theme is local pride among the Chinese of Hong Kong in the teeth of domination by Western colonial powers. The ideas play out in breathtakingly simple form: A boxer named Twister (who should have been called "Crusher" like those brutes in the Bugs Bunny cartoons) has arrived at Sammo Hung's club to box with some other Westerner (whom, we never find out). Instead, he insults Sammo and fights him to the death, leaving the Ip Man (Donnie Yen) to defend the honor of kung fu and Chinese culture in general.



Thus, the East-West conflict is not something merely described, discussed, reacted to, perhaps dramatized in a montage of vignettes. It is palpable and manifest in every frame of the last half of the film. The very mixing of the two styles of boxing makes visible not only differences in culture, but in the aspects of personal character valued by those cultures. The West favors shows of strength, bluster, and overwhelming force; the East favors skill, surprise, and exploiting the opponent's vulnerabilities.

An overheated Hong-Kong Rocky? sure. But cinematic? Textbook case. And it doesn't hurt that Donnie Yen is such a compelling and charismatic performer.

"Somebody get Aristotle in here for a rewrite"

As it happens, I am teaching bits of Aristotle's Poetics to my AP Literature class. A lot of it seems so elementary and self-evident, and yet apparently it isn't. For instance, Aristotle writes that a play is an imitation of an action. Not a person, not an idea, an action. Yet major expensive films omit that on a regular basis.

Take The Conspirator (2011), about the sham military trial and summary hanging of Mary Surratt, accused of being part of the Lincoln assassination conspiracy by virtue of being Southern, being related to one of the conspirators and of living among angry wounded people (Americans) desperately in need of scapegoats. Ignoring the prologue, which shows the various parts of the conspiracy in motion, at the outset of the story, Mary Surratt is going to be tried before a kangaroo court and be hanged. Not only do those facts never change, but the purported protagonist, Surratt's appointed lawyer never manages to change them. The second hour of the film runs out of narrative gas so badly that it repeats the same scene three or four times. Stanton tells Aiken nothing can be done. Seward tells Aiken nothing can be done. The other lawyers tell Aiken nothing can be done. Round and round the wheels spin, throwing up mud and going nowhere.

And then there is Dean Spanley (2008), which I will, exercising the utmost self-restraint, not describe as a shaggy-dog story, but which also would earn Aristotle's scorn. It also happens that I am teaching a creative writing course (yes, my teaching life is quite wonderful at the moment), and I am trying to hammer into the students the importance of making a timely promise to the reader (or audience) as to where the story is going to go. The classic rule in film is that by ten minutes in, you have to clue the audience in as to what the film is going to be about, what the objective is, what the conflict will be.

Dean Spanley lets an hour go by before it settles down and decides what story it wants to tell. It does have quite a touching and remarkable payoff, but not one worth that arid first hour. At least 45 minutes of the movie are engaged in pure misdirection, whether or not intentional it is hard to say. But it makes it hard to invest in the emotional stakes the film is really interested in. Once again, filmmakers have attempted to cram one hour's worth of story into two slam-bang hours of middle-aged men sipping liqueurs.

People, these are not just rules for their own sakes. Breaking the rules of screenplay structure has consequences! You're playing with fire! Or in the case of Dean Spanley, some rather tepid and dingy bathwater.
On more purely cinematic territory, why was everything in the past blurry, grainy and distorted in color? Was the air that different back when? This penchant, as displayed in The Conspirator for arty visual treatment to suggest earlier eras (it's even worse with future noir films) started, to my recollection, with The Godfather, which stood for the proposition that everything in the past used to be more yellow. That was bad, but it at least had to be planned in advance so that filters could be put on lenses. Now directors can decide in post-production that the whole world is topsy-turvy colorwise, which raises the question as to whether future cinematographers will need any competence at all, given that images can be reframed, objects added or removed and color timing completely reconfigured at will.

And are there no American actors other than Paul Giamatti (who seems particularly contemporary to me) who can portray people who lived long ago? Look at the picture at the top of this blog, and there is an Englishman facing off with a Scot, pretending to be 1865 Americans. I think SAG needs to step in here. (At least they got John Cullum, as authentic a Virginian as you can find anywhere, to play a Southerner.)

I think the English can share their objection, given that in Dean Spanley, English people are portrayed by Ozzies and Kiwis in a quite indiscriminate way. What next? Carmen sung by a soprano? Or a bass?

Don't nobody know how to tell a story no more?

Maybe it's better to look at Source Code (2011) as a great little trainbound "B" movie like the original Narrow Margin, because it effectively ends at about the 70-minute mark. Hero Jack Gyllenhall solves the mystery, foils and captures the villain and saves Chicago. (Hope that's not a spoiler for anybody, but do you really think a little movie like this had the guts to destroy a major American city? It's released by Summit, for heaven's sake. It takes a Paramount or Disney to destroy major real estate.
Seriously, and I do mean seriously, screenwriter Ben Ripley, whose first produced screenplay this is after 16 years in the business, and Duncan Jones, who made the similarly and more successfully claustrophobic Moon, have thing they want to say about love, identity and indeed what it is to be human. Problem is, they never really signalled us that this was the way they were going to go. We signed on for a popcorn roller coaster ride, not a meditation on mortality, and the solution to the mystery of why what starts as a cracking good thriller, Groundhog Day On A Train With A Bomb only grossed $54 million is answered by the 20-minute appendix, which even on its own terms makes no sense.

You see, Jake Gyllenhall is inhabiting another guy's body. Not really, because it's all some of kind of simulation-that's-not-a-simulation kind of thing. Anyway, to "the girl" he looks like some other guy she knows only slightly, but inside he's Mr. JG. And she falls in love with that hybrid guy in 8 minutes, and they will spend eternity together in simulated-Chicago-heaven. Really, there's nobody that can explain this higgledy piggledy ending. I'm sure they think it's profound and something out of The Twilight Zone but it's just ill-conceived, poorly executed and made no sense to begin with.

Here's the deal -- you gotta dance with the guy what brung ya. Walk in a thriller -- you can do some awesome non-thriller stuff, meaning of life and all that stuff -- but you have to keep the thrills going right to the end, or you're going to get a reputation, and not a good one.

Another case in point, Rango (2011). Of course the big question here is just who this movie was made for, other than Johnny Depp and Gore Verbinski's friends. For one thing, much of its time is taken up with a parody of both classical and spaghetti Westerns. Yeah, that's what Westerns need, a good kidding. First of all, nobody's ever done it before. Second, it's such a robust and popular genre today. I can't wait for Mr. Verbinski's scorching take-off on silent German mountain movies, and then a hot rip on Ruth Chatterton, whose popularity waned around 1932. That'll be a hoot!

As if that was not enough of an entertainment treat, the movie can't even decide what its story is. There is a rule that movies need to make a promise to the audience within the first ten minutes, narratively-speaking. Rango not only doesn't promise, it's still being coy and hinty past the 20-minute mark. This was bad enough in the 3rd Pirates movie (I wasn't masochistic enough to see the 4th) when Johnny D wandered around in a white void for 20 or 25 minutes for no apparent reason. I remember there was a lizard in that, too.

But animation is best when it is most efficient. Rango is positively roccoco. At one point, the characters all got on their birds and began to ride (they're too small to ride horses) and before they got where they were going, so many things happened I couldn't remember what their intended destination and purpose was. Clearly, this movie was intended for 82-year-old teenage boys, who can still get excited about things but can't remember what or why.

Johnny Depp is, however, a terrific voice actor, and that is part of the problem. He doesn't settle on a voice we can identify as the hero of the story. It's OK for Robin Williams as the Genie, to scramble through all his canned impressions of extinct celebrities. You're not rooting for the Genie (at least not much). But Rango is supposed to be the center of the story and I know he's a chameleon, but the film doesn't even make that fact interesting or endearing.

The curious thing is that Rango is funny all the way through. My wife and I laughed consistently in nearly every scene. There was always a clever reference, an hilarious non-sequitur, a peculiar bit of characterization. But nothing amounted to anything, nothing added up, and the stakes never seemed to matter (although we were talking about water, which means survival, nobody seemed committed to anything more than the next joke). It's like sitting down to a meal and then eating a whole bag of potato chips. (Not as if I've ever actually done that. I'm just imagining what it would be like, you see.) Lord, knows them chips is tasty but when you're done you feel oogy and sick and bloated and your body is still craving nutrition, just as your mind will crave an actual story after 107 (!!!) minutes of Rango.

If it ain't on the page

Tom Hanks is attempting a cinema experiment with Larry Crowne (2011), that is, to do without the basic elements of drama as promulgated by such luminaries as Aristotle and Robert McKee. Three act structure, goodbye. Conflict and obstacles, farewell. Tension and resolution begone. Let's put a man through some of the most difficult transitions in life, have him discard most of his assumptions about himself and the world and because he is So Darn Nice, he will just float through the whole thing. And there will be a beautiful daughter-like young woman to offer him affection and unconditional support without any romantic overtones or complications, so that he is free to have a grown-up romance with a movie star who has "troubles" which are dispensed with in a manner of minutes.

In fact, everyone's troubles are dismissed with an airy brush of the hand. Larry can't even pay his bills, but somehow he has tuition money. (It's been pointed out to me that as a veteran, he might have access to tuition money, but the movie which deals with so many other financial details never addresses the question.)

Not only is the whole thing ridiculous dramatically, it is an insult to the very audience it is aimed at, the American public struggling through the changes imposed on it by the current recession brought on through no fault of their own. Not a political diatribe, that would be of no value in this context. But something that addressed the very genuine difficulty and rewards of change, especially when they come in the middle of your life. There are real, hard and ultimately gratifying things to be said if the filmmakers had had the courage, tenacity and skill to address the very real issues of this kind of change. But instead, things are pasted together with a slapdash romance with Julia Roberts, who is the kind of actor who invites writers not to bother writing a character, because she will seem to create one anyway, and who also is capable of throwing a film entirely off-balance, especially when she appears in what should be a small supporting role, but which she -- intentionally or not -- converts into a co-starring role, though she has little if any story function.

Simply put, niceness may be an adequate way to pass time, but it is no way to create an actual aesthetic object. Similarly, Nice Guy Johnny (2010) announces its slender and hackneyed story and its central production problem in the title. The news handle for this film is that experienced filmmaker Ed Burns made it for $25,000. That is the sole matter of interest about this movie. It looks and feels exactly like a movie made for $25,000, especially in the acting department. But it also looks one of those post-apocalyptic movies in which both lower Manhattan and the popular Hamptons have become completely uninhabited. It is one thing for the lovers to feel as if they are the only people in the world; it is another thing for them to be the only people because the film can't afford background players.

Don't they know that we know that if the main character is engaged at the beginning of the movie, they will never never never marry that person? Really, was that relationship supposed to be of interest to us?

Literally the only defensible circumstances under which to watch this film is if one is an aspiring filmmaker, to listen to the DVD commentary track and pick up some tricks and tips about low-budget filmmaking. Getting it made seems to have sucked up all of Mr. Burns' attention and, like Mr. Hanks, he seems to have disregarded the need for original characters, conflicts, surprise, tension or really any element of storytelling. But it is a pretty cool commentary if you're interested in such things.

Laughing watch needs winding

Romantic comedies are not so much made as engineered. Even more than action films, which can always fall back on fight sequences the way a musical film can always throw in a dance number, romantic comedies are the most dependent on the strictures laid down by the grand gurus of the film writing trade such as Syd Field and Robert McKee (neither of whom has written a hit film--the fact that many of their students have is a testament to Field and McKee's marketing skills, not their precepts).

If, as Walter Kerr wrote, farce comedy is a watch that laughs, The Proposal (2009) runs down about two-thirds of the way through. Two critical failure points: (a) A "zany" scene in which Sandra Bullock stumbles upon Ryan Reynolds's "wacky" grandma (Betty White now plays all of these characters, no matter the ethnicity of the other actors) performing a "kooky" Inuit chant. Not only is this scene a refugee from a 1960's sitcom (and presumably demeanting to Inuits) it reveals nothing about any of the characters, does not move the plot and is not funny. That scene is followed shortly by a scene in which we are meant to believe that Reynolds's character's father has paid for an INS agent to fly from New York to Alaska in order to threaten his son with jail. What??? Can you pay beaureaucrat's expenses in order to have them further your personal vendettas? Do you show your son you love him by threating him with five years in federal prison? Because your son refuses to go into the family business?

Oh, I forgot the scene where Bullock ditches Reynolds at the altar to uphold a principle, thereby leaving him vulnerable to arrest for criminal fraud.

I don't understand this because these scripts supposedly go through acres and acres of analysis and rewriting and testing and what-have-you. Please someone tell me that these idiotic ideas were improvised on the set. Because no one should have gone into production with a script as dreadful and implausible as this.

Too bad, because Bullock continues to prove herself the grand master (mistress?) of this type of material, and the contrast with The Blind Side is quite impressive. But Sandra Bullock the actress should fire Sandra Bullock the producer for putting her into this shabby mess.

Just the facts, ma'am

Memento (2000), the famous "backwards" movie apparently poses as great a dilemma for writers on film as it does for audiences. In the course of preparing to show it for Film Studies, I was looking for a decent piece of analysis of the film, element by element. What I have found is that nobody writes ANYTHING about Memento other than recounting the fact that it is backwards (except for the parts that are forward) and recounting exactly how that works. Cinematography, acting, music, editing, none of these seems to get any attention whatsoever from writers about film. It's all story structure all the time. Only celebrity "journalists" rehashing the latest scandal display this level of utter unanimity.

The fact is, there is some remarkable acting, editing, cinematography and music in Memento. Everyone involved seems to have been intrigued by and committed to the concept. Actor Joe Pantoliano reportedly made a critical contribution to the montage of the opening scene. Moreover, the structure of the film has implications other than that of the manipulation of story. By viewing extreme violence backwards, we are able to look at its horror dispassionately, without the cheap recoil of our own squeamishness, and contemplate its dreadful consequences more thoughtfully than in a conventional film. I was particularly taken by the editing by Dody Dorn, which must, as a necessity, constantly hover between revelation and concealment. Never has the syntax of knowing looks been more critical to a film.

I see Memento is making a lot of lists for the best of the decade (2000-2009)--because of its story structure. How much longer will it take to see all the good things in this fine film?