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Notes on Cthulhu, Righteous Kill, Burn After Reading 10/6/2008 11:45:44 PM
Bill Johnson offers capsules notes on the story structure of some recent films. Cthulhu
posted 9/25/2008
This film does a good job of creating creeping menance when a young, gay college professor returns home on the death of his mother to a small coastal town in Oregon. The lighting and acting can be uneven, but there are also some beautifully staged scenes. A thougthtful horror film based on an H.P. Lovecraft story.
Righteous Kill
posted 9/21/2008
I make a distinction between story and plot and this film illustrates why that's a good idea. The plot here is a serial killer, probably a cop, is killing criminals who eluded the justice system. Fine. The film has all the usual plot twists for this kind of thriller. But the story issue is about losing faith. That issue is raised at the beginning and end of the film. The problem is, that just leaves the actors, among them DeNiro and Pacino, standard plot issues to wrestle with. There's nothing compelling about the story, and not much for the actors to do, because there's no real narrative tension around the outcome of the film.
Narrative tension is generated most often when a main character wants something and what he or she wants is accessible to the story's audience. When the audience internalizes a character's narrative tension, what happens to that character becomes compelling. That's when actors are able to give memorable, powerful performances. Here, what should generate that narrative tension is pushed to the side as the plot plays out. Without a compelling story, the plot here never generates much power and the actors don't have much to do.
Burn After Reading
posted 9/20/2008
The trailers promote this as a comedy, but the main underlying issue is desperate people trying to get the kind of life they feel entitled to/desire. The film is also a parody of government conspiracy movies. In this film, the all-seeing CIA is mostly befuddled by events that it wants to just go away.
Tell No One
posted 9/1/2008
This French film is based on the novel by Hank Coben. The movie offers a good example of how to convert a novel -- which advances through the inner reflections of the narrator -- to a movie which must advance mostly through action. The book does a great job of setting up its story in two opening paragraphs, about how a lie affects a relationship. The movie takes several scenes to establish how much in love two soul-mates have been since they were children.
The opening set up is a the couple being attacked, the wife dying, but eight years later her grieving husband gets an email from the dead wife, that she's still alive; and she warns him to 'tell no one' that he's heard from her. The action of the story is driven by the husband's uncontrollable need to find out what happened to his wife.
The movie jettisons the husband's complicity in the events that led his wife to fake her own death, but the utterly compelling plot question remains: what happened? Why? The movie does explore how a lie affects relationships.
Babylon AD
posted 8/31/2008
I make a distinction between story and plot, that story is about an issue of human need and plot is the outcome for concrete (generally) events. Films that fail generally introduce what a story is about late in the film, undercutting the impact of the plot. Babylon is unusual because it clearly introduces its story -- about a mercenary who's lost his humanity and who ultimately regains it -- but there's no coherent plot. There's no answer to the question, how does the outcome to this story make the slightest difference?
And that's just the ending. The beginning of the story has a powerful religious cult hiring a mercenary to transport the equivalent of the mother of the next messiah from Mongolia to New York...starting off in a car, then getting onto a trained in a bombed out train station and riding across a bombed-out landscape ruled by miltias and other heavily-armed groups. Why not use a plane? Not even a bother for an explanation (for example, that the chaos has made the area a no-fly zone). Just about everything to do with what would be called backstory is absent from the film.
There's an effort to make a decent-looking film. The director has walked away from the project. Hard to say what created the train-wreck.
