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Notes on Watchmen, Twilight, Revolutionary Road 3/13/2009 5:56:43 PM
Bill Johnson offers some notes on current films like The Watchmen. Watchmen
Watchmen is more like an art film than a typical Hollywood film. In a typical film, a main character often embodies a story's promise, and that character is in a state of narrative tension, which increases as plot obstacles block that character from achieving some goal. Which gives viewers a character to become invested in or involved with.
Watchmen has a fairly straightforward plot, who killed the Comedian and threatens the other Watchmen?
But the story itself is about a society that has lost its moral center, which leads to a resolution of the central plot question around the idea that death can serve a greater good. The deaths that initially appear to set up a greater good in Watchmen are a superhero helping the U.S. to win the war in Vietnam. But this only leads to the moral decay of Richard Nixon in office for several terms and a world on the brink of nuclear annihilation.
So the fulfillment of the story's promise revolves around ideas, and not so much a particular character being a vehicle for the story's promise, unlike a film like the recent Batman. This makes for a film not as accessible as most standard Hollywood fare.
I haven't read the graphic novel; I suspect for those who have read it, the film will feel more fully realized than it might for people who haven't. I expect to see the film again to see if I missed the setting out of its promise while I was waiting for a central character to emerge as the bearer of the story's promise.
For a film story that wants to be about ideas, some of the characterization in the film felt flat to me, not sharply observed, with Rorschach an exception. He's the most typical good/versus evil hero; he's also one dimensional as a character. He simply wants to inflict pain and destruction on anyone he considers immoral, criminal, or too liberal. He's writ small what has the world at the edge of annihilation in this story.
Revolutionary Road
posted 1/23/2009
A good-looking film. For those who have the novel, the opening scenes of the movie highlight the difference between telling a story as a novel and as a film. In the film, how this couple walk down a hall after a play sums up the state of their marriage.
The story is about a young couple living a lie, that they are 'better' than the other suburbanites, artistic, special. A mentally ill man shows up and forces them to acknowledge that lie, like the character Hickey in The Iceman Cometh.
The wife is unable to continue living the lie and the husband must deal with the consequences.
Underworld: Rise of the Lycans
posted 1/23/2009
The initial set up for this story was the arrival of a vampire/werewolf hybrid. The first two films operated as extended trailers to set up what I thought would be a third film about the actual story of this hybrid. My mistake. The third film is more backstory about vampires and werewolves. Maybe the fourth time will be the charm.
Benjamin Button
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
posted 1/7/2009
There's a great spectacle in the first hour of this film, about a boy born as an old man, who ages in reverse until he passes away as a baby. There's not much narrative tension until the now middle-aged man meets a young girl. When they eventually get married, the question that weighs on the marriage: what will happen as she gets older and he gets younger? That's a powerful question.
But in that first hour spectacle didn't always translate into powerful storytelling for me.
Twilight
posted 12/7/2008
Twilight the novel is a story about sacrifice. The narrative tension in the novel for the main character revolves around her exiling herself to live in a place she detests to make her mother happy. This can be conveyed in a novel because the story is told from the narrator's POV and her states of feeling and her narrative tension. I define narrative tension as the tension a character feels around achieving some goal that the events of a story (or the character's personal beliefs) block them from achieving.
In Twilight the movie, the issue of sacrifice for the main character isn't evoked, so she doesn't generate narrative tension. The character who experiences narrative tension early in the movie is Edward, the 17 year old vampire who is attracted to the novel's main character. He's attracted to Bella, but if he acts on that attraction he puts his 'family' at risk. Like the first Harry Potter movie, it's not until deep in the film, when Bella must act to save her father and Edward's family acts to save Bella, that the movie generates narrative tension.
Both the movie and the book also fail to generate a clear answer to the question, why are Bella and Edward attracted to each other? A recent film about a young vampire that does offer an explanation is Let the Right One In, a recent vampire film from Sweden. The main character here is a young, bullied boy. When he meets a strange, 12 year old girl, it's conveyed that both are lonely outcasts. The narrative tension in Let the Right One In is palpable, and it's a much stronger film.
Synecdoche, New York
posted 11/30/2008
A director doing a revival of Death of a Salesman realizes his wife is going to leave him when she comes up with a lame excuse to skip the opening of the play. He then creates an extended, Willy Loman-type fantasy about his life on a giant stage. He has his own, personal, long-suffering Linda (Willy's wife in Salesman) who helps him with the production, with an actress to play his help-mate.
This is wonderful, complex storytelling, fully-realized.
