For those of you in the midst of NaNoWriMo and for the rest of us in the midst of writing anything, here is J.J. Abrams talking about the blank page as the ultimate “mystery box” and how technology inspires him.

What mystery boxes are you creating for your audience?

Enjoy!

And, yes, I’m aware that these TED Tuesdays are being posted on Wednesday lately but, hey, it’s still Tuesday in the States and, frankly, all my days run together till Superman is still home when I wake up and I realize it’s Saturday.  Public Holidays (of which there are a ridiculous number in Japan) TOTALLY screw with my mind!

This is how you make a movie about a shoot-em-up bank heist into a subtle study of humanity.

This is how you make a movie.

Writer/Director: Scott Frank Main Cast: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Jeff Daniels, Matthew Goode

Overall Rating: 39.75/40
Script: 10/10 every word, every scene, every character choice serves the story and moves it along – nothing is extraneous (right down to the shoelaces), nothing is left undone.

Direction: 10/10 So rare for a writer director, Frank does not put a step wrong – he just knows his craft.

Editing & Production: 10/10 Elegant, clean, like baby bear’s porridge: juuust right.

Performances: 9.75/10 An incredible ensemble. Jeff Daniels and Joseph Gordon-Levitt show us fully complex personalities effected by their disabilities but not based around them. Matthew Goode’s performance is particularly striking in its subtlety. So many actors playing a con-man talking with his mark will take to heart that con-men are such good actors and play whatever character is required for the con to perfection, leaving the character itself behind. Goode walks a delicate line expertly, playing a con-man playing his mark, affecting friendly interest and concern, projecting the self-confidence his mark longs to possess and so will fail to see the menace just barely hiding underneath. Definitely an actor to watch. The only glitch in this film is the slightly heavy-handed performance of Greg Dunham as the mostly silent “Bone” which often had me grimacing. Bone is the old hand criminal who has such trouble holding back his violent instincts he barely has the energy to speak as well. The character is essential to the dynamics of the group and the plot but it is played a little too Tarantino for this film. That’s being really, really picky though!

See this film.

Before I lose all of you who turn off as soon as you suspect your taste will not be agreed with, especially by a woman-who-can’t-understand, let me say this: I do understand. In this era of political correctness and psycho-therapy there are few films or stories where a man can really enjoy a good, manly “HOO HAH!!” I get it. But just because there are so few doesn’t mean we have to celebrate one so poorly executed. Yes the shots looked like the comic. Fine. Go buy a second copy of the comic (in the big, beautiful A3 format) and have some pages framed. It’s art. But this film was excrutiatingly poorly written, directed and acted (though this was probably due to the direction.)

What is betrayed here is a lack of understanding of basic screen-craft. Film has different requirements to a comic. It is not static. It is more immersive – the audience is trapped in that dark theatre with nothing to experience but what is on the screen for every, consecutive minute. Until the DVD release, they cannot put the film down and pick it up again hours later when they are ready, having been refreshed by some other life activity, to dive back into the weighty, brooding, oh-my-god-the-honour-of-it-all mood that not only dominates but overwhelms this film. Asking an audience to have the same emotional reaction to each scene simply does not work – because you lose them. This has nothing to do with the attention span or intelligence of the audience – it’s basic emotional law that we become immune to emotional experiences (no matter how extreme) repeated ad nauseum. In practice this means that when your protagonist’s side-kick declares that his extreme grief is due not to the patriotic death of his son but “because I never told him I loved him” we laugh. Admittedly, the line was both corny and totally incongruous and it is possible that was the reason there were giggles but I submit that if simply ratcheting-up the same emotion constantly worked, even dialogue as bad as that would have simply washed over us in the maelstrom of emotion – it happens all the time in good action films.

One of the reasons this film is such a disappointment is that action films are masters of the emotional roller coaster – it’s why they are so popular. Good ones keep us on the edge of our seats never quite knowing what is going to happen next, hitting us hard just as they have made us laugh. Nothing unexpected happened in 300 and, frankly, after the first 30 mins nothing new happened, nor did the same things even occur in some different way: rousing speech to men, fight, rousing speech to men, bad guy or wife POV, rousing speech to men, fight, rousing speech to men. Seriously, the way these poor actors were made to pose and change cameras between each sentence had me dreading the next two hours ten minutes in – this wasn’t acting, it was voguing.

Several reviewers have touched on the historical accuracy of the film. Those of you who know I am an historian at heart were probably waiting for the bit in which I slam the ‘revisionism’ but I’m not going to because I think it’s irrelevant. A film needs a good story and, whatever inspires it, artistic license is valid AS LONG AS IT IS NOT PRESENTED AS TRUTH (like that damned “King Arthur” movie urgh.) The inspirations from Herodotus’s Bk 7 are clear:

• there was a contingent sent to the pass (it was to hold off the Persians for as long as they could while the army of Greeks that we saw at the end of the movie prepared for battle);
• that contingent was made up of many greeks, but at the end, knowing they would be defeated, Leonides sent all but the Spartans and Thespians home to join the preparations for the larger war;
• there was a traitor who gave away the path behind the Greeks (he was from Milas not from Sparta but their recently exiled King Damaratus was also in Xerxes company informing on them – so squish these two together and maybe that’s where the malformed creature comes from);
• in fact they make an entire scene directly from: “… it became clear to all, and especially to the king, that though he had plenty of combatants, he had but very few warriors.”

So the story provenance is fine – all that is required, as far as I’m concerned is that its own internal continuity be intact and it is. The film as a whole is presented as David Wenham’s character telling a story to the troops before they march on the very enemy in the story – it is supposed to be propaganda (something not the sole domain of nazis as Paul Byrnes of the SMH would have us believe – check out OUR recruitment posters from the WWs). Frankly, though, the writers’ would have done well to follow Herodotus a little more closely – the story structure is better!

I am sure that, even as I write, someone is penning an article declaring that these movies (I am of course including Sin City which I would rate above this one) are a whole new genre to themselves. I’m sure there will be a carefully crafted definition which turns each shortcoming into a deliberate and brilliantly executed requirement of the genre – and every critic of the movie into a nouveau-philistine. The truth is that what we have here is a story created for another medium painstakingly recreated without respect for the new medium and the result is a ‘moodie’ NOT a movie.

*For those of you interested in the real history this is a short but excellent article on Spartan society and its structure (you’ll note these men fighting for freedom ruled over a ‘country’ in which their slaves outnumbered them 10 to 1) and this is a link to the text and commentary on the relevant Herodotus.

When you think Hollywood blockbuster, especially starring Tom Cruise, you think (well, okay, I think) big Hero pic – and the problem with War of the Worlds is that there is no Hero – or, rather, the Earth kinda saves itself. I had a couple of ideas – would Tom be a scientist (a popular hero in recent years)- THE scientist to discover that if everyone can just lay low, the germs will do their work? Well, no because that wouldn’t be enough to make him a hero. Perhaps he (still a scientist) could make the realization and engineer the bio-weapon to spark the victory or perhaps he could be the warrior who delivered the missile (though we aren’t as enamoured of military heroes these days) Of course, the latter sorts of changes would destroy Wells’ intent but, hey Hollywood does that (and, let’s face it, if you’re updating a story – that’s exactly what a modern defence force would do, no?)

To my surprise, Spielberg stuck to Wells’ intent and left the fabulously designed aliens and the plucky Earth germs to play out their own story and we simply follow a parallel story of a father and his children coping with the situation. It’s a sweet story, Fanning and Chatwin are excellent as the siblings who trust only each other after the dissolution of their parent’s marriage and the gradual development of the relationship between Cruise and Fanning , after Chatwin’s character disappears, was, I felt believable. I think it would have strengthened the premise (which I take to be Fatherhood after divorce) for Chatwin’s character to stay with them and for Cruise’s character to have to become a champion in his eyes, too but that’s just me.
I’m still not really sure what the purpose of Tim Robbins’ character was, I know it was so that Cruise’s character could kill something but story-wise I’m still confused. Why was Cruise the only one to notice him standing out there waving his gun and why did Robbins give up trying to flag down survivors after Cruise and Fanning joined him? I won’t do more than mention the fact that Otto’s Boston street appeared to be untouched by what we had been told was World-Wide destruction – enough people have gone into that…

In the end, I felt neither cheated nor fulfilled having seen this film and based on the discussion between my three friends afterwards: "So, what did you think?" "Hmm, don’t know really." "Yeah… It was alright." they felt the same way. I guess, when it comes down to it, we all want to see the good guy actually defeat the bad guys – somehow.

In previous action films in which the protagonist is an anti-hero (that is: a bad guy but not a villain) we have always been given something upon which to hang our sympathy for the character: he’s been turned into a killer by the government/was born into a life of crime/knew no better and now has no way out – especially while his wife and children are in danger – but he has his own personal code of honour which we, as the audience, come to understand and respect. In Mr. & Mrs. Smith, except for a line in Mrs.’s set-up assassination telling us that her victim was a gun -runner to naughty people, we get nothing of the sort, in fact we get the opposite. The job on which Mr. & Mrs. Smith are both, individually, sent is to intercept a CIA prisoner who is going to reveal information which, they each believe, their boss does not want revealed – clearly both are working for criminals (an assumption cemented by their unflinching attack on police when finally ‘liberating’ the target.) Mr. & Mrs. have killed hundreds of people (combined total) and neither has ever had any problem sleeping after a hit – this particular revelation is presumably meant to be a comment on the angst ridden protagonists we usually enjoy but the only impact it had on me was to degrade whatever sympathy was left for the characters. I had to wonder whether the weapons they were using were bought via the ‘naughty gun-runner’ Mrs. asassinated earlier.
Is it a problem if an audience doesn’t care about or have any respect for these characters? Well I would say yes because it directly effects one of the main audience responses desired in an action film – tension. I simply did not care if they were hurt and so the action sequences were litle more than choreography. Then again, the action sequences are so tom-and-jerry-esque that there is never any sense that they would be actually be hurt badly (e.g., at one point Mr. has a knife lodge in his thigh, thrown by Mrs., which has no effect but a cute reaction shot from Brad.)

Perhaps comedy was the aim? I certainly laughed but is that really where we’re heading even in comedy? Good looking people with quips replacing plot entirely? Have we really reached that point? Sure, there was a sort of plot – will they realise they love each other (so we can see Brad and Angelina in a love scene) – but when you care so little for the protagonists it’s not much of a hook. Sure, the characters’ survival in the face of all that ammunition could be seen as the spine of a story but, again, who cares if they survive? In fact, I was hoping it would end in tragedy so that it would perhaps redeem itself as a really black comedy.

It seems that we now have finally reached the point where at least someone believes that audiences are happy to go to the movies just to see sexy people committing sexy violence with sexy weapons in sexy clothes for… some, vague reason. I say, audiences rise up and demand more! … Hmm… Anyone? … Please? … Oh dear.