Narrative Disorder… in Japan!!

This is how you make a movie about coming to terms with  disability into a gripping, edge-of-the-seat action flick.

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.

Sword of God by Chris Kuzneski Read more about this book…

I have finally struggled through to the end of this book but I have to admit that at least the last 150 pages (yes that’s close to half of it) was to find out if it would EVER get round to the point of the plot-line which is advertised on the back of the book. I have not read James Patterson’s “Murder Club” books but if he really thinks that “Kuzneski’s writing has raw power” and was referring to this book (which admittedly he may not have been), I’m not going to risk it. It is possible that the author has deliberately littered his pages with cliched phrases, derivative characters and clunky exposition because he thinks it appropriate for the “blockbuster” style he is trying to write but frankly that is an insult to both “blockbuster” writers and their audience.

I am no snob when it comes to novels - years producing audio books from all kinds of novels knocked any potential for that out of me. When I read a novel I read for the same reason I watch a film or a television series - to be immersed in a story. If the quality of the writing isn’t perfect but the story is engaging then that’s fine by me - goodness knows there are many “well written” or “literary” novels which will put you to sleep! Give me a good story over good grammar any day. Unfortunately, Sword of God gives you neither.

The plot is the good ol’ retired-military-man-is-the-only-man-who-can-stop-the<insert topical nationality/culture> terrorist’s plot. Yes there are a few more twists and turns than that but nothing substantial (unless you find it unusual for a US military man to become a bad guy due to military manipulation and trauma… sigh). On top of that, the writing in Sword of God actually gets in the way of what story there is. For example, I know readers of these military type novels love copious details about military hardware and process but plonking them down right in the middle of potential action scenes, destroying any flow which may have existed, is just inexcusable especially when it is done over and over. Similarly there is no excuse for high school phrasing to end sections as in: “She didn’t think it could get any worse. But she was wrong.” (p253) and the book is full of it.

I will admit that, perhaps, if I hadn’t been lured to buying the book under the pretence of it being a very different kind of plot, I might have been more open to the story, if only because I wouldn’t have been quite so focused on waiting for that plot-line to re-appear. Which brings me to something probably more interesting than this book: blurbs.

Blurbs for books are not written by authors but, obviously, by publishing staff keen on sales. I used to edit them for the backs of our audio books and was often struck by how they reflected the contents of the books to varying degrees. The blurb for this one is truly false advertising. In fact here it is:

Tunnelling deep under one of the most holy cities in the world, an ambitious young archaeologist slowly works her way towards an unthinkable goal. Somewhere ahead is a chamber containing the collected fragments of an ancient scripture, a find of unimaginable significance…

Meanwhile, halfway round the world, a covert military bunker holds a macabre secret. An elite special-forces officer seems to have been brutally murdered - but how, and more disturbingly, why? Any hope of solving the mystery rests on the grisly clues that remain.

As the race to uncover the truth begins, a plot unfolds that could burn all of civilization in the fires of holy Armageddon…

Sounds like the archaeologist plot and the “find of unimaginable significance” would have at least equal significance to the plot of this novel as the military plot, yes? Or at least SOME significance at all? The archaeologist does, early on in the novel, discover a sword which, it is hinted at, may be the sword of Mohammed which it is rumoured may be the sword Jesus will use on judgement day AND THAT IS THE LAST TIME THE SWORD IS MENTIONED. At no point does the sword or the ancient documents have ANY RELEVANCE WHATSOEVER to the plot beyond being reason for being in the convenient place at the convenient time. In fact, you could happily remove the archaeologist subplot entirely without effecting anything but the length of the novel. Sure, there would be a couple of loose ends, you’d need some other character to hand over one piece of evidence but that’s about the only important role she plays and could have been handled for more elegantly. Certainly there was no threat of holy Armageddon other than that the attempted terrorist act may have sparked a war which would be justified by the combatants as a “holy war” but there would certainly not have been anything supernatural about it. Very very disappointing.

REVIEW
Overall Score: 17/60
Story: 2/10 - derivative
Structure: 4/10 - all over the place, too much left undone or unsatisfactorily tied up.
Dialogue: 3/10 - cliche but not unbelievable for the characters, particularly bad when used for exposition
Characters: 3/10 - stereotypes (and I don’t mean archetypes, just stereotypes)
Descriptive style: 4/10 - cliched phrasing, lack of flow mostly due to badly inserted exposition
Exposition handling: 1/10 - clunky, incongruous, often resorts to straight lecturing, inconsistently breaks rules of POV in 3rd person intimate

Superman and I have long discussed how we lament (or, at least, are tired of) the tendency toward “chosen one” protagonists in fantasy and sci-fi stories on screen or page. In my own reading and writing I have, since primary school, very deliberately chosen to write protagonists who were not ‘chosen’ but themselves choose to undertake a hero’s journey during/because of which they develop in themselves the power/s required to succeed. Reasons?

1) Inclusivity - protagonists like this demonstrate that anyone can be a hero - even if I’m not mysteriously endowed with superpowers or my true lineage suddenly discovered, the protagonist can be a role model for me or, indeed, anyone. It also makes for the possibility of more interesting secondary characters - no built-in excuse not to pitch in or just stand adoringly on the sidelines.

2) Worthiness: To me, the person who chooses the journey despite having no sense whatsoever of having any special powers which will make the journey easier for them takes a greater leap into the darkness and will always be a greater hero than any person (no matter how reluctant or humble) who is aware that they were born with special powers or the right ancestry or chosen by the right mentor whose very faith is an assurance in their probable success. Note: any protagonist who seizes the sword as yet unaware of such powers and with no mentor who has hinted at them has this same “worthiness”.

However, as Jane Espenson observes (not uniquely but recently in The New Republic, the greater audience seems to be won by those stories in which the protagonists are ‘chosen ones’. And this has been a source of virtul paralysis for my current project - which character should I make my protagonist? Sure, a novel can have more than one protagonist (unlike most films) but there will still be essentially one main character. The obvious question is: which character is the prime mover in the story? Well, this is the thing: I’m God in this scenario - so not only do I have the freedom to choose either, I am also bound to make that choice before I can move on. Of course I’m leaning toward my old preference of the non-chosen (albeit she comes from a very special community of those more in-the-know than wider society) because I think it would be a more interesting story but that’s the issue: I am increasingly aware that I am rather an odd character and, though of course I am not unique and there are probably plenty of people like me out there with similar taste, there are more who are unlike me and prefer the chosen one stories.

So what is it about these stories? There are many theories about story etc… but I think one of the more interesting reasons (which really isn’t about story) is that the majority of people aren’t simply interested in a protagonist as the prime mover of a story, as an interesting character whose journeys they can follow but they are looking for an avatar - a character they would want to be AND THEREFORE (here’s where it gets controversial - tee hee) I wonder if the majority of people these days wouldn’t take the hero’s sword (or at least don’t think they would) without at the very least an Obi Wan or mysterious scar from a totally unconscious act of superior power to reassure them that they will succeed. If this were the case then they would find characters who do throw themselves intot the fray unarmed either totally unbelievable or too confronting because it sets a standard the reader knows they would not meet (and we all know that to hold someone to standards is to commit the terrible crime of the post-modernist world: being judgemental) Cynical? Yeah, a little, but what else really expalins it? Now, sure, people yearn not just to discover power within themselves but for someone else to validate that power, recognising that it was in them all along, preferably publicly and preferably in front of a childhood bully or celebrity we secretly believe would easily become a BFF if only we could get their attention lol! But that can still happen to the self-made hero and, surely, would be even more of an achievement because it has been earned and so it belongs to the protagonist much more than something they happened to be born with… but there, again, is my own take on the issue.

I’m reminded of a story I was working on several years ago. We had a housemate who was widely read (a librarian in fact) to whom I showed a piece I was working which involved a woman overhearing her boyfriend in a room with another woman and realising he was raping her (yes, it was a detective novel) and going to her rescue. This housemate said she thought it was well written but no woman would go to the rescue of a woman who was with her boyfriend - no matter how clear it was that the rape was occurring the woman shouldn’t have been in a bedroom with someone else’s boyfriend (the shocking moral inference being that she somehow deserved it, the story-craft inference being that noone would believe the character or want to read the book). I was shocked and frankly appalled at this but after asking several other women found she was not alone in her belief - I lost a lot of respect for those women that day but also dropped the novel idea - see, the scene I showed her was my opening ‘hook’ into the character so I lost faith in my ability to understand what would make a strong female protagonist attractive to a reader. And here I am again.

The thing is, there are plenty of people who throw themselves in when they are needed, they are the “I just did what anyone would have done” people we see interviewed after a fire or some such emergency. We surely laud these people because we hope we would act in this way ourselves, no? Or is it actually the opposite? Do we make such a big deal about it because we really believe we wouldn’t do it ourselves - or, taking it further, do we make it something very special - insisting on the word hero, insisting they are very special despite their protestations to the contrary - so that we have an excuse not to be heroic when the time comes - afterall there’s nothing ’special’ about us. I hope not, but maybe the success ratio of chosen one stories to self-made hero stories might be pointing to just that. IF I were Harry and had his special powers I would save the world but I’m not, so I don’t have to. Whew!

Of course Lord of the Rings is one of the big successful self-made ones - Frodo is no chosen one (despite Gandalf’s protection) but, let’s face it, it’s always been a niche novel - only the films have had wide appeal and how many people do you see dressed as Frodo at openings or parties? (of course that’s probably more to do with that particular avatar not even being handsome lol so there’s two strikes against it in the mainstream.)

So, my decision is made (YAY! Just as uni begins lol) - I will stick with my gut and make the ‘everywoman’ my heroine (or just ‘hero’ as the SEVEN pages on non-gender-specific language in my UniSA unit information pack informs me I should use LOL.) She will develop and discover various abilities, perhaps even be given them by people/beings who believe she is worthy but she will BE worthy because she will have made the choice to do whatever she can with or without any extra powers or assurance that she will succeed - because that’s what REAL heroes do. Maybe it means I’m gimping my chances of being published but … shrug.

You’ll have noticed for the last couple of weeks, on the top of the right side panel, a blue box. This is a wonderful feature google reader has which allows you to share blog entries you’ve enjoyed. The blogs I read are all listed but the article in the blue box is one I find myself returning to just to play video clip and give myself a good laugh - feel free to do the same, especially if you have ever tried to write anything.

That’s my last comment about the golden, glistening abs in the movie (seriously, at one point I thought I was looking at shields in the distance - it was their abs!) Enough has been said about the abs elsewhere, in fact they and the ‘HooHah’-ing pretty much dominated most of the pre-release reviews. I suspect I know why… there’s not a lot else to talk about - if you don’t want to piss off the nice people who provided the reviewer tickets.

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.