When Andrew Ranson Allen doesn’t have time for video games, or staring blankly at a wall, you know the world is spinning out of control. The apocalypse is coming. Some things are the natural order, and me with time on my hands is one of those things. My wife often tells me that I’m too busy, and I just stare at her blankly, as if she had just told me I was a walrus. How do you comprehend something that cannot possibly be?
But it is, Dear Reader, it is! The two words to describe my average day are “hurly” and “burly.” It’s a cacophony of trying to make friends with classmates, shooting short films, wasting away in darkened editing labs, watching thirty year old Japanese cinema, and getting on and off of buses with twelve hours in between.
Added on top of that, Corelyn is making noises about moving. Our apartment is great, she has no problem with that, but she’s beginning to shuffle her feet and insist that we lack a “neighborhood.” She may be right, but I don’t see what’s so great about living in a big commune of houses that are roughly like yours. Are we going to go make friends with these people? Unlikely, LA Allens don’t talk to strangers. I’m more comfortable as it is now: our next door neighbor is GameStop. Now there’s my kind of cohabitation, there’s a nearby hangout I can spend a few hours in.
That’s right, I never told you this, did I? We are walking distance from a GameStop. Now GameStop is the root of all evil, any gamer knows this, but even this cannot scatter the concentrated joy that a small room full of videogames provides. You’d have to call the place “Satan’s Den for Humiliating Orphans,” and actually follow through on that premise a little, before I’d stop going.
Everything is about what it means to you when it comes to capitalism. When I’m buying a videogame, I’m buying a lot of things. I’m purchasing one of those Friday nights after a long week of school, sitting on the floor in the basement, watching your buddy shout at “Resident Evil 2″ while you ruffle through someone’s CD collection and criticize/compliment them accordingly. I’m buying an escape into a different world, and often not a particularly nice one, but a tangible one. Isn’t it interesting how escapism is often not about going someplace happy (except in the case of Mom), but just someplace…else? And most of all, I’m buying an outlet for my enormous imagination, a partial release of all that…stuff that sits inside of me all the time.
Moving along,
We attended an event this past Friday where they screened “Forrest Gump” at USC, and then hosted Robert Zemeckis, Tom Hanks, Gary Sinise and Eric Roth (the screenwriter for “Gump” as well as the new “Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” and some other good films). Obviously, the place was packed, and lots of people didn’t get a seat, but myself and my friends did. I spent the next few minutes trying to drag admissions out of both of them that “the Lord provides!” They were reticent. I continued nonetheless.
Anyway, the movie was great (as always), and the presentation after was also highly entertaining. Tom Hanks is a huge ham, he loves to draw attention to himself, and I can’t believe how many people are surprised by this; I think it’s a real testament to his acting ability. He does great impressions, and he’s very funny, and he supplied an affectionate lightness to the proceedings that was wonderful. Meanwhile, Bob Zemeckis took jokes at his expense like a gentleman, told interesting stories, and (quite excitingly) congratulated newly admitted film students, advising us that we were “in the right place.” Of course he said that, we have a building named after him, but still! This is just this kind of thing you always have access to when you go to USC. It’s exciting to feel like you’re in the film school that matters, the one that the big guys and girls in the industry will come to.
Anyway,
On another note, I saw “Fast and Furious” on Saturday night for reasons passing understanding. Actually I saw it because Corelyn and some friends I hadn’t seen in awhile were going, and I felt bad. Now my moral, religious objection to everything that “The Fast and the Furious” stands for is deep and profound: tuner cars painted flourescent colors, car chases filmed on green screen, girls seeing it just for Paul Walker, crappy characters and shoddy filmmaking, etc. Still, I went, and while it was certainly not a good movie, there were at least some pleasant surprises. The opening action sequence was filmed so I could actually tell what was going on, and the first half of said scene was quite good. The second half got too ambitious, and the movie’s budget meant they had to just CG a bunch of things and I stopped buying it. I suspect this happens because directors come off as “innovative” by pitching things in a studio with great passion that can’t possibly be done, then they have to use computers to try and cover their exposed, naked idiocy. And computers aren’t good enough to do the job yet. They will be someday.
Also, there was a car chase about midway through that I somewhat enjoyed. My personal passion for car chase scenes has a simple rule: do it for real. Get the cars really going fast. Make the difficult turns. Take the time and money to drop my jaw or don’t do it. This stuff is an art, it’s like the fine wine of movies, and it should only be endeavored upon when gentle care and tons of money can be applied.
Now until this, these “Fast and Furious” films have been committed to the exact opposite of what I just described: trick photography, fake stunts, CG work, shaky camera. But they had one sequence which was a race through Los Angeles that I actually bought. I had a clear sense of where everything was (and it was kind of complex), there was a sensation of real speed, and at least the appearance of a couple genuine stunts. Fair enough.
Vin Diesel and Paul Walker absolutely phoned it in, though, and that’s too bad, because something interesting could have happened with this story if they had cared even a little. They so obviously didn’t. Oh well. Sort of a nothing movie, it just passed through me.
I’m beginning to see that Billy was right: I can’t enjoy crap films. The problem with crap films is that they normally suck by means of disloyalty to the rules of their own established universe, and that is a cardinal sin I cannot forgive. I need consistent tone, consistent character behavior, consistent plot, and other people can just excuse the absence of this stuff. When I defensively protested, insisting that I could enjoy movies that are awesomely bad, I now realize I was assuming an expertly made, deliberately corny B-movie, not a film that sucked on accident. I love the “Resident Evil” movies because even though they’re terrible and unconvincing, they keep me interested by staying light on their feet and they never violate tone or pacing. They’re uninspired, and the characters are morons, but they operate faithfully inside their moronic universe.
My number one pet peeve is a movie trying to switch movies half way through (or at the end), which always stems from a lack of self awareness. “Resident Evil: Apocalypse” basically has this plot: hot, super-tough yet vulnerable chick fights zombies in evil corporate quarantine zone. Meets less hardcore people, attempts to protect them, many of them die and she doesn’t care, and then in the end she plus anyone the audience thought was cool gets out alive. Now that is a stupid plot, but it’s technically interesting, so if you slap an enjoyable aesthetic on top of it and play by the rules, I’m going to come along with you.
So why I do I hate so many “bad” movies? Because for some unknown reason, simply operating truthfully seems impossible for today’s hyperactive films. “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” a film I continue to hesitantly defend, is incredibly guilty of this. It’s really a far worse film than any of the “Resident Evil” flicks. Let me give you an example: Indiana Jones escapes from a nuclear blast by sitting in a refrigerator. A refrigerator. He gets tossed several miles in this thing, but he crawls out without a broken bone. That is a violation, or what Roger Ebert brilliantly called a “clang” moment. You can make a movie where that’s possible, no problem, but the physicality of every other fight scene or chase has to be different to support it. In a world where you could do that, bullets should be flesh wounds and falling from a speeding car should be a bruise at best. But you can’t make an “Indiana Jones” film that way, because Indy is a scrappy, human hero. His appeal comes from him being in over his head, getting seriously hurt, and maintaining a high level of threat when he’s in peril. But if he can fly through the Nevada sky in a freaking box, then why is he taking a punch to the gut so hard?
Plot operates the same way. You have to establish a measuring stick for your characters’ behavior, and the events that will transpire during your film, because without it you can’t meaningfully play with your audience’s expectations. “Crystal Skull” hit problems with this again when Indy started having quasi-visions of what the skull “wanted” him to do. Not good. Jones always begins any of his movies an utter skeptic, and it takes the entire running time before he meaningfully believes the phenomena he’s witnessing. You have to be true to that. In this film, Indy goes from skeptic to babbling shaman without so much as a single, “This is unlike you, Professor!” It’s phony, we lose the character, we stop going with him. Marion is even worse: she goes from rightfully pissed off at Indiana to a grinning moron, giggling stupidly at his “adorable” exploits. She does this because they wanted her to, but the character never made that move, because they didn’t take the time to make that the story. You have to decide what your story is, you don’t just get to throw your characters around. You may love the idea of Indy and Marion getting back together, but that’s a big freaking story arc, and if you handle it with a few lines of dialogue, it’s just going to violate how we expect the characters to behave.
Rules are important in storytelling, because the storyteller is a greedy jerk. We have all the power, we can make anything happen at any time, I can introduce an alien invasion in the center of a Victorian Era romance if I want to, so in order to establish communion with another person, we have to quietly establish a series of rules and invite our audience to play along. Everything on screen serves to establish this: this is a dark thriller, this is an oddball comedy, this character is stubborn, this character wants to be loved, this version of New York is dark and twisted. Why do this? Because the audience is going to write the movie with us, reacting to everything we do and constructing the world and the characters we give them in their own minds. Movies that make too many left turns make the viewer feel like they have no agency, no ability to reasonably predict the outcome.
People always say surprise endings are hard, but technically they should be the easiest thing in the world. You watch “The Godfather,” and then in the end Michael Corleone is gay. Surprise! You certainly didn’t see that change I just created coming, but that’s not enough, is it? You have to feel like you could have called what happened but didn’t. And that’s a strange thing to want, isn’t it? It’s like you want to be fooled, you want a movie to trick you, even ones without surprise endings. Why desire to be tricked? Why not allow something to take complete left turns, to suddenly provide an ending it never hinted at? Life certainly does that sometimes.
Because movies, and fiction in general, are about the ordering of the universe. They’re about making sense of what goes on around us. The whole idea of a story is tying together plausible lies, almost as if they were laboratory experiment, and trying to establish themes and consistent messages. In watching movies, we look for an understanding of our world. We long to be God during much of our lives, and the cinema offers us a chance to try and take things in from His perspective, to try and see what they’d look like. Even in a heavily experiential film like “Rear Window” where we know only as much as the lead character knows, we are invincible, beyond harm or any stakes in the proceedings except emotional investment, and we have an opportunity to at long last see what this whole “life” shenanigans all means. This is why a character within the story often feels completely differently about what happens than we do. Even in a horror movie, where we are scared along with them, we paid to experience that fear and we are enjoying it. They are definitely not.
Quite a rant I just got on there. You have to stop getting me going, Dear Reader!
A great read. Who sez yer bizzy??