Category: Movies (Page 3 of 3)

Each Man Kills the Thing He Loves

March 10, 2011 / marielcalloway

After finally seeing the Coen Brothers’ remake of True Grit last week, I’ve been in the mood for Westerns. I’ve always been a sort of subconscious fan of the genre but didn’t accept it until recently. My favorite book from ages 8 to 10 was called The Gentleman Outlaw and Me—Eli. The first DVD I bought for my budding collection was a copy of the 2001 film American Outlaws (we all make mistakes). My favorite book series in high school was Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series, starting with The Gunslinger. I’m nearly obsessed with Cormac McCarthy novels. I have a Clint Eastwood poster on my wall. I’m really not sure how I didn’t see this coming.

Now that I’m beginning to embrace my inner cowgirl, I plan to watch a handful of westerns that I’ve been meaning to for a long time. Last week I managed to take a look at the boldly titled 2007 film The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.

Dystopia

March 6, 2011 / marielcalloway

While waiting in the security line at Newark Airport last December, I had a minor revelation. It was a terrible line, probably the worst I had seen in my 4 years of flying home from the East Coast, so there was not much for me to do but look around and taken in the sights. That’s when I noticed the signs.

They’re at every airport, the helpful “baggage claim” or “terminal” placards that help you find your way during what is an unavoidably disorienting experience. I stared at the “C-2 Security Checkpoint: All Gates” display board for a while before I recognized the distant echoes of authoritarianism in signage, and its relationship to screenwriting.

Interior Worlds

March 4, 2011 / marielcalloway

For class this week I watched the French film The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007) by Julian Schnabel. Based on the memoirs of Jean-Dominique Bauby, the film chronicles the life of a man who suffers a massive stroke and is then left paralyzed, unable to move anything except his left eye. In the film, Jean-Do (as he is called by friends and doctors alike) suffers from “Locked-In Syndrome,” meaning that his mind remains conscious and fully functional but that his body is unable to respond to the external world. Blinking is his only form of communication.

In my previous post, I briefly mentioned that screenwriters lack access to the interior when crafting a narrative, and must learn to externalize a story for film. How then does a writer go about the task of telling the story of someone whose entire world is interior?

Information Dump, or Why “Inception” Lost Best Original Screenplay

March 2, 2011 / marielcalloway

Okay, that’s unfair. Inception didn’t win Best Original Screenplay because the Academy preferred The King’s Speech, and with good reason. It was a great film built upon the foundation of a powerful script. (Why Hans Zimmer didn’t win Best Original Score is beyond me though…)

The most common criticism I’ve heard regarding the execution of Inception was that it felt like too much of an information dump. Nearly everyone I spoke to who disliked the film cited this as a reason. Even among those who did like it, they found the numerous explanatory sequences to be draining and a hindrance to the action of the film.

Here’s my reaction: I honestly didn’t mind. I realized that there was a sea of exposition to wade through, but it didn’t bother me. Christopher Nolan created a complex alternate universe and then did his job as screenwriter. He made the rules of this new word accessible to his audience so that we could suspend disbelief. I see nothing wrong with this. It is the task of every writer who dabbles in speculative fiction, where the traditional logic is lost in favor of more fantastical approaches to looking at the world. So where did Inception go wrong?

Category: Movies (Page 3 of 3)

Each Man Kills the Thing He Loves

Dystopia

Interior Worlds

Information Dump, or Why “Inception” Lost Best Original Screenplay

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