writing. photography. film criticism

Tag: Oscars

Repeating History: Why “Argo” Won Best Picture

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When I was little, I used to watch the same movies over and over again. At one point during my eleventh consecutive viewing of The Lion King, I asked myself why. What was the point of watching a story when I already knew the ending? At first I thought that it might be because I hoped that I could influence the outcome — somehow guide the characters away from pitfalls and lead them to triumph. Perhaps on some level that is why I’ve become a writer, but it’s not the answer to the question. Instead, the real answer likely has more to do with the way that our minds engage with stories and what we expect from them in the moment. The best stories are rarely about the what, but the how, and it is precisely the how of how Argo crafted a historical event into a binding suspense thriller that won it the Oscar for Best Picture.

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Interior Worlds

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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?

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

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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?

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