Tag: Film

What We Learn From The Movies

movieMack Sennett, one of the greatest directors ever (over 1,000 films) believed that movies were just an excuse for a chase scene, and for a hundred years, Hollywood directors lived (and died) by this credo.  Fortunately, today we live in a far more sophisticated age, and contemporary audiences are not sucked in by such tricks.  These days, movies are complex windows into the human condition.  They show us our world without cheap cinematic varnish.  With that in mind, here are a few truths we have learned from recent movies, especially the Action/Adventure features, which, btw, have always been a box office favourite.

Detectives, firemen, Special Forces personnel, Forest Rangers and Boy Scouts all have a sordid past.  This has left them jaded, sleepy, slightly constipated and somewhat saddened by that condition.  They live alone, mainly in squalor and even though they have maximum trouble relating to women (past, present and future) are not gay (at least, not overtly.)

Evil men are good looking, usually corporation rich, have impeccable taste, beautiful wives and/or girlfriends but despite being highly intelligent, always surround themselves with some of the stupidest henchmen in history.

All Assistant District Attorneys, world-renowned scientists, cryptographers, secretaries and American Vice Presidents wear push-up bras.

Dumb-ass sidekicks are always smart enough not to get caught by evil men or their stupid henchmen.

The deadliest marksmen in the world will always miss the first shot and then go nuts, spraying bullets around like they’re throwing pennies to the poor.

And speaking of which, bullets love plate glass windows.

When confronted with evil, men will have body armour, guns, knives, grenades, poison darts, a jousting lance, nunchucks, assorted landmines, two bazookas and a small tank readily available. Their female companions, however, will have a thong, high heels, that push-up bra again and a butter knife.

High speed car chases always occur in congested urban areas where normal commute times are measured in days and itmovie1 would take you or me somewhere between 20 minutes and 2 hours to make a left turn.

Men can successfully fend off five, six, ten, two hundred or more determined attackers, but when faced with a feisty female in a love-tap play fight, they will drop like somebody shot them.

When fleeing an explosion, if you run as fast as you can, you will get flung into the air and bounced on the ground like a rag doll.  However, if you just calmly walk away you will not be touched.

After having sex, women are normally naked, whereas men usually have their underwear on.

Hand guns prefer to be just out of reach.

Villains never just shoot detectives, firemen, Special Forces personnel, Forest Rangers or Boy Scouts as soon as they catch them but always take a few quality moments to reveal and outline their nefarious plans.

When you hear subtle North African music, innocent North Americans are going to die.

Men can be hit by a train, dragged behind a speeding motorcycle, trampled by a herd of panicking wildebeests and beaten senseless by sixty blood-crazed Shaolin monks, but will only wince when a female dabs their wounds with a Kleenex.

All old buggers are grouchy, but like prostitutes and crack addicts, normally have a heart of gold.

Any criminal investigation, including parking tickets, will eventually end up at a strip club, a seedy bar or a scuzzy hotel.

So, what have we learned?

After over a hundred years of movie making, audiences are no longer fooled by cheap theatrics.  They demand more from their entertainment dollar than a series of phony chase scenes.  They want sophisticated storylines and complex characters.  But mostly they want a true reflection of the world they live in, portrayed with realism and intelligence.  Just take a look at Argo.  Last year, it won an Academy Award for Best Picture.

The Lone Ranger Rides Again … Almost!

rangerI haven’t seen The Lone Ranger and I’m not going to see it any time soon.  Word around the campfire is it sucks.  So rather than waste my time — and pay Disney and Cineplex for the privilege — I’ll wait and let Movie Central do it to me for free.  At the end of the day, I’m not curious enough to rush into two hours of Johnny Depp with a dead bird on his head.  But I digress — and I haven’t even started yet.

Disney thought they had a guaranteed homerun with Lone when Bruckheimer, Verbinski and Depp (late of Pirates of the Caribbean) stepped up to the plate.  They even packed the movie with promises of a sequel (read “franchise.”)  Unfortunately, the dynamic trio hit into a disastrous double play.   (I’m assuming Bob Iger is still torturing people in the dungeons of the Magic Kingdom over the John Carter debacle.)  So instead of laughing all the way to the bank, Mickey Mouse is busy pointing fingers.  (Ironically, he only has three.)  However, the problem is not only Bruckheimer, Verbinski and Depp; the problem is the Lone Ranger himself and his buddy Tonto.

The legend of the Lone Ranger is not a story for the 21st century.  There are simply too many nuances for our unsophisticated tastes.

First of all, it’s a morality tale.  Lone is the good guy.  Those other fellows over there, in the black hats, are the bad guys.  They do nasty things (normally motivated by greed.)  Lone points himself in their direction and tries to thwart their evil schemes — full stop.  He is not an on-the-spot vigilante.  He leaves justice to the proper authorities.  Contemporary audiences don’t appreciate this subtlety.  However, because of it, Lone is not ambivalent about his purpose or his methods.  He knows he’s the good guy.  He’s not consumed with angst.  Our society doesn’t understand this interplay between good and evil.  We want our heroes to question it, mainly because we don’t really think it exists.

Secondly, the relationship between the Lone Ranger and Tonto is impossible for contemporary audiences to comprehend.THE LONE RANGER, Clayton Moore and Jay Silverheels  “Sidekick” just doesn’t translate into Oprahspeak.  In our relentless adherence to equality, anything less than a bromance between the two men is unacceptable.  We refuse to believe that Tonto has any dignity being the lower man on the scrotum pole, even though it’s clear he does.  (It’s too complicated to explain, but suffice it to say Tonto can hit the trail any time he wants to, but he doesn’t.)  Plus, our simplistic view is amplified by our aversion to actual ethnic diversity in film.  Minorities may be everywhere in the movies but, remarkably, for the most part, they dress, walk, look and talk stereotypically like the homogenized white guy standing beside them.

Finally, The Lone Ranger is a western.  This isn’t a bad problem until you try and tell the tale to kids.  In our world, there isn’t a Hovermom west, east, north or south of the Pecos who’s going to permit that.  Agrarian Workers and Native Americans (Cowboys and Indians) are personae non grata in today’s playgrounds.  Our children can zap aliens with death rays and mega-fry entire civilizations with video game warheads, but there is no way in hell little Bryce or Morgan will ever be allowed to strap on a toy pistol and go looking for bad guys.  It just isn’t done.  The demographics of The Lone Ranger’s first week in the theatre bear this out: ticket buyers were overwhelmingly white men over twenty-five.  This is not a bad group but clearly not the one Disney was aiming at.  Despite the advertising and the action figures, The Lone Ranger is not actually a kid movie — or at least not one parents are going to let their kids go see.

It’s too bad Disney missed the point and The Lone Ranger is a flop.  I grew up with Lone and Tonto, and I think, with a little creativity, they could have been retrofit into our brave new world.  In fact, their story is good enough that I still believe they should be.  After all, despite his being one of the deadliest pistolaros of the Old West-ern, in all the episodes of The Lone Ranger I saw, I don’t remember that he ever actually killed anybody.  That alone would be a welcome change from the carnage we see in most action/adventure films these days.  Unfortunately, now that Disney has bit the silver bullet, it’s going to be a long time before anyone else will return “to those thrilling days of yesteryear, when from out of the past came [sic] the thundering hoofbeats of the great horse Silver! [and] The Lone Ranger rides again!”

How to Write a Horror Movie

The last horror movie I paid money to see was The Exorcist in 19 [mumble, mumble.]  It’s a good movie, but I was old enough to know better.  Since then, I’ve lived a full and rewarding life without ever again shelling out coin for cheap adrenaline thrills.  Actually, I’ve had the hell scared out of me for real a couple of times, and I’m in no great hurry to have those feelings artificially induced.  Besides, contemporary horror movies are totally unimaginative.  For the most part, they’re just a series of heart-shocking surprises, stuck together with literal bursts of exaggerated gore.   Let me show you how it’s done.  Here’s a simple three part program that will help you write your own horror movie, and depending on how ambitious you are, take you to the very gates of Horror Movie Heaven: The Slasher Franchise.

First of all, horror movies are driven by the vivid portrayal of a single requisite character: the half dressed young woman.  She is as essential to the horror movie as the horse is to the Western.  If you don’t have at least one girl falling out of what’s left of her clothes, you simply don’t have a horror movie.  Ideally, you need one Alpha female and a couple of expendable best friends who get butchered early, to prove the villain/monster/psycho is serious, but strangers will do.  Actually, the best friends don’t even need names; all they have to do is scream.

From there, you need a boyfriend (he can be a husband as long as he’s newly minted.)  The boyfriend/husband is the catalyst that causes all the problems in the first place.  He’s the guy who ignores everybody’s advice to get the hell out of there and convinces them all to hang around and get murdered.   He comes with his own set of friends, usually a larger, stronger man and an idiot.  The larger, stronger guy gets hacked up later on to prove the villain/monster/psycho can’t be stopped, and the idiot is there for comic relief.  (Nothing much ever happens to him.)  Likewise, the boyfriend, is normally never killed, although he can be badly hurt (and usually is.)  He’s kind of a handsome Wile E. Coyote type who always survives his dumbass schemes to defend himself and the half dressed female.

Secondly, you need to drop everybody’s IQ by about 25%.  Once again, this is a fundamental feature of the horror movie.  The future victims have got to be dumb as a box of hammers and take an active part in their own demise.  For example, when confronted by a dark, rambling mansion or a deserted campsite or what-have-you, the first thing horror movie characters do is the stupidest thing possible: they split up and go exploring.  Together, they could probably protect themselves properly and possibly even beat the villain/monster/psycho bloody; individually, they’re just candidates for a toe tag.  Nor do they ever arm themselves with anything more than a toothbrush.  The villain/monster/psycho has any number of ingenious weapons available to him, but these clowns never even think to pick up a rock.  There is a willing suspension of disbelief in the movies, but the future corpses of horror must defy all reasonable thought.  Never let them grab a garden tool, pick up a kitchen knife or — heaven forbid — in a country as gun crazy as America, carry a pistol.  Also, they must run headlong down blind alleys; wander aimlessly down dark, creaky hallways and never — under any circumstances — turn on the lights.  In short, they should all be stupid enough to get outwitted by sheep.

Third, and least importantly, you need a villain/monster/psycho.  Actually it really doesn’t matter who or what this guy is.  He just needs a steady supply of sharp and/or pointy things to jab into people until they gush for the camera.  Simply remember not to kill him off at the end of the movie — in case the studio wants to pick up an option on Freddy Jason Myers, Part II.

Of course, there are all kinds of things you don’t want cluttering up your movie like plot, character development or dialogue, but those are just tricks of the trade you can learn to suppress as you go along.  Actually, for a quick shortcut to horror movie heaven just get some old Archie Comics, piece together a few of their adventures, add a villain/monster/psycho to massacre a few of them, and you’ve got it made.  Good luck!