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In Reply to: Ours is not to reason why, ours is just to buy and buy ? posted by john dem on June 26, 2002 at 18:50:22:
while I don't quite consider Predator a kiddie film (i.e., I prefer to think of action films like Predator as popcorn movies), you are dead-on about Minority Report being promoted as a more serious "think" film. Think films are designed to be analyzed and dissected for content and that's why the Director has to be much more meticulous about continuity, accuracy of science, feasability of the premise, believability of characters, and logic of the actions undertaken. IMHO, the suspension of disbelief is PARAMOUNT ...okay, in this case, Dreamworks! :o)AuPh
Logical holes may make a story less entertaining to watch, but adding a serious message doesn't mean that the movie should be held to a more rigorous standard than a popcorn film. That is, you wouldn't dissect the Minority Report storyboard in a serious discussion about whether it's good public policy to prevent crime before it happens.I think that for a film like Minority Report, the message is serious, but the story is a fairy tale through which we draw that message. Popular adult entertainment is still fairy tales. It's just a launching pad for our thinking about the issues, and the storyteller can bend the rules to get to that goal. Else you'd just go to an academic lecture instead.
Recently A Beautiful Mind has been criticized for its historical inaccuracies, but learning the changes and omissions does not make it a lesser film.
On Law and Order the defendant takes the witness stand in every episode. This is apparently very, very rare in real-life trials. Does knowing this make the show worse for you the next time you watch? Yet that unrealistic plot point (the "gunshot" as you call it) is required to complete the confrontation in the story, to complete the moral point of the story.
What differentiates a good storyteller from a bad one may be the way they can slip these things by you in telling the fairy tale. A film like Dancer in the Dark, for example, bends the rules of logic as far as possible without becoming comedy, yet the director manages to make you feel strongly for the characters in the process.
... it doesn't alter the fact that suspension of disbelief requires an active diligence on the part of the Director to make his story "bulletproof." The best crafted movies, regardless of philosophical content, respect the audiences intelligence by not pandering to emotions to cover weak plot points. This is why I feel that Spielberg is all too frequently a sloppy Director; that doesn't mean that I don't love many of his films, but there is a frustrating tendency on his part to rely on gut level suspense to carry the day in most of the films he directs.BTW, don't get me started on Ron Howard; his willingness to play it safe compromises his artistry. A Beautiful Mind is an excellent film that effectively captures for the average viewer what it must be like to suffer with severe pschizophrenia, but it could've been so much better and so much RICHER with a little less political correctness and a lot more historical/biographical accuracy. Unfortunately, Ron Howard isn't a very visionary Director, he has always been politely mainstream and will apparently always be a solely commercially motivated filmmaker. The problem with treating bigraphical material as fodder for political correctness is that it can become an exercise in revisionism that's no better than propaganda.
AuPh
www.quantonics.com - AH
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