By Tom Stempel
COMING UP IN THIS COLUMN: Wall-E; The Order of Myths; Sailor of the King; The Da Vinci Code; 300, but first:
MAILBAG: When Keith, Matt, and Sarah Bunting were hustling me into writing this column, they assured me that HND has a really smart bunch of readers who would start interesting discussions. Since the only thing I like better than having an interesting discussion is starting one, I was delighted to see from the first comments posted that they did not lie. For a variety of reasons, I will probably not be responding to each comment as they come in, but will hold them for the next column, especially since some of them can be dealt with at once. For example, several people brought up Titanic. I won’t deal with it here because I have dealt with it at much greater length, discussing most of the issues the readers brought up, in the book that preceded this column, Understanding Screenwriting: Learning From Good, Not-Quite-So Good, and Bad Screenplays. It is, as you might imagine, one of the scripts discussed in the Bad section. I go through the first draft, why it’s bad, why it’s better than the film (unusual for a film directed by its writer), what went wrong, and why I think it was such a big hit in spite of a bad script. For the book I deliberately picked bad scripts that had been reasonably successful commercially just so I could discuss that angle.
Matt and others brought up the whole question of audiences and their responses, which has always fascinated me. When I was about five or six I went to a Saturday westerns matinee and could not understand why all the other boys were running around the theater shooting off their cap pistols instead of sitting there watching the movies. As with Titanic, I have already had my say about audiences. The black sheep of my books (the only one not about screenwriting) is American Audiences on Movies and Moviegoing, which deals with audiences from 1948 up through the late nineties. It came out in 2001 and the University Press of Kentucky would love for you to take a few copies off their hands.
Several readers talked about writers and the visual element of films, and you will see that discussed in some of this episode’s films. “Withnail” would like me to look at failed screenplays, and since I loved doing the Bad section of my book, I am happy to comply, as you will see below. The only problem with doing bad movies is having to see them. I am experienced enough to be generally able to know if a film is not going to work for me and to avoid it. Matt would like to see scripts that break the rules and still work. To some extent Tell No One was like that, although I see some readers disagreed. There will be more rule-breakers. “JJ” would like to see unmade screenplays discussed, but I will probably avoid that, since I would be the only who had read the script, which sort of closes down the discussion. On the other hand, I would love to see one of the scripts he mentions, Robert Bolt's two-film version of Mutiny on the Bounty, so if anybody has a copy of it... And to “MovieMan 0283,” yes, there is a Fox Movie Channel, and the only good thing about Time-Warner taking over from Comcast in my neighborhood was that I finally got it. In the middle of the night, they tend to run really great old stuff, as in most of the films that were in the "Ford at Fox" DVD box set. Thank goodness for DVRs. And now on to the main events:
WALL·E (2008. Story by Andrew Stanton and Peter Docter. Screenplay by Andrew Stanton and Jim Reardon. 98 minutes): Well, I was wrong. As my wife and I came out of a screening of Pixar’s Cars in 2006, I said to her, “This is the beginning of the end of Pixar as we know it.” Previous Pixar films (the Toy Story films, Monsters Inc., even The Incredibles) focused on characters and story. Cars, especially in the neverending opening race, seemed much more interested in how dazzling the animation could be. Pixar, it appeared, was declining into its decadent years. Last year’s Ratatouille left the question open.
In Wall·E Pixar has returned its focus onto character and story. Look at the ways (plural) Wall·E is introduced. We learn about him from what he does. We learn about him from how he does it. We learn about him from how he reacts to what is around him, including his little bug friend. What details do the writers pick to tell you about Wall·E? Why the songs from Hello, Dolly!? And why the film clips from Hello, Dolly!? Look at how the actions in the film clips (the hats and the handholding) are later used. And that’s just in the first fifteen minutes, which is all about character.
What do we learn about Eve when she first shows up? How is she different from Wall-E? What does she do that he cannot? What does he do that she cannot? Even before they zip off to the Axiom, we have one of the most detailed relationships between two characters in any recent American film. Screenwriting is writing for performance, and the writers here have written two great characters for the animators to “perform.”
Screenwriters also write for the performance of the other members of the creative team. Wall·E’s world on Earth is conceived by the writers so the design team can use the wide screen to isolate Wall·E in the desolation. (The Simpsons Movie is one of the few other recent animated films to use the wide screen. How and why does The Simpsons Movie use the wide screen differently than Wall·E?) The Axion is also written for the designers to show off, but unlike the opening race in Cars, it is at the service of the story and especially the characters. Yes, the chases may go on a little too long, but if we are with the characters, and we are, then we want to know what is happening to them in those chases.
Oh, yeah, screenwriters write dialogue. But there is very little dialogue in here, which should tell you something that silent filmmakers learned years ago: you can tell a story without a lot of dialogue. Although you should know in this case the writers did in fact write out in English dialogue what Wall·E was saying. Then they gave it to the sound genius Ben Burtt and he “translated” it into “Wall·E”-speak. See what I mean about writing for performance?
THE ORDER OF MYTHS (2008. Written by Margaret Brown. 77 minutes by my count, 80 minutes by the Los Angeles Times’s count, and 97 minutes by the imdB’s count): But this is a documentary, and documentaries are not written, they’re just photographed life.
Guess again. There are at least three kinds of screenwriting going on in many documentaries, although only two here. The missing one is narration, although there are some details given in words in titles throughout the film. The second form of screenwriting in a documentary is a selection of a subject, which may automatically suggest a structure to the film, and as William Goldman so eloquently put it, screenwriting is structure, structure, structure, and structure. Here Brown is making a documentary about the preparations of organized groups, both black and white, for Mardi Gras celebrations in Mobile, Alabama, which rightly suggests the structure is going to be one that follows the processes the groups go through.
The third and often most crucial form of screenwriting in a documentary is in the editing of the material into the final structure. Here Brown gives us the complex look at Mobile that makes the film one of the best documentaries so far this year. One way she does this is by giving us material that we don't immediately understand as connected to the basic structure. For example, there is a brief essay on how people in Mobile feel about their trees, with reference to the importance of roots, both with trees and culture. That is followed up later in the film by a reference to Mobile being the site of one of the last lynchings in America. In a tree. Then both of those scenes add a double context to a simple shot later in the film of someone removing a string of beads from a tree during one of the parades. Likewise, the single shots spread out early in the film in which young black girls read their essays about moon pies seem to have no relation to anything else in the film. But they do.
Brown “lets” us “discover,” or perhaps rather “uncover” the meanings as we go. A question that almost always comes up with documentaries is: what are we not seeing? What got left on the cutting room floor? The Order of Myths peels away a lot of information about Mobile and its history, but Brown is aware it does not tell all (as compared to some filmmakers who insist they have told the whole story). So the final shot is essentially an outtake from the rest of the film, with a character about whom we have at that point only recently learned several interesting details, suggesting there is a lot more that is not, and will not, at least this time around, be told. It is, one critic said, one of the most haunting movie endings in years.
SAILOR OF THE KING (1953. Screenplay by Valentine Davies. Based on the novel "Brown on Resolution" by C.S. Forester. 83 minutes): I promised you that I would from time to time deal with screenplays from older films that showed up on cable and/or DVD. Sailor of the King is a virtually unknown jewel that never appears on television, not even on the Fox Movie Channel, was never released on videotape, and is only now finally being released on DVD. One reason its studio, Twentieth Century-Fox, probably ignored it was that it was one of the last small-screen black-and-white films Fox released before the company went whole hog for CinemaScope and color.
The script is based on a 1929 novel by the author of the Horatio Hornblower stories and novels, so you will rightly suspect it will be about naval adventures, with lots of duty, honor, and courage thrown in. Even though the story and production team is British, Davies was an American screenwriter, best known for his Oscar-winning work on the original Miracle on 34th Street. So while the script and film have British restraint, it also has American narrative drive.
It begins in 1914 with a young Royal Navy Lieutenant Richard Saville meeting and falling in love with a young British woman, Lucina. Look at how quickly Davies gets them together, without seeming to rush it. When Lucinda has to turn down Saville’s marriage proposal, she does so using the same logical reasons a navy officer should not get married that Saville has already said. And Davies is smart enough to put the Production-Code appeasing “What we did was wrong” (have sex without being married) up front in the scene so he won’t have to dwell on it, which would make it even stupider than it already it is.
Twenty minutes into the picture we are in the early forties and Saville, now a squadron commander, is chasing a German ship raiding convoys in the Pacific. On one of the ships is a signalman named Brown. Look at how long it takes for Davies to give us hints, and what those hints are, that Brown’s mother is Lucinda. Brown’s ship is sunk and he is taken aboard the German Raider. The Raider has to put into a large cove (talk about writing in a great visual location) to do repairs, and Brown, encouraged by the one other English prisoner, Petty Officer Wheatley, steals a gun and a life raft and sneaks ashore. (It will come as no surprise to modern viewers of the film that Wheatley can convince Brown to take action; he is played by Bernard Lee, who went on to play M in the first 6,734 James Bond films.) Brown, up in the hills of the cove, picks off the crew and slows down the repairs. The other British ships arrive in the nick of time and sink the German ship.
In the final scene, Saville, now an admiral, is with Brown as Brown is about to be awarded the Victoria Cross. Brown credits his mother with teaching him all about the Navy, as well as the marksmanship that proved useful. The two gallant men, not knowing they are father and son, await the King. The ending is touching and restrained and it has stuck with me since I first saw the film in 1953.
It was not the only ending. The new DVD has an alternate ending in which Brown dies, and it is his mother who is with Saville to accept the Victoria Cross. The first ending tested better (and it lets Jeffrey Hunter live; gay guys will love this film, by the way, since Hunter spends most of the second half with his shirt off), and it is better because we know what the characters don’t. The problem with the second ending as Davies wrote it is that Saville never twigs to the fact that Brown must have been his son. Lucinda does not tell him, and he seems stupider than he has been in the rest of the film not to guess. Part of the limitations of the scene may have been the Production Code again, since them talking about her having an illegitimate child would probably have not been allowed in 1953.
But let us think for a minute, as reader "Withnail" had wondered, about other ways Davies could have run the scene. We the audience knows who’s who, so a simple exchange of glances will tell they know. Or what if she recognizes Saville but he doesn’t recognize her? Or he recognizes her, but she doesn't recognize him? Make the scene a little more complicated and have Brown there as well, and then what happens? Do they tell him or not? Does he guess? You could all do this in such a restrained way that you could have sneaked it past the Production Code.
I am not suggesting the film be remade now, since the film is perfect at 83 minutes, and making it into a two-and-a-half hour blockbuster would probably kill it. Besides, how many contemporary box office hits do you know that are serious about duty, honor, and courage?
THE DA VINCI CODE (2006. Screenplay by Akiva Goldsman. Based on the novel by Dan Brown. 149 minutes): I recently caught up with a couple of bad movies I deliberately avoided paying to see when they were in the theatres. This was one of them, and its primary value is to show you how not to adapt a novel. Brown’s novel is full of ideas, and Goldsman assumes (not entirely in error, given the box office success of the film) that audiences will care about the ideas. Mostly we don’t, and you can see why in the film. It means that Goldsman gives us enormous hunks of exposition, such as in the long, long scene with Sir Leigh Teabing. The scene has the kind of talk we will follow in a novel, where all we have are the words, but gives the actors virtually nothing to do while they talk. Sir Ian McKellan tries his best, and as an acting exercise it is almost but not quite fun to watch. The ideas of the novel are what Hitchcock called the MacGuffin: what everybody in the movie is concerned about, but about which the audience generally does not care. Quick: what were they chasing in North by Northwest? Yeah, but what was inside the statue? And what was on the microfilm inside the statue? We never find out. Did it make you hate the film?
300 (2006. Screenplay by Zack Snyder & Kurt Johnstad and Michael B. Gordon. Based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley. 117 minutes): And this one was a lesson in the generic problems of adapting a graphic novel into a film. First, there is seldom much characterization in most graphic novels, and here it consists of everybody yelling at each other. The characterization is so shallow that when, in the middle of the picture, Queen Gorgo (Lena Headey) and Theron (Dominic West) behave for a minute like real human beings, it is jarring because it goes against everything else in the picture.
Second, graphic novels are graphic, not so much in bloodshed, although that is true here, but in stunning visual images. Reading a graphic novel in half an hour or so can be fun. But making that visual dazzle so relentless for nearly two hours simply becomes exhausting, like all those first features MTV directors make. Yes, screenwriters should write for the performance of the designers and the CGI folks, but give the latter a variety of images to conjure up. As the writers of Wall·E did.
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Tom Stempel is the author of several books on film. His most recent is Understanding Screenwriting: Learning From Good, Not-Quite-So Good, and Bad Screenplays.
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Understanding Screenwriting #2
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21 comments:
Wall*E is, like most Pixar movies, a prime example of how to tell a story visually, as opposed to most blockbusters which offer visual noise in the mistaken belief that eye candy tells a compelling story.
Which brings me to 300. I'm surprised the one aspect of the movie that never is brought up is the endless narration that explains a rather simple-minded story ad nauseum.
This sort of brings me to something I've noticed over the years that I feel warrants a discussion. Does anyone think that movies have gotten longer mostly due to stopping the story for scenes of exposition?
For example. the Coen brothers rarely make a movie over 2 hours, while the likes of Michael Bay can never make one under 2 1/2 hours. Good visual storytelling versus visual noise that needs to stop every 20 minutes to explain plot endlessly to the audience.
"There is seldom much characterization in graphic novels"...???
Dude, put down the unproduced screenplays and pick up Watchmen, From Hell, Sandman, Top Ten, The Dark Knight Returns, The Walking Dead, Preacher, The Killing Joke, Stuck Rubber Baby, and anything by Will Eisner.
I don't mean to come off like a rabid overdefensive comic nerd, but that statement is just not true. Maybe it's true of BAD graphic novels. (as it's true of BAD screenplays.)
And I continue to champion occasional unproduced script reports. I mean, I've never read Schrader's infamous first draft of Close Encounters, or his bio of George Gershwin (I HAVE read his Hank Williams script, which is awesome), but just the reports I've heard about them are very inspiring and exciting. A lot of unmade scripts are like that. Bernardo Bertolucci's Red Harvest?!? That just lights you up with possibilities. (although Kent Jones once told me he'd read it and thought it was kinda lame.)
Steven Santos: Does anyone think that movies have gotten longer mostly due to stopping the story for scenes of exposition?
I've noticed this as well and I find it baffling. It's most noticeable in big-budget entertainments you'd expect to be economical, if for no other reason than to pack in more showtimes each day (Michael Bay films, Ron Howard films, Batman and other comic book movies). This strikes me as odd because it cuts against the grain of common wisdom about movies -- that so-called art films are full of gaseous exposition and needlessly lingering scenes, while consciously "popcorn" movies cut to the chase. In the past decade, maybe longer, I've found the opposite to be true.
Come to think of it, maybe it's always been true. There was no reason why, in the 1950s and '60s, so many sumptuously produced but unabashedly shallow "event" films needed to be three hours long or longer, but they were.
The exposition issue is an increasing sore spot for me, and I'd like to see what Tom thinks about it with regard to modern-day comedy. Think of every Julia Roberts or Meg Ryan or Sandra Bullock romantic comedy that has stopped dead in its tracks with the compulsion to overexplain all the motivations of its characters. A comedy can't just be swift and "screwball" any more; there has to be a backstory or a reason far less compelling than anything that could potentially happen onscreen. I recently watched Living in Oblivion again, and it was marvelous at how quickly DiCillo established Catherine Keener's motivation in the opening sequence: a simple flashback of her ill mother stroking her hair.
What does Tom or anyone else think? Does exposition add "depth" to comedy, or does it take away from the fun?
"First, there is seldom much characterization in most graphic novels..."
I agree with JJ's chagrin over that statement, and also wholeheartedly second his recommendation of From Hell, not only a great graphic novel but a great work of art, period. To that I'd add Locas, Cages, Bottomless Belly Button, Curses, Storeyville, and potentially many, many other comics that will show you just how uninformed that statement sounds. Granted, I see your point if 300 is your model -- the comic was pretty lousy, and the movie's even worse. But there's been a lot of very sophisticated work done in the medium, much of it having nothing whatsoever to do with superheroes or action cliches. It's amazing to me that, as many advances as comics have made towards greater respect in the last few years, these stereotypes still persist.
Craig: "What does Tom or anyone else think? Does exposition add "depth" to comedy, or does it take away from the fun?"
The New York Observer columnist Ron Rosenbaum believes that warm is the opposite of funny. With certain exceptions ("Raising Arizona" being one) I tend to agree.
Over exposed exposition:
I suspect this development is due to modern studio executives and this sense a lot of them have that audiences are incapable of understanding sublety or picking up implications. That these films will only work if they play to the absolute lowest common denominator, the stupidest, most ignorant, most shallow people in the audience who have to be handheld and spoonfed every single bit of information.
However, if you are said exec, and you just go to studio screenings and don't see movies in theaters, and the only time you encounter actual audiences are at test screenings made up mostly of 15 year olds given free tickets in a Malibu mall on a Thursday afternoon, of COURSE they're going to start to think everything has to be endlessly simplified and overexplained.
I agree with Matt, there has been this interesting move torwards sparseness and visual storytelling in "art films" over the last few years (Sokoruv, Bela Tarr, Van Sant, ect) while popcorn films have gotten wordier.
I also don't think it was always this bad. Yes, too much exposition has been a problem throughout movie history, but, if you look back at at pure entertainment popcorn films as recent (and relatively undistinguished) as Cobra or Roadhouse, they were fairly efficient in communicating exposition (what little of it there was).
Is there more exposition? I usually find it's the opposite -- at least for big blockbuster types. You don't cover plot holes through exposition, you cover them by cutting to the chase. The reason big movies have become big and bloated is because once you do something bloated that's successful (Rings, for example), everybody thinks you need to keep topping what's come before.
TDK had plenty of arch exposition, simply because the story makes no fucking sense. But, more typically, action is just ramped up and scenes move ahead without explanation (like the Bourne movies), simply to keep the audience distracted from how illogical what they're watching is.
MZS: "There was no reason why, in the 1950s and '60s, so many sumptuously produced but unabashedly shallow "event" films needed to be three hours long or longer, but they were."
I feel like today's bloated action/comedy set-pieces are my generation's version of the bloated musical set-pieces of a few decades ago. They had PAINT YOUR WAGON. We have DEAD MAN'S CHEST.
...bad musicals and bad action movies both suffer from their inability to weave together exposition and spectacle, is the point I'm trying to make. One always ends up stopping dead for the other.
"I don't mean to come off like a rabid overdefensive comic nerd, but that statement is just not true. Maybe it's true of BAD graphic novels. (as it's true of BAD screenplays.)"
He did say "seldom," jj, not "never." The graphic novels you mention are a pretty small fraction of what's out there - the exceptions that prove the rule, so to speak.
That said, I think that comics are, pretty much by definition, a medium of relatively broad storytelling/characterization strokes. The characters are necessarily, to some degree, icons. When everything's broken up into panels it seems unavoidable. I'm not knocking the graphic-novel format; I'm just saying, different media have different strengths.
"That said, I think that comics are, pretty much by definition, a medium of relatively broad storytelling/characterization strokes. The characters are necessarily, to some degree, icons. When everything's broken up into panels it seems unavoidable. I'm not knocking the graphic-novel format; I'm just saying, different media have different strengths."
I think this is just not true. What exactly is it about the aesthetics of panel breakdowns that would prevent more nuanced characterization? That's as much of a non-sequitur as saying that film is a medium of broad strokes because it's broken up into frames or shots. That's just the grammar of the medium, the basic material with which the artist works. Filmmakers work with the shot, and sometimes the individual frame, while comics artists mostly work with the panel as their basic unit. There's a limit to what can be communicated in a single panel -- just like there's only so much you can say with one shot of a film or one paragraph in a novel -- but fortunately there's no limit on the number of panels you can use. There are quite a lot of examples of more nuanced storytelling and characterization in comics today, both in the superhero/action works that JJ mentioned and the more "alternative" books I listed above. The norm may still be generic superhero stories told in broad strokes (as the norm in most media tends to be fairly white-bread) but there's a multitude of better stuff out there that's easily found. To cite one example I already mentioned, Locas is quite possibly one of the most wonderful sustained character studies in any medium. I could name lots more. It seems like lazy criticism to suggest that the medium simply can't handle or isn't suited for subtlety.
He also said "most" graphic novels. It's actually a doubly negative statement: there is "seldom" (meaning not often)in "most" (meaning the majority), meaning the majority of graphic novels, i.e. comic books, i.e. sequential art, whatever, have poor characterization.
I reiterate, this is no more a broad characteristic true of graphic novels then it is of television, movies, novels, or stage plays. Again, it may be applicable on an INDIVIDUAL basis, but it's a gross generalization when applied to an entire art form.
But, y'know, I'm not going to debate this with somebody whose argument is that shallow characters are inevitable in comics because they're broken up into panels. I mean, yeah gods...That's like saying screenplays generally have poor dialouge because it's centered in the middle of the page.
And I should point out I specifically mentioned mainstream horror / fantasy / superhero / action titles, for the most part, to show that it was fully possible to have deep and complex characters in what's generally derided as the prime example of shallow, childish, irrelevant comic books.
I don't want to hijack what's supposed to be a screenwriting discussion and turn it into an argument over Chris Claremont's profound character writing of Sasquatch and Diamond Lil or something, so I'll refrain from extending this further. Just, everybody stop by the local comic book store after the next trip to the video store and take a look around, you'll be surprised.
It's pretty amazing to me that we can't go a day here at THND without someone talkin' comics. I mean, it amuses me, since I can speak more confidently there than I can at times on the usual metier, due to particular education - but it seems these days like the two are harder to separate than they used to be.
If I was not in a location at the comment where it's difficult to expound at length, I'd go on at length about the "characters in sequential art" argument, but it's just as well, 'cause a couple of times I felt like I'd run the comments section off the road on previous posts.
Keith is going to have to give someone a comics beat at this rate!
Although I am not a fan of, nor do I read, comics and graphic novels, I did want to point out that making generalities about the medium for rhetorical purposes is awfully disingenuous. Tom says that depth and subtlety of characterization is not to be expected from comics due to the overwhelming abundance of examples that "prove the rule." Why make such a statement if not to deride/dismiss comics or suggest their inferiority?
If we look at the movies, the vast majority of them are also shallow, paint in broad strokes, and promote superficial pleasures. This is true for studio productions and indies. Of the several movies that open every week, what proportion can we honestly say offer compelling, nuanced, and memorable characters? The primary goal of most movies, comics, and novels is entertainment, not art. When one becomes a connoisseur of any of those media, one tends to ignore the schlock in favor of the art. Thus, as cinephiles, we here emphasize all of the artistic possibilities of cinema, while the general public don't see movies that way. So for any of us to take a perspective on comics that's similar to the public's perspective on movies is quite unfair.
Dear god, people are touchy today. Deep breath: I didn't intend to "put down" comics as a medium. Since discovering Grant Morrison and Justin Green in the past few years I've probably had a greater number of memorable experiences reading comics than I have reading novels. When I said that comics necessarily characterize in relatively (that's RELATIVELY, folks) broad strokes, all I was getting at (or trying and failing to get at, apparently) was that comics deal with time in such a peculiar way - slicing everything into snapshots which aren't quite snapshots, blah blah, all that stuff Scott McCloud talks about - that a certain degree of behavioral nuance is ultimately left up to the reader's imagination. I'm not saying that's a bad thing. Sometimes it's a great thing. I count ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST as one of the best movies ever made, and I dare say most of those characters are drawn just as broadly as, say, Frank Miller's Batman (again, we're talking RELATIVELY broad, which does not equal bad, so please, calm down). It's part of what gives them their larger-than-life quality, what makes them resonate so much inside my head. Creating an "iconic" character is something many filmmakers/actors dream of doing, so I don't see why it should be considered a knock against comics to say they're an inherently iconic medium. I never said "shallow" nor did I mean to imply it. The comics that I love, I love as much as any movie or book or album or what have you. Pissing contests about which medium is the "best" are about as meaningful as similar arguments about genre; ideally you should be equally open to the possibility of having your mind blown in any of 'em.
I get the impression from the responses to my comment that I must sound like some kind of idiot to some of you, and not even worthy of arguing with (hi, jj!); I admit my command of critical language falls far short of what I'd like it to be, and I'm all too aware of the gap between what I feel and what I'm able to articulate. Getting involved in these discussions is one way I hope to get better at articulating those feelings. In the meantime, I apologize to those of you whose time I'm apparently wasting. I'm afraid I'm not yet capable of insights like "too much exposition has been a problem throughout movie history" [except for, um, ROADHOUSE].
To qoute Richard Pryor: "You gimme shit, you gonna GET some shit..."
And don't you dare mess with Roadhouse! You want the hillbilly claw of death?!?!
Don't forget Cobra. I mentioned Cobra too. If crime's the disease, he's the cure.
I'm a Dolemite man, m'self. Check this good shit!
I'd be curious to hear a screenwriter's opinion on Transsiberian, which I saw yesterday. Although I had many problems with the tone (for a noir, it goes kind of soft at the end), I really like how slowly it establishes the main conflict. Almost half the running time goes by before the two major plot twists occur, and the main antagonist doesn't enter the film for more than an hour (discounting a short prologue). This violates the whole three-act structure and reminds me of what Quentin Tarantino said on Elvis Mitchell's radio show (he repeated it elsewhere, I think) about the different between a "story" and a "situation." For all its flaws, Transsiberian is at least a well-told story.
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