Spoil the ending of a summer movie in October? Sounds OK to me.
A little ironic, isn't it? That the ending of IB is the worst part of the movie precisely because it breaks with movie convention, yet the director and distributor count on the conventions of the media machine, the TV and print reviewers, not to "spoil" the movie by talking about the ending. Well, now that the big money has been made, let's talk:
American movie conventions are very simple and they must be understandable to a 12-year old boy. (Comic book conventions cover much of the same storytelling ground, although they seem to be more complex. I'm not qualified to cover them, but here's a relevant question: "Why couldn't Superman kill Hitler?")
From Buster Keaton's "The General" (1924) through Victor Fleming's "Gone with the Wind" (1939) to Robert Aldrich's "The Dirty Dozen" (1967) the convention remains the same: your fictional characters can do whatever they want, except change the course of history.
That's it: it's basically the "War and Peace" model, wherein the fictional characters always seem to be at the right place at the right time. This is the model that Woody Allen lampooned in "Zelig" (1983).
Tarantino is the only writer credited with the script for IB, so I cannot even lay the blame elsewhere. The set up is one big red herring: you've got two simultaneous plots to kill Hitler at about the same time in the same place. The movie convention would dictate that they cancel each other out in a way that could be, in turns, suspenseful, frustrating, comical, but in the end, satisfying. But what did we get? This reverse-holocaust thing that was neither suspenseful nor satisfying. As someone else said in a different context: "overwrought and under thought."
Hitchcock would go over scripts with his writer day after day after day, just to eliminate silly stuff (the leader of the Third Reich is in the house and a black man just wanders around backstage, not a soldier in sight, until he's ready to burn the place down) and make some pretty far-fetched events seem plausible.
In film school they made us read Rudolf Arnheim's "Film as Art" which was very, very old-fashioned, but which had a solid basic premise: it's the limitations of a medium which make it art. (For him, the opposite of art would not be reality, it would be communication: think film vs TV). I cannot make the full Arnheim case here, but I can say that the movie convention to stay within historical bounds makes "The Dirty Dozen" a great movie and IB an unsatisfying 2-1/2 hour mess with a bunch of good scenes.
American movie conventions are very simple and they must be understandable to a 12-year old boy. (Comic book conventions cover much of the same storytelling ground, although they seem to be more complex. I'm not qualified to cover them, but here's a relevant question: "Why couldn't Superman kill Hitler?")
From Buster Keaton's "The General" (1924) through Victor Fleming's "Gone with the Wind" (1939) to Robert Aldrich's "The Dirty Dozen" (1967) the convention remains the same: your fictional characters can do whatever they want, except change the course of history.
That's it: it's basically the "War and Peace" model, wherein the fictional characters always seem to be at the right place at the right time. This is the model that Woody Allen lampooned in "Zelig" (1983).
Tarantino is the only writer credited with the script for IB, so I cannot even lay the blame elsewhere. The set up is one big red herring: you've got two simultaneous plots to kill Hitler at about the same time in the same place. The movie convention would dictate that they cancel each other out in a way that could be, in turns, suspenseful, frustrating, comical, but in the end, satisfying. But what did we get? This reverse-holocaust thing that was neither suspenseful nor satisfying. As someone else said in a different context: "overwrought and under thought."
Hitchcock would go over scripts with his writer day after day after day, just to eliminate silly stuff (the leader of the Third Reich is in the house and a black man just wanders around backstage, not a soldier in sight, until he's ready to burn the place down) and make some pretty far-fetched events seem plausible.
In film school they made us read Rudolf Arnheim's "Film as Art" which was very, very old-fashioned, but which had a solid basic premise: it's the limitations of a medium which make it art. (For him, the opposite of art would not be reality, it would be communication: think film vs TV). I cannot make the full Arnheim case here, but I can say that the movie convention to stay within historical bounds makes "The Dirty Dozen" a great movie and IB an unsatisfying 2-1/2 hour mess with a bunch of good scenes.
Mr. C,
ReplyDeleteAre you familiar with the work of Costa Gavras? He won an oscar for his film 'Z'...
He is coming to my school this week to talk to the 'writing for film and television' majors, and I will most likely go. I've never seen any of his films, so will probably have to do some research!
-Sean
I also was curious if you watched 'Synecdoche, NY'. It was with Phillip Seymour Hoffman and first time director, Charlie Kaufman (writer of Eternal Sunshine, Adaptation, Being John Malkovich...)
Synecdoche came and went in a flash this summer. I'm adding it to my queue.
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