Humanities Core Writing Diagonistic

Each quarter I have to give my Humanities Core Students a writing diagnostic exercise. This quarter I gave them the question: “What was the worst movie you saw this summer? Briefly describe it and explain why it failed.” Here’s my response, produced in ten minutes (which is about all the time I gave them):

“Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow” was the worst movie I saw this summer. I went to see it at the insistence of my 12-year old son. He thought it was great, but he’s never seen a movie he doesn’t like. I, on the other hand, felt it was like watching paint dry.

“Sky Captain” is constructed with a retro-feel. It is made to look like a film produce in the 1930’s, and the story, props, and acting are meant to mimic 1930’s film-making, but the world of the film is not exactly the world of the 1930’s—an evil genius is trying to take over the world with an army of giant, flying robots, which, like everything else in this sepia-washed monstrosity, fit the aesthetics of the 1930’s, klunky, rivets exposed, steel just waiting to rust, they seem a good metaphor for the film itself.

The plot is so contrived that it’s hardly worth summarizing. As “Sky Captain” (Jude Law) and his newspaper reporter girlfriend, Polly (Gwynneth Paltrow) try to find the creator of these robots they wander the globe falling into one predicament after another, each apparently inserted into the story in a failed-attempt to create some “Indiana-Jones”-like suspense, but this film is neither suspenseful nor reminiscent of “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

Though set in the 1930’s, the world we encounter there is not the world of the 1930’s per se, but the imaginary filmic world of 1930’s-Hollywood. This is certainly an original idea, but it’s not clear what the viewer is supposed to get out of this style of presentation.

To make matters worse, there’s no story here, just a stringing together of episodes that don’t seem to be building to any kind of dramatic conclusion. Yes, “Sky Captain” has plenty of back-story meant to give us real insight into the characters’ motivations, but it doesn’t work because this back-story comes to us by way of exposition rather than dramatic action. The characters are always explaining that they have this really important back-story involving an old romantic relationship between the lead characters (for example), but we only hear them talking about it, we don’t see how any of this exposition affects their real actions (except that Polly is the stereotypical reporter who’s after the story).

After the first twenty minutes of this film I kept looking at my watch. I couldn’t wait for it to be over, and this is a shock, since I usually find that any excuse to gaze at Gwennyth Paltrow will keep me glued to the screen (e.g., I can always watch “Great Expectations” one more time for that very reason). All this to say, all the original ideas, technological stunts, and beautiful and talent actors can’t save a film if it doesn’t have a good story.

Films I've Seen Recently

“Garden State” (At University, Irvine) This was the first movie I’d seen in over a month. We’d been on vacation, and then last week I was way too busy to go, and I think I had given up on really wanting to see any movies, since I had been feeling pretty hopeless about my own screenwriting career. Still, I was kind of dreading seeing this film, assuming I would be jealous of Zach Braff, the writer, director, and star, since I would naturally be thinking that he would be making the film I wanted to make. I figured that I’d be angry that he’d gotten all the breaks just because he had been working is whole life to get into show business, and I’ve only been working on it for about a year. (I’ve just read a comment in Linda Segar’s book, Making a Great Writer Great. She says it takes most screenwriters five years of work to make their fast sale, even a small sale for a $1000 option.) But I liked this film. In fact, it left me inspired to get back to work on my writing and try to think again about screenplays (and short stories, essays, memoirs, and novels). This is the story of a young man’s journey back to his home in New Jersey. He’s been living in California, mostly morking as a waiter in a Vietnamese restaurant after concluding a job as a mentally handicapped quarterback in some kind of made for t.v. movie or series. He’s been on various medications to combat depression and mood swings since he was nine years old, and he decides to go off his meds for his homecoming, which was occasioned by his mother’s funeral. In the course he learns valuable lessons about life, falls in love, and comes to terms with the demons of his past . . . blah, blah, blah, but I still felt touched by this film because of the careful and sensitive way Branff treats his characters and their setting, New Jersey. As I said, I also felt inspired, reminded by this “small” picture of why I love movies and want to be a part of them: they bring together images, music, and the spoken words in ways that deeply touch us. “Sex, Lies, and Videotape” (DVD) I know everyone else has seen this already, but as a fundamentalist Christian I would not have seen a film with the word “sex” in the title, (though the Campus Crusade guys at NAU were awfully fond of watching Caddy-shack over and over again for that one scene . . . you know the one . . . and I’m told privately that “Fast Times and Ridgemont High” was similarly popular. Well, anyway, now I’ve seen S,L, & V, and now I understand what all the fuss was about. This is a really compelling film, less about sex than it is about the power, or maybe I should say, “the hope,” we have that flawed and wounded people can heal each other. Of course, there is a fairly frank treatment of sexual topics in the film, but it hardly seems provocative in the way “Fast Times and Ridgemont High” is. Rather, sex seems to be the vehicle through which we explore the emotions and relationships of the characters (rather Freudian), and that may be a rather useful tool. As a bonus, I now get the thing about “one key” that everybody talks about, and lament the fact that I have a lot of keys. “We Don’t Live Here Anymore.” This is a great film. I haven’t heard any “Oscar buzz” about it yet, but every performance in the film deserves one. This is a great script, shot by a sensitive director, and wonderfully performed by four of our best actors (Laura Dern, Mark Ruffalo, Naomi Watt, and Peter Krause). The film explores adultery in a sophisticated way that doesn’t try to scare you out of it in the way “Basic Instinct” did, but tries to explore how and why people choose to have affairs, and what the results of those affairs will be, emotionally, on those involved, and it does so without resorting to psychotic lovers who will boil your kid’s pet rabbit. We can really see what motivates all the characters to cheat on their spouses, but we see most clearly through the eyes of Ruffalo’s character who really does seem like a baby when he pretentiously tells his wife that she can’t dare to offer insights into the “soul of man she doesn’t really know.” We get it, at that point in the film, that cheating on one’s spouse is as much a self-deception as it is a deception of the marriage partner, and most of our excuses can seem vain and pretentious when brought out into the light of day. According to all the surveys I see, lots of people are out there having affairs. I have no experience of this personally, but I understand the impulse, and this film will haunt that impulse in me for a long time.