Moooviiiieee

I just finished watching Just Like Heaven, starring Reese Witherspoon and Mark Ruffalo. It’s a romantic comedy about a woman who gets in an accident, and then the guy can see her spirit and they connect and all of that fun stuff. It’s a very basic movie, nothing special. Some nice shots of San Francisco (it looks like it could be a very pretty city) and some funny bits, but relatively predictable. I wouldn’t recommend it, but if you really want to see it, I wouldn’t try to talk you out of it either.
Afterwards, I watched the commentary, as is my wont, and I found parts of that feature to be almost depressing. It really revealed to me that movie making is in many ways a dying art because mediocrity and trickery are becoming the standard. I realise, of course, that I have never made a movie and I can understand why they do what they do how they do it, but it just leaves me feeling cheated and a bit uncomfortable.
The first thing they mentioned was a new method of changing shots in editing that has become possible in the past few years with all of the digital work that they can now do. There are a few tricks that they use here. One is, when there are two people together in a shot, taking the best take of person A and splitting the screen so that they can use the best take of actor B. So if Reese Witherspoon delivered her lines best in take two, and Mark Ruffalo’s best take was take five, then they split the screen between them and match the shot so that it looks like they filmed it together when really you are watching two different takes filmed at different times. Another option is taking the audio from take two and putting it into the mouth of the actor in take five, changing the pitch and speed so that it matches the lips. They talk about it and say that none of the actors has ever come and complained because they are making their performance better. But I hear what they have done and it just turns me off.
I wonder at what point will a movie be recorded with no sets, and no emotions, and no people, because it is easier to just fake the whole thing, even the people. Everything can be perfect and completely unreal. It’s losing its artiness. They talk about how important it is to cast the right people and have the best chemistry, and then they just take the bits and parts and ignore the whole. Is it really chemistry if the people on screen don’t actually spend any time together? It is like the technology has stopped being a tool to enhance and become the essence of the performance itself. I guess there is something about live performances that has been completely lost on screen. When something is live there is the possibility of mistakes, of something being a bit off, but that is life. And isn’t that movies and plays are supposed to be about? We don’t go to a movie to see how cool the effects are, we go to watch drama or comedy, to see people (or animals) living and struggling and relating life. Think about it – in how many movies or shows are the ‘bad guys’ shown as being overly clinical and lifeless and rigid and square while the ‘good guys’ are dirty and real and gritty and rounded. In the Star Wars movies the empire’s ships are all angles and very sparse inside, consisting of metal corridors in greys and blacks. The rebellion, though, has colour and variety and their ships are large and round. Movies are becoming square and technical.
That is my complaint on a technical level. I would rather see two people who aren’t necessarily doing their absolute best at the same time and know it is real before I would willingly see two actors who just had the best bits and parts pulled out to make the best thing. Life isn’t always perfect, and neither should movies.
The second worrisome element comes from two quotes that I actually wrote down. Okay, I’m lying, I just paraphrased them. But I am close. First the director (or producer) said: An audience can turn on a show and know everything about the characters in thirty seconds. So his solution was to just keep “stumbling forward” (his actual words), keeping a step ahead, always trying to have questions that will be answered and lead to new questions. But the fact that as soon as I saw about ten minutes of the movie I knew how it would end and that I wouldn’t be surprised by any of the details shows that he didn’t do it very well. The second thing was the scene near the end where he states that he loves the girl one of the commentators said “Too schmaltzy? No, the audience wants it.” and that is a direct quote. I will now deal with each quote separately. I was going to deal with them as a whole, but then I changed my mind. One of these days I’ll start editing what I write. Nah.
The first quote made me concerned for the movie makers and for the industry as a whole because he said it like it was a completely positive thing. Everything is great, people are getting so sophisticated that they know all of this stuff. But the way I see it, filmmakers are just pandering to the masses, and thus they go for the feel good formula that leaves people liking themselves without having to think. SPOILER ALERT! As soon as the guy is introduced, you know that he will fall in love with the woman and then they will almost lose each other and then they will end up together in the end. The other option, and the slightly more risky one, is that they will fall in love, but she is dead so she will leave at the end and he will find new love. Halfway through they find that she is just in a coma, so option one is the solution. At the end, she is taken off of life support and her spirit starts to fade and then her heart monitor goes with the “beeeeeeeeeeep” of a non-beating heart for a long moment and then her heart starts again and she starts breathing. The only ‘surprising’ part is that she doesn’t remember him until a few scenes later where they touch hands and then she remembers everything and end credits roll because they are in love and together.
There is nothing surprising about most movies. If you know the genre, you generally know the outcome, and it is usually a happy one. Sometimes a movie will surprise because the heroes won’t fall in love, or the protagonist dies unexpectedly, but not generally. There are filmmakers out there who can fiddle with the formula enough to make a good movie, and there are those who just do as they will and make interesting movies. And sometimes a movie doesn’t mess with the end formula, but is interesting enough on its own that it works anyway. The movie Stranger Than Fiction is an example. The ending is a bit of a ‘feel-good’, but it fits with the movie. They could have done it differently and it may have been better, or it may have been worse. It is hard to say.
The second quote is about the schmaltzy scene. It wasn’t out of place within the movie, but it was in general a bit over the top. But the fact that they didn’t care because the audience wants it made me wonder. Does the audience really want it, or have they just been told and conditioned to expect it, and are you just too scared to try anything away from that formula? I don’t know exactly, but I think that it is possible that if more movies took a stand and went for less schmaltz, then people would accept it and begin to expect better things.
Another thing they said that really made me start to scratch my head is when they talked about how much ‘on-camera’ stuff they tried to do, ‘just like Orson Welles’ (Citizen Kane)(I think) because that is what really makes a movie. This was just after talking about how much trickery they tried to do with the digital editing. They want their cake and to eat it too.
As I said, I am concerned for the art of movie making. It is an interesting medium that has plenty of potential that is so constantly misused because no one wants to think. I don’t know if I will ever be a ‘successful’ writer because I don’t want to pander. I don’t want to care if a person will ‘like’ what I write, but I do care if it will make them sit back and go ‘huh’ (not as a question, but as a statement).
Final note - Mark Ruffalo looks a bit and sounds a great deal like the lead actor from Scrubs (who also wrote, starred and possibly directed Garden State), and they have quite similar acting styles as well. It was a bit spooky at times.
All in all, go watch Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. That is a movie that makes you think. Probably you want to watch Hamlet first.

On a completely random note, I think my vote for possibly the worst movie title goes to the movie Blood and Chocolate. It’s not a great title in general, but I remember the first time I saw the preview. It is a movie about werewolves (and possibly vampires), kind of a cool action movie like Underworld. It got to the end of the preview and I was thinking that it might be fun. And then they said the title: Blood and Chocolate. I knew in that moment that I would never see that movie because there is no way that it could be good.