Reel Me In Already!

 

I’ve read a few books recently and it’s really time to do at least one review. I’m waiting to finish the movie Philomena and do a review about that as well. I started it a week ago and made a decision to hold off watching it until I could write it shortly after. Nothing is worse than waiting too long to write and forgetting the critical aspects. Some of the thoughts you had at first have faded into the background and you can hardly remember the story. I always put more pressure on myself for these types of reviews. It’s as if one man’s opinion about a film must adhere to strict rules of cinema writing. It’s silly I know. There are so many ways to do a review that seems ridiculous to even mention it. 

I normally opt for the direct approach.

 What is the director trying to say? What messages are tied in and what symbols (if any) are apparent to me? Then I mention what worked and what didn’t, how the characters came off. Another way is to talk about things like lighting and camera work, who did the score and did it fit. Here I’m not usually convincing because I know so little about sets and industry mechanics. I’ve read plenty of reviews that talked about the difficult work of getting funding or how certain actors were brought on late. I don’t focus too much on the ingredients, the presentation is what interests me. Too much background and it feels like an episode of Project Greenlight, HBO’s documentary about film making in the early 2000s. The show was dull for the same reasons that dress rehearsals are dull, it's just preparation. 

 If a movie doesn’t grab me right away I’m liable to click off. Roma was one such movie. Netflix put together an absolute bore of film and then took the color out of it. “Oh wow it’s black and white, how novel!” I turned it off after 15 minutes of watching a middle class family make popcorn and turn on the TV while the maid cleaned up. Waste of time. Reel me in already! 

I could never do it for a living because I just don’t have the patience to watch everything. They can’t all be great but even in decent movies there should be some element of mystery or humor or adventure. I used to read Roger Ebert a lot. His page is still around (oddly) but someone else writes reviews on it. He did a very snarky review of Constantine that had me howling. Instead of telling us what it was about and all the different ways it failed, he made a joke about it and trashed it. I remember thinking he probably wanted to leave the film after about 20 minutes but because he couldn’t, he thought he’d have fun with it instead. 

With historical movies you can examine the characters on screen versus the historical record. There were critics who didn’t like seeing Daniel Day Lewis’ Lincoln cursing on screen. I guess it came off as a modern interpretation and not likely the way Abe Lincoln behaved. I didn’t see the film but that sounds about right. I don’t have any way to know how common swearing was in the mid 19th century. Historians weren’t put off but a little foul language but it didn’t fit the character of the 16th president.  

Interpretations can be wildly off too. When I guess at messaging I try to make the views solely my own, and it’s often vastly different from what others say. But there isn’t always one way to see a movie. We can all watch the same thing and get different ideas. The important thing is to find a common theme and stick to it. It helps to read other reviews as well to get a sense of how to dissect a movie.

I always write my own thoughts in a rough draft to keep my opinions original. I don’t want other critics’ ideas to infect my ideas, even if mine are wildly off the mark. I’d rather get the purpose of the movie wrong then take ideas from another writer. Like every other kind of writing you do, mimic the styles of the ones you admire. It’s perfectly natural to do this. It’s a starting place until you develop your own personal style. I find myself falling into certain ditches on all my writing that isn’t always there to exploit. I love ‘against all odds’ stories (like Hillbilly Elegy) but sometimes the theme just isn’t there. A lot of dramas are ‘coming of age’ or ‘revelations’ where the main character finds some eternal truth. Philomena looks to be such a movie but I’ll know more next week.