Wednesday, January 26, 2005

Stand By Me and The Telling Detail

I'm about two thirds through watching Stand By Me, and I have yet to get into it. There is a point, watching a movie, when we suspend disbelief and accept the movie on its terms. Sometimes this point is helped by good movie-making, sometimes it is done just because there seems to be so much fun going on. Sometimes we just do it to ourselves. Stand By Me has always been mentioned to me as a really good movie, so I was prepared for something much better.

Stephen King is a master of the telling detail. The telling detail, when you are reading a story, is that little nugget the author throws in to tell you that there is a genuine experience behind what you are reading. Maybe it's the way Cracklin' Oat Bran slowly turns to mush at the bottom of your cereal bowl. It relates your experience viscerally to that of the character in whom you are asked to believe. Nobody piles these on faster than Stephen King.

But, in the movie, this pile of telling details achieves near worshipful stature. We see so many boyhood rituals, each one probably true, that we begin to see the four boys as an IDEAL boyhood. In fact, we get the sense that the boys are acting out an idealized memory an adult might have of the event. This slant could be workable, given that the story is being narrated by an adult. However, there are no indications of "unreliable narration". We appear to be given omnipotent flashbacks, not something cleaned up. So the excess of true details becomes untrue.

Monday, January 17, 2005

Million Dollar Baby and the Right Hook

Martial art movies, dance movies, and pornography have a certain advantage. There is something physical happening beyond and above the screen representation. Even if the plot, background, special effects seem fake or artificial, even if the acting is wooden, something real happens. That “something real” often rates independent critical review, and certainly underscores the movie. Sometimes, it takes away from the movie, of course. We can get so taken up with Jackie Chan’s fight scenes, we lose track of the storyline. It can happen that a movie is elevated by the physicality of the action scenes, too. In Million Dollar Baby, Hillary Swank turns in a superb acting performance. However, I think it was her right hook that made the movie real for me. In a series of matches, over and over, she delivered a combination of punches that looked and felt real. If you’ve ever been around people training in fighting arts, you know the difference between someone who “shows” you a technique, and someone who does it. Even if the combination is delivered in the air, you can feel the power, the effect it would have if it landed. Hillary Swank delivers that feel after she develops her technique, and it makes those quick matches feel real. Clint Eastwood is a great director and I’m sure he could have made the rest of the material work anyway. But for me, I think that reality gave weight to the rest of the emotional content, defeating a lot of my mechanisms for dismissing that kind of thing.

Wednesday, January 12, 2005

White Noise

Reviewers aren’t taken with this movie, yet it is doing well with the public. Quite well. One reason it gets trashed, in all probability, is the association with The Ring and others that have followed in that strain. It’s no Ring, but definitely better than The Grudge Good horror is, as the stylish. But bad horror can still be very good if it gets underneath our skin. To do that, it has to get into a level that we recognize as possible.

White Noise listens to static for voices. We’ve probably all done that, searching for a good radio station and crossing through something that we seem to recognize. A voice, a phrase. Our mind doesn’t catch it, not really, but we paint the rest in. If you stare at white noise long enough, you will see things. Possibly, you’ll freak yourself out.

This movie could be a man freaking himself out, crossing that line between real and not so much. The on-screen story, the fibula being told by the writers doesn’t make much sense. It certainly isn’t very deep. But the fear is. Planes of reality don’t seem fixed in the story, and electronic media are certainly magic, already.

It isn’t clever like Sixth Sense, eerie like The Ring, it doesn’t have the constant tension of either of those movies. But White Noise will probably do quite well, just because parts of it feel authentic. Of course any knowledge of technology or cognitive psychology will punch holes in the realism, but the effect still persists.