Episode 39: Was the Movie Any Good?

Transcript

Growing up, I wasn't much of a movie critic or a movie buff, I guess.
I loved watching movies.
However, my default mode was always to just enjoy the movie for whatever it was.
I also don't tend, most of the time, to repeat watch most movies.
Now, part of this is just that, I don't know, second time through, part of what I like about watching a movie is seeing how it unfolds the first time.
I like that first time experience of learning what's happening through the course of the movie as it goes.
And I like sort of, you know, you get that, it's almost like an 80-20 rule.
You get 80% of the information about the movie the first time through, and then you get diminishing returns each time you watch that.
Now, I'm sure that there are plenty of people who would argue with me on that.
That there, and I'm sure there are movies, particular movies, the more times you watch them, you notice certain nuances to them, and things you didn't pick up the first time around, and that's all very true.
So, I'm also not saying as a hard and fast rule that I never re-watch movies.
There are some handful of movies that I have seen over and over and over again.
I'm just saying as a general rule of thumb, most stuff I watch at once.
And most stuff, you know, growing up and, you know, even into adulthood, I would kind of watch it for whatever it was, and I didn't think all that much.
You know, I'd have some general sense of whether I enjoyed it or not, but I wasn't sitting around, like, critiquing the merits of the movie itself, I suppose.
Now, when I was in high school, I had a film criticism class.
We watched a handful of, you know, very well-known, well-directed movies, the ones I remember, let me think.
That's where I watched American Graffiti for the first time, The Godfather for the first time, Das Boot,
which, for me, was an absolute slog to get through.
Apocalypse Now was in that curriculum, and there was a couple others.
I'm forgetting a couple.
Really cool class.
The critiquing that they were really showing in this class was really more geared toward
symbolic stuff and certain directorial choices and certain history around the films.
And that's not quite the stuff I'm talking about here.
I did enjoy that course.
I did take some things away from it.
For instance, and this is a super basic thing, but that's the class where I learned that oftentimes in film,
when there are people standing in the rain, it symbolizes sort of a rebirth or a refresh or something to that effect
where it is a turning point for that character.
You know, basic stuff like that is sort of what this curriculum went through.
And I don't know.
I probably took away five or ten items out of there that stuck with me over time.
As I headed into my, I guess, 30s, I started watching some channels that were like movie review channels.
Movie review, movie criticism, there's hundreds, probably thousands of them out there on YouTube these days.
I don't know.
I'm sure there were at that time as well, but I bumped into a few that have stuck with me over time.
And it wasn't like I was trying to become a film critic.
Like, as with most people, I assume I just sort of started listening in just to see how the movies were.
But after watching these channels for a long time at this point,
I've picked up a few, just a few film critiquing things that now stand out to me as I watch films.
Just sort of a few basic things that I now find kind of interesting as I'm watching that help me, I don't know, evaluate whether or not,
because there's a difference, right?
There's a difference between enjoying the film and whether or not it was a well-created film.
Like, they're not the same thing.
So, and I'm not saying this is a definitive list of anything, but these are just like,
I'm just going to list like three things that, you know, if you're at all interested in, you know, film critic kind of stuff,
but you've never really thought about it all that much, you might find these interesting.
I would say, too, that as I look through this list,
two of the three of these aren't specific to film.
It's just sort of where I started paying attention to them.
These are more just basic story telling sorts of things that you could apply to books or, you know, stories or really anything.
One of the things that I just had never thought about until listening to critics talk about it.
One thing worth noting with characters in a movie is,
are they making choices that you believe you would make or that a reasonable human being would be making?
And it's the difference.
So, so this would be, you're sort of almost stereotypical example of this would be sort of the horror movie situation or the slasher where there was even a commercial about this, right?
Like a few years back that ran for a while, but this is the thing where someone's coming after you and there's like a wide open front door that you could run out into a neighborhood and get away.
And they decided to run up the stairs instead, like up into the bedroom where they can't get out, you know, like that sort of thing is not really a choice that a reasonable person would make.
But there are more subtle versions of this that chop up in movies where a bunch of things happen.
And then one of the characters does something that if you pay attention to it, you're scratching your head.
Like, why would anyone do that?
And usually the answer to that question is, they have to do that thing, otherwise the rest of the plot can't happen.
And that chain of things is bad writing, essentially.
Now, these days it can also be weird reshoots and studio interference and whatever else.
But at the end of the day, one way or another, that indicates that something has gone wrong with this particular movie's plotline.
Whether it was the writer or the director or the studio or whatever, something has gone awry.
If you think about the decisions that characters make through the movie and you realize that it doesn't make any sense what they decided to do, but if they had not done that thing, the rest of the movie couldn't have happened.
Another thing that I started paying attention to in movies are scenes, and this is particularly egregious in...
You see this most dichotomously in action movies.
Are there too many cuts in the action sequences?
This could go for really any sequence, but particularly, again, it's sort of...
It's very accentuated in terms of action.
Again, how many cuts are there to get you through a few seconds of footage?
A well-done action movie with good stunt people or actors who are doing their own stunts well or whatever, that's well-choreographed and well-constructed, has longer-running cuts or longer-running shots within a scene.
Whereas something where the actors, if the actors are struggling and the stunts don't come off right, you can notice that there's all these cuts.
One of the most egregious examples of this, I think it was one of the Taken movies, but I saw a scene where someone was jumping over a fence.
So it was just a single, you know, maybe medium fence, jumping over a fence.
And it was something like 12 different camera shots to get through just one person jumping over a fence.
And what that indicates is they had to shoot the scene like a hundred times.
It wasn't going well.
Maybe the actor couldn't do it or it was a stunt person or the wrong angles or whatever.
And they had to take all of these different shots they took throughout the course of that time and splice them all up into the final movie to make some sort of a coherent scene.
Now, there is a nuance here where when you do cuts, it does help draw the eye of different things and it keeps the scene interesting and all this stuff.
But when you cross a certain threshold, it gets ridiculous.
And that's something that also has started to stick out to me like a sore thumb.
When movies have just cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, just to get through a few seconds of a shot.
But this is also why when an action movie does this well and there aren't so many cuts and sometimes they do very long running either one shots takes or, you know, fake one shot takes.
That when that's done well, you can just tell something's different.
Even if you weren't paying attention to it was only one shot, the scene feels different.
A couple of things have done this well over time.
The original Netflix Daredevil show.
Each of the first three scenes has at least one episode where they do a really long single cut action scene.
I believe the first of those was episode, I think it was episode two or three or something of season one.
There's a scene in a hallway and he's falling out of doors and it's super tense, super well done.
And it's all one long running shot or at least it's made to be that way.
Whether or not it's actually a long running shot on their question, but it looks that way.
And also, and they don't do tons of truly single shot things, but John Wick does a very good job with this kind of stuff.
Largely because it's being directed by someone who really came up through stunt work.
So they know how to film a really good action sequence.
Third thing that I've really started paying attention to when I'm kind of evaluating whether or not this movie was any good.
And again, this is not really specific to movies.
This is more of just a storytelling thing.
What character or characters changed in the story and how?
When you're watching a movie, often it would be the main character, the main protagonist.
That should go through some sort of change throughout the course of the story.
Because if they start one way and then you watch two hours of a movie and they're still the same way at the end, it means they really weren't much of a character.
And if someone who's not much of a character is your main protagonist, that means that the writing of that particular character and therefore that particular movie probably wasn't very good.
Now, it doesn't 100% of the time always need to be the main character, but it's just that's often where this role falls, right?
Another way to think about this is, did they learn something?
Did their opinions change?
Did their ability to, I don't know, deal with certain scenarios change?
Like, what did the main character or whatever character you're paying attention to, what was their story arc?
How did they change over time?
What impact did the events of this movie or this story have on this character?
Are they better for it?
Are they worse for it?
You know, a great example of this, something like The Godfather.
You have Michael, who in the beginning comes home from the military, he's very straight-laced, a whole number of things happen throughout the course of that movie, and by the end of it, he's a mob boss.
That's a pretty dramatic character difference.
And he goes through an arc, and the choices he makes generally make sense.
And that's one of the reasons that it's a good story, it's a well-done story and a good movie.
Some of that also is then where you get into criticism about, say, the newer run of Marvel films.
You have these characters, and in the beginning of the movie, they're super, and they're awesome, and they do whatever.
And then a bunch of stuff happens through the movie, and at the end, they're not any different.
That's what separates some of the newer Marvel superhero stuff compared to some of the more original run, where the characters did change and learn and grow through the course of their movies.
Whereas a lot of times now, it just seems like it's all just for the CGI battle, right?
It's just not a good story anymore.
It doesn't go anywhere.
No one evolves.
No one changes.
It just doesn't matter.
All it's doing is teeing up the next one.
So anyway, again, I'm not a movie critic.
I love watching movies.
But as I have absorbed more movie critic content over time, these are just three things that have begun to stick out to me like a sore thumb.
Particularly when they're done poorly.
You know, are the characters doing natural things or not?
Are the action sequences full of cuts, or are they more reasonable?
And then, is your main character actually changing and growing over the course of the movie?
Or is he just the same walking out as he was walking in?
If you have any interest in, you know, movie critic kind of stuff, I'll link to a few of the ones I often watch for reviews and things.
Just because I find their opinions to be fairly level and well done.
And it's not a bunch of just, you know, overly sensationalized, trashing, and fanboying.
So, take a look if you like.
You know, and for whatever you do in your movie-going experience, enjoy it.
Or, if you like.
Yeah.