Category: movies

Read the credits after you watch a movie. Aren’t you amazed at how many people were paid to contribute to creating it? These are good times indeed.

Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2011)

Jiro Dreams of Sushi is an amusing, eye-opening, and well-produced documentary about an exacting Japanese sushi chef named Jiro Ono, whose dedication to his craft is remarkable as much for its relentless lifelong perfectionism as for its world-famous success.

What I least liked about it was seeing dead or soon-to-be-dead sea creatures being inspected, bought and sold.

Visually, what I liked best was seeing each individual piece of sushi placed on a lacquered, rectangular dish on the softly-lit counter top, where gravity briefly, subtly altered its shape in a kind of slow, glistening ooze.

The strongest impression I’m left with, though, is Jiro’s seemingly unflagging sense of purpose: to make the most exquisite sushi he possibly can. Nothing else seems to matter in the slightest.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/jiro-dreams-of-sushi/id542088376

Annie (1982)

Huh. Well, I really don’t know what to think of Annie. On the one hand, it’s really long, and as some reviewers point out, it doesn’t really go anywhere or mean anything, but on the other hand, I’m super nostalgic about the songs! I had fun watching it, but I have no idea whether a child or adult who has never seen it before would enjoy it.

Keep reading for a plot summary with SPOILERS in the form of a beat sheet in the style described in Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat.

Also below: Some things about the movie that surprised me, and the history of the character as she has appeared in a wide range of media from 1885 to 2014.

Watch on Amazon

Continue reading Annie (1982)

Timeless (Season 1)

Although iTunes calls Timeless a drama, there’s a healthy dose of science-fiction as well. It’s a time-travel show, for Pete’s sake!

The three main characters, who have a pretty nifty-looking time machine, are struggling with some kind of shadow organization that has control of a newer one.

The sets, costumes, and special effects are fun (the show must cost a fortune to produce), but I found the expositiony dialog intolerably overbearing. Clearly the writers are trying to contrast prejudiced views of women and minorities in the past with views of women and minorities in today’s more enlightened times, but the well-meaning messages are written in clumsily.

Since the good guys and the bad guys both wind up changing history and killing people, there are interesting moral issues at play, involving questions of the good of the many vs. the life of an individual and whether the end ever justifies the means. Why couldn’t some of the same subtlety be brought to bear on issues of race and gender?

See below for two grating examples of political correctness in Episode 8, “Space Race”.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/tv-season/timeless-season-1/id1142726283

Continue reading Timeless (Season 1)

Point Break (1991)

Well. Point Break (1991) was about fifty million times better than Point Break (2015). It had some actual characters and plot.

It also seems to have been a cultural touchstone, though not one that I was ever particularly aware of. If the interviews on the special features menu are to be believed, it introduced the zen of surfing to the masses.

My personal opinion is still mixed. On the one hand, the movie was horribly bloody. On the other hand, the skydiving was awesome.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/point-break/id547103622

Now, having just seen a Keanu Reeves movie and a Sandra Bullock movie, I feel like I need to re-watch Speed.

Ghost Protocol (2011)

I remember seeing Ghost Protocol among the new releases in a DVD shop years ago. Somehow it didn’t register as a movie I wanted to see. Since then, I’ve realized how iconic that 1996 Mission Impossible movie is and therefore will probably watch however many more are made, as long as Tom Cruise reprises his role as Ethan Hunt. At some point I decided I’m basically willing to watch anything Tom Cruise is in, though that doesn’t mean I like everything he’s in—I hated Jerry Maguire, and Minority Report was a horrible mess.

I really enjoyed the fight scene in the mechanical parking garage, but parts of Ghost Protocol were hard to watch; surely they filmed those Spiderman stunts with a greenscreen? Um, no. No, they did not. And it wasn’t a stunt double. Tom Cruise really had himself filmed on the outside of the Burj Khalifa. I don’t know who’s crazier, him or Jackie Chan.

A lot of heist movies show you the plan and show you the hero executing most or even all of the plan successfully; it’s fun because there are parts of the hero’s plan that you don’t know, or because you see the bad guys fall into traps set up for them. There’s still conflict because sometimes the bad guys get the upper hand, or someone on the good guy’s team turns traitor, but the good guy often has a secret backup plan, so it turns out he was never in danger, or at any rate is fully capable of getting himself out of it again.

What was fun about Ghost Protocol was the sheer number of things that went wrong for the characters. It was just one thing after another! The plans went awry over and over again! Or I thought they were going to, and that was worse!

https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/mission-impossible-ghost-protocol/id501587325

Miss Congeniality (2000)

Miss Congeniality came highly recommended by Blake Snyder, author of Save the Cat. I think he and I have different taste in movies.

Sandra Bullock plays a rather slovenly female FBI agent who is selected by a co-worker she has a love/hate relationship with to go undercover and participate in a beauty pageant to catch a terrorist, so Michael Caine gives her an unrealistically rapid makeover, and she winds up making friends with her competitors, who are grateful to her for being herself and protecting them.

I tend to think of makeover movies as rather offensive, but I was impressed at the way Miss Congeniality transformed the “tough girl” character without requiring her to alter the core of her identity. Sandra Bullock’s character in fact expresses her own skepticism about the value of a beauty contest in assessing the worth of a person, but comes to believe that people aren’t ever as superficial as they seem, even—or especially—beauty pageant contestants.

And to be fair, makeover movies probably aren’t as superficial as they seem, either. Everybody loves a good Cinderella story; Cinderella is always kind and good before she gets the fancy dress and shoes, which is why we believe she deserves them.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/miss-congeniality/id328167954

Constellations by Nick Payne

Constellations, acted by Edward Harrison and Stephanie Street at the Singapore Repertory Theatre, has a parallel-universe premise built on some very hand-waving “physics”.

The play has just two characters, Marianne and Roland. They appear in a series of short scenes on an empty stage below a light fixture of 100 LED “stars”. The scenes tell the story of one couple, but the two lovers don’t have just one story, they have many differing stories. Sometimes they never get past an awkward hello.

More below about the play and why it was entertaining.

Continue reading Constellations by Nick Payne

Looper (2012)

Looper has a time-travel premise, but it wasn’t at all what I expected. It was better.

I was perhaps expecting something like Edge of Tomorrow, if only because I read a reference to this movie when reading an article about that one a year and a half ago. But no, there is hardly any Groundhog-Day style repetition, just two simultaneous versions of one guy: a younger one (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and an older one (played by Bruce Willis).

As I was watching it, I started to think maybe Looper would be like Paycheck, a sci-fi movie in which a hunted, mind-wiped character has to figure out some mysterious clues he gave himself, or Predestination, a time-travel movie in which there are some really strange relationships between the characters. But although it’s just as flawed as any time-travel movie, Looper isn’t really that complicated.

Looper has some dystopian futuristic stuff and some magical sci-fi stuff (mostly done with practical effects and not overbearing CGI), but the heart of the movie is not sci-fi, it’s drama. The themes include justice, redemption—and motherhood, of all things! The resolution of the conflict doesn’t hit you hard because it’s a clever gimmick, it hits you hard because it’s a deeply felt moral choice.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/looper/id575490887

Keep reading for a plot summary with SPOILERS in the form of a beat sheet in the style described in Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat.

Continue reading Looper (2012)

Westworld (Season 1)

After watching the trailer plus one episode, I would say Westworld reminds me of two other sci-fi productions.

Westworld reminds me of Bladerunner (1982) because the “hosts”, the synthetic people who inhabit the Westworld theme park, are, like the replicants, starting to want to protect themselves and choose their fates. The difference is in the hardware: the replicants are genetically engineered, not built by robotic 3D printers and controlled by wireless signal receivers like the hosts.

Westworld also reminds me of the show Dollhouse (2009–2010), which is also about an expensive service that gratifies rich clients by supplying them with realistic but fake people. One difference is that the dolls are not fundamentally artificial; they were and will again be people with their own pasts and futures. Their brains and bodies are simply borrowed during their contracted time. Another difference is that the dolls go out into the real world and pass as people, whereas the clients of the Westworld park only interact with the hosts within the park itself… at least as far as we know!

There’s also an element of repetition reminiscent of Groundhog Day (1993) or Edge of Tomorrow (2014), but the loops are not actual loops in time, just loops in the behavior of androids who have been programmed to behave the same way over and over.

I’m interested in the philosophical questions the science-fiction premise raises:

  • Could an android become human by having experiences?
  • How should we treat androids for our own sakes, if not theirs?
  • Could we be downloaded into replacement bodies, and thus live forever? If so, would we still be human?

What I don’t like about the show is that it has violent scenes with a real tinge of horror. I get that the show is trying to be raw and disturbing. Reining back the violence would lessen the drama.

https://itunes.apple.com/au/tv-season/westworld-season-1/id1174542850

Update 13 March 2017: After watching all of Season 1, I can say that the show is thoroughly bloody, and yet philosophically interesting enough to hold the attention even of a squeamish person. Free will vs. determinism, good vs. evil, humans vs. artificial intelligence. Captivating.

Save the Cat by Blake Snyder

I love Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat.

I’ve been using Snyder’s fifteen-item beat sheet to analyze movies. The beat sheet has helped me remember movies after I’ve watched them, and has also helped me appreciate their twists and turns as they happen. Ultimately, I hope internalizing the beat sheet will help me as a writer.

A 2013 Slate article blamed Snyder for a slew of bad movies, claiming that ever since he published his ‘formula’, movie-makers have slavishly followed it, to the detriment of art. It’s hard to disagree, until you read the rebuttal, which is that bad movies exist because making good movies is hard. Okay, yeah, fair enough.

Storytelling is an old art, and stories already had a three-act structure back when Aristotle was around, because he wrote about it. Nobody blames Joseph Campbell, with his famous Jungian Hero with a Thousand Faces, for ruining storytelling by outlining the meta-myth from which all myths spring. No more should we blame Snyder for understanding how best to bend myths into movies.

I read the Campbell book in 2014; didn’t much care for it. I’ve considered reading Christopher Vogler’s book The Writer’s Journey, but I suspect it’s more on Campbell’s end of the spectrum than Synder’s. Somewhere sitting happily in the middle is Robert J. Bly’s book The Weekend Novelist Rewrites the Novel, which leverages many mythological archetypes and terms from Greek rhetoric but explains and exemplifies them usefully, often giving tips for writing novels lifted from—you guessed it—the discipline of screenwriting. I’m tempted to read something by Syd Field or Robert McKee, but then, at least at this point, I’m not actually interested in screenwriting per se.

Save the Cat isn’t all about the much-maligned beat sheet; if it were, the book would be called Blake Snyder’s Beat Sheet instead. What else is in the book?

  • how to write and test a good logline (one sentence movie concept)
  • Blake’s list of 10 unconventional movie “genres”
  • how to choose a hero
  • how to arrange your scenes on “the board” (use four rows; one row of about 10 scenes for Act I, two for Act II, one for Act III)
  • how to leverage a handful of quirkily named commonsense rules of screenplay writing (including Save the Cat)
  • how to troubleshoot a weak screenplay
  • what to do after you finish writing a screenplay
  • a glossary of terms (industry terms and Snyderisms)

Right, so, what does “Save the Cat” mean anyway? It just means that your protagonist should do or experience something very early on to win the audience’s support.

When and Why I Read Save the Cat

I have read this book before. It has been great at helping me think about plot. In fact, I have the Blake Snyder Beat Sheet on the wall by my computer. I read the book again to get a firmer grip on the details. There is so much more good advice than I remembered. How does it all fit in such a short book with so much whitespace? I don’t know how he did it.

Genre: non-fiction (movies, writing)
Date started / date finished:  26-Feb-17 to 04-March-17
Length: 195 pages
ISBN: 9781932907001 (paperback)
Originally published in: 2005
Amazon link: Save the Cat