A look at what's right (and what's wrong) with today's screenplays

No, I’m not talking about the superb Renoir film of the same name, though maybe I should one of these days. Today’s subject is actually audience expectations. The night before last, I watched House of Fury, an Anthony Wong martial arts comedy (seriously! and he really pulls it off, too!) and though it was surprisingly fun, it fell apart for a little while about two-thirds of the way through when it suddenly developed a bad case of multiple personality disorder.

Maybe I should back up a bit. House of Fury is about a chiropractor named Yue Siu Bo (Anthony Wong) who likes to tell tall tales about his supposed exploits as a secret agent. In fact, the movie opens with a fantastical scene in which he battles something like ten masked villains who can turn into sand, teleport around the field of battle and otherwise make life extremely difficult for him. Wong’s character emerges triumphant… but then we find out that we were actually seeing a story he’s been telling to some high school kids while he waits to pick up his daughter after school. Naturally they don’t believe him, but they enjoy listening anyway because he tells it so well. His daughter, meanwhile, catches sight of him and sneaks off in the other direction; she’s embarrassed by all his BS, and so is her brother.

Soon thereafter, though, a few actual bad guys show up at Yue Siu Bo’s office on a mission from the film’s chief villain, and now he gets into a real fight. This one, being set in the real world, is relatively gritty and realistic and involves absolutely no supernatural abilities whatsoever, and though Wong’s character makes a valiant effort, he’s eventually overwhelmed. One man triumphing against impossible odds is really just the stuff of fantasy, after all. His kids then try to find out what happened to him, and they discover that he really is a secret agent (tasked with protecting retired agents who have adopted new identities and entered the civilian population) so they set out to rescue him from the villain.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with this premise. In fact, it’s an excellent one; it creates conflict in Yue Siu Bo’s family, it makes for great character arcs for him and his kids, and it sets up plenty of fun and exciting action. The problem is that after establishing a clear division between fantasy and reality (the goofy supernatural fights Wong’s character talks about winning versus the real ones he actually gets into which don’t end so well for him) the filmmakers went and destroyed the distinction by inserting fantasy into reality. An older fellow named Uncle Chiu (played by Ma Wu) turns out to be a retired agent and the villain’s real target, and he suddenly starts levitating up the sides of buildings, flying through the air and displaying other patently impossible abilities.

There’s actually nothing wrong with fantasy action, either. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon proves that it can be used to magnificent effect. But whereas Crouching Tiger established a world in which people with exceptionally advanced martial arts skills can partially defy gravity, and then rigorously and consistently enforced the rules of that world, House of Fury tells us that gravity-defying acts are limited to silly stories… and then promptly breaks its own rules. Audiences can accept the impossible in a movie (just look at the Spider-Man franchise!) but only if the movie plays fair. Change the rules in the middle of the game and you utterly destroy suspension of disbelief.

P.S. Sorry this entry is late; I had a sudden avalanche of work on Sunday, and I never even got the chance to go out and see any movies, let alone think about writing a blog entry. Don’t worry, though; blogging about new releases is only delayed, not canceled!

It’s fashionable in some circles to beat up on Spider-Man 3, but while there’s no question that it fails to live up to the standard set by its two predecessors, it’s actually a moderately entertaining and partially satisfying movie. The problem is that its authors tried to cram too many characters, too many narrative threads and too many different themes into the story. There’s not enough time to adequately dramatize and satisfactorily resolve them all — but simply making the movie longer wouldn’t have helped, because some of its themes have nothing whatsoever to do with the others.

Part of the movie concerns Peter Parker’s internal struggle with the arrogance that can easily come with power. This dilemma is magnified by his infection by the Venom parasite, which makes him a stronger Spider-Man but also strips away his inhibitions and heightens his negative emotions, making him more selfish, more arrogant and more likely to act on his anger.

The foundation of his character arc also could have meshed extremely well with his ongoing external conflict with Harry Osborn over Peter’s role in Harry’s father’s death. Harry is rich and has some of the selfishness and arrogance that often come with wealth, particularly inherited wealth, and his emotions drive him to take bloody revenge on Peter. The two characters, therefore, had the potential to dramatize one of the basic themes of the Spider-Man mythos — namely that with great power comes great responsibility — and to organically explore the internal tension between selfish arrogance and selfless nobility. When Harry imbues himself with super-strength and sets out for revenge without care for the consequences to anyone else (to the city in general, which would lose its protector if Harry succeeded in killing Peter, but also to any innocent bystanders caught up in the whirlwind of their combat and to Mary Jane and Aunt May, two people he ostensibly cares about) Peter could have been given a rude awakening, seeing his own Venom-exacerbated but nonetheless real selfishness and arrogance reflected in Harry, and deciding to renounce both his unhealthy emotions and the extra power offered by the parasite.

Unfortunately, neither this theme nor the effect of the Venom parasite are adequately dramatized. Yes, Peter Parker does cavalierly injure and defeat Harry while wearing his black suit, and yes, there are some extremely funny scenes involving his stuck up behavior towards women, but we never really see the appeal of the parasite — its upside, the reason Peter wouldn’t just throw it away immediately — because we never actually see the extra power the black suit grants him, and instead of serving as a dark mirror for Peter’s newly dark self, Harry suffers from amnesia and meanders out of the story for awhile.

Much of the problem stems from the fact that the movie throws an additional villain into the mix: Sandman, whose thematic nature is utterly at odds with the rest of the story. The Sandman material is about feeling the need to do bad things for good reasons (Flint Marko, who becomes the Sandman, attempts to steal money to save his daughter’s life) and learning to see the shades of gray in life when people want everything to be either black or white. In the end, Marko renounces his criminal ways, and rather than obeying the letter of the law, Peter lets him go. This is fertile ground for a story and could have made a fantastic Spider-Man movie by itself, even potentially tying into the Harry Osborn storyline, as Harry too has done things that require forgiveness, and forgiving Marko could have enabled Peter to forgive Harry — and Harry to forgive Peter. But that would have been a very different movie, one that didn’t involve Venom or Peter’s struggle with his personality and with unhealthy emotions.

The schism between the two disparate themes and narrative threads is most evident in the scene when Sandman and Venom form an alliance to take down Spider-Man. This is entirely in character for Venom, who is driven by the petty emotions of rage, jealousy and vengeance, but utterly out of character for Sandman, who just wants to be left alone so he can try to help his daughter. The Flint Marko whom we’ve gotten to know simply wouldn’t actively seek to kill Spider-Man, let alone deliberately endanger the life of an innocent woman in order to accomplish that goal. The authors of the film try to use this development to merge two fundamentally incompatible story lines, but that simply cannot work.

So that’s the lesson of Spider-Man 3. Both stories it tries to tell are intriguing and partially dramatized, but the movie as a whole is thematically scattered all over the place instead of being tightly focused. Every movie, whether it’s a blockbuster or an aesthetically challenging micro-budget indie, needs one fundamental theme underlying the entire story. Every scene, every character and indeed every subsidiary theme is just an aspect of that single foundational master theme, and a movie requires that all the relevant aspects of that theme be dramatized if it’s going to be complete, just as all the colors of light are required to combine to form true white.