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

Have you ever seen the corpse of someone who jumped or fell off a tall building?  If you haven’t, count yourself lucky.  I promise you, it’s not pretty.  But in the movies (and on TV) everything’s hunky-dory if someone just catches you before you hit the ground.  Take Hancock, which is merely the latest example out of, well, a few million metric buttloads.  In a widely-seen trailer moment, Hancock teaches an obnoxious kid a lesson by tossing him about seventy five miles straight up into the sky and then catching him just a fraction of a microsecond before he slams into the pavement and explodes into a giant mess full of blood and guts and partially digested Reece’s Peanut Butter Cups and miscellaneous other substances better left unnamed.  In reality, being caught like that would be pretty much just as bad as hitting the ground, because the real problem is the force of impact.  If you want to survive a fall like that unscathed, you need to slow down gradually, not instantly.  (Hence the use of parachutes as opposed to a bunch of people standing around in a field with their arms out.)  So what Hancock should’ve done was fly well up into the sky, more or less match downward velocities with the jerk he’d tossed up there, grab him, and then gradually decelerate to a nice, easy landing.

Now, I know this is kind of nitpicking, and it may seem like I’m the only one who cares about this particular issue, but it’s representative of a larger problem.  If you want readers and audience members to suspend disbelief, whatever you write has to be completely believable within the context of the story, and it has to be internally consistent.  If that context is a magical fantasy fairy-land where people wave wands made out of special dried mushrooms and conjure up giant fluffy bunnies, then great, conjure all the giant fluffy bunnies you want… as long as people always use those special dried mushroom wands to do it.  If the context of the story is the real world, though, and you’re creating a superhero within that real world that we all live in, then even if the superhero is impossible (or at least unlike anyone that we know of who’s existed to date) the world in which the superhero exists should be the exact same world we all wake up and eat cold Pop Tarts in every day.  In other words, Hancock can be super-tough and survive a fall from the moon; that’s totally fair.  The kid, however, has to be just like every other kid on earth.  He needs a parachute.

Audiences seem pretty used to the catching thing by now, so unless you care about these things like I do, I guess you don’t have to worry about it, but you definitely do need to avoid any obvious inconsistency or implausibility that people haven’t been conditioned to accept.  It’s what I call my “people have to get squished” rule — unless there’s a good and specific reason for someone not to get squished, and unless you’ve already established that reason in your script well before the potential squishing, the logical and expected squishing has to happen.  (And by “squishing”, of course I mean whatever consequence should be unfolding in your story.)  If it doesn’t, you’ve just killed the audience’s or your reader’s suspension of disbelief.  And I promise you, a once-healthy suspension of disbelief splattered all over the ground is an ugly and unfortunate thing.

Last night I watched an interesting little Italian thriller called The Backwoods.  (Well, actually, it’s called Bosque de Sombras, but it stars Gary Oldman and Paddy Considine along with actors of various other nationalities, so I’m going to stick with the English title.)  Anyway, it’s not bad, though it also has some pretty serious flaws, but one scene in the latter half of the story got me thinking about a common problem in movies: Mexican standoffs in which one character just arbitrarily gives up.

Without spoiling anything significant about the movie (which isn’t good enough to recommend, but also isn’t bad enough to recommend against) there’s a scene in which a character, we’ll call him Arygay Oldmanay, has a gun drawn on another character.  He’s got the other guy dead to rights, no question about it, but then a third guy sneaks up behind Arygay and points a gun at him.  Now, in the broader sense of the term, this is a Mexican standoff, because neither side has an advantage, so the situation is deadlocked.  Yes, the third guy can shoot Arygay, but only if he doesn’t mind Arygagy shooting and killing his friend.  (OK, screw this “Arygagy” stuff; he’s just Gary from now on.)  So you’d figure that Gary would realize that the gun in his hand, which he has pointed right at the third guy’s friend, is his only piece of leverage, the one thing keeping him alive, right?

If so, you’d be wrong.  As in a really startling number of other movies, Gary lays down his weapon and gives up.  Why?  I can only guess that he’d seen too many movies, and he just thought that this was what he was supposed to do in situations like this, because it sure doesn’t make a damn bit of sense to me.  Now, if I were in Gary’s position and some kind of expert marksman had a high-powered sniper rifle with a laser sight trained right on my skull and the marksman assured me that he could turn out my lights the instant he saw me even think about pulling the trigger and long before I actually did it, meaning that the deterrence value of my weapon was genuinely neutralized, then maybe I would lay down my gun.  Otherwise, not on your life.  I’d threaten, I’d bluster, I’d bluff, I’d bargain — I’d do whatever I could to stay alive, but the one thing I wouldn’t ever do is conclude that surrender is the only option.  So when Gary gave up, it yanked me right out of the movie, which up to that point had at least created a pretty effectively creepy atmosphere.

I realize it’s hard to come up with a creative solution to a problem that’s already been put up on screen a million and a half times, but at least don’t just punk out on the problem — do something that makes sense, both narratively speaking and for the characters in the situation you’ve created.  Otherwise poor saps like me will continue to waste valuable rental dollars on disappointing movies, and then we won’t watch anything else you do in the future!

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!