@Caveat,
Ricky, and
ufcfan: I'm going to start with
Nocturnal Animals because that's BY FAR the best movie I've seen of the current batch of movies I've watched.
Figured you would. I genuinely can't remember what I said about it but you're good with the Sherdog searches.
@Caveat and I talked about it some.
I did get hit with one jump scare,...
Which one?
The QT school is dangerous. Sort of like Bruce Lee and Jeet Kune Do: They make it look easy but it ain't for everybody.
Yeah I don't mean literally. Nobody needs to actually do the chapter thing.
Honestly, my favorite breakdown of the writing process is courtesy of Edgar Allan Poe:
"Nothing is more clear than that every plot worth the name must be elaborated to its dénouement before anything be attempted with the pen. It is only with the dénouement constantly in view that we can give a plot its indispensable air of consequence, or causation, by making the incidents, and especially the tone at all points, tend to the development of the intention.”
However you want to go about it, however you want to connect the dots, that they connect - and to the end (fitting phrase) of conveying an explicit and discernible intent - is what's important. Maybe this is why I'm finding myself so disappointed with so much of what I'm watching. It rarely feels that plots are elaborated to their dénouement ahead of time, so that I rarely feel that air of consequence and rarely get a sense of a guiding intent.
This is writing with a
point in mind, and I like that. It feels a little too Bob McKee to me, but largely, I like it, particularly connection via cause and consequence, set-up and reversal.
I like the makers who follow the characters until a
dénouement emerges - I'd say the Coens and Tarantino write like this. They fuck around with genre until their hearts show on the canvas. Scorsese, on the other hand writes/directs with the larger message in mind (he lives and dies by "rise and fall"). They all get it, though.
You're right. It's sort of what I've been banging on about re: Marvel, and most other stuff stretched over many episodes, movies. I know we've disagreed on the specifics, but I'm insistent that people watching more and more movies today with some level of discernment will recognise this specific issue. Right now, for most, it's simply this feeling that "something's not right".
This sounds like I don't like movies now. On the contrary, I like them more than ever. It's an exciting time. I think
The Last Jedi got it right, for instance, as did
Thor: Ragnarok. And the year in general has been great.
Hell, I've even come around to
Blade Runner 2049 a lot since my first panning of it. Feel a little upset with myself, in fact, about my reaction.
With this in mind, I guess it's a means/ends issue. I don't have a problem with those ends - like I said, the ending of Take Shelter is a fucking home run as a sequence, as the driving home of that moment when the family clicks together - but I do have a problem with the means. His way of doing things isn't appealing to or satisfying for me.
Not sure what to do with that, to be honest. It's a classic reversal, but simply comes at the end. It pays off in that the family that stuck together got it right. And the movie spends a good amount of time carving in that struggle in the last couple acts.
This may seem like a distinction without a difference, but, for the record, I don't judge a movie's potential by who's starring but I do often decide whether or not to take the time to try a new movie based on who's in it.
You're right, it is a distinction without a difference.
The equivocation that I find problematic in Arrival is discernible here: If the aliens are "simply able" to "transcend" time with the faculties they possess, then no human being, Louise included, should be capable of their "level of sophistication" in the absence of those faculties. Sort of like those animal studies where scientists can get an ape to understand the concept of death, which is fucking insane...but that's still a far cry from being at our "level of sophistication." Louise being able to understand what they're trying to say, I can buy that, but her actually ascending to their level of sophistication and being able to perceive time just as they can in the evolutionary equivalent of the blink of an eye, that I'm not buying.
It's hardly a bigger leap than literal aliens making one dude a Tessaract so he can communicate with his daughter.
Insert gif where Hardy tells JGL to embrace the dream or something.
This would seem to be another problem: Doesn't she arrive already thinking she has an ex with whom she had a daughter who died? Wasn't she already seeing the future before the aliens even showed up? This would again seem to point up that equivocation: Is it because she possesses the same faculties as the aliens (if so, WTF?) or is it because she is able to grasp the language (if so, WTF with the flashbacks/flash forwards prior to her exposure to the language?)?
Now I don't remember. LOL. Will dizzle and get back to you on this.