Announcing my Campaign for Real Movies. By which I mean movies for adults. No, not dodgy films with nude people, but movies made for a grown up sensibility. The amount of press Sideways got for being in any way concerned with real emotional issues was staggering. If you didn’t know any better you might think it was a good movie.
But I saw The Seventh Seal last night.
Compare and contrast.
Sideways: easy sentimentality, glossy and pointless photo montages, cutesy likeable characters who go a bit astray but sort it out in the end, a clear moral, a highly marketable soundtrack; some pretty landscape; an anaemic discussion about wine and a general vacuousness that you only notice when you go home and realise you have forgotten the movie by the next morning.
The Seventh Seal: Hard, harsh land and seascape shot in silvery monochrome; a huge, unresolved debate about Life, Death, God, Faith and Fear; oblique, subtle, storytelling; a story that doesn’t seem to flow in any conventional sense; a mighty hero who battles Death himself; actors utterly embedded in the reality of their characters; the death of most of the leads by the end; the failure of God to deliver anything of real intellectual sustenance; Death as a persistent and predatory real character; and the most powerful life affirming ending I have seen in years.
Well, I know which I’d rather see. It’s 50 years old, but it rocks. As they say.
Time to reclaim the cinema for the real movies. Will you PLEASE join me in voting with our feet?
Do we really have to let them make Shrek 4?
How To Write A Screenplay
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Sounds like a bundle of laughs! I know what you mean, but does it have to be so serious all the time??
I’d just like it to be that serious some of the time.
I think in today’s world the media and especially the movie industry is simply catering to the mass of attention deficit disorder currently taking over the world. I know I’m guilty of watching two or three shows, while checking my e-mail and surfing the net. The surface approach is the only way to keep people coming back, after they zone out because they’ll simply move on if the story is too deep to get back into.
Don’t get me wrong I love movies and shows with deep intellectual content and hard won character realizations of the world and our place in it, but it still have to compete with the audience of today that wants to know everything about everything in a 60second newsreel.
As for Shrek 4, can’t anyone have an original thought anymore! I’ll vote for this, no more sequels!
You’re absolutely right of course – and I sense a real change in dramatic storytelling coming – some hybrid form emerging out the fact that tv advertising is dropping like a bomb because everyone is flicking around the internet getting pinged by their various interests every 30 seconds. The networks are going to have to come up with something radical that combines our need for stories with their need to sell ad space. (Or rather, we writers. If anyone’s got any ideas they should get pitching. I think they’d bite your hand off.)
Until that happens, when it works, good drama still works – for me anyway, I still love the midnight sessions with a DVD box set of my choice. Deep involvement and immersion in a story still wins out over Myspace. Just.
Frankk, I agree with you entirely. In Mumbai(India) it is difficult to get to see such movies as Seventh Seal by Bergman , but I downloaded the script because Bergman is my favourite Director. While reading, I must have laughed and cried many times for the shear beauty of script writing and visualized what a wonder Bergman must have done on screen. And how much I thanked his departed soul for having given such a gem of a script and such a deep and thoughtful dialogue. I have seen so many of his movies in Delhi(India)back in sixties and seventies, mostly in film festival retrospective, and Seventh Seal was never shown, then. I do miss the movies of that era, and good movies are so few now a days from Hollywood. I disagree that movies need only be shallow entertainment. And who define entertainment. A story that is intelligently (In audio Video sense) narrated with serious theme as backdrop , that makes you think and contemplate can as well be joyfull experience for many. Why entertainment means restricting yourself to forgettable movies.This I would call a scapism, avoiding to enrich yourself and make you more sensitive. It is my first visit to your blog and I am so happy it starts from your admiration of my favourite script Seventh Seal. I am sure world will once again get back to an era of beautiful story narration of sixtees and seventies…telling contemporary stories with sensibilities of that era , where use of high technology in film making will add to story narration rather than substracting.
What can I say?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6921960.stm