The motion picture as a device has the power to portray a story that can take you literally anywhere, especially with effect shots. Simple, you just take a fantasy story and film it, right? But so many films have to ground themselves with a “human angle” to engage the audience. Ripley in Aliens, Kate in The Thing (2011), David in Prometheus, etc.
Terry Gilliam films are some examples that have the ability to just become “lost” with a total disconnect-edness with humanity, eg. Time Bandits or Baron Munchausen fully embrace the concept and attempt (in some cases less successfully) to take the viewer someplace literally beyond reality and go magical and unexplained.
A couple of other examples might be Hellraiser 2: Hellbound (crappy film but big ideas), 2001 A Space Odyssey, Metropolis, or the 60s TV show “The Prisoner”. Examples of what film can really do, but at the same time sort of dis-engaging and scary.
Film is a magical media but I find it so disappointing when film makers fail to go places they should. A final example is my major disappointment when the alien hand reaches for the crushed scorpion in “Predator” and I just knew the film was going to be a man in a suit. (Luckily the machismo made up for that).
So what do you think? Why is film so boring and grounded in ideas that only push the Human Angle? And why do films that try it fail so much? Examples please!
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that movies are grounded in ideas that push the human angle because they’re created by human artists for a human audience. Those movies which do not push the human angle fail because they do not connect with the audience.
They can connect with the audience without a human angle, but it takes a special talent to be able to pull it off.
But good stories are always about people. Without character, the story has little of interest. It can be accomplished in a short work, but the more time you spend with a movie, the more important character is.
Plus, if there were an Aliens movie just about aliens, we the audience would just anthropomorphize the alien characters anyway, as we do with animal stories or a Donald Duck cartoon.
I feel like Richard Linklater’s “A Scanner Darkly” and “Waking Life” both had a bit of a strange disconnect … I mean, yes, there were humans in the movies, but they basically served as an illustration rather than something to identify with. “A Scanner Darkly,” has the added aspect of being a product of the fevered mind of Philip Kindred Dick - who really never did fully identify with humanity as a whole to begin with.
So … yes, a human element, but nothing near to what could be real, and nothing like what we experience day to day.
Asimov once posited two types of writing: one that was like stained glass, beautiful and complicated in itself, and one that was like plate glass, existing only to let you see what was on the other side. This could be applied to films as well - those that present the story so well the film itself is invisible and impalpable, and those that are constructed of Really Filmic Elements that themselves become what you watch.
The title made me think of “Road to Bali” which I just saw this weekend. Those road movies loved to do some fourth wall breaking.
But I guess the thread is about movies more like “A Trip to the Moon” where the rocket is launched by a bunch of cabaret girls and the moon is a big face that is upset by getting a missile stuck in it.
I think it’s that they depict things as being more metaphorical then realistic.
Will Ferrell movies probably count too. “Casa de mi Padre” mixed in lots of shots that were clearly movie props or paintings.
I admit I thought it was funny.
I’ve got to go with Chuck and Ellis on this one: Stories without characters are boring at best. If there is nothing to identify with, nothing to care about, nothing to feel about, then why bother?
The same thing applies to books, of course. Clarke’s Rendezvous With Rama posited a totally alien “society.” It became nothing but the backdrop for the human story played out by the heroes.
You can do a film without characters (see Fresh Guacamole), but the longer the film, the harder it is to sustain the conceit. It’s not impossible, but it takes a very talented person to manage to keep things interesting.
I would say that Louis Malle’s Black Moon manages the trick; there is only one real character, and we know nothing about her background. Descriptions of it tend to make it seem it has more of a plot than it really has (and state as fact things that are not actually established in the film). It also got a mediocre critical reception; if you try to make sense of it, you won’t like it.
I agree with this. Not that the people in the story have to be human – see, well, pretty much any Pixar movie, to see ‘people’ that are toys or cars or bugs or fish what-not. But the characters have to be similar enough to humans in motivation and feelings for us to put them in a story that we can understand and care about.
I think this is more true in a movie than in say a book, where the reader can take their own pace in digging into and understanding a more alien character. And where the audience can be more limited to those who are willing to dig, without bankrupting the producer/publisher.
In Top Secret, the lead characters have a discussion about how unbelieveable their situation is, and the leading lady says, “I know. It’s like something out of a really bad movie.”
The two actors then glance uneasily at the camera and the audience.
In Student Bodies, a spoof of slasher flicks, the movie cuts to an executive type behind a desk, who says to the audience that all slasher flicks need to be rated R to make money, but nothing has happened so far to warrant that rating. He then says, “…So I’m taking this opportunity to say…fuck you.”
This lines up with something Patrick Stewart said in the special features on, I think, one of the X-Men DVDs. He said he really doesn’t like science fiction, which is surprising, because his career is littered with roles in science fiction pieces. He pointed out that all of the great science fiction projects he’s been involved with have ultimately been about people, not the science fiction.
The movie Funny Games has a scene where, after the heroine shoots one of the bad guys, the other actually rewinds the film and redoes the scene, saving his friend. They also comment at one point that, “we’re not up to feature-film length yet.”