I hope that you will forgive me if this is a little on the nebulous side, but I am hoping that someone can help me put my finger on something that I have been noticing about movies of late. In essence, I am getting the feeling that a lot of movies are counting on the fact that we have so many movie and plot clichés ground into our brains that they can just not include a lot of stuff and we will fill in the blanks for them.
A recent example of this where it was really glaring was the movie Today you Die by Seven Segal ( yeah, I like cinematic junk food from time to time. What can I do?). Basically, watching the movie I got the feeling that the whole thing almost made sense objectively, but that it really was counting on the fact that I would have seen Segal movies before and would be filling in the plot holes subconsciously.
Make sense to anyone? Can anyone think of other examples?
If you’re watching Steven Segal movies, you’re probably just seeing lazy writing. But there have been a lot of movies that are basically nothing but movie conventions and cliches strung together, with little connection to a believable world. (I guess you’d call that stuff post-modernist; I started noticing it a lot in the early 1980s.) Doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad movie; it’s just that you’re definitely watching movie characters – people you won’t meet in real life, in movie situations – stuff that never happens in real life.
There is considerably less attention to plot in films today than there used to be. One clear example is Mr. and Mrs. Smith.
In the final action sequence, the Smiths defeat the two groups of assassins and walk away. Yet there’s no reason to believe that the assassins were going to leave them alone; sure, they killed a bunch of them, but there were probably more. Evidently, they actually shot a scene where the leaders of the two groups would show and say they’d stop trying to kill them, but that was cut. (!)Now, in the old days, when story mattered, that scene would have stayed in the picture as being essential (and it was). In this case, they deliberately went to sloppy storytelling because it wasn’t going to be more action.
Yes in the old days… when there was apparently only one movie ever made. One single movie that ended before the big no-way-they-could-win gun fight. That was the one movie that had been made “in the old days”
Actually, I find more often than not that movies these days are defying the conventions they know audiences have come to expect, and often in very creative and clever ways. Of course, I can’t actually think of an example at this very moment…