Let's say you are watching a movie and you are at the halfway point. Unlike life, a movie isn't a series of random events (scenes). A good movie needs to have a specific story arc and an aesthetic structure. Let's say this movie is one of those, with a good solid story told in a straightforward way. Now, if you are a writer or someone who has watched a lot of movies and has a good artistic sensibility, you can figure out the rest of the film at about halfway into it. And that would be disastrous because the whole experience would be lost once you predict what's going to happen.
This is a huge catch-22. The more aesthetic and solid the story, the more predictable it becomes. It's true from The Godfather to Star Wars. From My Fair Lady to The Pianist. These are great films, classics. But just the fact that they have been made, makes it difficult to make films like them. Viewer aesthetics are constantly getting honed into a finer and finer state.
Many writing guides say that a story's ending should be both surprising and inevitable. But those two things don't easily go together. For most good stories the ending is only inevitable and not at all surprising.
So what to do?
One lame approach is to have a twist ending, in the likes of The Sixth Sense. That ends up still being predictable or breaks the entire structure of the film.
The other is a post-modern solution. Use non-linear editing and jumble up the order of the sequences, like in 21 Grams and Memento. Or build a complex bizarre story, with so much going on it's impossible to foresee, like Being John Malkovich.
Not surprisingly, the top film of this decade on IMDB are City of Gods, Memento, The Departed and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (not counting The Lord of the Rings).
On this list, there is also the German film Lives of Others. Set in the communist '80s of East Germany where everyone was under observation, the film revolves around a Stasi officer spying on an influential writer. This is a pitch-perfect story filmed in the most straightforward linear fashion.
The film was so intensely engrossing that it was impossible for me to sit back, think and figure out the tale. At the end of every scene, I exclaimed, "Of course." But not once could I predict anything. The movie grabbed me and millions of other cynical 21st century viewers, and made us emote to its whim, moment after moment. That's some achievement.
This is a huge catch-22. The more aesthetic and solid the story, the more predictable it becomes. It's true from The Godfather to Star Wars. From My Fair Lady to The Pianist. These are great films, classics. But just the fact that they have been made, makes it difficult to make films like them. Viewer aesthetics are constantly getting honed into a finer and finer state.
Many writing guides say that a story's ending should be both surprising and inevitable. But those two things don't easily go together. For most good stories the ending is only inevitable and not at all surprising.
So what to do?
One lame approach is to have a twist ending, in the likes of The Sixth Sense. That ends up still being predictable or breaks the entire structure of the film.
The other is a post-modern solution. Use non-linear editing and jumble up the order of the sequences, like in 21 Grams and Memento. Or build a complex bizarre story, with so much going on it's impossible to foresee, like Being John Malkovich.
Not surprisingly, the top film of this decade on IMDB are City of Gods, Memento, The Departed and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (not counting The Lord of the Rings).
On this list, there is also the German film Lives of Others. Set in the communist '80s of East Germany where everyone was under observation, the film revolves around a Stasi officer spying on an influential writer. This is a pitch-perfect story filmed in the most straightforward linear fashion.
The film was so intensely engrossing that it was impossible for me to sit back, think and figure out the tale. At the end of every scene, I exclaimed, "Of course." But not once could I predict anything. The movie grabbed me and millions of other cynical 21st century viewers, and made us emote to its whim, moment after moment. That's some achievement.
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