Films Folded
Ted Goranson is a writer and consultant who works with structured narrative as well as other topics. New visitors may want to read this information about how the site is structured.
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July 23, 2008 Monte Carlo: Operatic
Ted's Evaluation: 2 / 4
IMDB Rating: 7.3
DVD at Amazon
I seem to be spending time with films like this. If you take away the story (excepting the last five minutes) the characters, the dialog and the songs, this is a very fine movie. It has such deft technique that it can support a tone of light humor regardless of the main attraction.
This fellow was a master. Too bad he only made useless movies.
There is what I call a narrative fold. The story is that a nobleman disguises himself as a servant to get close to a penniless noblewoman. They fall in love. He is shunned because he is a commoner — or perhaps because he has no money, it isn't clear. As all simple love stories do, this one must end with discovery and happiness. It occurs when the two at an opera where: guess what? The story is the same.
In that last few minutes, the songs and words on the stage of the opera overlap with those on the stage of the movie. Its nice.
The craft is enough for this.
July 22, 2008 Si j'étais toi: Insides
Ted's Evaluation: 2 / 4
IMDB Rating: 5.7
DVD at Amazon
It doesn't matter much to me that this movie fails, because its based on a pretty good idea. I assumed when watching it that the Japanese original was better as they typically are. It seems not.
The idea here is one at least as old as Shakespeare: when an actor plays a character, he or she hosts an unnatural soul in the available body. So if you want layered performance, you set up a script where this happens within the story. Its what's called folding, folding in the acting. Clever actors seek these parts, which turn out to be comparatively common.
What to do if you want to go further than anyone has? You introduce sex. Now, sex is also about one body entering another, so this can work, especially if there is some extraordinary tension. The plot provides. The situation here is that a woman's soul is transferred to her sexually active sixteen year old daughter. The man and girl both horny, frisson results.
In fact, this is one of those movies where the description is more interesting than the movie. Things like this are hard to make, especially when you have to conform to the limits of how sex can be played. And of course when you lack basic skills.
July 22, 2008 The Dark Knight: The Noir Card
Ted's Evaluation: 3 / 4
IMDB Rating: 9.5
DVD at Amazon
Two things interesting about this for me. (I'll let others talk about Heath.)
One is how much more of a comic book it is than a film. I don't mean that it is sillier or more fantastic, but that the values seem to be based on storyboards as panels. The implications are pretty interesting. All those Marvel productions are pretty much the same: the same level of fantasy, the same vocabulary of cinematic effects. The same slant from "graphic novel" framing to modern film traditions — which incidentally are less designed than are the accidents of common CGI compositing tools.
This on the other hand is not cinematic. It makes it boring for me visually, but there's another result: the story. The story is not your standard long form arc. Its at least four stories concatenated, as if you would read a few pages and come back at the next lunch break. It rambles, it has real comicbook soap opera. I really do think of this as a comic book that accidentally finds itself in a film.
That's as opposed to "Sin City," which though based on a comic, and supposedly co- directed by the comic artist, is intensely cinematic, so much so you almost drown.
The other feature for me: the handling of noir.
Noir is all about how the viewer manipulates the action by viewing. It has permeated nearly every corner of film and most intelligent filmmakers try to play with it. It is the primary narrative tool we have to add depth by adding layers. The Nolans are intelligent filmmakers. While the film isn't very cinematic, the script is, in this regard.
The novel trick here is the joker. Sure he is played well, and Ledger was becoming one of our foremost folded actors. But the thing works because the role was written to matter, and that's because he introduces a double noir fold. The watcher is in the film, and the watcher is "writing" the script regardless of any action that anyone in the film can take. Its classic noir doubled. The joker's key speeches even cover all the noir highlights: you have to ruin routine; you have to profoundly affect, even kill random innocents; you have to express an amazingly complex orchestration and make it seem capricious, accidental. You have to deny intent and complexity. You have to pretend to not be amused.
All these things are embodied in what Ledger was given. This is very important writing, and if you know "Prestige" and "Memento," even "Following," you would have expected something like this. Even if the film isn't good as a film, the writing is, and that allows Heath to make a film within. Its why "Clockwork Orange" is so important.
July 22, 2008 Saawariya: Red Miller's Wife
Ted's Evaluation: 2 / 4
IMDB Rating: 5.2
DVD at Amazon
I'm not very familiar with Indian cinema, but it seems that the Bollywoord formula is easy to understand.
I was sent to this as a gentle introduction, partly because my friend know I would immediately pick up the reference.
It seems that the songs and stories are all predetermined. All the characters and situations. The only thing that varies is the setting, and often — I am told — they take that from other films. Here it is clearly "Moulin Rouge," one of my deepest film experiences. And they do it well, thoroughly.
There's something to admire in the process of production design, when it does something like this that is both coherent and borrowed. I imagine it as a sort of rebirth of the Hollywood studio system from the 40s, where professionals were highly tuned to making collective visual imagination real — a sort of Hindu Lubitsch.
