Nothing I've ever
written has come within a parsec of making $89 million. This number
incidentally is the (as of this writing) worldwide box office of the 2011 movie
Sucker Punch, of which I am about to
break that rule of "If you can't say something nice . . ."
So, I probably should keep my fingers off the
keyboard concerning this matter. It
ain't gonna happen, though. Sorry.
The point I want to make is that it is easy,
especially for new writers, to mistake special effects for elements that move
the story forward. Generally, they do not advance the plot. They are
attention-grabbers. Shock value. Spice, but not story. I think it was either Wes Craven or John
Carpenter, when comparing the emotional involvement required to create horror
as opposed to simple on-screen scares ("Boo!"), said he could produce
the same effect by showing the audience blank celluloid and somewhere in the
middle have the film pop! The same thing happens in movies or books where
the writer tries to stuff ten pounds of special effects into a one-pound sack.
Films like Friday
the 13th no longer have the ability to scare the average movie goer. Creating an assembly line of "That's
cool!" moments does not work for long if the writer failed to give us
characters and themes to care about. Eventually it pushes us past horror and
disgust to the point that it just becomes funny. Next to indifference, unintentional
laughter is just about the worst response a writer can receive to his or her
story.
Explosions in space, ray guns, car chases,
profanity, sex, etc. are all the same when pasted into the works gratuitously.
The story goes out of its way to give
the reason for the characters to fist-fight, swear, or get nekkid. Pretty flashing lights get boring after a while, and 300 pages is a long while.
To belabor this point, I am going to rehash a
review I wrote a little over a year ago of Sucker
Punch. . . .
*
* *
My wife's and my entertainment
choices rarely agree. For example, she refers to my library as "That
crap you read." It's gotten to the point that I can begin a sentence
with, "I like..." and she instinctively shouts, "Crap!"
"But it's--"
"Crap!"
"No, I'm talking about--"
"Crap!"
"Will you listen to me?"
"Crap, crap, crap. Crap.
Crap-crap-crap-crap!"
"But--"
"Crap!"
"I--"
"Crap!"
"Tonya likes--"
"Good stuff!" Then
she smiles.
Okay. Okay. I admit I
occasionally watch movies that ... um ... Well, if The Shawshank
Redemption is an A movie and Godzilla Versus the Bongo Monster is a
B movie, then these would land somewhere around W.
When I first saw the trailer for Sucker
Punch, I was extremely underwhelmed. I strained at least a dozen
brain cells wondering whether somebody unintentionally made a live-action Powerpuff
Girls movie. A few days before the home video release, I saw new
trailers. In these, this pigtailed blonde in a half ninja, half school
girl outfit was whipping around a Samurai sword, dodging bullets, and jumping
in slow motion. Part of my brain -- the part that later I inevitably
refer to as Temporary Stupidity -- took note of the ka-pows! and shings!
and booms! and made me say, "You know, that kind of looks
cool."
And so while everybody else in the
world was going to opening night of Harry Potter, I rented Sucker
Punch.
The box claimed it was only 110
minutes long. I'm pretty sure this was in dog years, though. The
story proved a little bit hard to follow, assuming you measure your
"little bits" by the metric ton. I will do my best to recap.
It's a dancin' movie, like Footloose.
But nobody really dances and I suspect Kevin Bacon would have filed for a
restraining order if the movie ever wandered within six degrees of separation
from him. Oh sure, every once in a while, Sweet Pea wiggles just a little
bit (remember "little bits" are relative here) but it never actually
reaches the exuberance of, say, sleepwalking. But that doesn't matter, because
as soon as there is even the slightest chance someone might Vogue, we fly into
an extreme close-up of Sweet Pea's eyelashes, which are each just about the
same size as the average feather duster. The angle rotates to an
extreme close-up of her temple, her ear, her blonde pigtail, and the back of
her head, where we stop and experience two magical realizations: we have
traveled Somewhere Else, and we are about to begin a mind-boggingly implausible
fight scene.
Don't get me wrong, I like to watch
an itty bitty Powerpuff Girl slice and dice a 30-feet-tall demon samurai just
as much as the next guy. All the fight scenes are cool. It would
have helped however if they all belonged in the same movie. Because the
next time we get a close-up of her eyelashes we end up on a train shattering
shiny robots or in the air popping WWII Zeppelins.
There's Nazis.
And there's steampunk.
And there's robots.
And there's steampunk robot Nazis.
Then, when it's all over and we zoom
out from her eyelashes, we're back in the theater and everybody is clapping and
telling Sweet Pea what a dancin' prodigy she is.
Oh, and the dancers might be hookers
(well, actually love slaves), or they might be patients in a big ole Dr.
Frankenstein insane asylum. The bad guy might be a sleazy wealthy thug
packing a tommy gun or he might be sleazy nurse with a key around his
neck. And, the songs are really cool, but they may just be part of the
lobotomy.
Either way, my brain hurts.
After the 110 minutes in dog years
was over, I realized that the only reason I began watching Sucker Punch
was because I was younger and more impressionable then. I brought the
movie back into the living room and set it on top of the These Go Back Tomorrow
pile.
"It was crap, wasn't it?"
my wife snickered.
"It was a dancin' movie,"
I said. "Where everybody was kung fu fighting."
*
* *
If you'll remind me, one of these days, I'll
talk about how to use special effects . . . well, effectively.
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