There is nothing more loathsome in films than those stories where everything intends to be “clockwork-like”, and characters are just puppets to make the story happen. In fact, those stories are usually not that perfect, the “mechanism” in them is no more than a simplification of design, which mistakes the art of scriptwriting with a science, which it is not (art is for beauty and knowledge, not for square angles).
The moment when it simply becomes too much is when that little element that seemed to be the exception (”oh Jesus, at last we learn something human about our character, he likes tangerines”), 40-50 minutes later turns out to be just another piece of machinery (”remember those innocent tangerines? That’s how I smuggled the secret drug, hahaha!”)
Films written like that may have a solid architecture (although most of the times their explanations are too cheap), but even when they do, they are all bone, and no flesh. They are like junk food, it’s alright to have some now and then, as long as you keep in mind that you deserve better (and of course, there is no time in such ‘event factories’ for things as ’subtle’ as the Bechdel test).
Out of the bat, I am thinking of five ‘junk films’ that fulfill this pattern; I’ll only name one, of the most perfect kind: ‘The illusionist’.
Can you name others?
Related posts:
Advanced brain-fu
There’s nothing wrong with being a freak
Nacho and the primal forces
“I only do the math”, left brain exposes
The Bechdel test