Signs Taken for Wonders

So the new Pirates of the Carribean movie was... adequate.

It had a plot, at least. And beautiful locations. And Al Swearengen as Blackbeard.

It also had Johhny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow, though Depp's peformance felt... forced.

"Forced" is how I'd sum up the movie, actually. It lacked the wild, lighthearted goofiness of the original. Instead it seemed like a very studied attempt to give the audience what it wants, from Captain Jack (with a strained-looking Depp trying to recapture the mannerisms of his former performance) to Adventure (with the blaring soundtrack desperately trying to convince us that This! Is! Thrilling!).

Cruz was working hard, but she and Depp had no chemistry. The only person who really seemed to cut loose and have fun was Geoffrey Rush, who clearly knew he had no reason to be in this movie.

Judging from my fellow-audience members' reaction, the movie's comic timing needed work. There were some great lines that the audience just didn't laugh at.  I'm guessing the humor was either flying above their heads, or that it was being delivered too quickly, or that the scene was sending the wrong cues. There were a few pratfalls that got laughs, but overall I'd say the audience was... amused by the film. Not enthralled, and not ROTFL.

The film is loosely based on the Tim Powers novel On Stranger Tides. I haven't read the novel, but what I've heard about the plot suggests that its PotC adaptation both helped and hurt the movie. On one hand, it provided a Story, with some interesting mythological twists. On the other hand, the filmmakers were not about to let On Stranger Tides be its own beast. They wanted it to be a Pirates movie, and this led to a lot of yes, forcing the story into the pattern the filmmakers wanted.

That pattern doesn't quite work. There are too many characters working at cross-purposes, and their stories weren't developed enough for me to care about them. This was particularly evident in the climax, which felt "busy" rather than "exciting" to me.

But it wasn't a Bad Film. It was just an "eh..." film with some good lines and moments.

 

I finally saw The Kids Are All Right  -- that's 9/10 Oscar movies down! -- and I was disappointed. The performances were strong, but the screenplay needed more work. I was particularly studying Annette Bening's performance because she's many critics' favorite as Best Actress and... I'm still rooting for Natalie Portman. I was trying to figure out why afterwards, and I realized that part of my reaction had to do with writing issues.

In Black Swan, Portman plays a simple but fully-realized character, and she brings that character to life. In The Kids Are All Right, Bening is playing a caricature for most of the film. She gets one scene in the movie where the script finally gives her character behaviors that don't  "advance the plot" -- and that too is meant to advance the plot, by showing a pov character that Bening's character is more than two-dimensional. But then we're back to two dimensions again. Bening does the best she can to create a vivid character, but she's hampered by the script.

I've read a lot of analyses of these two movies that reverse my analysis. Many critics have major issues with Black Swan: the misogyny of its plotline annoys them. They claim horror movies don't require "real acting" because "all you have to do is look scared all the time." Lastly they sneer at Nina's character because she's so archetyically a "little girl lost." 
The first criticism is overstated, and doesn't actually comment on the effectiveness of the film. The second isn't worth responding to. The third is interesting.

Yes, Nina's character is based in archetype. That's not a bad thing, particularly in a world that's ruled by archetypes, in which the character is explicitly told to step into the respective roles of virgin and whore. We get hints of particularity -- the character's alienation from her classmates, her thieving -- but as with all the characters, we are told very little about her. We have to be shown everything. All the little details -- the gamut of expressions that cross Portman's face -- build the character. To state the obvious: the actress has more visible work to do.

In TKAAR, the writers seem to confuse detail with characterization. We know that Bening's character is a wine-lover, that she likes male gay porn, that she met her lover when she was a resident, that she does x of this kind of operations and uses micro-surgery, that she thinks the organic movement is a bit woo-woo, that she hates motorcycles, that she's uptight and a perfectionist (the characters helpfully tell us this), that ...

There are a lot of details here. But for much of the movie we see her character do three things: nag, criticize, and make brief, absent-minded loving gestures. The first two are meant to drive her partner away, the last to help the audience understand why her partner stays with her. There are no loose threads, no details that aren't intended to move the plot forward (even the gay porn detail is included for plot reasons). There's also nothing that complicates the two-dimensional portrait of this woman as a loving but hypercritical "husband."

In Black Swan, on the other hand, scenes do more than one thing. The scene with the cake, for example: talk to some audience members and they see it as a scene revealing the character's anorexia; others see it as a film about the mother's controlling nature; others about the daughter's repressed desire to rebel; others about the mother's desire to punish the daughter for the success she didn't have... We're witness to fucked-up behavior, and it isn't clear how we are immediately supposed to interpret it.

Immediately before I saw TKAAR, I read an article about Tolkien's use of detail that argued that, while literary critics tend to love elaborate description,  Tolkiens's avoidance of particularizing detail is more effective at getting the reader to immerse in the fictional world. I think in the case of these two films, the same is true of character. I believed more in the character I was told less about.