When we last left our unlikely heroes, they dealt with the questions of the maturity of film as a medium, art verses advertisement and the realist movement in film. They also made fun of Superman, comparing him to a homesick little boy at summer camp, but that’s neither here nor there…

Lance Schaubert: That’s where the originality gets better, though. Spiderman, the original, was fairly good because it returned to who he was in his sarcastic… and they lost that.

Doug Welch: Sure. And how you depict that filmicly, visually, how you interpret that tone… Sometimes you get the mixing of media and it just doesn’t work out. I just had a recent conversation about the last Harry Potter movie. You know, big fan of the books. Liked most of the movies. But the basis for liking the movies was that they were faithful to the books. The expectation was to go to the movie (and we’ve had this conversation before) but to go to the movie and to see all of the scenes that she wrote in the books on the screen, to see it visually. That’s the expectation. That, for my money, was the failure of 7.1 – it wasn’t really a movie. It’s just a series of scenes from the book now displayed on the screen and everybody who read the books and loved the books who wanted to do that? They liked the movie. It gave them what they wanted. But, you know, is that a movie? No, that’s not a movie. Movies operate differently. Well, we want to wait for Neville to kill the snake. We don’t want him to kill the snake and that sets off the new war. We want to wait for that and do intercutting between Harry and Voldemort and Ron and Hermione. “You need to do this first in order to get this done.” That creates tension. That’s something a movie can do that a book can’t do.

LS: Yeah, the escalation of conflict.

DW: Yeah, it’s faithful to what’s going on. It’s faithful to the story. It’s not someone else who kills him. But it just has to be told differently because it has to. Were there some mistakes made in the last part of the film? Yeah. I think the Epilogue was odd. Again, it’s a book feature that you can do in a book that you can’t do in a movie. You can kind of tell their story, that’s a nice little bow.

LS: And the subtleties in the names and everything.

DW: Right right. All those. But again, it’s one of those thing that if they didn’t do it, there’d be a HUGE outcry and blah blah blah. We didn’t get… No come on. This is a movie. You don’t need that extended deneumot in a film. They don’t have it in Return of the Jedi!

LS: [laughs.]

DW: NINETEEN YEARS LATER: And here’s Han and Leah.

LS: and babies.

DW: Yeah, with the twins, you know.

LS: [guffaws.]

DW: Anakin and whoever.

LS: There’s a baby Yoda.

DW: Yeah and Boba Fett. Little baby Boba Fett. [laughs.] Yeah, and little baby Yoda.

LS: [laughs.] He’s so small.

DW: Yeah, you don’t need that. And… well Lord of the Rings has sort of an extended deneumot.

LS: Well…

DW: Twelve of them.

LS: Four-and-a-half-hours.

DW: And a hundred pages in Return of the King, which was my favorite hundred pages, that extended deneumot.

LS: Yeah.

DW: But it wasn’t nineteen years in the future, here’s…

LS: Yeah, it was present-tense. Even in the Scourging of the Shire.

DW: Right. That served as kind of a different thing.

LS: Eucatastrophe and all that stuff. It’s funny because my brother-in-law Micah, he’s a sophmore in highschool, is just now reading Harry Potter. He read the first one and watched it the same day. At the end of the movie he said, “This. Was. Stupid. There was nothing different.”

DW: Yeah. Otherwise, why make the movies? That, for me, is a good question. You talk about intent. What’s the intent? The difference between art and advertisement. In the end, who says, “What we need is to depict this for people who are over with the books or whatever.” Okay. That’s fine. But there were a lot of people who didn’t read the books and enjoyed them (or didn’t) or enjoyed some of them (but were confused).

LS: Five was terribly confusing.

DW: Well 7.1 would be terribly confusing for people who are like, “What?!” But I’ve heard a great review from somebody who was watching 7.2, who had watched the three previous films, but just said, “If you just jump in with both feet and say, ‘Okay, whatever this film throws at me, I will accept. I won’t question. I won’t say, “why didn’t the wands work?” Just put that aside. They’re remaining true to whatever universe this is in.’ If you do that and just let the film be the film…” They really enjoyed it without knowing the mythology and the internal consistencies.

LS: That’s good to hear.

DW: I appreciated that. That’s good for the filmmaker. In the end, does the film stand up on its own? Or is it just a means to make money on all those people who read the books and bought the movies and wanted to see that in film form. Okay, did we all listen to the audio tape to get everything in audio form?

LS: [laughs.]

DW: And a lot of people did. Apparently they were really well made. I’ve not listened to them.

LS: Guy does a lot of different voices.

DW: I dunno. I wonder in some way… Obviously it’s the most successful film franchise of all time. That’s reason enough to do it.

LS: Which is interesting that they haven’t nominated anyone for it.

DW: Well… I dunno… Special FX? Did they get anything on that? Cosmetics? Set design?

LS: They might have now, but they hadn’t yet.

DW: Well, it was a different thing because it went through different people’s voices along the way. From Chris Columbus to…

LS: It’s not like Peter Jackson.

[youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoKFtf4A_mc”]

DW: Right. That’s more of a “hey we really appreciate what you did hear. This was a HUGE undertaking. You deserve something for all of this.” I think how they treated that was as just one film.

LS: Yeah.

DW: You know it’s “we’re not gonna give you this. We’re not gonna give you this. But we’ll give you…” I dunno what other films nominated in 2003 that won over that. So, if the intent is “man these are great stories, we need to get this story out for people who read the books.” That’s a different intent than, “Man, people read these books, they will pay a boatload to see these things on the screen.” That’s more…

LS: Advertisement.

DW: Yeah. I would say to people who are upset because they changed things: Good for the filmmaker. No. We’re gonna tell the story in a more-filmic way.

LS: Like three.

DW: Like three. We’re gonna express themes we see from the book in a different way. We’re gonna express them in ways that novels can’t. One of the images from number three is the pendulum.

LS: Oh, right.

DW: Which is a huge change. I don’t think that was in the book at all. It’s this image of time, which appears quite a bit in that book. Certainly the time-turner, the sequence with time, going back in time is a major plot-point.

[youtube=”http://youtu.be/9eBE8CttgvQ?t=29s”]

LS: It didn’t change the past.

DW: Right. Things are moving and you can’t… stop them, in a sense, no matter who you are. Even Dumbledore can’t stop time. But that’s something you can do in a film that you can’t do in a book. Not as well.

LS: To have that image—

DW: Have that image in the background of the scene, of the kids on the lawn and they’re discussing things, and in the background there is the pendulum swinging. You can’t do that really in a book. If you want to convey that theme, you don’t do it that way.

LS: Yeah.

DW: You do it some other way. In dialog. In setting scenes. Internal dialog, which books do much better – what am I thinking as opposed to what I’m doing.

LS: The voice-over.

DW: Voice-over, right. Right. And that… you know I’m not a fan of that.

LS: [laughs.]

DW: Sometimes it works. I watched an interesting film where there was quite a bit of voiceover, and the movie did it better. The movie’s called Bronson, it stars Tom Hardy. He plays the most notorious prisoner in Britain, still alive to this day, still in prison. Really he’s just in prison for thirty years. I don’t know that he’s ever killed anybody, been in prison for thirty years, thirty of the last thrity-four. He just can’t operate anywhere else. He’s so dangerous, so on-the-edge. The film portrays the character of Charlie Bronson. He takes a moviestar’s manual deliberately. He’s playing to an audience. All of his life’s choices are playing to the audience.

[youtube=”http://youtu.be/KKC-FKGMeCY?t=6s”]

One of the recurring motifs is he’s on stage and you get a reverse shot of the back of his head speaking to an audience of people in tuxedos. They’re at the theatre and he’s there and he’s made up in some way. He’s got a clown face. He does a dual sort of thing, a dual side of his nature, but he’s always playing for an audience. A voice over in that respect in that context works really well because we’re the audience, so he’s speaking to us as a one-man-show. There’s really very, I mean there’s supporting actors and supporting characters, but there’s no one at that level. It’s his movie. He’s doing a one-man show with all these other characters that might as well be set-dressing. And so it’s a very intense performance and a very intense movie, of course, about a very intense individual. But in that context I’d say voice over works pretty well.

LS: Because it shows it differently.

DW: Right. And it’s not just “we’re pulling out of this livingroom drama or we’re pulling out of this family drama for me to talk to you for a minute.” You know, breaking the fourth wall.

LS: The Aside.

DW: Right. And if that’s a common feature of the film…

LS: Like if everything else stops or becomes quiet?

DW: Right. Like a movie like… [double-snaps twice]… like High Fidelity,

[youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vk_0qpFO8Tw”]

where John Cusack is talking to the audience about his failures at love and then comes back into the scene, I mean, okay that’s fine as a recurring metaphor or you have a specific narrator of Peter Faulk in Princess Bride or something like that, telling the story as its being acted out on the stage, okay. But just to pull out of a drama to tell you what somebody’s thinking simply because we can’t think of any other way to do it – what was the point of that? Especially if it only appears in the introduction and in the conclusion. If it only appears in the beginning and the end, then that to me is lazy.

LS: What about Inside Man? … … “Listen to me very closely because I choose my words carefully and I never repeat myself.”

[youtube=”http://youtu.be/lvypmY9P9QU?t=5s”]

DW: Who’s he talking to in that?

LS: I think he’s just talking to a camera inside the room.

DW: That’s Clive Owens’ character.?

LS: Clive Owens.

DW: Who’s just recording that for… for who?

LS: We never really know.

DW: That to me, then, is kinda like: what’s the motivation for telling this story? I would say, and this is kind of genre-breaking a little bit, but I say this to my preaching students about first-person sermons. It’s one thing for you to show up as Peter. But why? Why are you showing up? And who are we? What’s going on? You have to set for me the context for your story, your testimony. It’s not just showing up and saying blah-blah-blah. It’s… Otherwise you’re just putting on a show just because you can.

LS: Right. Yeah, it’s hard to do first-person on a theatrical level or anything like that.

DW: Yeah. You have to operate within the context. If the context of the film is “we’re gonna break the fourth wall a whole lot and we’re gonna, you know, talk to the audience in all different ways.” Then okay. That’s fine. But understand what that does to a film. I’ve suggested that maybe some of the voice-over in Shawshank puts the movie a little bit at arms distance from us and closes off, even the ough there’s so many great lines in the narration.

LS: Which your brother harps on all the time.

DW: I know. I know. And it’s like, “We don’t want to lose those moments, those words!” And I understand that. But, you know, does the film need it? I think the imagery stands on its own without all that. Who’s Morgan Freeman? Why’s he talking… why’s he talking to us?

LS: That’s the to edit is divine thing.

DW: Sure.

LS: Do you actually have what it takes to pare that down?
DW: That would be an interesting editing… I don’t know if someone could do it with the mute button on their… watch the movie of Shawshank, muting all the voice-over. It might be like this: Have you seen (there’s a couple different versions of this), one is Peanuts – they’ve taken the fourth panel out of –

LS: YYYESSS!

DW: Peanuts.

LS: Oh my goodness.

DW: Or. Or what is more brilliant than that, which is pretty cool. I think they call it 3eanuts or something, but a 3 instead of the P or something like that. But what’s more brilliant is Garfield minus Garfield, and it’s just John talking to no one. It’s AB-solutely brilliant.

LS: Do you have it on here?

DW: Yeah, it’s like Garfield without Garfield or something.

LS: It just makes it sound really sarcastic? Darker?

DW: It just makes it really existential. I mean, here’s the comic strip for today:

 

 

 

LS: [laughs. laughs.]

DW: So here you got the lonely… John. I think it’s brilliant. A site dedicated to removing Garfield from the Garfield comic strips in order to reveal the existential angst of a certain Mr. John Arbuckle. It is a journey deep into the mind of a young Everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness and depression in a quiet American suburb. And you know what?

I think they’re brilliant.

(continued in next week’s Ask the Experts)