This may come as a surprise to anybody who has been privy to my many embarrassing rants, but I am about to speak positively about a movie based upon a comic series. To compound the felony, I know next to nothing about the series upon which the movie is based. Gather ’round as I confute the laws of I Evolved Into This!? physics.

After seeing Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, my girlfriend remarked that there wasn’t much to the characters. She was turned off in particular by what she viewed to be a lack of inroads into the character of Scott Pilgrim himself. Fair enough, I say. For much of the film, Scott and his screenmates are somewhat inscrutable. But as the film progresses, it does reveal a few unseen facets. It merely does so in broad strokes, encouraging the viewers–by association with their own experiences, personalities, and senses of humor–to contribute that which isn’t in the script. For this reason, Scott Pilgrim is not for everyone.

Perhaps we’re meant to take Scott for the cliche that he initially seems to be: a sad sack, unlucky in love and lacking in convictions. Gradually, events from his past are revealed that contradict the cliche, which can (and should) be viewed as character development. When Scott ***OBVIOUS BUT OBLIGATORY SPOILER WARNING (highlight text to reveal)*** triumphs over his last foe, be mindful of which sword he’s using–and which one he’s not. ***END OBVIOUS BUT OBLIGATORY SPOILER WARNING*** Sure, it’s not exactly subtle, but it’s an ingenious way of literally illustrating his growth.

That scene is just one of many smart uses of video game and comic iconography in the film. I’ve spoken out against amped-up, hyper-stylized filmmaking in the past, and that’s exactly what this might appear to be to a careless observer. In fact, Scott Pilgrim–while certainly amped-up and stylized–does what it does with clarity and a sense of purpose, which are the chief qualities that set it apart. Is it self-consciously clever? Sure as hell. But it’s not to the film’s detriment. Not only is the style relevant to the storytelling, but it’s a lot of fun. Where other action movies try to obfuscate their most preposterous moments, Scott Pilgrim revels in them.

I can’t vouch for its faithfulness to the comics, but the film does refine comic-inspired techniques that other, similar projects have clumsily implemented. For example, split-screen close-ups, which resemble bordered panels, are used to a similar purpose as the classic two-shot. Perhaps Scott Pilgrim learned the few positive lessons of Frank Miller’s The Spirit, which used modern special effects to “draw” on the screen. And perhaps (again, I don’t know) it mimics the comic’s approach of appropriating the iconography of another medium–video games–rather than simply ape the original experience. Whatever the case may be, anything lost in the translation is not apparent to me. I’m a sucker for a well-told story that plays to the strengths of its own medium, and the Scott Pilgrim movie passes the test.

Ever heard of Beowulf? The recent movie, not the story. How about Avatar? You probably saw that one. Most moviegoers did.

There are two big movie trends right now that seem impossible to escape. One is so-called “realistic CGI,” in which the animators try to achieve a photorealistic look with purely synthetic images. (Photorealistic images have already been achieved in movies by pointing real cameras at real things, but let’s not digress too far into that.) The other big trend is 3D, which requires the viewers to wear large plastic goggles. Hollywood asked you if you wanted these things in your movies by making them, and you responded by opening your wallet.

The royal “you,” of course. I’m not pointing fingers.

There have been some oddly specific objections to these movies, more than just the backlash you’d expect from a burgeoning trend. The complaints range from mild annoyance to actual physical pain. People think that the CGI characters look weird, waxy, and lifeless. Some have complained about getting headaches while watching the 3D presentations.

The Uncanny Valley

It turns out that human biology itself might be resisting the CGI graphics. The recent buzz term for the unshakeable “offness” of realistic computer images is “uncanny valley.” Our brains are fully prepared to accept images of real actors, photographed in the flesh. We’re also prepared to accept animation, so long as it’s on the cartoonier side. It’s when realism and animation start to encroach on each other’s territory that the trouble begins. That point of convergence—too realistic to accept as a cartoonified representation, never realistic enough to accept as the genuine article—is called the uncanny valley.

Psychologists have done some recent research on macaques, which might shed some light as to why this happens.

Princeton University researchers presented images of real monkey faces, unrealistic animated faces and realistic animated faces to five monkey subjects and recorded how long they gazed at each. Similar to the human response to objects in the uncanny valley, the monkeys avoided looking at the most realistic animated faces. The scientists, who published their results in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, speculate that realistic animations might resemble sickly or diseased animals because they lack subtle cues of health such as normal skin texture and hue—and that an aversion to such sights may have evolved to keep us healthy. [Scientific American]

While this is a compelling explanation for why CGI characters never quite seem to look right, I doubt it will deter further attempts by movie animators.

H3daches

Then there’s the issue of 3D, which presents yet another psychological puzzle.

Recent web-discussions on the issue of ‘Avatar h3dache’ seem to agree that the problem lies in presenting the viewer with a fairly rich 3D environment, but no opportunity to choose to focus on a part of the scene that was filmed (or rendered) ‘blurred’, i.e. out-of-focus foreground elements such as leaves. Some of us seem to be fighting Avatars determination to make these choices for us, and getting our cognitive perception in a twist in the process.

In his determination to avoid criticisms of traditional ‘jack-in-the-box’ leveraging of 3D (wherein a director will engineer a shot so that things deliberately swing out at the viewer) Cameron seems to have compromised by shooting as much of the movie as possible with a very limited depth-of-field, in order to accentuate the 3D illusion.

…

Examining unfocused areas of the frame in Avatar is literally quite a headache, and counterintuitive to our enjoyment of the ‘baked and locked’ 3D planes that we are being presented with. Knowing that depth-of-field is all he has to play with if he’s not going to shoot rocks directly at us, Cameron doesn’t hold back - he relentlessly racks focus in scene after scene.

So the trick to avoiding a headache when watching this movie is to be obedient, and concentrate on the parts of the shot that the focus tells you are ‘important’. Once I understood this at the preview screenings last week, my headache began to clear up, but I was conscious too of the effort of having to ‘zip over’ to the next point of rapid-focus in order to keep up and preserve the 3D illusion. [Shadowlocked]

To simplify, your eyeballs are focusing on an unmoving 2D surface—the movie screen—which is lying to them, telling them to focus and refocus on distances that aren’t there. The actual surface isn’t going anywhere. Like realistic CGI, nothing in nature has prepared our eyes to accept this.

I humbly submit that the audience shouldn’t have to “be obedient”—in other words, politely ignore the movie’s problems. After all, if 3D has any possible benefit to the art of moviemaking, you’d think it would be giving the audience multiple planes of action to look at. While Cameron’s 3D renderings have a deep, rounded appearance, the movie itself—the images on the screen—stick to just one plane of action at a time. It moves no differently than a 2D movie. When Avatar goes from one plane of action to another, it doesn’t do so by composing in multiple planes and letting the viewer decide. It drags the viewer, through rack focusing.*

Texture aside, Avatar isn’t terribly 3D at all. In classic movies, there is a longstanding tradition of “deep focus” shots that show everything clearly, far away and all the way up to the foreground. This style of camerawork gave filmmakers many planes of action to play with. In The Rules of the Game, characters bicker like children in the foreground while other characters sneak around them in the background. It’s played for laughs, and it works. In Citizen Kane, the boy plays outside the window while his parents debate his future inside the house. These movies might not “pop” at you with the special glasses, but they are composed in 3D. Multiple planes of action, playing upon one another. That’s real 3D cinema—movies that use depth in the action.

The irony is that Avatar might cause even more headaches if it were photographed in this way. With eyes skating all over the place and constantly refocusing on depths that aren’t there, the presence of actual stuff to look at might just drive them haywire. Just give them one surface to look at. Be confident that the viewer’s brain is smart enough to bring the movie into the third dimension on its own, without the aid of big plastic glasses. So long as the movie is good enough, of course.

(*Rack focusing is when there are at least two things happening on the screen: one near the camera, and one further away from it. The camera focuses on one, and then quickly refocuses onto the other. You see it happen every other second in Paul Greengrass movies.)

I don’t want to expend too much energy on it, but I thought I might chime in briefly on the results of Oscar Night 2010. I didn’t catch the first part of the ceremony, but I caught the rest once I ran out of better things to do. Here is a list of observations, culled either from the broadcast itself or from summaries of the parts I missed.

1. An honorary Academy Award for Gordon Willis.

This guy’s work with low-exposure photography on the Godfather movies is legendary. That he hasn’t been acknowledged for it until now is shocking, even for the Academy. Was he even nominated for the first two? I don’t think so.

2. Best Film Editing goes to The Hurt Locker.

This will be one of the many remarks I’ll make in this post over how The Hurt Locker, for all its virtues, has no business beating Inglourious Basterds in a number of categories. This is one of them. The Hurt Locker features the “run ‘n’ gun” style of shooting and cutting that I’ve come to despise. It’s not much of an offender—it manages to maintain its coherence—but at the same time, I’ll take the classic technique and clarity of Inglourious Basterds any day.

3. Best Cinematography goes to Avatar.

No. No no no no no. This is one gaffe on the Academy’s part that isn’t just a matter of taste, but of pure, factual wrongness. I won’t deny that Avatar’s stunning images are commendable, but cinematography—by definition—involves actually shooting the footage with a camera. Cinematography is the art of manipulating and capturing light through the lens. Avatar’s visual wonders are almost exclusively dealt with through computer animation. Cameras have nothing to do with it. If there ever was a reason to not take the Oscars seriously…

4. Best Original Screenplay goes to The Hurt Locker.

Is The Hurt Locker really a writer’s movie? It seems to me that you don’t see The Hurt Locker for the dialogue or the story developments, but for the visceral experience of spending time in a bomb suit in the streets of Iraq. The Academy has a tendency to give certain movies a “sweep” of the categories, as a matter of putting as much of its dubious clout into one cause as it possibly can. In this particular case, it looks like The Hurt Locker is the lucky winner. There isn’t much else of an explanation for why this award didn’t go to A Serious Man or (yes) Inglourious Basterds, which are much more written movies.

5. Best Supporting Actor for Christoph Waltz, Best Supporting Actress for Mo’Nique

Shockingly, these are the winners I was pulling for in these categories.

6. The John Hughes and horror movie montages

Somebody please convince me that these two show padders weren’t a complete waste of time. Clips from mostly bad horror movies? A tribute to a man who was a fine enough writer but an unremarkable director? I realize that pandering to fair-weather viewers is the theme of this year’s Oscars (just look at the size of the Best Picture category!), but isn’t this too obvious and counterproductive?

7. Best Actor goes to Jeff Bridges for Crazy Heart

Sometimes people praise a movie when they mean to praise an actor. Crazy Heart is one of those movies. I’m not sure it deserves the acclaim it’s gotten, but Jeff Bridges more than pulls his weight, and he’s an excellent actor overall. And you have to love a guy who uses the word “groovy” in his acceptance speech.

8. Best Director goes to Kathryn Bigelow for The Hurt Locker

I think I might be getting blue in the face. I’m actually not going to deny that this is a well-directed film. The atmosphere and the tension isn’t in the script or the acting, but in the way the images are put together and the way it pulls us in by our shirt collars. That’s the hand of the director.

That said, Bigelow over Tarantino? Hurt Locker over Inglourious Basterds? Remember, we’re talking about direction here, and if The Hurt Locker pulls us by our shirt collars, Inglourious Basterds sits us down, gives us a shoulder massage, feeds us, and slowly strangles us in the meantime. In a good way.

9. Best Picture goes to The Hurt Locker

I suppose this was predictable. What wasn’t predictable was the four seconds it took for Tom Hanks to appear, open the envelope, and read the name. Check it out when they cut to the backstage camera. Kathryn Bigelow didn’t even have time to get to the snack table before her movie’s name got called. I realize the Academy is raring to break the glass ceiling by showering a female director with as much praise as possible. But when you factor in all that praise, the choice of song, and Streisand’s comment about making history, it all smacks of condescension. It’s one of those calculated superstar moments.

I don’t think it’s at all diminishing to Bigelow, her excellent movie, or her tremendous talent to say that, either. I think it’s diminishing for the Academy to ignore actual merits in favor of imagined ones.

That’s probably all I have to contribute to the discussion over this year’s cavalcade of acceptance speeches, unconscionably expensive clothing, and badly scripted comedy routines. Congratulations to Kathryn Bigelow and The Hurt Locker for victories perhaps partially deserved, and my sincerest condolence to Quentin Tarantino for the 100% undeserved losses of Inglourious Basterds. I don’t know if it truly is his masterpiece, but it—along with the criminally overlooked A Serious Man—is one of 2009’s movies to see.

(Note: If the title of this page isn’t enough of a clue, this article will discuss various plot details of Shutter Island. If you haven’t seen the movie yet, you might not want to read this. There’s your spoiler warning.)

This film is an exercise in doubt. If I were to break it into three parts, I would say that the first third sows the seeds of doubt over whether or not the authorities of Shutter Island can be trusted. Our U.S. Marshal characters go in to solve the mystery of a missing patient. They are met by a number of important people who make a big show of being helpful, without ever doing anything to help. We get the pervasive sense that nobody is being honest. This sense is communicated through every frame of every shot.

The middle third sows the seeds of doubt in our perception of the events. In a chance encounter, one particular character makes a compelling point: if our hero’s sanity comes into question, then his credibility is forever undermined, even to himself. And because our hero is our guide through this narrative, that means that everything we’ve witnessed so far and everything we’ll eventually witness can only be taken in those uncertain terms. His mission is no longer just to unravel the mystery, but to cling to the faith that he’s in the right. In his view, the authorities of Shutter Island might question his sanity, but his sanity allows him to see their ulterior motives for doing so. It’s all part of their devious plan.

So what does the final third do? The majority of movies don’t require the audience to think very hard. Most viewers have been trained to expect that the mystery will be solved, that the questions will be answered, that everything will be tied up nicely. The cleverness of this portion of the movie is that these people will find what they’re looking for. Shutter Island provides the necessary evidence to support this interpretation. All has been revealed. We’ve reached the cheese at the end of the maze.

That is, if we stop looking once we’ve found the cheese. We must be careful to guard ourselves against confirmation bias, which is what happens when we see the evidence we’re looking for and disregard the evidence we’re not interested in. In truth, Shutter Island is littered with too much evidence to conclusively point to any one answer. By my count, there are three major possibilities left open at the end of the movie, and they all deserve consideration. They are broken down as follows:

1. Our hero is insane. In the course of the final act, the authorities reveal that our hero is a mental patient, living in an elaborate delusion. It appears that they’ve gotten through to him, that he’s accepted their attempts to convince him. However, in the final scene, he speaks confidentially to his doctor—the man who, in his fantasy, is his U.S. Marshal partner. He reveals that he still intends to escape and bust this Shutter Island conspiracy wide open.

This seems to be the most commonly accepted interpretation of the ending. He’s insane, and has been the whole time. There have been some negative reactions to the film that appear to be based on this version. The viewers feel as though everything they’ve slogged through to get to this point has been invalidated, as if a film this well-crafted could ever be described as a slog. But never mind that.

2. Our hero is sane. In this version of the ending, our hero is still playacting—not as an insane man pretending to be sane to placate his doctors, but as a sane man pretending to be insane in order to guarantee a release from his pain. His last words to his “partner” strongly imply that he is sane, but is willing to be lobotomized so that he won’t have to live with the terrible things that his fantasy was safeguarding him against.

While this interpretation doesn’t frame the earlier portion of the movie in a drastically different way from the first interpretation, it does cast some interesting doubts upon earlier scenes that seem to imply insanity. It becomes that much harder to tell when he’s been wrong and when he’s been right.

3. The conspiracy is real. According to the laws of reality, this is the least plausible of the three endings. But for one thing, “least plausible” is not the same as “implausible.” Shutter Island is an utterly self-contained environment where any attempt to question the authorities can easily be dismissed as the ravings of a delusional paranoiac. One of the main reasons for disbelieving in conspiracy theories is that they’re untenable in an open marketplace of ideas. Shutter Island is anything but.

For another, to dismiss this interpretation out of hand is to ignore the seductive ideas that the film has been playing with all along. Our hero’s certainty is all he has to tell him that he’s sane, and the most obvious way for his enemies to protect themselves would be to declare him insane. In his most vulnerable moment, it may be that they’re not freeing him from the delusion, so much as crafting it for their convenience. In a place like Shutter Island, reality is fragile and mutable. Which version of reality is the “real” one might depend solely on how many people are willing to agree upon it. In the final scenes, our hero simply gets voted down.

There is not enough evidence to settle upon any one ending, and that’s just as it should be. As Scorsese’s on-and-off collaborator Paul Schrader is fond of saying, the final scene of a movie should continue to play out in the lobby of the theater. Movies with open-and-shut endings are rarely as interesting as movies that encourage the viewers to puzzle over the pieces. Unfortunately, it often seems as though a clean-cut ending is all that the average moviegoer cares about, as though two thirds of the story are just a means to arrive at that point. It’s a shame.

I will submit an informal theory, which I will dub the Beavis and Butthead effect. Imagine, for a moment, an average anti-intellectual moron. We’ll call him (arbitrarily male, of course) “Jack.”

Jack goes to the movies. He sees, oh, say, Avatar. He comes away from it thinking it was crap. “Who are these people trying to fool?” he bellows. “This is the same plot as a bunch of other movies I’ve seen! Why, the acting wasn’t even that great!” Jack goes home, logs onto IMDB, and gives Avatar a 1 out of 10 rating. Somebody needs to put these Hollywood hacks in their place, after all.

Meanwhile, Jill (arbitrarily female), for all her differences of opinion, is very similar to Jack. Jill goes to see Avatar and she loves it. She finds the special effects dazzling; Pandora is so real to her that she felt she could reach out and touch it. She thinks to herself excitedly: “This is the best movie I’ve seen in a long time! Just look at all the stuff on the screen! Check out all the hidden messages!” Jill goes home, logs onto IMDB, and gives Avatar a 10 out of 10 rating. Surely this marvel, this wonder of a film, deserves to unseat stodgy old bores like The Godfather and The Shawshank Redemption. Why, those movies aren’t even relevant to today’s world.

You rarely see a Jack or a Jill go for the “5 out of 10″ rating, or its close neighbors. If you’re lucky, they’ll shave off a star or two at the top because it wasn’t the second coming of Christ. Don’t expect anybody voting at the other end of the scale to shave off anything.

I’m not sure what drives this phenomenon, but it is observable. Whether you go online and look at the numbers or just listen to the scuttlebutt around the water cooler, there seems to be a reverse bell curve governing people’s opinions about entertainment. In the parlance of Beavis and Butthead, either “it rules” or “it sucks.”

Why is there such an absence of more varied opinions? Why isn’t there a more complex gradation between the two poles? Here’s my theory. Outside of natural selection, there aren’t many ways for something complex to arise from something simple. You’re probably not going to get a thoughtful, well-rounded opinion from a simplistic viewing process. If all you’re doing is passively absorbing what the screen pumps at you, then you’ll likely respond just one way or the other. It becomes a reflex. It rules or it sucks, and damn the very notion that anybody should discuss it more deeply.

Movies are for thinking about. Art is for thinking about. If you go into it thinking that it’s okay to turn your brain off–or worse, that you should turn your brain off–then you’re depriving yourself. You’re disabling yourself from knowing real crap when you see it, and you’re closing yourself off to the sheer richness of a truly good movie.

Most of all, you’re shutting off the critical faculties that are necessary for knowing when a movie isn’t great, and isn’t crap, but just… is. What doesn’t deserve your best appraisal doesn’t necessarily deserve your worst. Some movies are just lightweight entertainments.

Setting the record straight, I believe Avatar is worth seeing. To say that it’s the best film of the year, or even a great film at all, is worrying. It’s certainly an imaginative, pretty film, with many evocative moments and much else to write home about. No, it isn’t especially well-acted, and the plot is low on both subtlety and originality, but plot and acting are highly overrated phenomena. Perhaps its worse crime is that its visuals are so splendid that the rest of the production just isn’t audacious enough to keep up. This is by no means a bad film, and certainly not a “1″ on the IMDB scale. But neither is it a “10.”

Your homework is to look up a bunch of movies on IMDB and check out their user ratings. Look for how many people voted at the extreme ends of the scale, versus how many voted for the middle ratings. Test my theory.

(And yes, I realize it’s been a long time since the last update. For the few people who may have noticed, I apologize. Hopefully normalcy will resume soon.)

I have been challenged. At least, I think I’ve been challenged, so I will respond as such. On the Shoryuken.com forums, a conversation broke out in the movie thread regarding the creation of Top 10s, Best ofs, and similar lists. When I expressed my own ambivalence about it, P. Gorath responded:

P. Gorath: I think it’s a good exercise to objectively rank things close to you. Deciding on criteria helps you focus what’s important to you and carry that moving forward.

And so, it is done. Give unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s.

To make this early foray a little easier on myself, this is going to be—conservatively, I think—a top 10 ranking of the greatest movies ever made. It is structured as a countdown, because these lists are always done as countdowns. The people who write them probably harbor the ridiculous notion that the audience cares enough to feel a sense of suspense about what the next title will be. Far be it from me to break tradition. You’ll have to start at the lowly 10th greatest film (these lists are never out of nine, 11, or 27) and work your way down to the Big Kahuna.

An interesting observation on the makeup of the list: the decade with the most titles is the 1970s, and the runner-up is the 1990s. No titles before the 1960s made the top 10, which is likely due to a number of factors. Having grown up in the post-studios, post-Brando age, I’m obviously more comfortable with movies made in the traditions I was born into. That’s not to say I don’t appreciate movies made during the earlier period. It’s that I apparently don’t appreciate them as much. There is also the influence of opportunity. Lists such as this one are inevitably biased towards the recent. Newer titles have a better chance of being seen, and, accordingly, a better chance of getting mentioned.

And now, onto the list.

10. Crumb (1994)

9. Psycho (1961)

8. Woodstock: The Director’s Cut (1970/1994)

7. Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985)

6. Fight Club (1999)

5. Pulp Fiction (1994)

4. Superman (1978)

3. The Godfather (1972)

2. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

1. Taxi Driver (1976)

There. Now everyone can feel free to “ha-rumph” about the worthy titles that didn’t make it, the unworthy garbage that I dared to rescue, and the unmitigated audacity of putting them in the order that I did.

I find that P. Gorath and I were probably too zealous in our use of the word “objective.” Subjectivity is in the nature of lists like this one. It is my conjecture that any attempt to objectively rank art or entertainment will eventually crumble under close scrutiny. It will reveal itself to be a function of the personal value system of the critic. Assuming the critic is being totally honest about what he appreciates in a film, there is no difference between a list of all-time favorites and a list of all-time greats.

This also means that lists assembled democratically aren’t especially worthwhile. If critics A and B like movie X more than critic C likes movie Y, then movie X only rises above movie Y by virtue of its popularity—which is utterly irrelevant to quality.

There were a few questions I asked myself in paring all my favorite movies down to 10. Did seeing the film leave a profound impact that lasted for days? If it did, the film would be considered for the list. Did I, at one point, have a momentary but consuming obsession with this film? This would goose the film up even higher. Was this film, at one point, considered my all-time favorite? It would be assured a spot near the top. For perspective, I limited my choices to films made during the 20th century. The jury hasn’t even come back in on the cinema of the 2000s yet.

The number one choice of Taxi Driver came easily. I asked myself: out of all the great film directors, who most deserves a spot on the list? Martin Scorsese has the distinction of making not just one, but two decade-defining masterpieces. He kicked off the 1980s with Raging Bull, setting the bar so high that everything after it was sure to pass beneath. And then there was Taxi Driver in the 1970s. These two films alone would distinguish Scorsese, even without the entirety of his body of work. I chose Taxi Driver for the simple reason that if I could discount all other Scorsese films, even Raging Bull, Taxi Driver is the one that would stay with me forever.

I recently saw this question posted in (don’t judge me) the Internet Movie Database forums: Is it possible for a TV show to last without overturning its premise? The question was asked in reference to sci-fi and fantasy shows, but it applies to just about any kind of indefinitely long-running story. I will broaden the question: Is it possible for any long-running story to last without overturning its premise?

What’s a premise, in this context? The short answer is “what the story is about.” The premise of Smallville is that it’s about Clark Kent and Lex Luthor in their teen years, before they become superhero and supervillain, respectively. The premise of The Simpsons is that it’s a less fantastical, more dysfunctional look at the typical sitcom family. The premise of House, MD is that it’s a group of doctors who specialize in bizarre cases that nobody else can handle.

Let’s go for a more accurate definition. The premise is nothing more than the set of conditions, or limitations, that determines what a story is going to be about. And what it’s not going to be about, for that matter.

Example: Alec Holland is an experimental plant researcher in the bayous of Louisiana. One day, he becomes the victim of an act of sabotage. He mutates into the Swamp Thing, a man/plant hybrid monster, which must take revenge on the perpetrators and find a way to become human again.

Now, maybe there’s some other interesting stuff happening in Louisiana at the same time–political scandals, achievements in the arts, and so on–but that’s not in the story, because it falls outside of the conditions of the premise.

One condition of the premise is that Swamp Thing is trying to become human again. If he does, then his goal–the thing he wants, which drives him to do what he does–is met. There’s no more story. The main character is done. His character problem, the problem that falls within the conditions of the premise, has been solved.

Maybe he has other problems. Maybe Alec Holland has severe credit card debt, or a little cousin with autism. But that’s not in the story because it falls outside of the premise.

If Swamp Thing were a one-off story, like a novel or a movie, this would be no big deal. Assuming an optimistic ending, Swamp Thing would beat the bad guys, figure out how to become human again, and live happily ever after with the friends he meets along the way.

But Swamp Thing was an ongoing comic book series–to be continued forever, no end in sight.

Swamp Thing needs to become human again, or there’s no reason for the story to move. But if Swamp Thing solves this problem, the story ends and DC Comics is out of a monthly title. The premise, the set of conditions that determines what the story is about, has put the writers in a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t position.

There are a couple solutions. One of them, typically employed on TV shows, is to gradually lessen the importance of the conditions and hope the audience doesn’t notice. The premise becomes broader, more inclusive, less distinct. The story becomes less specific, more directionless, more bloated, more meandering. Everything but the kitchen sink can be included, with hit-or-miss results. This happened in Swamp Thing for a while, causing a decline in the quality of the series. On the Simpsons, this approach produced the finest TV comedy of the ‘90s.

A riskier solution is to, in one swift motion of authorial godhood, abruptly destroy the premise and implement a new one. If it works, the story has a new lease on life. If not, the story is reduced to utter ridiculousness. This solution was successfully implemented in Swamp Thing, courtesy of a daring-but-then-unknown British gentleman by the name of Alan Moore. In just a couple of key issues, he introduced plot points that completely redefined (let’s all say it together this time) the conditions that determine what the story is about.

This not only freed the books of the limitations that had come to shackle them, but introduced new ones that kept a strong sense of direction and did not pose the same Catch-22 as the previous ones.

In answer to the original question, I would say it’s necessary to do SOMETHING to the premise. Once you’ve explored every cubic inch of the box you’re in, there’s nothing else you can do. You either find a new box, or look for ways to expand the box you’re already in. Or you do something that, Seinfeld aside, is unthinkable in American television: you end the story before it becomes necessary to ask questions like this one.

This entry discusses the plot of the film The Usual Suspects frankly. As this film includes one of the most controversial surprise endings in recent memory, I advise those who haven’t seen it to avoid this entry until they have. In the meantime, feel free to peruse my many other fine articles!

On the one hand, the ending of The Usual Suspects could be a clever twist that forces you to reconsider everything. On the other, it could just be a crass dramatic con job. It all depends on how you look at it. There is little good to be said about the “It was all just a dream!” plot device in its various permutations. It’s usually the writers’ way of forcing their way out of a corner. It’s a literary blunt instrument. The Usual Suspects may or may not be an exception.

Is Verbal Kint really Keyser Soze? “Probably,” says director Bryan Singer. The case is never quite closed, as sure as it seems when Verbal strides out of the police station without his characteristic limp. (Watch the film very carefully. There is much evidence to implicate Verbal, but there is also some evidence that muddies the waters.) Though it’s not a certainty, this entry assumes that Verbal is most likely Soze.

If this is so, then the rug is pulled out from under the audience. Everything they’ve been led to believe over the course of the film, everything that has entranced them, has been an elaborate lie. Negative reactions are understandable. The audience members placed their trust in the story, only to have it wholly and cruelly undermined. It’s as though the whole movie up to the point of the revelation is rendered inert.

I will be so bold as to ask, “Why?” In a sense, every movie is invalidated sooner or later, usually the moment the end credits roll. The wool is inevitably pulled from the eyes of the audience. They’re forced to acknowledge that everything they’ve just seen was just a figment of somebody’s imagination. “It was all just a dream.”

What does The Usual Suspects do differently? Maybe it recognizes itself for what it is, whereas most fictions do not. It takes the audience out of the fiction just a little bit sooner than usual, so that they must understand it too. It’s like bringing up the lights in a theatrical performance while the set is still being changed. It confronts you, admits it’s manipulating you, and revels in the fact that it does not care.

That’s all well and good, but there’s a difference between accepting something and liking it. To that, all that can be said is this: as far as you were involved, prior to the Big Moment, were you enjoying yourself? The characters are all amusing in their own ways, but the plot is not the easiest to follow. Roger Ebert’s memorably succinct comment was, “To the extent that I understand, I don’t care.” The validity of the ending is irrelevant if the movie hasn’t already won the audience over.

But if it won you over, were you not intrigued by the ominous specter of Keyser Soze? Was there not sufficient suspense in the possibility that this demonic figure might win in the end? And were you not presented with a character that, supported by evidence, might reasonably be behind it all? Does it matter that much or all of Verbal’s story was a deception? Aren’t all stories deception? What else matters if the story can affect us in the moment, as a good story should?

Verbal Kint may just be another storyteller, and he may also be Keyser Soze. Whatever the case, he’ll flip you for real.

Remember the 2012 video clip from this post? I made some ridiculously clever and snarky comment about the actors reacting to special effects for five minutes, which doubtlessly impressed and attracted every girl who read it. (None.)

It turns out that someone else made the same observation and made a custom edit of the video, removing all the computer-generated footage of mayhem and destruction. All the practical shots–that is, the shots of actual physical objects that really exist, including the actors–remain in the sequence.

Exciting, no?

Based on the running time of the edited version, roughly 4/5 of this sequence consists of computer-animated shots of stuff collapsing, crumbling, blowing up, falling over, and otherwise being destroyed. I’m hesitant to proclaim that the suckage is self-evident… but it is.

Don’t go see the 2012 movie. If you take nothing else from this post, let it be that.

Roland Emmerich is a very bad filmmaker. It’s bad enough that he’s a hack to rival Michael Bay, Brett Ratner, and the like, but that’s not what really makes him bad. When someone mentions the name of a director and the first thing you think of is a famous city blowing up, falling apart, or otherwise being destroyed, you have gone beyond the echelon of simple suckage and reached the level of true badness. Emmerich seems to deal exclusively in paranoid doom fantasies.

If it’s possible for entertainment to be socially irresponsible, then Emmerich’s movies certainly fit the bill. He likes to incorporate famous doomsday scenarios into his movies, but he doesn’t like reality very much. If there’s any degree of truth to the subject matter, it’s long gone by the time it goes through the Roland Emmerich “make things more exciting!” Play Doh machine. Man-made climate change is a real problem. The Day After Tomorrow did as much to obfuscate the reality of that problem as any doomsaying environmental alarmist ever has.

Surely people are capable enough of distinguishing fiction from reality, right? Surely Emmerich’s mindless popcorn movies are harmless, right?

Not really. There is a scientifically observable correlation between the release of movies that feature certain paranormal phenomena and the public’s belief in those phenomena. For example, a big budget motion picture about EVP is released. People are well aware that the story is fictional, but lack the criteria to evaluate the phenomenon of EVP itself. Subsequently, the number of people who believe there are messages from the afterlife hidden in radio and television static skyrockets.

Human beings are good at absorbing information, but they’re bad about recalling which pieces of conflicting information are correct and which are not. It’s the simple fact that the concept is implanted in the audience’s mind that enables the belief in that concept to germinate. Evolution unfortunately didn’t equip us very well to deal with bullshitters like Roland Emmerich.

Okay, so what if people believe in paranormal flim flam? Even if the movies can encourage such beliefs, nothing bad ever comes of it, right?

I’d argue that encouraging irrational beliefs can undercut people’s ability to compete in this age of reason we inhabit. At the very least, it becomes extraordinarily difficult to take people seriously if they start enthusiastically yammering on about conspiracy theories, ghosts, and UFO abductions. At worst, they might get so into the phenomenon that they start actively pursuing it. Ever see footage of a UFO convention? It’s not a pretty sight, and that’s coming from someone who’s competed in video game tournaments and regularly visits comic book specialty stores.

Aren’t there plenty of movies and directors that have dealt with this kind of story over the years? Sure enough, but as I said before, nobody makes those movies their stock and trade quite like Roland Emmerich does. His latest trip into the world of delusion is the 2012 myth: the idea that the world will end once the ancient Mayan calendar runs out. Consider, for a moment, that maybe the Mayans couldn’t predict the future, and that the calendar stops for any number of far more plausible reasons. Keep in mind, the Mayans didn’t actually say the world would end. The movie’s tag line, “We were warned,” is something of a mystery. We were warned about what? That it’s impossible for a man-made calendar to continue into infinity?

So yeah. Screw Roland Emmerich, screw his movies, and screw the ridiculous 2012 myth. Once the movie is out, we can look forward to hearing even more about it, until the year passes and people are forced to make some other arbitrary prediction of the end of days.

That’s the theoretical side of the argument, of course. Let’s take a look at the movie itself. This scene, released in advance, features John Cusack and the other actors pretending to ride inside various vehicles while reacting to the special effects for five minutes.

Let us, for a moment, speculate about the behind-the-scenes interaction between Emmerich and the cast while this scene was filmed. I can hear it now:

Emmerich: “Okay, John, now the street behind your car is collapsing!”

Cusack: “Oh no, we have to get away from this collapsing street!”

Emmerich: “Okay, John, now the lamp post is falling into the path of your car!”

Cusack: “Oh no, we have to get away from that lamp post over there!”

Emmerich: “Other side of the car, John.”

Cusack: “Oh.”

Emmerich: “Okay, John, now there’s a building in front of your car and you’re going to drive through it!”

Cusack: “What?”

Emmerich: “Just look scared and surprised.”

Cusack: “Okay.”

Emmerich: “Now you’re in an airplane!”

Cusack: “An airplane? What happened to the car? How did we get away from all the other stuff?”

Emmerich: “It doesn’t have to make sense. Just do it. You’re in an airplane.”

Cusack: “Okay.”

Emmerich: “Now you’re perilously flying under two buildings that are listing into one another, when you could have just as easily flown over the top of them!”

Cusack: (isn’t listening because he’s on the phone with his agent)

John Cusack, incidentally, must have accepted a million billion dollar deal for appearing in this film.

Now, let’s have a look at some choice Roland Emmerich quotes. These are real and not fabricated at all.

Reporter: Can you discuss the controversy [The Day After Tomorrow] has raised over the possibility of global warming’s effects on the environment?

Emmerich: I’m a filmmaker, not a scientist. But I had a very smart and intelligent screenwriter, who did a lot of research, and he tried to keep it as accurate as possible.

Mouth fart noise.

Reporter: When you were writing this movie, did you have any worries that a disaster movie taking place in New York City was happening too close to 9-11?

Emmerich: I thought about it very carefully. The first thing I did was I stopped writing. I was halfway finished and I stopped writing for nearly four or five months because I was so shocked with what happened, like everybody. But then, slowly, friends of mine said, “Why don’t you keep writing? It’s a natural disaster, what’s the big deal?”

9/11, a natural disaster? Maybe they didn’t pay the research guy enough.

And then there are several, from the promotional campaigns of a few of his films, in which he claims he promised himself he’d never do another disaster movie again, except that [insert retarded idea here] was such a good idea that he just had to do it one more time. I won’t list any specific quotes, since I just summarized all of them.

Look forward to plenty of “just one more time” Roland Emmerich movies until he dies or the world gets destroyed for real.