5 ms·

If you have a bad writer, no amount of good other stuff can salvage your movie. Not true for the other roles.

tkgally 5y ago
I basically stopped watching movies a long time ago—I was never much of a cinephile to begin with—but last week, out of either boredom or curiosity, I streamed a Hollywood blockbuster from the 2000s that I had read about somewhere. What struck me most was how the action scenes, editing, costuming, sets, casting, and acting all seemed—to my nonexpert eye—to have been carefully and professionally done, while the storytelling was horrible: implausible, unnatural, and full of obvious holes. The story didn’t need to be great literature, but it should not have been hard to make the pieces fit together in a way that made sense. I don't know whether to blame the writers, the director, or the commercial motivation for making the film. This particular movie was obviously intended to lead to spinoffs in video games and other forms of merchandising, and that may have influenced the editing in a way that garbled the story.
- underwater 5y ago
  There has been huge trend from the audience towards overanalysing plots and story details. Specifically, to analyse them independently from the emotional and storytelling aspects. Jump onto reddit and you see everyone ripping apart the details of Star Wars, the Marvel Universe, Chris Nolan films, etc. I think that this is a mistake. The point of the plot is to support the story. It doesn't matter if it's logical if it makes you feel something powerful. The plot needs to be strong enough to hold up during the running of the film when the viewer immersed in the story.
bryanrasmussen 5y ago
>If you have a bad writer, no amount of good other stuff can salvage your movie. no, if you have good actors they can make your bad writing in some ways standable. There is the whole "so bad it's good movie" which is generally because the actors manage to make the badness bearable. Con Air and The Rock were not written by a writer as good as the ones you mentioned but they did have the right actors to make those movies really enjoyable for a lot of people. I would submit the actors salvaged those movies.
- socialist_coder 5y ago
  Yeah, good point. I don't disagree with that. On the flipside, bad acting will ruin any movie too, no matter how good everything else is.
  - hashhar 5y ago
    That goes for every role. Bad lighting will kill thr movie, bad audio mixes will kill it and on and on.
- imbnwa 5y ago
  > Con Air and The Rock were not written by a writer as good as the ones you mentioned but they did have the right actors to make those movies really enjoyable for a lot of people. I would submit the actors salvaged those movies. I mean we can expand the scope of the conversation and lower the bar, but the article writer's scope seemed to be one of being "on a quest for the one-in-a-hundred experience" to which I was responding to the dearth of such. Are Jerry Bruckehimer movies really one-in-a-hundred experiences? I mean I get where you're coming from: I loved and still love Starship Troopers but I'm not gonna assert its high-value cinema or on the level the article writer is seeking. Friends is some of the most mindless television I've ever seen but its basically the most popular and successful TV show ever, so what do we want to measure?
  - rolleiflex 5y ago
    I’m still not sure what Starship Troopers even was. Was it a comedy, satire or just a flat, wide-eyed warning about war and nationalism in the vein of WW1? It’s a movie that starts in a regular high school, dating, and (spoilers ahead, NFSW ahead) continue with most of the crew being eaten alive, slowly, in full view of the camera, while begging to be killed. The seriousness of the nationalism in the movie and the following / preceding carnage, the apparent lack of irony and the characters basically having the acting skills of cardboard cutouts sort of make it into … something I’m not even sure what. It’s like an army recruitment movie for a losing war except this one continues to film after the cadet signs the papers, and then and follows him on camera to his horrible, painful, slow death. Then unironically waves the flag at the end and with a number to call for more info. It’s either so good that the entire movie is a hilarious deadpan parody about horrors of war, or it’s so bad it’s inadvertently become that. In either case, it’s definitely something. It reminds me of the Wilfred Owen poem: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46560/dulce-et-decorum-est https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46560/dulce-et-decoru...
hashhar 5y ago
You can come up with the best story you have but if I as an audio engineer create a mix where you can't legibly hear dialogue you'd walk out of the theater in anger. If the cinematographer has constant camera shakes in every shot - even a dialogue scene - then also you can salvage the movie. For some not so extreme examples think about what happens if the actors are shit - The Room is a good example. The story is good but the acting is what made it into a "so bad - let's troll this" movie.
- setr 5y ago
  > if I as an audio engineer create a mix where you can't legibly hear dialogue you'd walk out of the theater in anger. Tenet? No one I know in the US could watch that film, but my international friends liked it, presumably because they had subtitles.. the theater had to blast the sound to make the audio vaguely discernible
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    That is a Christopher Nolan signature trait.
  - cbsmith 5y ago
    Honestly, Nolan's audio cacophony generally works for me (though it is distressing, which is the point). Tenet in particular worked great.
    - setr 5y ago
      The theater I was at reached a point of nearly physically hurting. It doesn’t really work when it’s distressing during passive explanatory scenes. I didn’t even get the chance to be confused by the technobabble
- imbnwa 5y ago
  >You can come up with the best story you have but if I as an audio engineer create a mix where you can't legibly hear dialogue you'd walk out of the theater in anger. But we're talking about basic competency now, not what makes a movie the very best it can be. > If the cinematographer has constant camera shakes in every shot - even a dialogue scene - then also you can salvage the movie. I wonder if you had Paul Greengrass movies in mind
logicchains 5y ago
It's possible to get everything wrong and still keep making movies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Asylum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Asylum
- Tomis02 5y ago
  Z Nation is possibly the best zombie show to date. Low budget doesn't mean it has to be bad.

I basically stopped watching movies a long time ago—I was never much of a cinephile to begin with—but last week, out of either boredom or curiosity, I streamed a Hollywood blockbuster from the 2000s that I had read about somewhere. What struck me most was how the action scenes, editing, costuming, sets, casting, and acting all seemed—to my nonexpert eye—to have been carefully and professionally done, while the storytelling was horrible: implausible, unnatural, and full of obvious holes. The story didn’t need to be great literature, but it should not have been hard to make the pieces fit together in a way that made sense. I don't know whether to blame the writers, the director, or the commercial motivation for making the film. This particular movie was obviously intended to lead to spinoffs in video games and other forms of merchandising, and that may have influenced the editing in a way that garbled the story.

underwater 5y ago
There has been huge trend from the audience towards overanalysing plots and story details. Specifically, to analyse them independently from the emotional and storytelling aspects. Jump onto reddit and you see everyone ripping apart the details of Star Wars, the Marvel Universe, Chris Nolan films, etc. I think that this is a mistake. The point of the plot is to support the story. It doesn't matter if it's logical if it makes you feel something powerful. The plot needs to be strong enough to hold up during the running of the film when the viewer immersed in the story.

bryanrasmussen 5y ago

>If you have a bad writer, no amount of good other stuff can salvage your movie. no, if you have good actors they can make your bad writing in some ways standable. There is the whole "so bad it's good movie" which is generally because the actors manage to make the badness bearable. Con Air and The Rock were not written by a writer as good as the ones you mentioned but they did have the right actors to make those movies really enjoyable for a lot of people. I would submit the actors salvaged those movies.

socialist_coder 5y ago
Yeah, good point. I don't disagree with that. On the flipside, bad acting will ruin any movie too, no matter how good everything else is.
- hashhar 5y ago
  That goes for every role. Bad lighting will kill thr movie, bad audio mixes will kill it and on and on.
imbnwa 5y ago
> Con Air and The Rock were not written by a writer as good as the ones you mentioned but they did have the right actors to make those movies really enjoyable for a lot of people. I would submit the actors salvaged those movies. I mean we can expand the scope of the conversation and lower the bar, but the article writer's scope seemed to be one of being "on a quest for the one-in-a-hundred experience" to which I was responding to the dearth of such. Are Jerry Bruckehimer movies really one-in-a-hundred experiences? I mean I get where you're coming from: I loved and still love Starship Troopers but I'm not gonna assert its high-value cinema or on the level the article writer is seeking. Friends is some of the most mindless television I've ever seen but its basically the most popular and successful TV show ever, so what do we want to measure?
- rolleiflex 5y ago
  I’m still not sure what Starship Troopers even was. Was it a comedy, satire or just a flat, wide-eyed warning about war and nationalism in the vein of WW1? It’s a movie that starts in a regular high school, dating, and (spoilers ahead, NFSW ahead) continue with most of the crew being eaten alive, slowly, in full view of the camera, while begging to be killed. The seriousness of the nationalism in the movie and the following / preceding carnage, the apparent lack of irony and the characters basically having the acting skills of cardboard cutouts sort of make it into … something I’m not even sure what. It’s like an army recruitment movie for a losing war except this one continues to film after the cadet signs the papers, and then and follows him on camera to his horrible, painful, slow death. Then unironically waves the flag at the end and with a number to call for more info. It’s either so good that the entire movie is a hilarious deadpan parody about horrors of war, or it’s so bad it’s inadvertently become that. In either case, it’s definitely something. It reminds me of the Wilfred Owen poem: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46560/dulce-et-decorum-est https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46560/dulce-et-decoru...

hashhar 5y ago

You can come up with the best story you have but if I as an audio engineer create a mix where you can't legibly hear dialogue you'd walk out of the theater in anger. If the cinematographer has constant camera shakes in every shot - even a dialogue scene - then also you can salvage the movie. For some not so extreme examples think about what happens if the actors are shit - The Room is a good example. The story is good but the acting is what made it into a "so bad - let's troll this" movie.

setr 5y ago
> if I as an audio engineer create a mix where you can't legibly hear dialogue you'd walk out of the theater in anger. Tenet? No one I know in the US could watch that film, but my international friends liked it, presumably because they had subtitles.. the theater had to blast the sound to make the audio vaguely discernible
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  That is a Christopher Nolan signature trait.
- cbsmith 5y ago
  Honestly, Nolan's audio cacophony generally works for me (though it is distressing, which is the point). Tenet in particular worked great.
  - setr 5y ago
    The theater I was at reached a point of nearly physically hurting. It doesn’t really work when it’s distressing during passive explanatory scenes. I didn’t even get the chance to be confused by the technobabble
imbnwa 5y ago
>You can come up with the best story you have but if I as an audio engineer create a mix where you can't legibly hear dialogue you'd walk out of the theater in anger. But we're talking about basic competency now, not what makes a movie the very best it can be. > If the cinematographer has constant camera shakes in every shot - even a dialogue scene - then also you can salvage the movie. I wonder if you had Paul Greengrass movies in mind

logicchains 5y ago

It's possible to get everything wrong and still keep making movies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Asylum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Asylum

Tomis02 5y ago
Z Nation is possibly the best zombie show to date. Low budget doesn't mean it has to be bad.