A Story is a Promise Blog

A fundamental principle for a popular Hollywood film is that it asks the audience to care, typically about a main character. Disclosure Day starts by introducing us to a young man involved in tech who has stolen some data storage devices from a powerful organization. He manages to escape with a young woman. We’re given no reason to care. She had studied to be a nun, but that feels more like a plot device when she discovers what the young man is trying to reveal to the world. When we meet Emily Blount’s character, she's the live wire that runs through the film. She wants to be more than a local weather girl in a backwater TV market. I call this a dramatic truth. We meet her, we learn her dramatic truth. I’ve been posting about this since I put up a website in 1995. My writing disclosure day, so to speak. This explains the mixed reviews for Disclosure Day. We eventually learn a dramatic truth for the young man, and even deeper into the film, the ‘Bad’ guy. For anyone wh...

Maleficent , a new film starring Angelina Jolie , has a wonderful opening and a wonderful close, but the middle seriously sags. Why that happens speaks to a problem with story structure. The film opens with Jolie as a mythical creature and a young girl who watches over and protects the Moor, where other creatures like pixies roam. Humans occupy a nearby kingdom. Each mostly keep to their realm until a young man enters the Moor to steal a jewel and is caught by Jolie. They become friends, grow up together, and she falls in love with him. When the nearby king fails in an attack on the Moor, the young man uses Jolie's love for him to take her wings and get himself appointed king. This sets up a central question, will she get revenge? She curses the new king's daughter so that when she reaches 16, she will fall into a deep sleep that can only be woken from a kiss of true love. In this middle section, Maleficent watches over the girl, whom she clearly and deeply loves. As th...

When you watch a film like Sleepless in Seattle , you know Ryan and Hanks will find and love each other. Just as easily, in six months they could go through the world's ugliest divorce. There's nothing in the film that really conveys they have intimate feelings for each other. Other Hollywood films might get the main characters into bed but they end up in the same place, two actors pretending to be in love because that's what they are being paid to do. Then along comes Only Lovers Left Alive , a film by Jim Jarmusch. To get this out of the way, I love his films, and the way they ask me to think and experience what I see on the screen. What Lovers also conveys through its two main characters is what an intimate relationship between two loving, sexual adults looks like. Watching the film I believed these two characters love each other. I don't often see this in films, partly I suspect because there aren't many actresses of the caliber of Tilda Swinton. The last...

Big budget Hollywood films that fail to find an audience often offer lessons in storytelling. Transcendence is an example. In most successful films, a main character embodies a story's promise (what the story is about) and that character experiences narrative tension around the course and outcome of the story. Transcendence violates this by starting with the aftermath of what's happened in the film with a major, but secondary character. This sets up a plot question, what happened to create the world we see in the opening scene? We then meet Johnny Depp in the present. He's a scientist working to create a singularity, an artificial, highly intelligent computer system that has the potential to evolve rapidly. But Depp is soon shot and dies, and his consciousness is uploaded into a computer. This takes 25 minutes. The action is slow and the settings mostly dark. Main character #3 is kidnapped to force him to help shut down the new version of Depp, and he experiences narrat...

The Book Thief opens with narration by death, who adds some comments through the movie. In the film, a young girl is given up by her mother (who is possibly a communist or Jewish) to a German couple just before WWII. The girl is illiterate, but learns to read and then 'borrows' books from a local, well-off woman who lost a son in WWI. I haven't read the book, but the movie has a golden-hued look that seems out of place with what is happening. The deeper problem is that, until the end of the film, it's not clear why it's narrated by death and what, ultimately, all the golden-hued action is meant to convey. In the last line of the film, death admits to being haunted by the girl's death. To be a dramatic question for the story, the question of what about the death of her brother haunted the girl, and whether she could survive this haunting, would have given the film and death's narration a dramatic purpose. It's a question that would relate to other fa...

I enjoy writing capsule movie reviews that explore principles of storytelling. The first I'm posting here is a review of the movie Solaris. The goal of these capsule reviews isn't just to review the movie, but to set out what about a particular movie created either the mechanics that helped a movie transport its audience, or some of the causes of that failure to transport. In general, any big-budget Hollywood film that fails to find and satisfy its intended audience will have flawed mechanics. Other, more recent capsule reviews can be found on my website . A Capsule Review of Solaris posted 12/12/2002 This film has gotten some weak reviews that call the storytelling slow, and a few suggestions that Clooney wasn't right for the part. My take, the story has a basic flaw in its structure. The initial set up is fine. Clooney is a therapist who clearly is unable to process through his grief about something that happened to his wife. He accepts an assignment to inves...