I don’t see many movies, but over my annual holiday month off—and with my writing career mostly stuck in waiting mode—I had time to see a few movies recently.  So I thought I’d comment on them.

Note that I said “comment” not “review.”  I don’t plan on reviewing movies on this blog, or much of anything else, truth be told, including politics.  I may comment on anything at any time, but that’s not the same.  The one thing I may formally review is books, but only books that I really love.  When I read a book I love, or at least like very much, I’ll mention it here; doesn’t matter if it was sent to me for a blurb or just something I picked up, it works pretty much the same way.  So, for those who send me books, be aware that I’m not an easy blurb or reviewer.  Quite the opposite.  I’ve found that I’m probably quite stingy when it comes to formal praise of others’ work to be used for marketing purposes.  I hope this doesn’t discourage anyone, because I do enjoy giving recommendations that I truly mean for whatever purpose might be beneficial.  Just understand that I don’t recommend many books, even books that most others feel are good or even great, and I don’t do negative or neutral reviews.  So if you approach me for a recommendation of some kind and don’t get it, please understand that I may not have had time to devote to reading it thoroughly, or I may not have loved it.  There are plenty of fine writers, many very successful, whose work would and has earned exactly the same response. 

So why even try?  Why approach an elitist curmudgeon with the puerile sensibilities of a mentally deficient hamster?  Because when I do give a recommendation I mean every single word, so it may be worth a go.

Films, on the other hand, I won’t review.  I’ll just tell you what I think.  So today I’ll tell you what I thought, in various levels of detail, about the movies The Blind Side, Avatar, and Sherlock Holmes. 

The Blind Side I liked a lot, even though it is a great example of my claim there is no such thing as non-fiction and that the statement “based on a true story” is ultimately irrelevant.  As someone once said—just who, I have no idea—”If the truth be told, I’d rather hear a story.”  It’s a good story, and so shouldn’t surprise people that it’s true but not factual.  In fact, I liked it so much that I won’t say anything other than go see it because I think you’ll like it.

On Avatar and Sherlock Holmes I will be somewhat more elaborate, which in this case isn’t good.

In the past few weeks I’ve seen a number of film critics and commentators recommending Avatar as one of the top films of the year, and I find this a bad, bad sign about the future of cinema.  Now, don’t misunderstand me: the film was visually stunning and the 3-D wasn’t gimmicky, which is an admirable move in the narrative form.  I enjoyed the movie mostly, though I won’t see it again and there were times when I found myself on the brink of boredom.  And while the story was decidedly cliched, predictable, and thematically didactic, it wasn’t any more so than most blockbusters, especially given recent history (the latest Transformers film, anyone?). 

You might tell from what I’ve said so far that I don’t greatly enjoy many movies, certainly not as many as I did before I started work as a professional storyteller.  But what I disliked the most about Avatar and its reception by many critics and the public is the clear foreshadowing that in future years I’m going to enjoy even fewer movies.  The Hollywood blockbuster, to which I have no ideological objection, is moving ever more toward excess glitz to cover anorexic story.  But that’s always been true, you  might say.  Yes—but recently more and more movies have been getting away with it. 

There’s always been a strong strain of visual puritanism among movie-makers, which often expresses in a fixation with technique even at the expense of rhetorical effect on the story.  Typically, these films have made the indie circuit where they’re watched by other filmmakers and no one else.  But now CGI has become so advanced that it’s capable of entertaining mass audiences purely on the level of distinction, so much so it can distract from or even hide the poor narrative structure beneath all the glamour.  Avatar used revolutionary production techniques to communicate what is, frankly, an unremarkable story—and in many quarters is being celebrated for this.  As a fan and writer of speculative fiction, this really, really worries me.  For years the best sci-fi and fantasy stories were avoided by Hollywood because of how difficult—sometimes impossible—it was to do the settings justice.  Recently we’ve seen technology unlock the door barring some of the greatest stories ever told from the visual medium.  The Lord of the Rings trilogy is a fine example of technology being implimented in service to great story.  But with the door now open too many filmmakers are mistaking their visual tools for their product, not as a means of production.  Avatar is the most spectacular average story ever filmed, and is certainly paving the way for many more gigantic expressions of mediocrity.  

If you think I’m being too harsh, consider that Avatar and Dances with Wolves are essentially the same story at the archetypal level.  Their structures are nearly identical, as are their themes.  Yet watch the two and there is no question which is a great story and which is not.  I’m disappointed because Avatar could have established a new standard for visual storytelling, broadening the possibilities of the medium; instead it took something very old standard and unremarkable, wrapped it in a massive, intricate, and glitzy bow, and called it revolutionary.  A revolution means doing something that hasn’t been done before, something truly new.  Avatar puts all its creative energies into packaging the common, old, and trite.  There’s nothing revolutionary in that. 

And you know, I think I liked Sherlock Holmes even less.  Partly this is because Holmes inexplicably became more Iron Man than super slueth (only without the suit); partly it was because the resulting action/mystery balance was, well, decidedly unbalanced; partly it was because I figured out the great “mystery” of the film about ten minutes in, and I hate that.  But the whole, complete, and total reason I didn’t much enjoy Sherlock Holmes is because it never understood what story it was actually telling.  I can’t say much without giving the story away, so I’ll leave it at this: the story is about Holmes vs Holmes, but the movie thinks it’s about the audience vs the filmmaker.  Really.  The entire movie is spent trying to manipulate the emotions of the viewer through uncertainty, and the manipulation is both intellectually and emotionally obvious.  The great crisis of the film is one of belief, and that belief is Holmes’s; his perspective should have been the perspective of the audience.  If that had been so, then the audience would have travelled the difficult path the movie wanted to take them down, because the character would have been their vehicle.  (If anyone’s interested, this is an example of abused point of view.)  Instead, the film feels schizophrenic and dishonest, trying to force the audience along a different path from the characters while claiming a joint journey.  In many ways, it’s a mess.  An entertaining mess sometimes (it does have Robert Downey Jr. in it, after all), but those moments of cohesion and pleasure are spaced out by all the instances where the film completely forgets its own story and goes places it had no business going by pathways better left untaken.  If you’re interested in an example of undisciplined and rhetorically mediocre storytelling in spite of strong moments of material, then Sherlock Holmes is something you should probably see.  If you’re just looking for a good time, read Doyle’s stories or watch Basil Rathbone or Jeremy Brett, because you can do much better than this movie.