The Expos

6 October, 2011

They're called the Expos cause they
got some splainin to do. 
Exposition, that is.

The KEY to exposition is to make your audience want to know the information you're trying to tell them. Sounds easy enough.

Here are some strategies.

1. The Mystery

The Matrix's first 30 or so minutes is basically a mystery. We know that Trinity and Agent Smith can jump impossibly high, and then she sorta vanishes some how. Then there's the "bugging," and the mouth closing over. Basically there's a bunch of things that are impossible in the real world. Then we have Neo mention, and wonder aloud about what the matrix is. The audience is along with Neo as he's trying to figure out what the Matrix is. So when we have that set piece where Morpheus directly explains what the Matrix is, it's mind blowing instead of dull exposition.
You take the Red Pill, then I explain a bunch of crap to you.

The Thirteenth Floor, which is a very similar movie from the same year uses the same thing. Except they use the mystery as almost the entire plot.

Instead of coming right out to the audience and saying "Okay, so this movie is set in the year 1995 and there are wizards." You can have little hints about the fact that wizards or magic exists and then the main character and the audience are looking for clues about what's going on.

What's he standing on?
The mystery plot is overdone in sci-fi and stories set in the future. For example, the Will Smith I, Robot film is entirely based on a murder mystery. The founder of US Robotics, James Cromwell, perhaps jumped to his death. Will Smith thinks it's murder and is suspicious of all robots. So you go along with Will Smith as he suspects a robot, then a broader plot, and then a robot takeover of the planet. He follows hints left by James Cromwell. Ultimately it turns out that the giant AI running the robots and the city infrastructure decides to takeover the world in order to prevent human deaths from wars and pollution and such. And James Cromwell wanted to stop it, so he commanded a robot to kill him, and then left these hints for one specific detective to follow so he can stop the AI from taking over the world. But...wait a second. Why have yourself killed to leave cryptic hints? Why not just call him up and tell him what's up? Or, since he's the founder of US Robotics, and works in the same building as the evil AI...why doesn't he just destroy the AI like he vicariously gets Will Smith to do? It really doesn't make sense if you think about it. The screenwriter decided it would work better if there was a mystery angle and didn't bother to make Cromwell's actions realistic or logical.

2. The Lay Person

A long time ago, in a galaxy far away...they had these laser
sword things and they went all WOOSH and were awesome.
Make a character not know the exposition either. Luke Skywalker doesn't know much about the force, and neither does the audience. Then it makes sense to have someone explain it to them. See many other movies.

3. The Info Dump

Lord of the Rings and Star Wars are pretty big fans of this. Just throw a ton of information at the audience right off the bat. Make them read if you want to. This is the laziest and least dramatic way to do it. However, it can be effective for delivering a lot of information quickly and therefore getting the story moving faster.

4. Small Talk

"Hey Timothy Johnson, how are you doing since your son, Chris, died five years ago. I bet that's been hard to get over. How is your wife, Cindy, handling it?"

This happens far too often in films. You can adeptly deliver exposition through conversation, but it takes some finesse, other wise a lot of the audience will immediately see right through it.

5. The Expostion Device

Nice head. Too bad it got blown off. I mean...oral sex. 
Starship Troopers uses the fake propaganda videos to deliver information quickly. The beginning of Tropic Thunder shows a fake trailer for a movie starring each of the main characters, thus establishing each character and their acting persona very very quickly and it's funny. Get Him to the Greek uses a similar device, a music video for Russell Brand's musician character. Children of Men uses a news report about the death of the world's youngest person, an 18 year old, to very quickly establish that there are no kids being born.

6. Bad Narration

(V.O.) And then I pointed my gun at him and
made a squinty, wrinkled brow look to show
him I meant business.
The use of a voice over at the beginning or peppered throughout is the favorite tactic of meddling studio execs trying to ruin a film. They thought Blade Runner needed a poorly worded voice over to make it make sense. They thought Dark City's mystery plot was too confusing so they just had Kiefer Sutherland deliver a short narration at the beginning that gives away most of the mystery plot, thus leaving the audience watching the main character stumble around in the dark trying to figure out the mystery that the voice over just gave away. Not all voice overs are bad, but it's usually a bad sign.

7. The Status Quo Beat

One of the most popular ways to deliver exposition is to have a 10-15 minute sequence at the beginning of the film, showing the main character in action doing what they do, prior to the real inciting incident. In Raiders of the Lost Ark, we get to see Indiana on a mission, running from the big-ass ball, and then he goes back to being a teacher. Then the real plot begins. We've established his character by showing him in action. Minority Report (another Spielberg flick) does the same thing. We see Pre-Crime in action for a quick mission, establishing the characters, the setting, Pre-crime and how it works, and all while on an otherwise meaningless mission that has nothing to do with the real plot. That starts right after we've set up the status quo. Gladiator also uses this method. There's a quick battle that has nothing to do with the bigger plot, but establishes Maximus as a badass.


Before we get to the plot, first we have to show
the audience how this cool Operating System works. 
So if you have a lot of information to deliver, you are probably going to use one of these. Your situation dictates your choices to some extent. If you have no lay-persons that need things explained to them, then that's obviously out. The info dump, the small talk, and the bad narration approaches are the laziest. Unless you really know what you're doing, I'd advise against them. That just leaves the Mystery, the Device, and the Status Quo beat. Mystery works well, but does take up plot time, so if you have a more complicated plot in mind, perhaps the exposition shouldn't dominate the first bit of plot time. The Expo device is one of my favorite, but you need to find a way to make it original or to have it not be so transparently exposition. The Status quo beat is one of the safest ways of doing it. You give us the setting, the main character, lay down some rules for how this universe works, but without the pressure of having to get to the big plot just yet. It forces you to find something actiony for the characters to do, and that's basically the candy to help the medicine go down. Exposition is the medicine. Don't forget that, the audience doesn't like it. They're like dogs, you gotta hide it in their food.

Snoretoberfest: Or Why You Aren't Watching the MLB Post-season

6 October, 2011

I know what I'm watching. 
On Monday Night, sports fans had the option of watching the Tigers-Yankees ALDS Game 3 (with the series tied at 1-1), OR the Colts-Bucs Monday night game sans Peyton Manning. This should be a no-brainer, playoff game or a early season matchup between a basement dweller and an up and comer from a small market and few marquee players. So how do you think the ratings went?

MNF = 10.84 million viewers
MLB Playoff game = 6.05 million viewers.

Source

This discrepancy is a very big deal. Common sense would tell you that a playoff game following a grueling season featuring two teams from big markets and plenty of star power should completely destroy an early season matchup without much star power at all. The biggest draw in the football game was Peyton Manning in the booth.

So why does nobody give a shit about the MLB playoffs?


1. Baseball is Boring


Okay, before I get death threats, let me be clear. I believe that almost ANY sport can be incredibly entertaining if you get invested in it enough. If you're raised playing it, watching it, with a favorite team, you know all the intricacies, and you can really understand the minutae of the game, then it's going to be more interesting to you than some sport you've never seen before. This is true of all sports. My point is that when you throw a baseball game on the tube in front of a lay person, it's not going to excite them as other sports they are also unfamiliar with would.

Imagine we take Borat and tie him to a chair and give him a remote and the only things on TV are Baseball, Football, Futbol, Hockey, Basketball, etc. He's gonna settle on Football or Hockey. Those sports can be quite exciting even if you don't really know what's going on. The problem with basketball is that scores are so frequent they seem practically meaningless until the endgame. Futbol and baseball are the opposite. There's so much inaction (come on Soccer fans, don't tell me 90 minutes of light jogging is non-stop action) that you'll fall asleep if you aren't invested in the outcome. Maybe baseball would be alright if a game only took 80 minutes. But if I'm gonna invest 3 1/2 hours in a game, it's gonna be football.
Non-stop Action

The biggest thing about baseball is the pitcher/batter duel. Yet to the lay person, this duel is practically incomprehensible. They can understand how many balls or strikes you need, but aren't going to get anything out of pitch selection. Kids these days can't even sit through a movie without texting. Don't underestimate the power of being attention grabbing.

Baseball simply isn't the top sport in America, it's football and by a longshot.

2. The Playoff Format Sucks


In the NFL, you play 16 regular season games, then in the playoffs it's one-and-done. No best of 3 or 5 or 7. One game decides who moves on. That means that the quickest you can be eliminated is after playing a postseason 1/16th the length of the regular season.

In MLB, you play 162 regular season games, then the first playoff series is best of 5. If you lose the first 3, you're done. So that means the quickest you can be eliminated is after a post-season  that's 1/54th as long as the regular season.

See the problem? The NFL equivalence of the MLB playoffs would go like this:

World Series Champion
You go 13-3, ensure a first round bye. Then you host a 10-6 team. The first quarter is a disaster, with three turnovers. With 12 minutes to go in the second quarter, you trail 21-0. If this were baseball, that's it, game over, your season is done. 17 minutes is equal to 1/54th the length of the regular season. Even if it's a close game, you gotta call it by halftime, because that's the equivalence of the series going to a full 5 games.

How about comparing it to NHL which has an 82 game season and starts the playoffs with a best of 7 series. If the NHL had a playoffs just as short relative to the season as MLB did, then you'd call the series with 10 minutes to go in the 2nd period of Game 3.

MLB has such a long season. Just think about investing yourself in 162 games, winning your division, having the best record in baseball, and then losing 3 in the row and the year is over. Or even just losing 3 of 5.

That's two balls and one strike. 
This might make sense in other sports, but Baseball is the worst sport to have this problem. There's a saying in baseball that "Every team is gonna win 54 games, every team is gonna lose 54 games, it's what you do with the other 54 games that counts." If you wanna narrow it down to decent teams that have a shot at the playoffs, then you could make the saying "every team is gonna win 82 games, lose 55 games, it's what you do with the other 27 games that counts. That's it. The difference between the best team in baseball, and a mediocre team that was barely in the playoff hunt is just 27 games spread over 6 months.

Baseball is a sport of averages, likelihoods, and it only works right if you have a large sample size. It's the one sport that really makes sense to have such a long season. And it's the sport that makes sense to have the longest playoffs. And yet it has by far the SHORTEST playoffs of the major American sports.

The quickest you can win the WS is in a playoffs that's 6.8% the length of the regular season. The quickest you can win the SB is in 18.8% the length of the regular season. The longest the playoffs can take would be 11.7% for baseball and 25% for football.

3. The Regular Season is Almost Meaningless. 

Yeah, the regular season doesn't mean anything. 
There's so much talk about "diluting the regular season" in college football if you bring up a playoff system. Since your regular season is only 11-13 games, in order to have a shot at the title, you need to win them all, or maybe you can get away with 1 loss. This means that every single game has meaning.

Baseball is the exact opposite. There are so many regular season games that you can easily lose the first 20 games and to end the season at .500 you just gotta go 82-62 the rest of the way, or go .570, which isn't that significant a hole to climb out of. By September, most people are burnt out on baseball, especially the ones whose teams aren't gonna play in October. Contrast this with NFL fans. Even if their team sucked up the joint, they're not gonna miss the Super Bowl.

Let's look at it another way. In the NFL, you know your team is going to have to win 12 games to guarantee a playoff spot (as 11-5 teams have missed the playoffs), or if you wanna play the odds a bit, let's say 11 wins is enough to guarantee a playoff birth (4 teams in the last 4 years have won 10 or 11 games and missed the playoffs).

So you need to win 11, and you can't lose more than 5. That means that losing the first game of the season can get you 20% of the way to too many losses to control your destiny. Winning any game gets you another 11th of the way to the playoffs. Losing any game gets you a fifth of the way closer to staying home in January.

I call this one the Castigator
In the last 6 years, the best team to miss the MLB playoffs was the 2005 Indians, who went 93-69 but missed the big show. So let's say that guaranteeing a playoff berth requires 94 wins, or no more than 68 losses.

Winning any one game gets you 1/94th of the way to the playoffs, and losing any one game gets you 1/68th of the way closer to staying home. That's how utterly unimportant regular season games are individually. So think about this. You're asking teams to go 162 games where the stakes are that a loss gets you 1/68th of the way closer to missing the playoffs, THEN you ask them to play games where a loss gets them 1/3rd of the way closer to ending their season.

The regular season is far too diluted in meaning, and then they try to make up for it by giving a shortened playoff and that makes the games somehow mean "too much."

Using the same metrics, NFL postseason games are 5 times more important than regular season games. MLB postseason games are  22.6 times more important than regular season games. So that means that a single MLB playoff game is just as important as the month of April.


4. How Playoffs should be done


The Stanley Cup Playoffs are the greatest 6 weeks of sports anywhere. You start with 16 teams. You need to win 4 best-of-7 series to win the cup. Teams come in as a roster of professionals. By the end of the Cup Finals, you're looking at two teams of Brothers who've just completed an epic quest. These two teams spent 82 games trying to get in, then they spent up to 25 games battling for their playoff lives. That's like playing another 30% of the regular season where every game is extremely important. The longest the MLB playoffs can go is 19 games, but compare that to a 162 game season, and that's only 11.7%. That's why Hockey players look completely spent after the finals. They've just spent every ounce of energy, sacrificed their bodies, taken slap shots to the face, lost teeth, bleed all over the ice, and come back for more. Man I'm glad Hockey's back.

Villains: Or How I Learned To Stop Thinking And Just Hate The Bad Guy

5 October, 2011

So I finally got around to watching both Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. I'm not a big fan of comic-book movies for a number of reasons, but my man crush for Christian Bale along with Inception were plenty enough motivation for me to see what I was missing.

Ninjas
Wat.


Cool Shit/Plot
Christopher Nolan makes pretty soulless films that are way more about plot points and "cool" things than they are really about characters. I mean, honestly he never lets two chracters stay in a scene and just talk for more than 20 seconds. They never start to feel like people to me. That's okay, it can work, just as long as you pack in enough cool shit and awesome plot points.

There's no Cat button...Defrost?
So the whole microwave weapon in Batman Begins was just ridiculous. Maybe in a film where the cool shit wasn't the whole fucking idea could you get away with this. Basically the bad guy has pumped a chemical into the whole water supply that makes you go fucking crazy, BUT you have to inhale it, drinking it won't do. So it's in the water supply...I don't get it. And neither does Batman, until PLOT TWIST!, the bad guys manage to steal a microwave weapon that will vaporize watery things for miles around. Basically it's an inside-out microwave oven. Hey, wait a second, aren't people mostly made of water? Shouldn't this just nuke the shit out of everyone? No? Oh okay, I guess your plot points don't need logic. Why don't they just rent a plane and spray the shit over the city? Seems a lot easier than infiltrating the water supply then stealing a secret military weapon and then microwaving the whole city...

In The Dark Knight, Batman takes a bullet hole in a wall, not even the shattered bits of the bullet, then takes this hole and runs computer simulations to reconstruct what the bullet was like that created the hole. I suppose this could work to determine what kind of bullet or gun caused it, but no. Batman's computer model gives him a fingerprint on the bullet. That's right, he finds a hole in a wall and his computer back-engineers that into a fingerprint that was on the bullet. Do I need to explain how completely non-sensical this is. I thought the whole idea was that this was supposed to be the gritty-realistic Batman...Not bad CSI Batman. It's supposed to be just an awesome technology. Batman has several of these and they make sense, none of them are magic, they have a grounding in reality. But this idea that you could take a bullet hole and recreate a finger print that was on the shattered bullet is ridiculous and will never be possible.

Physics Lesson
Batman saves Maggie Gyllenhall from falling to her death by grabbing her and holding her as they both slam into a parked car. I guess Batman's suit spreads the forces out over his body and that somehow cushions the blow. It doesnt' really make a lot of sense, but fine. However, Maggie is just landing on him landing on a car. Think about it this way, how are the forces acting on her any different if he's holding her or not. Either way she's decellerating from free fall speed to stopped. Either way it's like running into a brick wall at 60 mph, are you telling me Batman's moobs act like airbags?

This is one example of an epidemic in Hollywood, the magic grabbing/holding effect. Falling a huge distance is fine as long as someone holds on to you. How often do we see Spiderman or Superman or other super heroes chase after someone who is falling, only to bring them to a dead stop by grabbing them just shy of slamming into concrete. Phew. Wait a second...Why is it bad to crash into pavement at 100 mph? Because you stop suddenly. It's the acceleration that hurts, not the fact that it's concrete. So when superman grabs you and stops you just inches from the ground, you're telling the audience that his arms are somehow super cushiony. If he really did it, it'd be like jumping fifteen stories onto steel girders shaped like arms. Bet they'll catch you all cushiony.

Or how about in The Matrix Reloaded, where Morpheus and the Key Maker are on the back of the semi truck as it is about to crash head first into another semitruck. Morpheus is all like, hey Neo, come on and save us. So the trucks crash together and the worst thing that will happen is they will fly over the crashed trucks at about 70-80 mph, then land on pavement and slide to a stop (or be blasted by the truck explosion). Instead of that, Neo flies in at hundreds if not thousands of miles per hour, grabs them and carries them to safety. Imagine standing on the street, minding your own business, when an airplane flies by and yanks you by your shirt collar and you instantly go from zero to 500 mph. More likely, you're head would snap back so hard it'd fall off. This is what Neo does to Morpheus rather than let him skid to a stop from 70 on pavement, he yanks him to an instant 500 mph.


The Over-the-top Bad Guy
When creating a villian, there are three main ideas.

1. The Completely Evil Bad Guy
Give him an evil sounding name and have his goals simply be super evil. He has no depth, and his name sounds something like Modkrod, Sauron, Voldemort, Vader, Sidious, General Grievous, Captian Bone-to-pick, or Admiral I'm a bad guy.

2. A villain that has different goals from the main character, but also isn't just evil for evil's sake, they see things differently. Sometimes they're simply a competitor who selfishly wants the same thing the MC is after. Other times their different world views are the source of their differences. For example, In the Matrix, Agent Smith sees humans as a virus or a disease, as an AI, he sees things differently. Although what his goals really are is kind of up in the air, so that makes him more like a Category 1 bad guy. Another example would be Se7en, where the bad guy is a sort of religious nut who thinks that he's going to put the fear of god back into people and make them live more piously, and thus he thinks he's probably saving souls by doing the evil things he is doing. See how much better that is than Sauron or Voldemort simply being evil looking,sounding guys that want power..

3. The Villain with the same goals as the MC.
If the Villain and the MC want the same things, suddenly there's a lot more depth here. The real disagreement isn't over the goal, it's about how far you're willing to go to accomplish it. The Bad guys are of the "The ends justifies the means" crowd, while the MC has some super-moral code they adhere to and will fight against their own goal because the bad guy is willing to go to far to get it.

In Minority Report, the bad guy is willing to kill in order to keep Pre-Crime running, because on the whole, it saves many more lives. The Main Character thinks murder is always wrong and ultimately fights to dismantle pre-crime. So at the end of the film, Pre-Crime is ended...thus returning us to a world with murder...Thanks Tom Cruise for getting rid of future-seeing cops that stop murders before they happen.


Another example, is the film Surrogates. In this world, everyone is a fat-ass shut-in who lives vicariously through a robot that looks like a super sexy version of them that goes out in the world. Bruce Willis is a cop who uses a surrogate at the beginning but is sick of the things and wants to live in the real world again, his wife however is obsessed with her perfect image and doesn't want to return to being an imperfect meatbag. The bad guy is James Cromwell, the guy who invented surrogates in the first place. He decides that his invention has ruined society and turned all of the users into people that are dead inside. So his plan is to unleash a virus that kills everyone using a surrogate, thus returning the world to normal. So Bruce Willis and James Cromwell both want people to return to the real world and abandon these perfect robot surrogates. So at the end, the virus is downloading that will kill all people attached to a surrogate. Bruce Willis is trying to stop it, and he stops it, keeping everyone alive, but then he has to press another button to stop the virus from destroying the surrogates (but without killing the people attached to them) he decides to let the virus go and blow up the surrogates. So then we cut to the street where all the surrogates suddenly go limp. And the world returns to normal thanks to Bruce Willis not stopping the virus totally. The End.

But wait...If Bruce Willis modified the virus from something that kills billions of people, into one that just destroys surrogates and doesn't harm a single person with a few keystrokes...couldn't Cromwell have just made a virus that didn't kill everyone in the first place. See what I'm getting at. The bad guy wants to stop people from using surrogates. He's also the president of the surrogate company. He has the power to destroy all surrogates, and stop building new ones, thus stopping the use of surrogates. INSTEAD of doing that, he tries to kill billions of people and writes it off as "they're already dead." Oh okay. Thanks for giving us an ethical dillemma by being completely over the top evil.

When the MC and Antagonist only disagree on how far you should go to accomplish your goal, you need to make both of their views make sense in order to create an actual ethical dillemma. In Minority Report, the bad guy actually seems to be in the right, because the ends seems to really justify the means. Killing one or a few people in order to prevent thousands of murders seems like a fair trade. So that leaves the main character as making a stupid stand to destroy something good because they can't see the big picture. OR they go the other way and make the villain just go completely over the top in how far they are willing to go.



So in Batman Begins, Liam Neeson and Batman both want justice and to punish bad guys. Batman thinks you should do this by enforcing the law, let the courts and prisons do the punishment, he's no executioner. So you'd think the counter point would be another vigilante who will just kill bad guys and not bother with the justice system, the problem is that there's no oversight, how do you know you're killing really bad guys for sure? no trial, no jury, etc. It creates a real ethical dilemma. Maybe Liam accidentally kills a handful of innocent people, and Batman then has a dillemma: do you allow Liam Neeson to keep being a vigilante who enforces justice but also makes mistakes sometimes? Instead of that, Liam Neeson wants to give everyone in the city crazy juice and then let all the bad guys out of jail in order to create total chaos and destroy the city so that it becomes a symbol or something.

His way of creating justice is to DESTROY AN ENTIRE CITY. How logical.

To make the villian with similar goals work, you need to set up both of their positions as logical, that way there is actually a dilemma to be had.

In Fight Club, Tyler Durden serves as a mentor for Ed Norton in teaching him to not care about material possessions or his job, to free him from this empty consumerist lifestyle. Then Tyler creates Project Mayhem and starts freeing others. They both are in agreement about the fact that this modern life is empty, meaningless, misleading, and needs to be stopped. At the end Tyler wants to blow up the buildings of credit card companies, thus erasing the debt record and putting everyone back to zero, thus enabling millions of others to join them in this movement. Ed Norton tries to stop them, first off he objects to the fact that they would be killing people, but Tyler points out that all of the people in the buildings are their people, so nobody will be killed. Ed Norton still wants to stop it. So here's the difference between them. Honestly I gotta say I'm with Tyler on this one, but the difference between their positions isn't nearly as far apart as in Surrogates. This way you don't see either of them as being irrational, but holding equal positions. Thus it's a real dilemma for the characters, and for the audience as well.

In Apocalypse Now, the real conflict is about whether a war should be fought according to rules, with R&R, barbecues, rules of engagement, etc. OR if you should just go ahead and do whatever it takes to win and end the thing. Kurtz thinks if you're going to fight a war, then take the gloves off and actually fight it. The main character is on the side of the Army, who wants to keep the public image good to keep the war going, so they want to stop Kurtz. The Army gives Willard the assignment to stop Kurtz. So here's Willard's dilemma. Do you assassinate Kurtz, the guy who the Army says is going too far, but in accomplishing your goal you will have yourself actually gone beyond what people in the Army are supposed to do. OR do you join him in his quest to actually win the war? Again, it's a real dilemma, it's something that the MC has to think about and so does the audience.

In The Dark Knight, rather than trying the Villain with similar goals, they go back to Villain #1, General Mayhem, I mean, The Joker, who is so evil that he even burns money! Gasp! A villain that destroys money!? How do you understand someone like that, they can't be understood they are just pure evil! The problem with this kind of villain is that they have no depth, they're just really bad. What's the Joker's goal? To just watch the world burn? Really? That's all we got? And to make him even more like a real person, let's give him the magical power to plan ahead incredibly. There's the egg-timer window thing, which would require such precise timing to make it work that it's nearly impossible. Then the whole chase thing where he actually wanted to get captured. I.E. the nonsensical plot twist. He just has planned fifteen steps ahead and whenever he's in a jam he's happened to have planted a bomb in the perfect place to get him out of a jam. Basically this is a Wizard or a character from Fantasy that can make shit up to get out of a jam, but instead of saying he has some magic power or something, there is no explanation, he's just that bad...Cool, thanks.


Batman's Voice
So whenever Bruce puts the suit on, he talks in a super deep scary voice. That's fine, he's masking his voice so people can't figure out who he is. Makes sense. Up until he starts interacting with people who know his real identity, but he keeps using that voice anyway. Suddenly he's talking to the girl and dressed as a bat and talking in a fake deep voice. At this point he just looks like an idiot.


Closing Thoughts
I enjoyed these films as a gritty more realistic take on the superhero film, but I feel like sometimes they go to far in trying to make cool things, and when it comes to villains have avoided subtlety at all costs. If they want the series to really go anywhere, they better come up with a villain that isn't so ridiculous. Apparently Liam Neeson is coming back as the villain for The Dark Knight Rises, even though he died at the end of Batman Begins. Supposedly he's Ra's al Ghul, which wikipedia tells me is a sort of immortal assassin whose goal is to save the planet from evil human pollution. Rather than going all Al Gore on everybody and trying to spread awareness and invent green technology, his method is to kill lots of people as a way of reducing our carbon footprint. Sounds like we're gonna have a real ethical dillema on our hands with this guy...

MoneyBalls (Angelina's nickname for the Pittster): Aaron Sorkin's trilogy

4 October, 2011

P Diddy's basketball
With Moneyball, Aaron Sorkin has completed a trilogy of character films that also included Charlie Wilson's War and The Social Network. All three films have a lot in common: they're about public/powerful/real men and each man can be defined by irony. These films also share a lot of similar storytelling devices.

Charlie Wilson is a forgettable congressman, mired in coke and whore scandals, and yet he manages to create the Soviet-Afghan war behind closed doors through unlikely deals. Not the president, just a low-rank congressman.

The Social Network is about the Zuck and how he created/stole Facebook and alienated or took advantage of everyone close to him. The creator of the most used social network in the world actually says out loud in the film "I don't want friends."

Billy Beane was a highly-touted prospect, a pretty face that could do it all and was drafted in the first round. He fails hard and ends up working as a scout and works his way up to the job of GM where he totally changes the way GMs evaluate talent, turning away from the pretty-boy 5-tool players and instead looking for the "island of misfit toys."

Let's put this guy in a movie
about baseball statistics.
So you can see, at the heart of each film is a simple conceit: the main character is living irony. This is important when writing a film. Even if you're making a simple bio-pic, you need a conceit or a "guiding principle" as Truby would call it. Once you know this conceit, or the irony of the character in Sorkin's case, then you can see the plot unfold much more clearly.

The second story-telling device that dominates these films is the dichotomy of the main character's goal and dream. The goal is what the character is actively after, an immediate and tangible action/event/result. The dream is more elusive, bigger-picture. It's the difference between trying to get into a good college and wanting to have a successful career. The difference between the dream and the goal is where you'll find the endings to Sorkin's films.

In so many scripts and movies, you'll find characters with no dreams, only goals. It can still work, but usually it makes for a lousy ending. Endings often come down to simply, "did they accomplish their goal or not?" Did he get the girl or not? Did he save his wife or not? Did they win the championship or not? Good endings are much less about winning the game, and more about whether or not they achieved the dream. In The Matrix, Neo's goal is to save Morpheus, but he accomplishes his dream of becoming The One.  Tell me what's his dream in the 2nd film...

Charlie Wilson's goals are all about getting money from congress to fund the Afghan resistance, buying weapons with that money, and getting the weapons in their hands. The larger goal is to fight off the Soviets. Charlie's dream however is to turn Afghanistan around, turn it into a decent country that will succeed rather than one that scumbags and terrorists will recruit from and take advantage of. Charlie accomplishes his goals, but at the end of the film, with the Soviets defeated, can get absolutely no support to rebuild the infrastructure of Afghanistan, leaving the freedom fighters he helped train to wait around a few years before they cause 9/11. It's a bittersweet ending that causes us to reexamine our priorities and look at how the US continues to act.

What about 257 friends?
Zuckerberg's goals are all related to making Facebook, making it more successful, and so on. His dream however, is to get that girl back that he had at the beginning of the film, and more broadly speaking, to connect with people as true friends/lovers. But the harder he tries to accomplish his goals, the farther away he gets from his dream. Power has its price.

Billy Beane's goal is to make the Oakland A's into a winning team, win a world series. He is constantly reminded that his team has no budget and is doing well for itself just to even make the playoffs. It's a bit like Rocky, where the goalposts are moved, rather than trying to win the fight, Rocky and the A's are just trying to prove that they belong in the ring.

Most of the way through the film, I thought Billy's goal was to make a winning team, prove they belong, and his dream was to win a world series (something I already know he's not yet to accomplish). However, as the film is beginning to wrap up, there's an odd moment where Jonah Hill, wrapped up in a big winning streak is dumbfounded by Billy's lack of enthusiasm for their success. Billy then clearly changes his goal/dream. He tells Jonah that his dream isn't to win a ring, it's to change baseball. Meaning he wants to make it so small market teams like his can compete because of his way of evaluating players.

Lazy Writer: "Then there's a smoke monster. And
everyone's all like, What!?!"
The ending of the film is based around the Red Sox offering Billy the job of GM along with a huge salary. He has a daughter that lives with his ex-wife, meaning that moving to Boston means he'll be leaving his daughter. Rather than letting his daughter be the only factor in his decision as many films would have done, Billy instead makes the decision because of his dream, to change baseball, something he couldn't do if he went to Boston where he would have had a huge payroll to work with.

If you've read my posts from last week about male and female character's, you'll already know where I'm going with this: Letting family concerns dictate character's actions is sloppy and lazy writing. A lazy writer would have had Billy stay in Oakland to be with his daughter. Aww, what a nice guy. Sorkin has him do it to accomplish his dream. How many films have you seen where the climax is all about the kids or the girl? They're almost all about that. Give your characters goals and dreams that go beyond the family and you'll hit a home run. Metaphorically speaking. It'd be weird if you literally hit a home run. Just like if the A's won a World Series.

TV: Where Everything Dies Without Dignity

October 3, 2011

But George, I love That 70s Show.
TV networks are like Lennie from Of Mice and Men, they find precious shows and hold on to them so tightly they turn into a fine paste (which they spoon feed idiots for a few extra years).

TV show success is defined by a Favrian lack of self-awareness, an unwillingness to step out of the lime-light long after it's turned into a lemon-light, a golden shower of shark-jumping, fridge-nuking sub-mediocrity that all but undoes any legacy that may have existed.

I don't need to spell out all the shows that have made the celebrated shark-jump. Instead, I'll focus on a few good shows that illustrate the fall from grace.


The Office
Assistant (to the) General Manager
The British Office was like a mini-series. It still exists in the ether as a completed work with a beginning, middle, and end. In America, we prefer to keep our shows around long enough to ruin everything that we liked about them. Now into season 9, the "will they or won't they?" plot that drove the UK version and early seasons in the US and provided just about the only storyline that was properly dramatic--powerful, yet painfully realistic--has been replaced by a tedious child-raising story.

We can't let our characters exit gracefully, no, we want to see them grow old and boring, raising kids, paying mortgages, saving enough for retirement. Some will say it's a mirror on the audience and somehow that makes it a worthy story. Simply being realistic doesn't make a story worth telling. It's almost as if Jim and Pam are relatives we all share, the cute and funny cousins that we remember fondly. It reminds me of numerous Sci-fi stories where people have implanted memories they all share but think are their own.

They tried to replace Jim and Pam's unrequited romance with several other romances, but none of them had anywhere near the same effect since they involved comedic relief characters who we don't easily attribute actual emotions to.

Better get the kids to soccer practice,
mr. single father; I just don't know how he does it!
Dexter
Don't get me wrong, I really like Dexter and am eagerly anticipating this season. The problem with Dexter is actually its greatest strength...Dexter is movie like in a lot of ways. Each season could really be trimmed down into a 2-3 hour movie and it would work pretty well. See,  movies have to be about the most important events in a character's life. TV is more about maintaining the status quo and getting the most out of the situation. Movies are life-altering events. That's why it's hard to really have film-like shows, you're going to run out of life-changing events that don't feel artificial.

Let's look at Debra Morgan as an example. (spoilers ahead). Deb's brother is a serial killer with a heart of gold. So of course her life is going to be a bit odd. She falls in love with and nearly marries a serial killer who tries to kill her. Then she falls in love with a serial killer-hunter, only for him to be murdered in front of her (and she was shot herself) by a serial killer.  She falls in love with a guy who is kidnapped and tortured by a serial killer but survives. Then she has to help her serial killer brother raise his kids after he's made a widow by a serial killer.

I mean honestly...Take any one, maybe two seasons, and you could have a believable story. But when you look at the whole series, it loses all credibility. Deb has become a serial killer pin-cushion. You just know that in the Dexter writing room this sentiment was expresed, "It's original because instead of being the target of a serial killer, this season her lover is the target."

There's a new serial killer in Miami every year, and there's never any shortage of a free killers for Dexter to hunt down. You'd think there were a thousand murders a year in Miami. It makes sense in a movie, or when you take one season at a time. Hunting a serial killer is the biggest thing these characters would do. By season 6  it's not even eye-raising. Instead of the plot being based on the hunt for this killer, we've given every minor character their own relationship sub-plot. Because that's why I watch a show about a vigilante serial killer, to see office romances play out between non-emotive cops.

I will give Dexter's writers credit for (spoiler) killing off Rita because they must have realized how tedious the family plot had become. I mean hello, I'm watching a show about a serial killer, next thing I know he's in marriage counseling opening up about his feelings and trying to connect with his teenage step-daughter.


The West Wing
I can't wait to find out which co-worker
she makes friends with benefits with.
This is my favorite TV drama of all-time, but I can't let the last few seasons off the hook. For the first 4 seasons it was a character-driven realistic look at how the president's staff lives. Wrapped up in their jobs, their social lives are practically non-existent. They measure their ups and downs with the polls and election results. It's actually a pretty difficult to explain formula. It's Aaron Sorkin, the guy that turned a story about computer programmers into The Social Network. The dialogue is smart, the plots are elegant and subtle, and ultimately all about the characters.

Once Sorkin left, the show fell victim to 24-syndrome. The plot from season 5 on was driven by kidnappings, bombs, nuclear meltdowns, classified leaks, basically any crisis that can take over a cable news channel was penciled in for a 4-5 episode stint as the "plot." So lovable characters became little more than mouthpieces for plot information.

I'm exaggerating of course, but this all could have been avoided had the show exited a little more gracefully when Sorkin, the show runner, did. It did manage a fairly graceful exit that felt like an ending as the new president takes office in the series finale (though not by choice as they planned on continuing the show).


So let's make a checklist to define shows squeezed to death.

1. Relationship sub-plots for all the characters (typically amongst existing characters that you wouldn't expect)
2. Outlandish number of coincidences
3. Plot no longer character driven
4. Transition from getting the girl/boy to tedious child rearing/marriages
5. Lack of any overall story structure (beginning, middle, end)

The exception that proves the rule is Seinfeld.

1. Unlike Friends, That 70s Show, How I Met Your Mother, and numerous other shows, they resisted the trend to have all the characters hook up at some point. In the hands of lesser writers, Elaine would have ended up in a love triangle with Jerry and either George or Kramer. Seriously.
2. This one isn't really applicable in the way it is to Dexter and dramas.
3. The plot was always driven by each character's neurosis. Never by baby-mama love-triangle drama.
4. George and Susan never make it to that point and no other character ever comes close to settling down.
5. Not really applicable since this had almost no real "drama" to it. However, they walked away gracefully and did end the series with a bang and not the whimper of cancellation.


Let's just hope that Arrested Development has the balls to avoid these mistakes.