I saw Courage & Stupidity today, a short (30 minute) independent film about Steven Spielberg making Jaws. It's shot beautifully on 35mm and the performances are great though Kahil Dotay's Richard Dreyfus veers into parody now and then. It's a real oddball. For Jaws fans, there's not enough trivia and inside jokes for it to be satisfying. For the casual viewer, the film is structurally peculiar. Scenes seem to exist for no reason and the film meanders like the tides at Martha's Vineyard. The basic idea for the story--that the greatest film menace is unseen--is not bad, but the idea is underelaborated and overplayed. The dialogue is well written and the thing looks great, but the overall effect is like watching a sequence of nice moments with no emotional or thematic core.
The other day I was thinking "why isn't there some kind of Netflix for books? Wouldn't that be great?" Then I realized--library! Duh. I was reading a bit about Orson Welles while waiting for Sean as he played Arthur's Math at the library. So I checked out the Kane DVD and watched about half of it again tonight. It's a real oddball. The film is like a montage linked with dissolves. My thinking about this kind of showy production is that its art lies in drawing attention to itself without drawing the audience out of the story. Here's my theory: If you're visually distinctive but the audience gets pulled out of the story you're an experimental filmmaker. If you're not visually distinctive then you're a traditional filmmaker. If you can do both, you're a cinematic genius. And that is the gift of people like Orson Welles, Darren Aronofsky and Michel Gondry.
2 comments:
the LA library is just like netflix because you can order books online from any branch and they will have them sent to your local branch! there was a commentary on the radio the other day about how this library thing (the whole concept of free books) would never get off the ground if it was only now proposed for the first time. lucky.
You can do that too with ILL (interlibrary loan) at school. But you have to pick up at the library. Lazy me would rather just open the mailbox.
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