When you kinda hate the hero...
...and you kinda like the movie. Case in point: Bad Santa. Wow, Billy Bob can't get much grosser. And yet, you leave the movie feeling pretty darn fuzzy. And I watched it on a hot August afternoon, so it's not just tapping into Christmas hoo-ha. What gives?
The answer is painfully simple, but I think it's a lesson worth articulating. (If this is obvious to you, remember that sometimes we need to be reminded of even the obvious things.) I liked Bad Santa because of the little kid. The kid is... well, just about the sweetest kid I've ever seen on screen. This kid makes Haley Joel Osment look like Christopher Walken. Or something.
But it's not simply that the kid is sweet, and that we care about him. The really important thing is that the kid is innocent. The kid is the only thing that makes the world of this movie tolerable, because the kid's existence suggests innocence and goodness are still possible in this world. Which means, it's possible our hero's heart might grow three sizes one day.
The lesson? The hero can be anything you want, if the characters around him are well chosen. For a current example, see Lord of War.
...and you kinda like the movie. Case in point: Bad Santa. Wow, Billy Bob can't get much grosser. And yet, you leave the movie feeling pretty darn fuzzy. And I watched it on a hot August afternoon, so it's not just tapping into Christmas hoo-ha. What gives?
The answer is painfully simple, but I think it's a lesson worth articulating. (If this is obvious to you, remember that sometimes we need to be reminded of even the obvious things.) I liked Bad Santa because of the little kid. The kid is... well, just about the sweetest kid I've ever seen on screen. This kid makes Haley Joel Osment look like Christopher Walken. Or something.
But it's not simply that the kid is sweet, and that we care about him. The really important thing is that the kid is innocent. The kid is the only thing that makes the world of this movie tolerable, because the kid's existence suggests innocence and goodness are still possible in this world. Which means, it's possible our hero's heart might grow three sizes one day.
The lesson? The hero can be anything you want, if the characters around him are well chosen. For a current example, see Lord of War.
posted by Jennica at 4:29 p.m.
2 Comments:
Aside: Can you explain why all the voiceover in Lord of War works, when usually that much of it would be instant death for just about any movie? It wasn't particularly well-written in and of itself, I don't think.
Actually, it would be cool to know how that movie works in any way dramatically.
I'm wondering if the reason it works is because it works against what we normally think of as good v.o. Instead of, say, bringing us closer to the character, this voice over makes it easy to hold him at a distance, which supports the story's indictment of the character. If Lord of War had had no voice over, and we'd just seen what Yuri was *doing*, there would have been room for our interpretation. But Yuri out and out tells us what he's doing, and why, and doesn't apologize. The film allows for no defense of his actions. It creates an immediacy that makes it so we can't look away.
Among other strange and brave things.
This is a great segue into the next thing I want to write about... the painful v.o. in Little Black Book.
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