I like to know how things work. I like taking something apart and figuring out how to put it back together, with new knowledge or why it works. I want to understand how something works and why it works the way it does and usually the best way to do that is to take it apart, examine each individual part, figure out what that one part does and how all those parts fit together, then rebuild it so that it works again, because if it doesn't then that means you've missed something and don't fully grasp how it works at all. Blame it on Lego and K'nex I had when I was a kid, I guess, but I rarely, if ever, consider it a bad thing to want to understand why something works the way it does.
However, movies are probably the one thing I wish I didn't dissect, trying to piece together what works in a film and what doesn't, because now every film I watch is something I'm constantly thinking about and dismantling in my head, which is bad since a key part of how film works is that you don't actively think about it, you experience it. Films work their best when you're free to watch and listen and not think, because thinking brings you out of the film and back into reality, and it's pretty hard to sell another reality when you're still in this one.
This isn't to say I don't want to understand film, or that the knowledge I have of film is something that leads to me enjoying films less than I used to be able to, which just isn't true. But it does mean that there isn't as much magic in movies as there used to be, a point I've been reminded of when I read Film Nerd 2.0 today, which is a blog where a father details how certain movies he shows his sons go over with the younger crowd, kids unaware of things like genre conventions or foreshadowing. It's really entertaining to read about how these kids react in ways that filmgoing adults simply can't anymore, thanks to years of experience with film and television that grants us incredible insight into the inner workings of character and plot, even if you don't actively think about it you can still recognize patterns when you see them.
What got me back to writing in my blog was reading these kids going through Star Wars for the first time, and due to the way his blog is setup I can't just link to the first entry in Facebook and expect you to be able to read them all, cause he's also a film critic so he's got mountains of other things to read that need to be sorted through to find these entries. So I figured I'd collect them here and expand on some of my own reactions reading, well, their reactions.
First up, A New Hope, aka the first Star Wars, which is naturally followed up by The Empire Strikes Back. However, the next film he chooses to show his kids is The Phantom Menace, which is an interesting choice but makes perfect sense when you think about it for a moment, as that allows Attack of the Clones much better impact and importance than it would have had without calling back on the original movies, and makes the darker aspects of Revenge of the Sith work beautifully to contrast the grand finale of Return of the Jedi.
I love the energy and enthusiasm that these two kids show for Star Wars, because it's a kind of energy that I simply can't muster for the series myself. The prequels are bad films, straight up not worth the time it takes to watch them, and the originals are great but don't hold the same kind of power they had over me when I was a kid because now I can't see it as more than a series of technical achievements. This line was delivered nicely, that scene had great lighting, that set must have cost a small fortune, that was a bad FX even in '77 but I can understand why they'd keep it if they didn't have enough time or money to replace it. The Star Wars movies have lost their magic to me, and while I can appreciate them in other ways now, I can't see them with fresh eyes anymore.
This isn't to say I can't be captured by movies at all, basically everything by Pixar is able to grab me and take me away from this mundane reality, but after seeing the same old tricks done over and over again I can't help but get distracted at some point and start trying to peel away at the edges of the screen, looking for that shot where he's got a cigar in his mouth but switch camera's and it's suddenly in his hand, or that fight scene where it's obvious that kick didn't connect but they used the camera to hide that from us and added a kick sound effect so we wouldn't notice, or how blatantly racist early Disney movies are when you step back a little and think about what they're actually singing during that swinging jazz number.
I don't regret in the slightest knowing how things work behind a camera... but if I was given the chance to give up that knowledge, I'd have to think about it for a bit.
No comments:
Post a Comment