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SKMDC
superkaratemonkeydeathcar
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: chicago
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2006-04-28, 16:26

Quote:
Originally Posted by Windswept
Hmm.

Your comment is interesting, SKMDC. I seem to recall various times during films when I have been led to expect something bad happening. The tension kept building up in me, and when finally nothing bad *did* happen, the effect was strangely deflating and disappointing. I felt I had been fraudulently misled by cues in the movie to feel an uncomfortable dread at impending doom... and then all my emotion proved to be falsely inspired.

I think that is unfortunate filmmaking - to mislead hapless viewers with ambiguous cues. If the filmmaker has done this UNintentionally, then I think he should have had trusted colleagues preview his film before release to help eliminate misleading effects.

If he has misled viewers *intentionally*, I think that's rather fraudulent and I would lose respect for him as a filmmaker.

Awhile back, I bought a foreign film with four or five stars on the box and notes of acclaim from various European film festivals. As I viewed it, I dutifully responded to an assortment of tension-building cues. But when the film ended and 'nothing' climactic at ALL had *happened*, I was SO annoyed. I felt like throwing the movie across the room.

"Do these people have *any* concept of plot structure?" I asked myself. Apparently they don't. Either that, or my sensibilities have been blunted in some way by constant exposure to, and expectation of, a meaningful sequence of events in films and literature.

Oh well.

*sigh*
Or perhaps the director is taking advantage of how we're conditioned to watch movies, something bad usually happens, then good triumphs over evil etc.
Here the characters (all three) are experiencing internal struggles with their loneliness, it manifests itself differently in all three, and the three of them together manage to make a whole person propping each other up. When Olivia and Finbar have a falling out they both recede as human beings, when they reconcile they become whole again, or as complete as they can be given their particular circumstances in life.
That's all this movie tries to do, show us their character development, no great breakthroughs are made, and the camera could pick up and drop down on another segment of their lives and we might not feel any different about them, but you're right, the plot takes a back seat to the study of the characters.

When Miles Davis made Kind of Blue he want to make a record where the music came at you horizontally instead of vertically like most jazz records, this movie is modal in that same sense.

"What's a Canadian farm boy to do?"
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