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Move Me With A Movie
It’s 🌎Global🎞️Movie🌍Day🌏 and I’ve had a long, exhausting week. Time to kick back and enjoy 🍿 somebody else’s creative 📽️ work for a while…
📽️ Fugetaboudit 😵
I have a very simple definition of a good movie: a good movie makes you forget you’re watching a movie. ~Michael Cimino
Yes indeed, a good movie not only makes you forget you’re watching a movie but it makes you forget that anything besides the movie exists.
That’s the great thing about seeing a movie in a movie theater. It’s incredibly immersive.
The lights go down and your full attention is on the story someone else is telling.
Of course, the bad thing about that environment is that if the movie is one of these 3+ hour epics, you’ll need to break the immersion and miss part of the movie if you don’t do your business before the thing starts.
The great thing about watching movies at home is that if you fall asleep, you can rewind the part you missed. You don’t get hissed at if you’re talking with someone about what’s going on in the movie.
Movies at home are immersive in the sense that you can enjoy the show by sharing it with your special someone. You can pause it and discuss what just happened. You can openly compare it to the book it’s based on. You can just use it as background noise while you make out.
Okay, that’s kind of like the cinema, but you don’t have to worry about somebody in your row or the one behind judging you for it.
I’ve had a long, exhausting week and I’m very much looking forward to some quality couch time with Kelly.
I wonder what we’ll watch this weekend, but I don’t wonder what we’ll have…
🧈 Butter My Popcorn, Baby 🍿
How To Make Theater Popcorn – YUM!
It’s funny how something so incredibly messy got so popular as a movie-going treat.
You get butter all over your fingers. The bits break off and get all over your chairs and clothes. It’s a complete distraction.
But it’s so tasty and it’s mostly air, so it’s a relatively healthy treat.
How Popcorn Went From Banned to Saving Movies – Cheddar Explains
The microwave has taken a bit of the fun out of making popcorn. The convenience of being able to press the Popcorn button on your microwave is great, considering how busy we always are. Way, way back when I was a kid, we had a popcorn maker with a transparent dome that doubled as a bowl.
We didn’t have funny cat videos to waste time with back then. We put some kernels in the heating basin, fastened the lid and waited for the magic to happen. The cool thing was, as the popcorn popped, you could watch it filling what would become the bowl all the way to the top.
These days, the diminishing rate of kernels popping mean that you need to run to the microwave before it burns the crap out of your popcorn.
Back then, the slowing pop of the last few kernels was a satisfying denoument to a miniature spectacle. We were more easily entertained back then…
Popcorn Original Song
Seeing Is Disbelieving
What is art but a way of seeing? ~Saul Bellow
I’ve spoken before about the concept of a willing suspension of disbelief.
People complain about being “taken out of the story” by this or that. Everybody has their hot buttons.
Some flights of fancy are simply too fantastical to permit immersion in the story to be sustained.
That’s a hard sell for me. My imagination allows me to go pretty much anywhere the story takes me.
That’s not to say I enjoy it, necessarily, just that unexpected twists don’t throw me out of the story.
I don’t believe it and neither do you.
We know we’re being told a story. We’re hoping we’ll enjoy the story or perhaps learn something from it.
Typically, being “taken out of the story” is caused by failing to deliver on your setup.
This can sometimes be a deliberate subversion of expectations. The Village by M. Night Shyamalan is a great example of this.
Spoiler Alert: This movie is almost two decades old. If you haven’t seen it by now and you don’t want it spoiled, go back up to the popcorn song or jump down to the clincher at the bottom of the post. Sheesh!
Anyway, you’re watching this thing and you’re thinking it’s some premodern fairytale horror scenario with mysterious monsters in the woods encircling this quaint village. Somebody goes through the woods and finds… now. The real world is real and these people are stuck in some kind of weird cult/social experiment. Totally didn’t see that coming, well, until I just spoiled it for you that is.
That’s a great subversion of expectations.
Jumping from genre to genre for no apparent reason is the kind of thing that would break most people’s immersion or buy-in on the premise of the story.
People like certain genres. You can play with that a little, but you can’t just jump around like a hyperactive frog in a lily pond. You need to set up some expectations and deliver on them in order to justify the buy-in.
What you can do is what the MCU has done with some of its Phase 2 and 3 works. Take the basic superhero action story (Phase 1) and fuse it with thematic subgenres to keep the stories fresh and interesting.
Whether it’s a superhero-action / comedy like Ant-Man, a superhero-action / political thriller like Captain America: Winter Soldier or a superhero-action / heist movie like Avengers: Endgame, you can take elements of another genre to give some dimension to a work that might otherwise be quite formulaic.
Of course, some people are so brittle and critical that everything throws them out of the story. If they can’t enjoy the therapeutic release of zoning out to a movie or a book, maybe they should get actual therapy. You can’t make these people happy by trying to cater to them, so don’t try.
What we need is genuine works of creative originality. We all have our own stories.
Not all of us have the skill or the desire to try to share them, but what might happen is that someone else’s story is so similar to the story in our own heads and hearts that it totally clicks with us.
The concept that there’s a lid for every pot is quite encouraging. We can tell new stories without trying to meet a specific audience or scrape in movie ticket sales. Tell your story and the fans will identify themselves.
Obviously, the more niche it is, the smaller that fan base will be.
Even so, there are well-established genres that you can write completely original stories for. Even if people think it’s already been said and done a zillion times over, we’re still getting gripping new tales in every genre under the sun.
Westerns have been done to death? Not so fast, there, cowboy. The Old West has so many stories available. Gunslingers, desperados, gritty settlers, ranchers vs. cattlemen, railroad tycoons, Pinkerton investigators and so much more. It hasn’t all been exhausted. Give us something new.
Mysteries are old and dusty? I think not. This genre is so rich that it has blossomed into tons of subgenres. Police procedurals, cozy mysteries, kid sleuths, magical detectives, true crime, political coverups, historical conspiracies and so many more mysteries still to be investigated. Give us something new.
Fantasy? This is by definiition a boundless genre. Whether you’re doing a somewhat grounded portal fantasy, a modernized fairy tale, a completely constructed milieu or any of a variety of magic-themed stories, the possibilities are endless. Your characters don’t even need to be human or bipedal. You can have talking animals, Smurfs, talking beach balls or whatever your mind comes up with. Give us something new.
Historical fiction? There are at least 5000 years of recorded or archaeologically detected civilizations to pick from. Regency romances, Imperial Roman intrigues, survival stories from the French or Russian Revolutions, more wars than can reasonably be counted, the heights or depths of any given era of any given country are all available. Give us something new.
Unless you do something so completely disjointed that people can’t figure out what the hell you’re getting at, you can tell a completely original story in any genre, time period, setting and style. I’m not saying “build it and they will come”, but you actually kind of can if you have an appropriate marketing plan.
If you know basically who you’re writing for, it will be easier for those fans to self-identify and share among their peers.
That’s the key.
There are avid, even rabid readers out there. They’re looking for something new. When they find it, they share it. They blog and vlog about it.
There are people who follow those people. The trendsetters will make a splash and the greater community will see if it’s a wave they can ride.
If you give them something new, yet familiar (genre), they’re going to read the hell out of it and pester you until you write the next one.
Don’t be like George R. R. Martin and take a years-long break in the damned middle. Don’t be like Harper Lee and hold off writing another book for decades until you’re on death’s door.
If you’re going to do it, do it and keep doing it.
Plan your own literary universe. Plant your flag somewhere and tell some stories under its shadow.
Whether it’s your own imaginary world like Middle Earth or the Planet Mongo, whether it’s post-WWI Paris or 80s Tokyo, whether it’s a sleepy fishing village on the Maine coast or a dusty Chilean ghost town, plant your flag and write your stories. If you write something worth reading, they’re going to insist on more. Plan ahead. Give us something new and then give us something else that’s even newer.
You can reuse characters or you can explore different characters in a similar setting. As long as it’s all tied together by people, place or time, you’ve got yourself a series that people are going to want to read and read and read some more. Create your works and give them what they are craving. Give us something you.
That’s all for this weekend. I hope you take time to enjoy a movie this weekend or, better still, an excellent book. You deserve a break, after all.