Category Archives: Movies

Wants, Needs, and Character Arcs

Wants, Needs, and Character Arcs

 

StudioBinder is a computer application for film production but they also host a YouTube channel about film that can be very enlightening into all aspects of cinema including story structure. Recently I came across a series of video they made on story endings and how they break down into 4 large categories. That has spurned a lot of thought some of which I’m sharing here.

First off, the core concept they put forward is that characters have wants and needs. I would describe wants as what drive plot and needs as to what fulfills story.

The want is the character defined objective and its associated obstacles. The wants are malleable and often change as the plot progressed. In Moonraker Bond starts out wanting to know who stole the missing space shuttle but by the third act his want is to prevent Drax from killing humanity. The want is what the character is actively trying to achieve.

The need ties directly to character and their growth or fail to grow across the story. Need is the elements of the character that changes and what they need defines the nature of their change. In Moonraker as with many movies in the Bond franchise, Bond has no need. Psychologically and emotionally, he is complete and exits the story as exactly the same character that entered it. However, setting aside episodic story telling most characters have an arc, a change that transforms them in the story and that is tied to their need. Often a character is blindly unaware or in denial of their need. It is the lack of self-awareness about their need that hobbles the character and holds them back from achieving a more well-rounded emotional level.

If you follow the link, you’ll see that the people at StudioBinder define a happy ending as one where both the character’s wants and needs are fulfilled but I will voice an objection to that. Yes, it can be true, but it can also be true that meeting the need alone makes a happy ending. There are stories where what the character wants is wrong and the need when fulfilled supersedes the want and it is something that the character no longer desires and so failing to achieve it is not bitter-sweet or semi-sweet, but actually sweet. A good example of this is The Sure Thing an early romantic comedy from Rob Reiner. In it Gib’s, John Cusack’s character, want is to have commitment free sex with a blond bombshell, his need is to learn to have a deep emotionally adult relationship. Being a rom com, he achieves this when he learns to truly love and never has the free sex he chased after. His want is unfulfilled but satisfying his need changed his character so dramatically that the want simply sublimated away.

In Iron Man Tony Stark’s wants change and evolve with the plot, starting out he wants to party and have fun, then he wants to escape, and he wants to stop selling weapons and eventually he wants to stop Obadiah. His need is to find a purpose to his life and that is fulfilled by becoming Iron Man.

The results are flipped for Steve Rogers Captain America: The First Avenger. Steve’s want is to do his part in the war, and he does, spectacularly. His need is to ‘find the right partner’ the woman that loves and understands him as he is. Peggy is that woman but to fulfill his want Steve has to sacrifice his need, placing his duty before himself, because the need is tied to character not plot, and puts the plane down into the artic to what he believes will be his death.

Wants, Needs, characters and plots, there is a lot to think over here.

 

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Streaming Review: Operation Finale

Saturday night, along with a friend, I watched 2018’s historical drama Operation Finale a dramatization about the covert mission to capture Adolf Eichmann, the man principally for the design, implementation, and operation of the NAZI extermination camps. Let us be absolutely fucking clear on one point, Eichmann is not solely responsible for the Holocaust, he contributed his skills, talent, and abilities to make the systemic murder ‘efficient’ but the entire rotten NAZI system from the top down was responsible.

Not covered in the film is that Eichmann was captured by the Allies but escaped and after surviving on the run for a number of years in occupied Germany, slipped out of the continent fleeing to Argentina with his wife and family.

Operation Finale focuses on Mossad agent Peter Malkin (Oscar Isaac, who was also a producer on the production) whose reputation is less than sterling when he caused a low-level NAZI to be executed in the field after misidentifying him as Eichmann. When Eichmann (Ben Kingsley) is discovered in Argentina because his son Klaus has an unlikely encounter with a holocaust survivor, Israel authorizes a covert mission to verify, capture, and extract Eichmann for trail. The team infiltrates Argentina and despite tensions about brining Eichmann back safely for trail versus extra-judicially executing him, they capture Eichmann only to discover that their plan route out has been delayed by ten days and now must keep him confined as local NAZIs with assistance of the authorities search for Eichmann.

The film never found either the box office or critical love that I think it deserves. The script is tight remaining credible in its depiction of spy craft and finds tension both the dangerous situation the agents work in and the emotionally charges air between captor and captive never losing its focus on Peter and his haunted visions of people lost in the Holocaust. The filmmaking is restrained without overly showing camera moves or cinematography surefooted in its character-based approach. The only production element that nagged at me while viewing the movie was the use of 75 yar old Ben Kingsley as Adolf Eichmann who was 51 at the time of his capture, make-up, and a light digital touch during WWII flashback attempt to maintain the illusion but are never fully convincing.

That said Operation Finale is a damn fine film and well worth the investment of two hour.

Operation Finale is currently streaming on Netflix.

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Streaming Review: Ragnarök (2013)

 

As I have commented on with two posting here, I am currently and thoroughly enjoying the Swedish/Danish television co-production of the Nordic Noir series The Bridge. Particularly impressive has been Sofia Helin’s performance as Detective Saga Noren and I went looking for other projects that she appeared in to compare her performances there and that lead me to Ragnarök.

Released in 2013 Ragnarök is a Norwegian monster movie about an archeologist, Sigurd, that follows clues about a Viking voyage to Finnmark in the extreme north of Norway and an abandoned fenced off zone between Norway and Russia where he finds not only the archeological evidence to support his theories but an ancient aquatic beast. Trapped with his two children and a couple of associates Sigurd must discover the nature of the beats and with little supplies and no weapons see everyone safely out of the dark and dangerous forest.

Sofia Helin plays Elisabeth one of Sigurd’s companions and is in a supporting role in the production. While she is given little actual character work to do, she displays that her work in The Bridge is actually from a great deal of range.

Ragnarök itself is a middling film. It is not bad, and it is not great. The action sequences of tense and taut, the plot takes turns that moved it away from predictability. (When they were trapped in the caverns, I fully expected the rest of the film to take place underground, but both the characters and the writers were more inventive than that.) The cinematography is lovely, fully capturing the deep and isolating wilderness the characters find themselves trapped in while the special effects for the monster are credible and still hold up eight years later which cannot be said about many higher budgeted productions.

The film’s failings are that as a dramatic story there is not enough meat on the bones of the character’s conflict to drive a full feature and as a monster movie the beast arrives too late in the story. The ‘monster movie’ elements of Ragnarök takes place entirely in the films third act and while well-paced and well thought out the late arrival of the film central premise damages the final product.

Still, I do no regret taking the time to watch this film and at a scant hour and a half it doesn’t require a massive commitment.

Ragnarök in Norwegian with English subtitles is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.

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Streaming Review: The Howling

 

It has been nearly 40 years since I last watched Joe Dante’s werewolf feature The Howling. My last viewing was either videotape or a pay channel during the early 80s only a few years after the film’s release in 1981. Based upon the novel of the same name Gary Brandner the movie along with An American Werewolf in London, released the same year, presented a radically new approach to werewolves in cinema that The Howling, despite a slew of sequels, failed to make the same level of cultural impact.

The film, departing heavily from the novel, centers on journalist and local news anchor Karen White who survives a traumatizing encounter with serial killer and as part of her therapy, along with her husband Bill, secludes herself at a rural facility known as ‘The Colony,’ administered by notable psychiatrist. While living at The Colony Karen discovers that not of her co-residents are exactly what they appear to be and there may be a connection to the serial killer.

There is a reason why The Howling is not as well known as its sister werewolf film An American Werewolf in London, and that is far fewer interesting things happen in it. This film takes a great deal of time establishing its characters and its environment while providing precious little dramatic tension or conflict. With a brief running time of just 91 minutes, it has little room for leisurely establishment. The cast is good and well positioned, the cinematography has a glow to it that enhances the unnatural world of the colony and the transformations by Rob Bottin are groundbreaking, but the complete package fails to get over the top and aside from an ending sequence that is stellar the film is largely forgettable.

The Howling is not a bad film nor is it a great one but rather exists in that uncomfortable middle ground of being basically serviceable. While it has logic and character motivational problems that are left wholly unresolved or explained its novel approach to the cinematic werewolf makes it worth at least one viewing.

The Howling is currently streaming on Shudder.

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Werewolf Transformations

 

Sunday night I watched The Howling first the first time in decades, long post about that film to come, and it got me thinking about the changing nature of werewolf transformations in cinematic history. My thoughts are guided by the films I have actually seen and should not be construed as an exhaustive study.

1935’s Werewolf of London preceded that other Universal werewolf film by six years. It shares almost none of the mythology that the next film planted solidly into popular thought and in many ways plays more like a retelling of Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hyde. The transformation from man to hybrid wolf and man takes place during subtle cuts. The character passes behind foreground objects such as pillars and emerges partially transformed going through successive stages until fully changed in a werewolf in tails and top hat.

1941 changed werewolves forever with Siodmak’s script for The Wolf Man. This is the film that introduced silver as a werewolf’s bane and many other lasting tropes. Talbot’s transformation, unlike Werewolf of London, happens on-screen by way of lap-dissolves where in succeeding shots, dissolved into each other to create the illusion of a single take, hair and appliances are added to the actor until the change is complete. The process was time consuming and difficult for the actor and never fully convincing but remained the method of onscreen werewolf transformations for the next 40 years.

1981 witnessed the release of two werewolf films, The Howling, with transformation effect by Rob Bottin, and An American Werewolf in London whose transformations were designed and created by Rick Baker, both men would go on to produce some of the most legendary make-up effects in the last sixty years.

Both men utilized bladders, puppets, and vanguard make-up techniques and appliances to create on-stage, in-camera, transformations that had never been seen before. Audiences watched as body parts swelled, extended, pushed out from human to wolf proportions, in elaborate and minute detail. However, it was Baker’s An American Werewolf in London that changed the paradigm not only for film but for literary werewolves.

While both transformations achieve similar on-screen effects, Baker’s imbued the changes with bone cracking agony for the tragic character afflicted by this curse. David’s first and most elaborate transformation in the film is a grueling, painful, and terrifying ordeal because nothing about it appears even remotely tolerable. He suffers, and the audience along with him, through every moment of the change.

And just like that the agony of transformation became canon. To this day I read werewolf stories where the author takes the time to describe the breaking and reforming of bones and he painful shift from human to wolf. Authors I am sure that have never seen An American Werewolf in London follow the template that Rick baker laid out 40 years earlier.

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Reading Dune

 

In fits and starts I have completed a re-read of the classic Science fiction novel Dune by Frank Herbert. I had to work in fits and starts because a growing cataract situation in both eyes has limited my reading hours and much of those have been devoted to my current work in progress novel. I have read Dune before and wanted to revisit the material ahead of the release of the latest adaptation coming in October of this year.

Dune, set in a distant far-future, concerns the bitter and lethal rivalry between feuding noble houses, a treacherous emperor plotting against his own kin, a suppressed people on a harsh and unforgiven world, ecological transformation, and cartel powers all centered on a planet where deserts are the entirety of the surface area.

On one level the novel can be read as an adventure story as Paul Atreides having survived the destruction of his noble house plats, plans, and takes revenge on the forces that killed his father and exiled both he and his mother.

Another reading is as a warning about the power of charismatic leaders and religious fanaticism with Paul’s quest illustrating how even ‘just’ causes often lead to horror and injustice. The work can also be interpreted as treatise on the interconnectedness of life and the dependence everything shares with everything else in an ecology.

The theme one comes away with from Dune, adventured story, prophetic warning, or ecological explainer depends entirely on the read and what they brought with them to the process.

Published in the early 60s, Dune reflects much of its period and how prose fiction has changed in the intervening nearly sixty years.

By today’s writing styles Dune is a novel that engaged in a lot of head hopping. In the middle of a scene the point of view will shift from character to character revealing their inner unspoken thoughts. This is frowned upon current fiction where it is expected that each scene is recounted from a single character’s point of view. For modern readers Dune can appear to be frenetic, choppy, and uneven.

More out of step with current culture is Dune’s approach to homosexuality. The principal antagonist of the novel Baron Harkonnen is presented as a corpulent, greedy, vile person without any redeeming qualities and it is clear that his sexuality is meant to be a mark of his evil nature.

The novel also appears to support the concept of eugenics without expressing endorsement for the result. The Emperor’s elite troops and the Fremen of the planet Dune are both, in the eyes of the novel, superior to any other fighting force because of the harsh and unforgiving nature of their home-worlds, which is a simplistic and naïve understanding of what makes a superior fighting person or force. In addition the novel presents us with the Bene Gesserit a faction devoted to a secret plan to breed a superior human with psionic abilities that unifies the masculine and feminine natures of humanity. Even for the early 60s this is a very binary view of human gender with men reduced to ‘takers’ and women to ‘givers’ without acknowledging the subtleties and overlap even within a binary viewpoint.

Dune is very a product of its time and even given its period the basic premises were already considered quite conservative challenges that the filmmaker will have to overcome in craft a cinematic experience that will be acceptable to modern audiences.

Here’s a reminder that my own SF novel, Vulcan’s Forge is available from FlameTree Press and can be purchased wherever to by fine books.

 

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Fixing Zemo’s Retcon

 

 

Recently in the Disney+ MCU show The Falcon and The Winter Solider the villain from Captain America: Civil War, Helmut Zemo, returned as a reoccurring character.

Civil War presented Zemo as secret police/security officer from the fictional nation of Sokovia that had been devastated by the event of Avengers: Age of Ultron and seeking revenge upon the Avengers for the death of his wife and family.

TFaTWS returned Zemo closer to his comic book version letting the audience know that he was wealthy, an aristocrat and held the title of Baron.

Many people have felt that this directly contradicts the earlier presentation of Zemo breaking the MCU’s continuity.

This is an easy fix to make both Zemo’s seamlessly into one coherent character.

Zemo as a young man met and fell hopelessly in love with a woman a low social standing. His tradition  bound aristocratic family refused to accept a person of ‘low birth’ into their arms and Zemo walked away from his wealth, his privileges, and his family to be with his love. Starting a family of his own and building his own life and losing all that in the Avengers’ war on Ultron. Grief and revenge drove him to the event of Civil War and after cooling his heels in prison and basking the publicly fractured Avengers he reunited with his family and the Bucky brought him into the current crisis.

You may now use this as your ‘head canon.’

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Godzilla vs Kong

 

Using our HBOMax account we watched the latest installment of the monster-verse franchise Godzilla vs Kong which follows the films Godzilla: King of the Monsters and Kong: Skull Island. I thoroughly enjoyed Kong: Skull Island but Godzilla: King of The Monsters didn’t work for me, too overstuffed with different monsters it lacked a clean plot and simply rushed from monster to monster without enough connecting plot tissue to create any real stakes.

I’m happy to say that Godzilla vs Kong is a much better and much more enjoyable film. The movies had just enough human centric story to give the audience something to emotionally lean into without forgetting that we’re there to watch two massive kaijuengage in epic battles.

The film follows two intersecting plotlines. First Godzilla, formerly seen as a protector of the earth from other titans (kaiju) has without cause and mysteriously begun attacking human cities and installations. Second, a shadowy technological company Apex is attempting to penetrate into the monster-verse’s ‘hollow earth’ to obtain a new energy source and believes that Kong is the key to finding the path into the planet’s interior. The problem is that as natural enemies and possessing a sixth sense for each other’s presence Kong’s movement attracts Godzilla prompting battle. Each plotline has its associated humans trying to achieve their missions while unraveling the mysteries that they discover until everything converges for a massive battle in neon accented Hong Kong.

There are secrets revealed, not so hidden villains exposed and in general a massive amount of damage inflicted but overall, this was a fun movie of kaiju duking it out. It is what it says on the tin, ‘Godzilla vs Kong.”

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Me and Movies Theaters When I was Young

 

For some inexplicable reason lately, I have been thinking about the movies theaters I frequented when I was a tween and a teenager.

Until about age of 10 I lived in rural North Carolina and my only solid memories of going to the movies were drive-in theaters with big bags of homemade popcorn and gloriously colorful Hammer horror.

After my father passed away, we move to Ft. Pierce Florida and soon started going to the theaters there.

The Sunrise Theater was just over two miles from my home on 32nd St and I walked the distance to see their presentations. The Sunrise was a single screen theater and the place I went to the most for my movie fix. I remember a number of fun Saturdays watching films like Escape from the Planet of the Apes, Race with the Devil, and The Towering Inferno in that darkened air-condition space.

Ft Pierce did have a multi-screen theater I seem the remember the name being the Village Twin, but I could be wrong about the name. It was just over three and half miles from my home and I also walked and sometimes biked to that theater for movies. It was there that I saw Jaws, Superman: The Movie, and Alien. I still have quite vivid memories of speeding home from Superman pumping the peddles hard with Willams’ iconic score playing in my head.

The final place to see movies in Ft. Pierce was our drive-in theater but as we had no family car, my mother did not drive, I only saw one film there. A Movie I was so desperate to see that I went on my bicycle to a drive-in, Romero’s Dawn of the Dead.

Movies have always been and always will be a major element of my life.

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Ghost Stories and Mysteries: Minefields of Exposition

 

All stories require exposition. From romances set in the modern day to period pieces, fantasies, and science-fiction all tales require a level of explanation about the characters and how their lives and histories intersect with the larger world around them, but ghost stories and mysteries raise the bar for the writer in both the amount of exposition required and the skill to deploy it in a satisfying manner.

Ghost stories often turn on a mystery, why there this ghost, what events created it and what is needed for the restless dead to finally rest. In that way a ghost story is an often, but not always, a mystery where the dead actively participate. Mysteries are built upon the fact that there is hidden knowledge that will be revealed and its revelation with illuminate both plot and character in a satisfying way.

For both types of stories, the exposition usually arrives late, near the end, when the final pieces are slotted into place and the truth is finally uncovered. This is the moment of greatest danger for the writer.

It’s very tempting and trap to have one character deliver the exposition in a massive info dump laying out all the particulars of the plot and how the various elements interlock creating the narrative. If managed skillfully and with dramatic tension still alive, look to Knives Out for a fine example of this performed masterfully both in the writing and by the actors, the reveal can be exciting and dramatic. Done badly and it’s a boring scene with usually one actor forced to attempt to salvage the story by eating the scenery.

This week I watched The Nesting, a title which makes no sense whatsoever, a horror movie and Gloria Grahame’s final film performance, about an agoraphobic woman and her experiences in a haunted house. The core story and set up are perfectly serviceable but when it comes time to deliver the expositions we are treated to John Carradine, sadly far past his prime, attempting to deliver a clunky info dump as his character dies. The film was hardly working before and this badling worked exposition killed what little life remained.

If you are writing a ghost story or mystery, take particular care around the final exposition, remember that a scene, including expository ones, require tension derived from a character trying to achieve something and facing obstacles in that pursuit.

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