Ta-Nehisi has an interesting point about the visual failures of big-screen comic book adaptations. I think the challenge, generally, is that things that don’t have to meet the test of plausibility in the form of illustration do have to look plausible when real people are acting them out. You can’t get away with the anatomical distortions illustrators get away with whether they’re drawing top-heavy superheroines or the Hulk, unless you want to end up with the terrible versions of the Hulk we’ve seen on-screen, and it’s hard to pull off aliens, feats of derring-do, and general strangeness that works on the page in real-life either.

TNC mentions the Lord of the Rings movies as an epic adaptation that does work, but I don’t think the book-to-film leap there is quite analogous to the comics. Most of the things that people in those books do is within our realm of understanding and possibility. Fighting is essentially hand-to-hand or with familiar weapons. The animals and other races of humanoids in the books are variations on physical forms we’re familiar with. There is some magic, but most of it’s translatable, or on a smaller scale. Sure, sending water in the form of horses to drown some guys on horses is magic, but it’s magic that amps up a potentially natural phenomenon. Ghosts come out of a mountain to fight human men, but they still look basically like humans fighting other humans. And when we read things in a book, we translate them with our minds.

When the possibility of what humanity can accomplish, and the nature of what humanity is changes, that’s where it gets hard to translate the action with human actors. And when we’re given a picture of what things are that is beyond what we conceptualize people doing, and then are asked to believe it again when it’s just people doing it, it’s hard to make the leap. Movies were always going to have trouble making what we were willing to accept as real on the page look real on the screen.

Charlie Jane Anders’ exploration of the turning point in the eighties when science fiction movies took the leap and became franchises, rather than one-offs, is a wise look at the commercial developments that shaped the entertainment landscape we live in now. But as much as inevitable sequels to sci-fi movies generally trouble us these days, the move towards franchising also represents a truer understanding of the possibilities of science fiction.

Star Wars couldn’t have ended with A New Hope because the story wasn’t over: the Emperor was still in power, and the conflict between the Empire and the Rebellion hadn’t reached a crisis point. From a more traditional sense, it wasn’t clear yet whether the narrative was a comedy or a tragedy, if it was going to end in what seemed like any of several possible romances, or in definitive defeat. But Star Wars didn’t have to end, and Star Trek didn’t either, because there were still possibilities left in their universes to explore.

The defining characteristic of science fiction isn’t any one character, any one conflict, any one plot. It’s that the story is set somewhere else, where the rules of that universe are not the same as our own in ways that are governed by advancements, or different possibilities, in science. Given that, it’s equally valid to do a one-off story or a meandering, generation-spanning narrative. Good people working within the genre should know what they’re doing, and what its—and their—limitations are. If your motivations for continuing a story are driven by profit rather than the needs of the particular story, you’ll make bad stories. If you make a lot of money off a story that demands three movies, or a movie and a novel series, or a series of cartoons and a lot of comics, there’s nothing wrong with doing good for your wallet and the world of story.

So, my post about The Tree of Life yesterday was cranky, and worse, inarticulate. I ended up sounding silly, and Simon, justifiably, slapped back at me for it. As an apology and explanation, I wanted to lay out a couple of things to do a better job of explaining both my preexisting assumptions and prejudices and what I find obnoxious about this particular trailer.


1. I tend to think of mass-market movies and film as discrete things: all I mean is that I think there’s a difference that’s conveyed by context. Film’s a medium, and it includes things that I would gladly be hypnotized by in a museum, whether it’s looping images of Sarah Palin speaking intercut with Alaskan native dancers or anything by Matthew Barney. If I’m hitting up a multiplex, I tend to expect something a bit more conventionally plotted.


2. That is not to say that I think artistic, experimental, plot-averse, etc. film should go sit in the corner, or anything. I’m all for a world where we see much more diverse things in mainstream movie theaters. But…


3. I think studios and directors have an obligation to sell audiences on those more unusual projects. And I think that pitch has to sell the project on the merits. Most of what I found so objectionable about the trailer for The Tree of Life is that it essentially seemed to tell viewers: “It’s Brad Pitt! And Sean Penn! And it’s deep! And we have arty images!” If Malick’s actually doing something “radical,” if this movie stretches back to prehistoric Earth (all things that have been reported out of it), then that campaign is both a cheat to audiences and an insult to their intelligence. Give us at least a sense of what we’re going to see, and make a strong pitch for why we should want to see that. If that hideously pretentious voiceover in the trailer isn’t part of the movie, it’s very silly marketing. If it is in the movie, I reserve the right to consider it bad, pretentious writing.


4. Additionally, I, very personally, don’t think any director is so visionary that they automatically deserve my time. The movies are a business, and if you’re going to work through the studio system, and get $25 million to make a movie, then I don’t think you’re exempt from explaining what you’re doing and can just expect audiences to just follow along (I’m speaking generally here, not necessarily about Malick). That said…


5. I’ll probably, in perpetuity, watch anything Tony Gilroy makes, without explanation. And the reason for that is this. When I go to a mainstream theater to see a movie, I ultimately worship at the altar of the writing. I understand this is a specific preference, and it is not necessarily correct, and certainly not necessarily the most sophisticated way to watch movies. But I think it’s worthwhile to be honest about it. 


What I really want to see is brilliant plotting and dialogue, and I’m interested in how that gets played out in front of me. Gilroy’s so compelling to me because he can stage something like the opening fight scene in Duplicity, which is a gorgeous piece of physical comedy, and sort of formally stunning in its severe color palate and battle lines of corporate suits, but that also serves the plot and the writing directly, making you wonder why these men are fighting, and alerting you that what follows is going to be both dead serious and very silly. 


I love him because he can work with actors in such a way that a line like “I am Shiva, the god of death,” can sound like perfectly natural speech out of the mouths of both an insane man and a perfectly sane one in Michael Clayton, that he imbues a child’s explanation of a fantasy series with an incredible richness that gives a dignity to it, makes us feel the pull of that fantasy for the person reading it. His language shows us the semi-permeable barriers between madness and sanity and the divine, and he does it in movies about corporations.


I feel the same way about Preston Sturges. The physical comedy in the dining room scene in The Lady Eve is funny, but it’s the verbal translation of the action that makes it brilliant. Something like this sequence:

See those nice store teeth all beaming at you. Oh, she recognizes you! She’s up, she’s down, she can’t make up her mind. She’s up again. She recognizes you! She’s coming over to speak to you. The suspense is killing me. “Why, for heaven’s sake, aren’t you Fuzzy Oathammer I went to manual training school with in Louisville? Oh you’re not? Well, you certainly look exactly like him, it’s certainly a remarkable resemblance… But if you’re not going to ask me to sit down, I suppose you’re not going to ask me to sit down… I’m very sorry, I certainly hope I haven’t caused you any embarrassment, you so and so.”

Is Veronica Geng decades before Veronica Geng, and it’s incredible. Even Buster Keaton, who never gets to talk in his best movies, it’s the writing that matters, the jokes on the title cards, the plotting that creates a mirror image of all the gags.


Anyway, I’m way off-topic here. All I meant to say is that when it comes to the movies, rather than film as a whole, the rigor of the plotting and dialogue are the bones to me, and the execution and visual expression of those plots and themes are what matter most. If you want me to love something else, I’m open to it. But I want to be persuaded, rather than pandered to.

Given that Mark Wahlberg’s career has really, truly taken off, moving both into comedy with The Other Guys and back into Oscar territory with The Fighter, I sort of doubt he and the rest of the gang will ever get back together to make The Brazilian Job. A sequel to The Italian Job was never strictly necessary, from a narrative or any other standpoint, but in that moment when Ocean’s Eleven squeezed so much fun out of a light caper movie with a sophisticated cast, it would have been diverting. And more importantly, it might have given Jason Statham the opportunity, nay, required him, to be something other than grimly determined:

I still need to see The Bank Job at some point (is Statham only allowed to express emotion in movies with “job” in the title?), but even thought what he’s been given to do is somewhat limited, the man has a body he can put to other uses than mayhem, and an ironical, winning smile. It’s dull watching him stride away from explosions and fight people all the time—he’s beyond aplomb and into boredom:

Maybe he can teach Ben Foster how to walk away from gas station conflagrations with his mouth set and his sunglasses firmly in place, and then go on to other things? And no, voicing Tybalt in the animated movie Gnomeo and Juliet doesn’t count.