film

Weekly Watch: The Shape of Water

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The other weekend my wife and I decided to go to the movies. It’s that time of year where all the stuff that was in limited release at the end of last year for Oscar consideration is starting to trickle out to our neck of the woods. We checked the listings and came down to seeing either The Post, the new Spielberg take on the Pentagon Papers, or The Shape of Water, Guillermo del Toro’s latest. The wife decided on the latter, figuring it was more the kind of movie that should be seen in the theater.

Boy was she ever right (as usual).

Mostly when I think of “see it in the theater” movies I’m thinking of the big, popcorn movies that dominate the box office most of the year – superheroes, big sci-fi/fantasy franchises, or action movies (the wife has a disturbing affection for the Fast and Furious movies). Things that really play into the “bigger is better” idea and make it worth dealing with the public to watch in super wide vision, rather than just on the TV.

The Shape of Water isn’t one of those movies. It looks beautiful, don’t get me wrong, and it has some praise worthy effects, but it’s not interested in them as an end, as so many big movies are. Rather, what makes The Shape of Water the kind of movie you want to see in the theater is that it’s the kind best experienced when you turn the lights off, shut out the real world, and give yourself over to it completely.

That’s because The Shape of Water is, essentially, a fairy tale. Voice overs at the beginning and end of the film make this about as explicitly as they could without just saying “this is a fairy tale.” It’s not a movie for your logical, rational mind; it’s for your heart or spirit or soul or whatever place it is where your feels live. That’s not for everybody – witness the low ratings from some IMDB commenters who ding the movie for not being “realistic.” Problem is, the movie never sets out to be realistic.

I mean, “realistic” isn’t a word that should be anywhere near a story about a mute woman who falls in love with The Creature from the Black Lagoon (or Abe Sapien – take your pick). Just so stories aren’t realistic – or else they wouldn’t be just-so stories – and that’s what this is. A collection of outsiders – mute woman, gay man, African-American woman, a communist – band together to save another odd outsider, battling all the way against forces of conformity.

By turning away from realism del Toro is able to give the film a lyrical, dreamlike quality. When a black and white musical number pops up in the second half of the film, it seems perfectly in place. Another scene, wherein the aquatic containment properties of the common apartment bathroom are pushed beyond all sense, works just as well. Del Toro, aided by an amazing cast, weaves a spell, but it has to be one you’re willing to fall for.

But don’t take it from me. The Shape of Water now had 13 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director. You want to see it, and the best place to see it is in a large, dark room where you can let it completely absorb you.

ShapeofWater

Does The Room Piss You Off, Too?

/ JD Byrne / 1 Comment

If you’re any kind of movie nut you’ve heard of, if not seen, The Room. Released in 2003 it was written and directed by Tommy Wiseau, who also played the leading role. It is famously bad. I’ve seen it referred to as the “Citizen Cain of bad movies.” Its badness is so noteworthy that it’s the subject of a new (much better, by all accounts) movie, The Disaster Artist, directed by and starring James Franco as Wiseau.

I’ve seen The Room and it’s as bad as advertised. In spite of that, or really because of it, it’s become a cult favorite, so much so that it’s actually made back the initial money spent on it (north of $6 million, all from Wiseau). Not because people actually like it, but because they revel in its awfulness. Wiseau seems to have made his peace with this, but it kind of pisses me off.

Don’t get me wrong – I’ve said over and over again that a person’s response to art, what they like and don’t like, is deeply personal. In addition, I’m fond of enjoying stuff that consensus suggests sucks, what generally get called guilty pleasures (I hate the term). I, for example, have a deep affection for lots of movies people consider lousy that tend, for some reason, to involve Max Von Sydow (Victory, Dune, Flash Gordon). I like them because I like them, in spite of the fact that most people don’t. I’m cool with that kind of thing.

But from what I’ve read from people who have made The Room a cult favorite it’s not because they see it as an undervalued gem. Nor does it appear to fall into the “so bad its good” category, as everybody involved takes the thing completely seriously. No, it seems that people just really enjoy watching an artist fail, enjoy watching a horrible product because it’s horrible.

There’s a Seinfeld episode where Jerry’s dentist (a very pre-Breaking Bad Bryan Cranston) converts to Judaism and proceeds to tell lots of jokes of Jewish people. Jerry seeks out a priest to tell him of his problems with this.

As a mere consumer of pop culture I’ve got no problem with people interacting with The Room in any way they want. As a producer of it, as a writer, it kind of pisses me off that people take such enjoyment in something they know, and will admit, sucks. I know so many people – musicians, authors, visual artists – who put their heart and soul into their work and make good, but completely overlooked, stuff that it honks me off to see something celebrated because it’s bad.

My plea, I suppose, is this. If you love The Room because you really like it – which is a perfectly valid way to feel – then, by all means, go ahead and love it. But if you’re interest in it is merely to be part of the cool crowd that knows all about it because it’s horrible, spent your energies elsewhere. Try a new writer, stream a new musician, go to a local gallery. There’s good – even great – stuff out there waiting for you if you’re willing to look for it.

Not Exactly The Thomas Crown Affair, Is It?

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Art heists are great fodder for movies and books. The stakes are usually pretty high, involving unique, priceless works of art. Daring do is often required to pull them off. And it provides a good opportunity for suave characters to behave suavely.

This isn’t one of those stories.

In February 1965, Salvador Dalí painted a version of Christ on the cross – in an hour and a  quarter – and donated to Rikers Island, New York City’s notorious jail complex. Dalí was supposed to meet with some inmate artists, but wasn’t feeling well, so he sent the painting instead. It was hung in the cafeteria, where it proceeded to collect stains from various jailhouse food fights. In 1981, somebody realized what it was (and had it appraised for $250,000) and took it down.

After a short tour around the country and some time in storage, the painting was hung up again at Rikers – but not where the inmates could actually see it. Instead, it was put up in a lobby where jail employees went in and out. In 2003, a group of those employees (four guards) decided to steal it.

The plan was to create a couple of distractions and allow the leader of the scheme to take the Dalí while replacing it with a fake. It didn’t go well:

It was noticeably smaller than the original, an instant tip-off, but the reproduction was also one that, based on descriptions, not even a child would have wanted to claim. Plus, the reproduction of the cafeteria stains were an entirely different color. It was bad.

Then, of course, there was the painting’s presentation. Yes, the glass case had been locked back up with the copy safely inside. But where the original had been displayed in its gold frame, the fake was simply stapled to the back of the box, sans frame.

The whole plan was amateurish at best, but when you factor in the location—a prison teeming with law enforcement officials who spent their days gazing at that exact painting (there were two guard booths in direct view of the Dalí)—it was stupidity at its finest.

The very next day, several guards reported that there was something wrong with the Dalí.

They all got caught, of course, although the ringleader managed to get a not guilty verdict at trial (the others were convicted).  As for the Dalí itself? One of the thieves says that the ringleader got nervous and destroyed it.

On second thought, maybe there is a great story here, in the tradition of a Coen Brothers “heist gone wrong” kind of thing. I’d watch it. I’ll even suggest a theme song:

Dali

The Simple Joys of Verisimilitude

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My wife was born and grew up in Wyoming (she had stops in Hawaii and Pittsburgh before I lured her to West Virginia). She’s not big on “hometown pride” or anything, but it does make her cranky sometimes when Wyoming is depicted in popular culture and they get stuff wrong.

This weekend we saw Wind River, the new movie with Jeremy Renner and Elizabeth Olsen. It’s set in Wyoming, mostly on the Wind River Indian Reservation. It’s not quite the part of the state where my wife grew up, but she knows the area (the main town involved is one she knows) and it’s one of the reasons we wanted to see the flick. It’s also gotten really excellent reviews, and deservedly so. Definite recommendation from me.

Anyhow, about midway through the film the Renner character delivers some important back-story. The movie is tense and atmospheric and, so, for an hour or so we’ve been leading up to horrible things happening. The character’s soliloquy eventually comes to this line (approximately): “the autopsy couldn’t give a definitive cause of death because the coyotes had gotten to her pretty good.”

Coyotes. You know, like this:

Only Renner doesn’t say “Keye-oh-tay,” like most people would. Instead, he pronounces it “keye-oht.”

This is an emotional gut punch moment, so I wasn’t surprised when my wife grabs my arm and leans over. “He said keye-oht! He got it right!” she whispers excitedly. Here, in this moment of deep character development, my wife is connecting with the character using the right local vernacular. It was all I could do to keep from laughing during a very not funny scene.

Getting the little parts right like that will often go unnoticed. If I’d been watching it without a Wyoming native right beside me, I wouldn’t have given it a second thought. But sometimes it matters, if only to a few people. It’s worth getting that kind of stuff right for them.

The Exception That Proves the Rule

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Years ago I wrote a review of an album by an obscure (even by prog standards) band. It was a middling album and I gave it a middling review. Fairly soon after I got a hateful email from one of the band members taking issue with the review. Aside from one factual thing I got wrong (which I changed) the rest was an odd mix of special pleading and attempts at sympathy. They put themselves out there, shouldn’t that count for something? Didn’t I care that another band member had just died and wasn’t it a shitty thing to do to write a less than positive review at that time (as if the obituary made it outside the band’s local area). It was an interesting experience.

And an understandable one. After all, once a creative person looses something on the world it’s inevitable that somebody, somewhere isn’t going to completely fall in love with it. Dealing with negative opinions of your work is just par for the course. If you can’t handle that, don’t publish books, release albums, or put your paintings on display for all to see.

Given that, the general wisdom in the writing world is that a writer absolutely, should not, never under any circumstances, respond to a review. Down that path lies madness. Even if there’s a clear error in there somewhere, it’s better to just let it go than be perceived as some thin-skinned artist whose feelings have been hurt. Because guess what? Nobody cares – unless they care enough to laugh at you.

Naturally, there’s an exception to that rule. At least if your Martin Scorsese.

Scorsese’s last film, Silence, wasn’t the critical darling and commercial success I’m sure he’d hoped for (full confession – haven’t seen the move, read the book a long time ago). In particular, a review in the Times Literary Supplement in the UK caught his eye. Scorsese decided to respond, both to correct a factual inaccuracy and to take issue with something the reviewer said.

“Bad move!” you cry! Not quite – as a result of Scorsese’s letter to the editor, he was invited to write an entire column unpacking the philosophical issue in the review he’d taken issue with. And, verily, there was no storm of shit produced by it. So how did he get away with violating this golden rule?

For one thing, he’s Martin Scorsese. He’s entitled to a little bit of leeway. Having said that, fame doesn’t prevent things going wrong, so there must be something else.

And it’s this – although Scorsese responded to a review, he didn’t complain about the review’s verdict of his work. He made two discreet points – one factual and irrelevant to the film’s merits, one philosophical that dealt with issues well beyond whether Silence was a good movie or not. In other words, he actually engaged, constructively, with what the critic said. He didn’t get defensive.

As I’ve said more than a few times – reaction to art is personal and nobody’s opinion of a piece of art can really be “wrong.” So it’s pointless to take negative reactions personally. Constructive engagement is one thing – hair-on-fire literary retaliation is entirely different.

Still, there’s a reason that the rule about responding to reviews is one that almost everyone can agree with. Think of it this way – if you’re tempted to write something about a negative review of your work, ask yourself, “am I Martin Scorsese?” Chances are, you aren’t. Act accordingly.

BookReview (Big)

When Aggregators Attack!

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A couple of weeks ago a pair of generally reliable box office draws – Johnny Depp & Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson – opened big, summer, popcorn movies. Their offerings – Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales and Baywatch – did not do great box office business (about $63 million on a $100 million budget and $28 million on $60 million, respectively). Perhaps that’s not surprising, if you look to the review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes, which currently gives each film a “freshness” rating of 29% and 20%, respectively.

One might think this would lead to some serious analysis on the part of the studios involved, searching for what the problems were with these two movies. Well, they’ve analyzed and they’ve found the problem, all right:

RottenToms

At least that’s the way this Slate piece spins the spin coming out of Hollywood. It highlights the argument that those movies (and your other typical summer blockbusters) “aren’t built for critics but rather general audiences.”

This is almost certainly true. Critics see movies in bunches and absorb more cinema in a year than most people will in a lifetime. The tropes, story beats, and such that show up in lots of movies have to wear on someone who watches so many. By contrast, somebody who goes to the movies every now and then has different expectations. A couple of hours of entertainment, sealed away from the troubles of the world, is a fine enough thing. More than that, in the era of streaming where you can watch a movie at home for a lot less than going to the theater the reduced cost of entry might lower expectations (I’ll catch something on Netflix I’d never pay $10 to see in the theater).

What’s funny is that just a couple of years ago critics were the ones worrying about the disconnect between themselves and audiences.

While I agree with the Slate piece that it’s silly for studios to single out Rotten Tomatoes as the cause of their problems – and float the idea of doing away with advance critic screenings in the process – that article overlooks an important bit of context from the original Deadline story upon which it’s riffing:

In the case of Pirates 5, I hear that the movie had the highest test scores in the history of the series. Once audiences get into the movie, they seem to be enjoying it with an A- CinemaScore, higher than the B+ of On Stranger Tides and in line with the second title Dead Man’s Chest and At World’s End, and an 82% positive score. The franchise is still fresh abroad, and given its glorious overseas opening, the movie will certainly be profitable for Disney with an anticipated final global haul of $800M-$900M.

Meanwhile, Baywatch tested over a 91 three times.

In other words, it seems like the issue is the same thing critics worried about years ago – the disconnect between those writing the reviews and those watching the movies for fun. Which, although it’s a thing, isn’t an iron clad law. After all, the critics love Wonder Woman (93% fresh) and have previously shown love for such crowd-pleasing fare as Deadpool (84%), Rogue One (85%), Moana (96%), and Star Trek Beyond (84%). Furthermore, even movies that aren’t critically praised are rarely as panned as Baywatch and the new Pirates. So, maybe, if people stay away from big popcorn movies that are poorly reviewed it’s for a good reason.

Look, review aggregators aren’t the most subtle of instruments (I disagree with the Slate piece that they’re a “boring and ugly way to think about art,” however). At best they give you an idea of what the general critical consensus is about something, at least at the extremes. But they lack the nuance of actual reviews. It’s often more important to the ultimate decision (should I spend my time/money on this entertainment?) why a critic does or doesn’t like a movie than the simple thumbs up or down verdict. That’s why I recommend reading the same few critics regularly, even about movies you don’t think you’re interested in, to learn their likes and dislikes.

Like it or not, review aggregators are here to stay. They’re a fact of life in the modern world. Blaming Rotten Tomatoes (or Metacritic or whatever) is easy scapegoating. But it’s just that. Trying to keep the public at large from knowing what other people think of your movies before they buy a ticket is the height of arrogance.

On Storytelling and Stakes

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The wife and I went to see Logan, the last of Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine appearances, the weekend it came out. It’s really excellent and reminded me of how good the 2013 entry, The Wolverine, was (the original origin story in 2009, not so much). In fact, I’d go so far as to say that those two movies are among my favorites of all the modern era superhero movies. I tried to figure out what that was, if there was something about them that really set them apart from, say, something in the Avengers canon or one of Christopher Nolan’s Batman flicks. Turns out, I think it’s because they’re smaller movies. Or, at least, the stakes involved are small enough that you can actually care about them.

I first noticed this in connection with Star Trek. Think about it – in the original series the jeopardy in each episode was usually faced by either Kirk, Spock, or McCoy or some combination thereof. A few episodes extended to other crew members and, on a very rare occasion, to the entire Enterprise. But the show never really tasked our heroes with something so grand as saving Earth or the galaxy or whatnot. The only thing in that area that jumps to mind is “City on the Edge of Forever,” which did involve setting the universe right, but, critically, the real drama was all about the main trio and, specifically, whether Kirk can let his love interest die as she must to set things right.

When we get to the movies, though, the stakes became increasingly high. How many of them involve some Earth-shattering baddie that only the Enterprise crew can stop (where is the rest of Starfleet at these times, anyway?). Paradoxically, that actually ramps down the tension, because who really thinks our heroes aren’t going to literally save the universe? An example proves the point – what’s almost universally hailed as the best of the Trek flicks? The Wrath of Khan. Which is, at its heart, about Kirk and an old foe battling it out until the end (universe altering tech in the background to one side).

Returning to The Wolverine and Logan, in both those flicks the stakes are fairly low, in terms of superhero movies. They play more like short stories, side plots in a bigger novel wherein the fate of the world hangs in the balance. But when it’s just the fate of a few (including our hero), things hit a lot closer to home. In other words, it’s easier (for me, at least) to become emotionally invested in the fate of Logan and his young charge than it is to really care whether a gaggle of X-persons stop Apocalypse because, come one, of course they will.

Although it’s horrific, the old adage attributed to Stalin (who would know from horrifics) that “one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic” is true. It’s easier for people to empathize with a single other human being rather than a large group defined by broad common traits. The same is true in fiction. Sometimes you make a bigger impact by telling a smaller story.

Logan

Weekly Watch: The Martian

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It’s a fact of my modern life that I don’t see most of the movies I want to see when they hit theaters. Various factors conspire to keep me separated from these flicks for months, until they happen to slip through my sphere of influence. The minute The Martian came out, I wanted to see it. Ridley Scott adapts a DIY-publishing success sci-fi story for the big screen? Yes, please!

Alas, it came and went from theaters. It kind of slipped below my radar. I nearly paid way too much money to watch it while I was on the road last week, but fought the urge. Finally, a stroke of luck – it was on HBO last weekend. Hooray for my low tech ways!

Here’s the real problem with that kind of delay. It’s hard in the modern world to avoid opinions about a movie (or a book or album) when the first come out. It’s damned near impossible to do so for months afterward, particular when it’s nominated for some big awards and wins some others. I’m not talking about being ruined by spoilers. I’m just talking about how you can have certain expectations about something when you finally get around to see it.

So what of The Martian? Well, it didn’t live up to the hype.

Which is not to say it’s bad. In fact, it’s very well made, pleasing to look at, and has some good performances. It’s got a “rah rah, bring the boy back home” story that winds up into a feel good ending. That’s not a problem in and of itself, but it’s what leads up to it that doesn’t work so well.

Mark Watney, the main character, is a nice enough guy and the situation he’s put in really sucks. Not just stranded, but left for dead. He has considerable obstacles to overcome in order to survive and he . . . fairly easily overcomes them. At one point he says, about a problem, that he’s going to “science the shit” out of it. That attitude – every problem has a solution, take one at a time – is driven home back on Earth when Watney begins training the next generation of astronauts.

It’s a great motto and probably an excellent way to deal with real world problems. It doesn’t, however, bear any real dramatic weight. The bottom line – Watney’s too damned competent. Everything he tries works (until plot requires that it get destroyed) and, while we see him make some snarky comments about his situation, it never really seems to get to him. Even if all his schemes kept working, he’s still millions of miles from home and alone. We know what solitary confinement does to people – it ain’t pretty.

In this way, The Martian suffers considerably from comparison to the much smaller (and much less seen) Moon. Even before it gets to the issue of clones and whatnot, it paints a really effective picture of what being along on another planet(oid) would really be like. The struggle, as the kids say, is real.

But Watney’s isn’t. It’s not that I want to see the man suffer, but some struggle would have been nice. There’s no way a big-budget summer movie, rated PG13 and starring Matt Damon, is going to go all the way dark and have him die on the planet or commit suicide or something. But some hint that the vast expanse of time without human contact had some impact on his psyche would have been interesting. As it is, only his weight loss seems like an issue (and it’s light years away from what Christian Bale puts up with).

Writing this, I’m reminded of a post on the IMDB discussion board where someone asks “is this based on a true story?”. It’s not as dumb a question as it sounds, looking at it now. Real life can be many things, but it’s not often filled with the dramatic tension we expect in fiction. A true story of clever survival, rooted in the fact that it actually happened, has a pull to it that a fictional tale of similar stature just doesn’t. I read somewhere that the difference between fiction and real life is that fiction has to make sense. It has to have some drama to it, too.

Which is not to say The Martian sucked. It was a perfectly enjoyable way to spend a couple of hours, but it didn’t live up to my perhaps exaggerated expectations. It was fluff, but it was engaging fluff. There’s something to be said for that.

martian2015-5

Not Getting It Right Versus Getting It Wrong

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A little while back someone in one of the online writers’ forums I haunt asked about what, within our particular area of real life expertise, makes us throw up our hands when we see it in fiction. This was particularly in a sci-fi and fantasy context, so my own area of expertise – criminal law – doesn’t really come into play. But reading the discussion and thinking about the question made me realize there is a fine line in fiction between not getting something right and actually getting it wrong.

Exhibit A, since it’s right in my wheelhouse – Law & Order. I’m talking the mothership here, the one that effectively split its time between the courtroom and the police investigation. To put it bluntly, Law & Order very rarely actually got things right, but it didn’t very often actually get things wrong. The former is forgivable, understandable, and even to be encouraged in the interest of drama. The latter just makes me want to punch the TV.

An episode that was on the other day while I was knocking around the house provides great examples of each. “Charm City” is the first part of the first crossover between Law & Order and my favorite cop show of all time, Homicide: Life On the Street. A gas bomb attack in New York has ties to a similar attack years earlier in Baltimore, bringing Baltimore detectives to town to crack the case.

The eventual trial provides an example of the first situation – not getting it right, but in the understandable service of the narrative. Curtis testifies at trial and, among other things, tells the jury that a partial thumbprint was found at the crime scene and it matched the defendant. In no way would a detective testify about this in a real trial. That evidence would come in via an expert witness, probably from the state or city’s crime lab. But we’ve never seen a crime lab expert in this episode, so it’s a waste of narrative resources to introduce an entirely new character to pass on this single (uncontested) fact. Curtis is a main character, by contrast, so give it to him to carry. It’s not right, but it’s not all that wrong, either.

By contrast, earlier on is the kind of thing that Law & Order routinely does that makes me howl. The two New York detectives question the suspect, who gives up nothing. Their boss lets the Baltimore guys take a run at him. Homicide viewers knew that Pembleton’s great skill was extracting confessions in “the box,” and, he does, but only after the suspect says he “can’t talk about it.” Pembleton responds, “you mean you’re unable to talk about it, or you just don’t want to talk about it?”

The confession winds up getting suppressed because, in the Law & Order universe, “I can’t talk about it” is an invocation of the right to remain silent and the right to counsel. There’s even a good back and forth about how it doesn’t matter that such things will “fly” down in Baltimore. In truth, such things “fly” everywhere that Supreme Court precedent controls. Invocation of counsel, or the right to remain silent, has to be explicit before it keeps the cops from barreling on with their inquiries.

The ruling was, simply, TV-land bullshit, an attempt to throw an obstacle in the path of our heroes. This was getting it wrong, seriously wrong, more than just not getting it right. And, in the end, it didn’t really make a difference (the guy was convicted anyway, without much drama). The overly-defense friendly law is a staple on Law & Order, but it’s usually at least closer to getting it right than this.

In the end, does it really matter? No, because the vast majority of people watching Law & Order aren’t lawyers, much less criminal defense lawyers who might zero in on that kind of thing. For most viewers it’s just an obstacle for our heroes to overcome. That, after all, is why we’re watching. Which is why it’s important for “experts” to back off a little bit and give fiction some room to breathe. Everybody sing along:

 

Technical Brilliance Only Goes So Far

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A few weeks ago my wife and I finally saw Mad Max: Fury Road, the movie that’s risen to the rarified air of awards talk genre pictures seldom see. It’s got an Oscar nod for Best Picture, after all. Although I’m not a huge fan of the old Mad Max flicks, I’m a sci-fi fan, fond of dystopia. My wife’s a big action movie fan. So we’re definitely in what might be the target audience for something like this. Nonetheless, when it was done, we turned to each other and asked:

“Is that it?”

Not that it wasn’t cool. The movie looks gorgeous and George Miller deserves a lot of credit for doing some really insane stunt work using real vehicles and people instead of wallowing in CGI overload. Who wouldn’t want a flamethrower guitar? Or keytar, maybe? I’m a keyboard player, after all. And, yes, it was cool to see such overt feminist overtones in a movie that comes out of a very masculine tradition.

But is that enough?

The best explanation I’ve read as to why Fury Road deserves consideration as one of the best movies of 2015 is from this article by Amanda Marcotte over at Salon. Her argument seems to boil down to it being a great technical achievement:

“Mad Max” is more than just a really good movie. It’s also a wildly innovative movie, one that plays with the very idea of filmmaking itself. The director, George Miller, tore up the book on how to make a movie, taking huge risks in doing so, and ended up making the movie that people could not stop talking about this year.

 

“Mad Max” barely has a script. There was heavy storyboarding, but in terms of a traditional script for actors to work from, nope. Instead, they filmed for months in the desert, collecting 480 hours of footage (which is three weeks, if you watch non-stop), which was pounded and then refined into a coherent story in the editing bay, with Margaret Sixel, Miller’s wife, at the helm.

As a result, she argues, it’s an

artistic experiment toying with how to use the tools of film-making to tell a story in an entirely different way than we’re used to

that happens to be “fun” and “moving.”

Therein, I guess, lies the rub. I’ll give Fury Road the “fun” label – it certainly wasn’t an experience I wish I hadn’t had when it was over. But I don’t get “moving” from it and, in retrospect, can see where the fact that it “barely has a script” is perhaps a main reason why. It’s not the film is incoherent (which is a credit to the editing work), it just doesn’t make much sense.

The talk about Fury Road reminds me a little of the buzz last year around Boyhood. It, too, was a great movie making experiment, filmed over years in order to capture the main character aging into adulthood. However, I remember, amidst the plaudits, that some critics dared to suggest that, at the end of the day, the finished product wasn’t all that captivating. Still, the audacity of its making carried it a long way.

Technical achievement is worth celebrating, but it’s not the be all and end all of art. Progressive rock, more than most subgenres of popular music, values instrumental mastery – it lionizes people who can play. That being said, there’s still something to be said for avoiding the “too many notes” trap). A flurry of sound might be impressive, but is it interesting or moving? Not necessarily.

So it goes with literature. Clever wordplay and narrative structure that defies common sense can be daring experiments and produce new ways of telling stories. But at the end of the day, if the story itself doesn’t connect with readers, it’s a lot of flash that, in the end, doesn’t produce much heat.

Same thing with movies. Fury Road is, without a doubt, technically impressive. I just didn’t get a lot out of it beyond that. To be truly great, as so many think Fury Road is, demands more.