A Love-Hate Relationship

Want a dichotomy? I hate romantic comedies, and my favorite movie is a romantic comedy.

What's my favorite movie? A Japanese film called Densha Otoko, or Train Man. It's the true story of an internet phenom known only as “Densha”. He stands up for a woman on the train when a drunk harassed her. He got her phone number out of the deal, and, being a geek, he turned to internet forums for advice on what to do.

The movie is split between the 2chan segments, where Densha seeks advice and empties his heart online to a rotating cast of listeners, whose forum speak is portrayed excellently onscreen through kinetic typography, and the dates with his dream girl, where he awkwardly and cutely tries to pitch woo.

From there you can probably guess the rest. He screws up and almost loses her, he works out his problem and gets her back, and they live happily ever after.

It's not the best movie I've ever seen. Citizen Kane is better, obviously. So is Ben Hur, Sunset Boulevard, Seven Samurai, all the standard choices. In terms of being a great movie, Densha Otoko isn't even in the top 100. I'm not even sure if it's really a good movie.

But, it is my favorite, and not as a guilty pleasure or “so-bad-it's-good” thing. In terms of pure enjoyment, this formulaic and only slightly visual innovative romantic comedy is my favorite film of all time.

And yet, I hate the romantic comedy. I hate it as a genre. Not universally, obviously, but the odds are really high that if you show me a romantic comedy, I will hate it. Not just dislike it, mind you, I will find it an utterly loathsome film.

Why do I love a formulaic romantic comedies, then, if I hate the genre? That's why I hate it. Because it is a genre which has perfectly good potential, and Densha Otoko's example shows off perfectly what the failings of this genre are.

So, at its core, the romantic comedy is the story of a relationship. The conflict starts with them apart, and ends with them together. That's the problem.

Love is... essentially... a selfish motivation. There's nothing wrong with it, I'm not against love, mind you, I want it like any red-blooded American. But, if I were to meet a girl and strike up a relationship I would not expect anyone else to be invested. It is between me and her, and, although ideally it will benefit both of us, it won't make the world better for our friends or coworkers or society in general.

If I'm watching a movie about two people falling in love, why should I care about them? There's nothing inherently heroic about what they were doing, and nothing at stake beyond one relationship not working out. So, why should I give a crap about your characters and care about your story?

Well, in Densha Otoko I care because they make a point about why I should care about Densha and want him to succeed. He's a geek whose life has been limited to online interactions, so much so that he uses it as a crutch to live his life for him. By pursuing this girl, he grows in confidence and interpersonal skill. His relationship is not the ONLY aspect of his character that grows.

That's good drama, a character starts out as flawed but sympathetic, and over the course of the story he improves as a person. It's why I love the character, it's why I love the movie. It's not just some wish-fulfillment fantasy about getting women, it's about realizing that you can be the person you want to be if you have confidence.

So, let me ask you: Why is that so rarely the case?

Romantic comedies, as a rule, fail to remember this very necessary element. The hero is almost always just someone whose life is fine but they don't have a relationship. Or, if it's a man, usually that he has tons of sex all the time but no desire for a relationship.

Who cares? Why should I want to follow the story of someone who has 99% of their life in order and every reason to be happy but for one last luxury. Well, most movies don't give you a reason. There is no growth outside of the relationship and that just makes for a frustrating movie, not only because it isn't very dramatic but because the subtext is insulting: The pursuit of personal joy is enough to carry a movie.

It isn't. That's not good storytelling, it's just wank. It's just wank. It's just pure, self absorbed wank of people saying “Look how awesome are attractive people are and how awesome things happen to them. Although there's some entirely survivable slapstick antics.” At they're worst, and they commonly reach the worst, the characters are hopelessly unlikeable, since they've benefited from negative behavior their whole lives without any real consequence.

I've been told that people who are actually in relationships like these movies sometimes. Just like people who are parents like movies about kids with no real story value.

I can't tell you enjoyment is wrong, but I just want you to recognize why these movies just don't have a lot of logic or real drama to them. It's cool if you like it because you like seeing happy things be happy, but the genre is capable of more.

Go watch Densha Otoko. That is the watermark, that manages to have everything the average romantic has plus a solid character arc and genuine likability. So, I don't feel bad saying I hate romantic comedies because I have a solid standard to hold them to.

The Abed Op-Ed

There's a movie coming this Christmas called War Horse. It's about a lost horse that tries to find its owners during World War I. Directed by Steven Spielberg, score by John Williams. If you hear tapping sounds, that's the entire crew nailing up shelves for their new Oscars.

It's probably going to be great...why shouldn't it be? Spielberg has been making movies like this his whole life and he's great at it. Still, the engorged gland in my brain that produces hate practically explodes when I'm seeing trailers for it. I mean, it's maudlin, it's tear-jerking, and it's probably so formulaic that I've seen it all a million times.

Then again, who am I to be so jaded? I'm 24. I have a BA in English. If Roger Ebert wants to lecture about the overused devices in movies, he can because he earned that right by devoting his life to the study and critique of the medium.

My generation has been spoiled by access to the internet in general and TVTropes.org in particular. We've seen the tropes and devices of literature chopped up and rearranged in a dizzyingly complete array. As a side result, I think we think a little too highly of ourselves. And so, like Icarus flying too close to the sun on wings of artificial genre-savvy, we're heading for a dangerous situation. (Not real danger, mind you, more quality of television and movies danger.)

To see this danger playing out, turn to NBC's very high-quality comedy Community. In it, the delightfully funny Danny Pudi plays the character of Abed Nadir. If you're not familiar with Community, Abed's main shticks is that he has encyclopedic knowledge of the tropes of TV and movies and frequently comments on them both in character and beyond the fourth wall. And there's a lot to like: The performance is great, his lines are cleverly funny, and his fascination with classic sitcom style comes from a place of honesty and genuine knowledge that makes it work all the better.

Unfortunately, as we've learned from Dark Knight, though, just because something is great doesn't mean that I won't have a negative influence on the creative landscape. Abed making an impact as an excellent character means that we're going to start seeing imitators, and unless we start cloning Danny Pudi, they won't be as good. I'm not against cloning Danny Pudi, obviously, but without the help of science I can't really offer that as a solution.

Returning to reality, though, there's a real danger that a “Too Smart for TV” character starts becoming the norm. We already saw it happen to slasher movies when Scream came along and an entire generation of viewers decided that they were two smart for slasher movies even if they hadn't seen enough of them to be genuinely jaded. Abed, though, is the universal expert who knows all movies and all television: the stakes are a lot higher this time.

As even TVTropes will tell you, tropes are not bad; they're useful. Formulas and devices aren't necessarily innovative, but they're still important to making likable stories in a reliable time-frame. Take Frasier, a long-running, high quality show. It lasted 12 reliably funny seasons on tropes and formulas and never stopped being funny. If we start pointing these tropes out constantly, however, then we're risking their long-term usefulness. Tropes run on a suspension of disbelief the same way that actors and props do. If someone is constantly pointing out that the Senator is really Laurence Olivier, then it's hard to get into the performance no matter how good it is.

What is going to happen when every single show has to have a genre-savvy snarker quipping constantly about how this stuff would only happen on TV? Not only will we play that joke out, but every trope that they quip about will be collateral damage.

Now, I can't ask to get rid of Abed and I wouldn't want to, but maybe we should start being a little bit nicer to tropes. People my age aren't jaded intellectuals who've seen everything under the sun, we've just had more time to read about tropes than other people. It might do us all some good to lie back and appreciate useful formulas for what they are.

Inception

Inception is a very, very good movie, but that can’t hide the fact that it doesn’t live up to the high potential that it sets for itself.
Great efforts have been made to keep the story of the film a secret, but it really isn’t possible to discuss the film much without going into at least the outline. If you want to see the film completely untainted by potential spoilers, then don’t read any further and just go see it because, whatever problems I have, this is still a great movie, probably the best of this year’s summer blockbusters, and almost guaranteed for a best picture nomination.
Still here? Well, the setting of Inception involves talented psychics who can use shared dreams to enter other people’s minds to steal secrets. Leonardo Dicaprio plays Cobb, a master agent who takes a job to perform an “Inception”, the supposedly impossible task of planting an idea in someone’s head. To accomplish this, he assembles a team in classic heist movie sense, including Ariadne, a young prodigy played by Ellen Page, who Dicaprio’s character tasks with building the dream world. The one problem, however, is that Cobb’s emotional baggage is starting to pollute their operations.
All of this is delivered in a very long opening sequence which goes into great detail explaining the principles and rules of dream diving and setting up the pattern of the heist. Then, the team enters the actual dream heist, and three different layers of dreaming are created. At this point, the movie shifts somewhat radically into enter action-thriller mode, with each layer containing a different action set-piece. This is where the film starts to get disappointing.
Not enough is done with the original premise that all of this is happening in dreamscapes. The premise of the action is that human manifestations of the victim’s subconscious attack the invaders like white blood cells. It works in theory, but unfortunately it is kind of a let down since the result is an intentionally generic army of spy-movie mooks pouring gunfire on the almost inexplicably action oriented agents. The third layer, in which agents assault a snow fortress (for some reason), could have been put in a Bond movie without a single alteration. Nowhere can you find symbolic representations of the subject's mind or unusual or illogical dream architecture like in Satoshi Kon's much, much better dreamscape action movie Paprika.

There are great moments, particularly in an exhilarating and visually stunning scene in which shifts in gravity on one layer cause gravity to change in a deeper layer, leading to a spectacular shifting aerial duel, but unfortunately these moments are in the minority. In an expository scene, Ariadne plays with the dreamscape by literally folding a city onto itself, but in the actual heist the environments are rigidly static and not really that dreamy.

There are glimpses of greatness here, and the film does touch on questions of reality and subconscious psychology, but unfortunately it really only touches on them. Still, though, the action scenes are executed beautifully and cast is stellar, and when the film does get surreal the effects are visually stunning.
Ultimately, I wouldn’t be noticing how much greater Inception could have been if it wasn’t already so good that I didn’t feel the need to compromise to enjoy it.

What Does Your Bad Product Teach Us?

I like talking about movies and series (Serieses? Serii?) that I watch, and I've noticed that there are two different methods of discussing things.

When you talk positively about things you are dismissed as a fanboy and people find you neither informative nor entertaining. In order to find concurrence, you must seek out other fanboys. Before long, you are talking about pairings and...*ugh*...canon.

The alternative, being negative, is well-liked and entertaining, but the very people who praise your belittling prowess secretly dismiss you as an evil troll who wants to bring them all down because girls don't like you.

Ideally, you can also be honest and review things as both good and bad based on what they deserve, but people will still assume you're doing one of the two and treat you as such. In fact, if you're being completely honest, people will universally assume you're a mean-spirited ogre and complain about how mean you are to all their favorite movies, because 90% of everything is crap and deserves to be mocked, and even good stuff has flaws that should be corrected.

I was musing on this controversy while being disappointed by "The Big Lebowski", which I watched for the first time recently, and I thought...as long as I talk about movies I will probably be dissapointing others and thought of negatively...and yet I still want to do it.

So, I'm joining the millions of others in the world by jumping into the world of amateur. By the way, I know that being an online amateur critic is incredibly unoriginal but I really don't care, trying to make it original would just end up making it gimmicky. This will probably only please me...which is good enough.