A. and I saw two films yesterday, and my reactions to each of them probably say a lot about what sort of person I am.<\/p>\n
We headed over to Hollywood in the afternoon, got caught in one of those inexplicably snarly patches of LA traffic, missed the start of the film we’d intended to see, but found that Hotel Rwanda<\/a> was just about to start, so dived in. It did almost exactly nothing for me. Despite the vastness and gut-wrenching horror of the source material, and also despite some technically dead-on performances, the narrative is small, clumsy. Whether for lack of budget, lack of artistic guile, lack of bravery, there’s no poetry. I wasn’t remotely moved.<\/p>\n And then, in the evening, we stuck The Usual Suspects<\/a> in the DVD player, I geeked out to a film I adore, which I’ve seen countless times \u2014 even dissected the screenplay for PhD stuff \u2014 and at the moment where the narrative comes together in the most beautiful structural ballet, not for the first time I found myself genuinely moved, tears in my eyes. (The moment, for what it’s worth, is when Kevin Spacey’s leg straightens. It never fails to take my breath away.) It’s quite silly, because there’s nothing close to sentimental about the film. Hotel Rwanda is about genocide. The Usual Suspects is about noirish crime. And yet it’s Suspects that consistently moves me.<\/p>\n Narrative can have music. When it works, it can be like<\/em> music. It’s no longer about discovering the plot. It’s about experiencing the structure of the thing as a whole, just as we thrill to a favourite song. I’ve taken a lot of stick from A. and others about how much I was moved by Titanic<\/a>. I agree with their criticisms of the film, mostly, but I also can see why we disagree about the film as a whole: I think its narrative structure is entirely magnificent. It’s that which moves me, not caring about the characters, or being swept along by the score. Certainly it’s not the dialogue. So I find myself profoundly moved most of all by elegance and beauty in the structure of narrative. I suspect that might make me very strange.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A. and I saw two films yesterday, and my reactions to each of them probably say a lot about what sort of person I am. We headed over to Hollywood in the afternoon, got caught in one of those inexplicably snarly patches of LA traffic, missed the start of the film we’d intended to see, … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-130","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","category-narrative"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=130"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":821,"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130\/revisions\/821"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}