#56 -- The Plot, The Story, And The Expectation

"If you do it right, you can make the inquisitive ask questions, you can make the casuals come back, and you can make the professors lose sleep."

There is no such thing as zero-expectation. That probably makes some people happy. Heck, it's roughly 96% of what a marketing department does, fostering and metering expectations. If a marketing department is doing its job for a TV show or a movie, you're going in with familiarity about what's going to happen -- or what's supposed to happen. Elsewhere, if the storyteller is doing his or her job, they're aware of expectations, and while not necessarily playing up to those assumptions, they do not treat the crowd as a bubbling mug of stupid. The astute storyteller makes precipitous speculation a vital part of the story's existence and validation, using every tool, character trope, and twist on the norm that they can to accomplish this. This unsteady line-walking is a dangerous place to be, both creatively and financially. Either half could collapse the other if it's not handled with precise aplomb. I imagine every time somebody gets to minute-15 of a very expensive movie on release weekend and grumbles, "I have no goddamn clue what is happening," somebody in marketing is killed, and then probably hollowed out to be used as a pinata at the next Dia De Los Muertos party.

My father had that reaction while watching Inception. It's okay, he's probably smarter than me, and his brain knew to concentrate on more important things than figuring out if Christopher Nolan was creating a metaphor for movie-making via a shared-dream, idea-thievery, million dollar-grossing blockbuster.

"I liked the snowmobiles."

("Me too!")

Luckily (yes, luckily) you always have some familiarity and expectations because you are a human with a functional brain. You always know that, "This movie looks like something," and that you're familiar with that something. People know that there will be movies about robots, or romance, or mystery, or compelling moments in human history. People know that these things are ideas and stories are created by other people, or at least by the demi-humans hungry for mass-market appeal or prestigious awards. Regardless, you have basic expectations. That expectation will eventually become what the writer whittles a story out of. Even if a bizarre movie poster is all you have to go on, you'll think, "Looks confusing." And then you'll sit down in the theater, or fire up NetFlix, or whatever, expecting confusion. If somebody hands you a book, the book's potential contents are an extension of what you know about that person. Is it a person of taste that you trust? You'll expect good things, expectations perhaps altered and informed by what you know about their taste. Maybe Amazon recommends a book based on your prior purchases and shopping habits? After feeling a little intruded-upon, you give it a shot, curious if an analytical mouse-click algorithm could possibly be a good thing to identify your tendencies.

Even if you walked into a movie theater at random and sat down, not knowing what would come on the screen, you would still have a thought in the back of your head about how rebellious you are, flying blind, at which point, you're either attentive, anticipating surprise, or apathetic, expecting a bad movie. You come pre-packaged with expectations. We all start somewhere.

Expectations are part of fore-knowledge. Fore-knowledge is a collective pool of consciousness that a storyteller will tap into in order to draw an audience in. Take the familiar, arrange it, and then allow the story's characters and plot to drip into this mould. There is a library of ancient, universal storytelling templates that we share an understanding of and acknowledge, if not openly. These are the collective expectation. These are what storytellers inflict influence upon. On the one hand, you have the story. On the other, you have the characters, who must navigate that story and be as identifiable, and as convention-defying, as the understood fore-knowledge you've presupposed your audience will possess.

Logic suggests that you could begin with a something conventional, something easy, when crafting a story. Maybe it's a simple thing that could have its simplicity swept away by a tiny detail, yielding uniqueness. The most memorable:

A long, long time ago.
In a galaxy far, far away. . .

Those two sentences, standing blue against the black of space, blew a million minds. How could it be a long, long time ago, and in space? Why are we hearing about something so long ago? Because, there were Star Wars. Cue John Williams' score, and we're rolling.

Suddenly, audience expectation is heightened, and speculation begins, all because you showed them something ordinary, and then bent it. This ordinary thing could be a storytelling convention that's been altered, allowing "normal" people to be bumped around by some off-kilter world that might be just different enough. Consider the intro to X-Men -- a Jewish boy in a German concentration camp is separated from his mother, triggering an involuntary magnetic storm from inside his body. We know that this should not be real, and yet within some of the most disturbing moments in human history, perhaps there is in fact a story within a familiar plot. How is this event back in the 1940's going to change the modern times, which the movie quickly catches us up to? This is "plot" keeping up with "story," since we have people that embody safe conventions in semi-unique worlds and scenarios. The pace at which these details are metered out is often dependent on the medium. Take Harry Potter for example. For the first few books, it was very much a normal boy entering an amazing world. By the end the third book though, it's shifted, and the focus is more on character complications -- the magic is understood by the audience by then, and JK Rowling, demonstrating a great deal of growth as an author, smartly transferred the focus onto making the character-discovery just as fantastic as the magic, if not more so.

Alternatively, instead of a magical world or unusual circumstance, this "ordinary thing" being changed to run counter to audience-expectations could instead be an abnormal character, who is so compelling, that watching the entire world bounce off them becomes an insatiable, expectation-smashing experience. This is less common because it's harder to write and it's harder for an audience to connect with. Most people feel it's easier to identify with a tabula rasa, feeling that they can project themselves onto that character, deciding either yes or no, they could do well (or maybe even better) in an extreme circumstance that is so much more interesting than the mundane existence they inhabit. Note how that despite his wide appeal, many identify Batman as the least interesting character in Gotham City. He's smart and capable, true, but audiences are intrigued by a fairly particular character built out of right-angles and bullet-point commandments smashing into unpredictable, world-defining antagonism. Don't we all feel like the crazy world is against us normals? It's hard to have an identifiable, abnormal protagonist to have a good character arc without them becoming smug or predictable, especially on serialized TV. This is the reason why the hero is usually the straight-man and the sidekick is the wisecracking goofball. Connect with one, lazily, but actually adore the other. If the hero was the unique, world-defying personality, and he or she just kept doing good every week, only in an engaging, unorthodox manner with a pinball-vocabulary, then they aren't compelling or surprising or unique. If they suddenly lose their edge, and go off-script, off-expectation, then they're just a real-world asshole.

This is why normal people occupying weird worlds are the go-to for day-to-day television. We all think the world hates us -- why not give it a face that can be punched every week and a plausible, power-fantasy protagonist that somehow embodies our shortcomings? Well, if you want to be smart, you don't allow yourself to be satisfied with that. Be a tad more unpredictable. Let expectation of story fuel speculation about how a character will navigate the story's world.

In order to balance these things though, it comes back to audience. What do they know (about story)? What are they sure of (in the world)? What do they expect (of the characters)? Perhaps the most fun: what have they heard rumor and speculation of? How can these familiar threads be re-woven to make for compelling entertainment?

We can drill down into a few examples:

Alias is a show that did a lot with very little, but overstayed its welcome. Its characters and world had their arcs in the first two seasons, and creatively, it should have just ended. It tried a time-jump but only succeeded in a shark-jump. Observe Battlestar Galactica as a reference on how to do an end-of-season time-jump properly. Battlestar's world changed, the plot changed, the characters changed -- everything was altered. When Alias did it at the end of season 2, the audience was left behind in the past with main protagonist Sydney, a character that had trouble catching up with the plot that had progressed beyond her, and not in a, "Now the character will be tested and really grow" kind of way. More in a, "People got sick of the protagonist becoming a self-pitying mess, so that was the season everybody stopped watching" kind of way. We were expecting the established mythology, which was startlingly creative with its pseudo-science and Cold War legend, to steer the characters. Unfortunately, this plot couldn't be sustained, becoming much too convoluted and predictably outlandish, and the characters died on the vine.

Lost is a show that proves speculation alone is not fun, especially when "It" could be anything. Once we "knew" the characters, they lost (hah!) appeal. What began as people with baggage + haunted island + survival urgency became time-paradoxes and Cold War-era (again, JJ Abrams and his Cold War) grudges colliding with shape-shifting Egyptian blood-feuds. It began to become self-obsessed and delusional after the middle of the third season, insisting that a journey through throw-away weirdness with stubborn character archetypes was indeed interesting. It wasn't. The story stagnated, and the characters weren't strong enough to make standing around enough fun.

Batman Begins is a movie that capitalizes on sixty years of impossibility, and makes explaining away ancient implausibility compelling storytelling. The audience comes pretty well-armed to this one. Most everybody knows that a guy named Batman fights crime, and if you're tuned in a little bit more, you'll agree that superheroes are equal parts stupid and crazy. Batman Begins does not argue against Batman's idealistic recklessness, and it smartly takes the intricate details of a well-off man's metered descent into vigilantism, making it into a recognizably realistic world where a recognizably realistic version of a human takes philosophy and revenge to destructive extremes.

Is it impossible that Batman can beat up a dozen guys? No, he's a man that we watched train for years to learn that skill. Is it impossible that he could have such resources and technology? No, his company manufactures this stuff, and he carefully made decoy purchases to defer attention. Is it impossible that he could drive the batmobile over a rooftop? No, he had building schematics stating it could hold the car's weight. We once felt that Batman, and perhaps superheroes in general, were entirely implausible, and armed with that expectation, an audience is ripe for manipulation, if it is executed correctly. This is a prime example of story influencing plot, influencing character.

Casino Royale is a movie that turns a myth into a man. Similar to Batman Begins because it's about an impossible demi-god like James Bond, this is an interesting case because it's a modernization with so much history, but it's Bond himself, and all of his recognizable habits and, *ahem*, conquests, that are most famous, and his individual stories are less-so. (How is he modernized? He's made human. That's an intriguing argument for humanity's increasing need to identify itself.) Nevertheless, Bond is a character whose myth can inhabit any sort of plot, and he'll traverse it with confidence, killing henchmen, seducing women, stopping the global crisis, and not even slowing his gait as he strides right into the next movie. Giving him a problem that he can't solve destroys audiences' expectation that the plot is inconsequential to Bond. He is given emotions this time, but no consistent outlet for them. He is given true fear, but that just makes his arrogance all the more dangerous. This suddenly-humanized character is suddenly-sympathetic at the end of the movie, all because the story, formerly meaningless in the Bond-universe, worked in tandem with the character, the plot, and the style. Casting him as a brutish sociopath that eventually reforms somewhat was a brilliant piece of visual language.

Once Upon A Time is a show that reminds us that story-worlds themselves are sometimes the most interesting characters -- so make them collide. This is the exact opposite of Casino Royale. The fairy tales, the very fables themselves, are the key characters. We've never known what Snow White likes. She spites a queen, lives with dwarves, and is revived by a kiss. End of story. We've never been told what Hansel and Gretel's main character motivations. They're kids lost in the woods that kill a witch. That's all. It's the stories, the plots, that are famous, and ready to be amalgamized. This show smashes these scenarios together, so damn familiar as they are, and then lets the character drama (mathematically-impossible, 108% schlock that it is) inhabit this recognizable, mashed-up world. The recognizable stories collide to create storytelling fission-reaction -- the resulting energy is a candy-coated, mass market-ready dram-opera that sells itself. It has speculation, variation, fallout, familiarity, and no real rules, letting our minds soak up the sucrose.

Seinfeld is a show that moved from people in a world full of nothing, to horrible people destroying the world around them, to a cultural touchstone unto the real world itself. The show is not self-recognizing until the very last episode, and that's why the last episode was flopped onto the ER waiting room floor with a big "DO NOT RESUSCITATE" sign pinned to it. The show turned on itself and for once, it ceased to be about Nothing -- it suddenly consequences, and it suddenly had a story, whereas before, it simply had characters, well aware that there was no real plot, but also never looking directly into the camera and acknowledging it. We weren't expecting that -- I don't think Larry David intended it to be funny when he wrote it either. Most interestingly, Seinfeld became one of the first modern comedies to become canonized in the popular culture pantheon, meaning that if a new show lacks true purpose and focuses on character neuroses rather than them progressing as humans (because by the end of Seinfeld, they were so far beyond human, which is why they had to go to jail) then the audience will be able to say, "Oh, so it's like Seinfeld. Just less funny." 

A good modern comparison would be It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia, which has followed an almost identical tonal arc of fairly-human characters coming across the bizarre, and then eventually the characters become the malevolent, primary inflictors of plot on a world that seems increasingly more sane by comparison.

Mad Men is a show that enshrines America's cultural turbulence. The good and the bad. If you have a decent awareness of American history, you can observe this as characters passing through an era that was both clinically superficial and startlingly private. The rocket-age was optimistic because fear would surrender a Cold War foothold to the Reds, so cultural progress was frequent and rapid -- a good time to stage a period drama. As I mentioned earlier, humanity is increasingly interested in discovering itself, so to frame a plot, containing the characters, within a time-period where we expect there to be more going on in these lives than they'd like us to know. It's not a terribly unpredictable world, so the show's writers inflict some chaos on the situation with good-humored style, like when a linchpin character gets his foot shredded by a lawmower at an office party (spoilers?). The way Mad Men handles something as solid as recent-American history and shows how it will morph the characters, who are in turn trying to morph the American psyche as ad agency pitch-men, and then subsequently, the plot that contains the characters within this epoch, is all very exemplary historical fiction storytelling. 

So knowing what we know about history, a constant, we can guess how that history will change the plot, a variable.

If you do it right, you can make the inquisitive ask questions, you can make the casuals come back, and you can make the professors lose sleep. You can make the journalists write the dissenting op-eds weeks later, because that proves you're a presence in their heads. You can make worlds collide or stop them from turning altogether, and people would divide into sides, agreeing that either would be entertaining, but there is only one right answer -- theirs! You can make people lose faith, for just a moment, on purpose, and then give back the audience's terra firma at the exact right second. If you do it right, people will think that they can outsmart you, and that you want them to, and you'd be so damn happy if they stood a chance.

Maybe they do.

-- Alex Crumb

. . .follow the person on Twitter

Recommended related reading:

[Digital Narratives For Humans] by Alex Crumb

[The 10 Types Of Bombast In Storytelling] by Ghost Little and Doberman

[The 7 Great Movies That Will Make A College Student Both Wise And Emo] by Doberman

[FULL STORY ARCHIVE]

#53 -- "The Tree of Life" Reviewed | * * * ½

". . .a science, fiction film."

Life, identifiable life, is a difficult thing to face.

Fragile and grand in its insignificance, life is soft in a deafening universe. It comes in short moments and it's remembered in even fewer of them. We cannot meditate on its expansiveness without dividing ourselves from it, distancing ourselves from the only thing that makes us tangible, pondering theory and meaning, pondering our own biology and our own ego.

The human spirit is boundless, should we desire it to be, capable of comprehending our place and our size in ways that would be heresy in centuries past. The question now isn't "Who, or where, do we come from?" but "What do we come from?" We most certainly go to death, if that even is a thing worth mentioning. James Cameron once said that nobody every really dies in science-fiction.

The Tree of Life isn't a science-fiction film. It's a science, fiction film.

Addressing science and addressing fiction as vital entities that will create life, human life, in particular, it is devoid of superficial meaning, just as human life is, particularly when framed against the universe's very creation. Even from mankind's limitations, physical or otherwise, the film presents us humans as symmetrical with The Big Bang itself. Small in some ways, but so large in more, because we make ourselves thusly. It's filmed with the hopes that some day a poet from another planet will find it in a time-capsule and learn from humanity's intimacy with life itself. Optimistic and childish and fascinated, the story is formless and it scatters time as if it were a handful of salt. It endures because we viewers demand that it endure. We will make story and find story if we can.

It's story is questions:

"Why good?"

"Why bad?"

"Why hurt, and why happiness, and why anger, and why are we blessed with such potential, and why do we come across disparity?"

"Why is clarity withheld?"

Because life is an implausible, wide thing. Run these questions alongside any family and you will find limitless stories -- basic, but all unique. It's startling and realistic, like one hundred brief stories about the same person in a small-town newspaper. Stories about nature and nurture in equal measure. They combine to make the titular Tree of Life.

And yet, there are the laws erected around us, and then there's assumed fiction that goes defied, again circling back to questions that we aren't really looking for answers to, but are looking more for affirmation and identification from things capable of doing harm. They fear the ones they love and their humanity, so the family in the movie, the boys in particular, search for questions that will turn authorities into fiction and expose them as liars -- innocent logic applied, hoping to extract meaning. That desperation works its way up the chain with the parents asking equally desperate questions of God, and then the film suggests that God has to go ahead and ask these things of all of Creation, whether He invented it or not. Authority is never too far away, lurking and judgmental in the background, hanging overhead like an angry parent, a god, or a blinding sun, the last of which being present in innumerable shots throughout the film. 

That presence is terrifying and the movie is oftentimes terrifying, placing the death of the middle brother early in the movie and then flashing back to let the rest of the story build towards that event. This, like the movie's frequent, whispering narration from various characters, is cruel. There is no shelter in these internal monologues, just confusion, regret, and dread. The boys don't initially have the ability to actually harm each other -- time goes by though. Rough-housing inside becomes recklessness climbing trees becomes firecrackers becomes brotherly dares and BB guns. Eventually, it happens, and there's the death. It's never shown on-screen, we only see the emotional aftermath.

A decent metaphor for mankind as a species.

In the future, where the oldest son is grown, his life is a lucid nightmare. The world is a gray city full of deaf-mutes. He's constantly rising in an elevator that blinks mechanically like a death-bed heart-monitor. The events in his adult life are cold, fragmented, meaningless, and difficult to place -- a result of his grief. Without warning, he's wandering a desert until he finds his family; father, mother, brothers, exactly as they should be, happy, on a beach, wandering together until all of the light fades at the end of the day.

And that's all there is to it.

* * * ½

(out of 4)

Recommended related reading:

[The Prestige | * * * ½] by Ghost Little

[Shakespeare In Love | * * ½] by Ghost Little

[Jane Eyre | * * *] by Ghost Little

[FULL REVIEW ARCHIVE]

-- Ghost Little

on Twitter | @GhostLittle_WTF

#52.5 -- Super Mario Hoveround

We've discovered what would be the most thrilling Mario spin-off ever!

We don't think Nintendo would ever have the courage to make a game that reveres the works of T.S. Eliot as much as Super Mario Hoveround does.

[FULL REVIEW ARCHIVE]

 

-- Doberman

on Twitter  |  @GhostLittle_WTF

#47.5 -- Gobbling Sound Emanates From Wooden Turkey, Scientists Baffled

"The executor of the Dillinger estate has made threats against us."

I woke this morning, made tea and scones, and dressed myself, as I do, and at 11 o'clock, I approached the masters' study to inquire of them the topic for this week's entry. Instead of the productivity and politeness I am accustomed to, I was greeted with this note, which was affixed to the door with an ornate Mayan knife made from Quetzalcoatl feathers and obsidian. I will print the note in full here and now, as I was instructed by the contents of the note itself.

Dearest Poots,

It's Thanksgiving, man! It's all about football and slow-cooking food! Don't you like mixing types of alcohol while having awkward, and yet strangely intimate, conversations with people you've only met two or three times in your life? Well, we do!

Plus, balloon floats!

If you don't mind, you can have the remainder of the week off. We had a few prospective pieces that we could have used but we ran out of time because of a few unanticipated roadblocks, namely:

• The executor of the Dillinger estate has made threats against us
• Iambic pentameter takes forever to write in

With these things in mind, we thought it best to delay things until the heat dies down. Post this note so people know what's up. Also, we wanted to share some video footage of a recent scientific discovery. Apparently, gobbling sounds are emanating from a wooden turkey and the academic community is just completely baffled. That is all. Enjoy your time off, Poots!

I have embedded the video as was requested.

Happy Thanksgiving, all.

Good day.

Recommended related reading:

[The Organ] by Ghost Little
[The Diffused States (Part 1)] by Ghost Little and Doberman
[Watch Out For That Dinosaur!] by Caretaker Poots

-- Caretaker Poots

on Twitter  |  @GhostLittle_WTF

#42 -- The 7 Great Movies That Will Make A College Student Both Wise And Emo

BY THE WAY: An updated version of this article, and all of our other reviews, can be found on our new official site: http://www.ghostlittle.com/ No ads, no Google bullshit, just content. [The 7 Great Movies That Will Make A College Student Both Wise And Emo]

"An inexperienced film-junkie still in his larval form though might call it the best mobster movie since Goodfellas and he'd be unanimously fucking wrong."

The trouble with good movies is that people often try too hard to like them. Hungry people try too hard to like them. Students are particularly hungry for identity and for understanding and there's a lot to like in movies they've been told are great and there's no reason not to like them. Like scarves and black coffee, great movies pick up fair-weather fans, and more relevantly, gloom-weather fans. They can be powerful. These movies can cause pretty heavy impact, unloading weighty messages that free minds can't help but cull for meaning. It can be too much though. In the vernacular, they can fuck with young heads.

For these reasons, and more to be detailed later, we give you the 7 great movies that will make a college student both wise and emo, in no particular order:

1) Do not watch Dead Poets Society. You will never have Robin Williams as a teacher. In fact, it's more likely that you'll go through school silently, miserable to the last hair fiber, misunderstood because you couldn't even define yourself if you tried, defiant, maybe, but incapable of identity or credibility. The lesson in this movie is: "Don't be a pussy, go for it." That's a terrible lesson to teach to budding teenager at prep-school. "Subvert the system" is a better credo at that age. Nobody but Robin Williams would condone acting like a brash individual at that age and that's because Robin Williams is an honored, Zelda-playing, highly-profane and highly-successful, Julliard-trained actor. If you're out of college, and trust us on this, it isn't too late to go all Dead Poets and become a carpe diem'ing basket case. In fact, the timing is perfect! Most people are so grounded in a shitty work-routine by adulthood that a genuine, bright-eyed, poetry-quoting, art-loving individual is welcomed with open arms. If you tried to emulate the Dead Poets attitude in college, you'd be held in contempt by your peers as a grinning, overachieving wannabe and you'd be a social outcast to the lexically-flaccid, just like the kids in the movie.

INSTEAD, watch: Stand By Me! Metering out a pitch-perfect nostalgia dosage. It's a movie about the scariest adventure you never had as a kid with the best friends you ever had or never realized you had until way later. It's got tons of cool swearing and a child threatens Kiefer Sutherland with a revolver. It's such a better movie than Super 8.

2) As awesome as it is, Fight Club does more ill than good. It's an ironically glitzy ad for anarchy and nihilism. It's all good until you realize it's all about how you'll eventually go crazy in adulthood and the only answer is to stop caring and have sex with Helen Bonham-Carter and, let's face it, then nobody wins. We love this movie to death and most people will be able to watch it and say: "Yeah, that movie was sick. On with life!" There's a certain crowd though that will start dressing like Tyler Durden though and start wearing cheap sunglasses indoors and act aloof in their American literature classes and chew lots of sunflower seeds all the fucking time. In the 1990's, Everybody wanted to dress like Kurt Cobain, who dressed like a slob and didn't care -- his fans cared. They cared so much that they wanted to be indifferent just like him. Fight Club is the greatest pitch for hitting rock-bottom during a midlife (quarter-life?) crisis, the moment when you stop caring, utterly powerless against our own self-pity. Don't be like Ed Norton. Ed Norton is a pussy.

INSTEAD, watch: Wanted! James McAvoy begins this movie as a pussy. At the end, he shoots Morgan Freeman in the head from a mile and a half away as revenge for betraying and lying to him. That's badass. He becomes badass because he realizes he's a pussy capable of more. Be like James McAvoy. But don't shoot Morgan Freeman. Ever.

3) Requiem For A Dream will make you want to drink yourself to death. It's got, you know, that one song, more than double the editing cuts of a normal movie, and, like, fifty gallons of heroin. The movie is so elegant in the beginning, approaching the band of drug users like your ever-compelling junkie cousin at the beginning of Thanksgiving dinner and he's got great stories about accidentally selling his pool table to an undercover cop on Valentine's Day. That's funny. For a while, that's damn-funny. Then he starts saying that he needs to eat his own skin right around when the mashed potatoes are being served. The only way out for you is to rip the pouring spout off of that bottle of Cuervo and black out Requiem For A Dream's very existence from your memory. Killing 10,000 braincells to forget, genocide, is a justifiable reaction to seeing Aronofsky's hate-crime on happiness. At least The Fountain had a heartbreaking love story.

INSTEAD, watch: Equilibrium! If you haven't seen it, take a DVD (not a Blu-Ray) of John Woo's The Killer, have sex with it, swallow some Xanax, and then read Brave New World. Yeah. It's kinda like that. And it's that good. Christian Bale stops taking his meds in the future and starts doing bullet-karate on people. Near the end, he cuts a guy's face off of his skull with a katana in one stroke. All because he stops taking drugs!

4) Stop quoting The Boondock Saints. Goddamn, what a great movie. It's so dang delightfully misguided in its grandiose delivery (and something that its sequel pokes fun at (one of the only things its sequel does that's worth mentioning)). The movie opens with a preacher describing the Kitty Genovese story, then delivers some kind of mashup of Watchmen and V For Vendetta by way of South Boston. Well done, Troy Duffy, you read yourself some Alan Moore. As utterly entertaining as The Boondock Saints is, its final question distills into a fairly binary decision about vigilantism, yes/no? Do you have faith in the system? Can normal people justifiably be touched by inspiration and go on a bad-guy killing spree? If they can speak Latin and dual-wield pistols, fuckin' a-right they can! It's a superhero movie. An inexperienced film-junkie still in his larval form though might call it the best mobster movie since Goodfellas and he'd be unanimously fucking wrong.

INSTEAD, watch: Punisher Warzone! Now, Punisher Warzone and The Boondock Saints are awesome for similar reasons but the difference is that Punisher offers no pretensions about what it is. If Boondock was the gritty retelling of the original Punisher story, justification for vigilantism intact, then Punisher Warzone is The Boondock Saints: The Videogame: The Movie. The Punisher alone kills fifty dudes in the movie, one of whom dies because he is punched in the face so hard, it becomes concave. Justified!

5) Where to start with Garden State? This is a Zach Braff power-fantasy. And now you suddenly remember what stomach acid tastes like. What, you think if you run off to the movie industry, you'll come back to town, truly indifferent to your own success because of over-medication, and Natalie Portman will be all quirky-pants hot for you? That would be neat. Again, we can identify with this movie on most levels, it's just going to depress the hell out of anybody aged 16-22. It's about somebody else willing you out of a pretty deep depression and finding you're stronger than you probably ever gave yourself credit for. But to experience that sensation, child, you need to be utterly depressed first. Emerging from a dark phase in your life is great to look back on but you shouldn't kill yourself first to rise higher. That's what Vegeta does, man. Don't be Vegeta. Don't be Zach Braff either. He's a punk in real life. If you never act like him in the first place, you won't have to be a depressed wallpaper-sheet of a human being.

INSTEAD, watch Rango! These two movies are entirely unrelated. But seriously, have you seen Rango? It's the Pirates of the Caribbean CG-animal cowboys sequel that we deserved but never got. There's a part where anthropomorphic moles ride bats and play Ride of the Valkyries on a banjo, washboard, and jug!

6) Why do so many girls own a copy of American Beauty on DVD? First, there's Kevin Spacey going through a midlife crisis. Then there's the kid with the video camera trying to understand beauty in trash. Wait. Okay, stick with us on this. Beauty. . . beauty, beauty. . . American beauty?! American beauty is destructive and American beauty is hard to capture and American beauty is ugly and American beauty is often secretive and forbidden and it is misunderstood and until you walk that road, that miserable road, you will never have come close enough to American beauty to understand it. And. . . that's the name of the movie! The entire movie as an Americana art project vomitorium. Notice we used the term "art project," built with great purpose around the notion that it will be a many-sided sniderohedron that some folks just won't be able to comprehend, and they'll throw awards at it, just 'cuz.

INSTEAD, watch: The Incredibles! Best Pixar movie? Tied with Wall-E and Up. It approaches the superhero mythos and midlife crises with more elegance than the Watchmen movie while aping the Fantastic Four's powers and family dynamic. It's a love-letter to Americana, rather than a eulogy.

7) And finally, whatever you do, don't watch Donnie Darko. Ever.

INSTEAD, watch: Inception! Dream thieves, spiral-gravity, snowmobile chases, questionable realities, espionage, heavy weapons, heavier themes -- a heist movie, in reverse, about the very concept of drawing an audience into a movie, and letting them decide if the world is real or not.

We realize we might have been generous with the "great movies" label, particularly in Donnie Darko's case. 

Recommended related reading: 

[The 10 Types Of Bombast In Storytelling] by Ghost Little and Doberman

[Behold, The 7-Step Plan Of Vengeance®] by Ghost Little

-- Doberman

on Twitter  |  @GhostLittle_WTF

#40 -- "The Prestige" Reviewed | * * * ½

"This is a movie about being fooled because we want to be fooled and it doesn't stop there -- we want to be fooled by something complicated and we won't take simple for an answer. . . Don't look closely. Stand at a distance. You aren't being fooled."

This movie is a Monet. It's impressionism. It's clearest when you stop squinting and you back away and you stop trying to examine it because as you examine it, The Prestige is giving you your answers over and over. Let it. In fact, while you're worming your way around the question, trying to match it up with an answer that must, by necessity, be as equally taut and coiled, you have all the answers you need. It is both question and codex, describing itself, and you, at the same time.

Christopher Nolan is cruel and he doesn't care who knows it. The guy is fairly humorless in his movies and that's one of his flaws. As a director, his grasp on the audience's reactions goes beyond the movie itself and he bats around expectations like an arrogant racquetball player. His characters in The Prestige, Borden and Angier, are cold and obsessive, assuredly like Nolan is, mystifying people because they know how to, not because it cheers them up. They have the ability to distract the gawking masses, and out of pity, these two magicians suffer for their art, probably more than they would have liked to. It's sort of a self-pitying sacrifice but the outcome is a warm amazement at the power our own minds have over us when we go looking for something and ignore all other possibilities in search of something complex. The search for a complex answer sends feedback into the simple question we asked in the first place, layering and warping it until its nigh-unrecognizable.

The Prestige is fairly self-referential, something we normally don't like because it places an invisible dunce cap on the audience, and yet The Prestige goes even further -- that dunce cap isn't its last trick, it's just more sleight-of-hand. In fact, the movie thinks very highly of you, proven by the fact that it bothered to challenge you at all. It has deeper meaning than Inception, Nolan's later movie, but lacks Inception's urgency, focusing instead on keeping every shot air-tight instead of making it exciting. Inception is better the first time you view it while The Prestige is sharper the fifth or sixth time you see it and they're both equally good. Push. We're not talking about Inception though.

No, instead, we have The Prestige today. This is a movie about being fooled because we want to be fooled and it doesn't stop there -- we want to be fooled by something complicated and we won't take simple for an answer. We need to let that go. Maybe enjoy ourselves. Maybe try smiling at a neat li'l trick.

In London around the start of the 20th century, two stage magicians become rivals and through some non-linear storytelling, one of them is wrongfully accused of drowning the other after a trick involving some sort of lightning machine. But that doesn't happen until later, apparently. Flashback to years earlier when they were just starting up, dissecting what it means to be a capable stage performer. It appears total commitment is the answer to that question and we are slowly told that answers might not be as clear as they seem. People are always acting, always leaving misdirection.

Angier, the man who drowns in the introductory flash-forward, is a better performer, favoring flashiness. Borden, the accused now on trial, is blunter but sneakier -- he starts as the "antagonist." The two of them constantly trade the upper hand and the roles of antagonist and protagonist. The audience doesn't know which one to keep an eye on and credit to Nolan for these switches is highly-deserved. We're asked from the very beginning if we're "watching closely," but this is even more misdirection.

Don't look closely. Stand at a distance. You aren't being fooled.

The whole time, while the two of them are swapping mistresses and puzzling each other with new tricks that bring them to anger, assuring others that it's a puzzle within a riddle within a masquerade. It isn't though. Angier visits Nikolai Tesla / David Bowie in America to make him a high-science machine that will zap him from one place to another, a magic trick that Borden has mastered without the use of a body-double, which is the traditional way to accomplish The Transported Man illusion. Little by little we learn just how extensive their contention is. Eventually, Angier discovers the machine can clone anything or anybody.

It doesn't really matter what the solution is because the point the movie is making is that actual answers can never be guessed if we go in with an obsessed eye. This rubs some people the wrong way and those people must think very highly of themselves. The answer is: you're a dummy, stop pretending, stop thinking you know everything. Even when the answer is right in front of your face, waving at you, which The Prestige does with zero apologies on repeated viewings, you won't see the answer until you're cool with being fooled and that's not a bad thing. If you can't stick with the movie after the twist with Angier cloning and killing himself over and over, all to serve a magic trick, You're Doing It Wrong. 

It's a stupid twist and it knows it. It teaches a lesson about suspending disbelief, which is why you're there, watching a movie. Movies are all about people dying over and over and people swapping characters every other second, which is how Borden does his version of The Transported Man, and yet Angier refuses to believe it is so simple. Angier is the all assholes at the movies demanding complexity, considering themselves to be very smart and feeling quite entitled to a story as equally-gnarled. At the movies, we believe the misdirection because we want to believe in the mystery.

Like your dad trolling you for trying to act like an adult before you're ready, The Prestige gives you all the tools you need to fix a roof that doesn't need fixing, and yet you search it for the flaws he assured you were there and he is kicking back somewhere with an iced tea, waiting for you to come find him after two hours of trying.

Your reaction should not be: "you asshole."

It should be: "good one."

* * * ½

(out of 4)

-- Ghost Little

on Twitter  |  @GhostLittle_WTF

#38 -- "Shakespeare In Love" Reviewed | * * ½

". . .honestly, Shakespeare In Love is not meta enough. . . it is like throwing a bratwurst down a hallway."

An interesting conversation happened at the bar last week when we mentioned to somebody that we would never see that movie Contagion because it would only increase our hypochondria and that it was weird that they give away Gwyneth Paltrow's death in the trailers and that she had been an overrated actress ever since Shakespeare In Love, a movie which we had never seen.

"Oh, you need to watch Shakespeare In Love. It's amazing. It's my go-to feel-good movie to watch when I'm feeling down."

"Really. That's a pretty big statement. Is it better than Love, Actually?"

"I'm getting kinda sick of Love, Actually."

"Okay. Is it better than Saving Private Ryan?"

"I haven't seen Saving Private Ryan. Why do you ask?"

"Because Shakespeare In Love won the best picture Oscar over Saving Private Ryan in 1998, which I'm pretty sure was the biggest acts of grand larceny since Prometheus."

That dim-light conversation was how we found ourselves watching Shakespeare In Love and yeah, we did go into this movie on a sour note, a bad way to go into any experience, expecting one thing and instead getting another. Expecting local venison steaks and instead getting a shrink-wrapped mid-sized bratwurst -- not terrible, just disturbing because you're worried about how it was made. Co-written by Tom Stoppard, a genius, it's a very meta-story about William Shakespeare getting writer's block while working on "Romeo and Juliet" and then overcoming the aforementioned writer's block by inadvertently living the play's story himself, and, umm, writing it as he goes. Shakespeare is the Romeo in that sentence. Today, Shakespeare's stories are veritable narrative-engines that you can tweak and tune to run in any environment -- lighten it by setting it as a CG cartoon (Gnomio & Juliet, featuring the voice of Jason Statham as Tybalt), tighten the gear ratio to make it work in modern California (Romeo + Juliet, directed by the mad-Australian Baz Luhrmann), add werewolves and vampires (Underworld, directed by nobody) because werewolves and vampires have blood like soda-fountain syrup and it is joyous to watch it squib everywhere. Those are all just the takes on "Romeo and Juliet," let's not forget those riffs on "Hamlet" (The Lion King), and "The Tempest" (Forbidden Planet). These plays are sort of like wide, straight-line hallways that you can decorate to your liking, highly-adaptable templates tailor-made for being self-referential and tongue-in-cheek meta-narratives, but honestly, Shakespeare In Love is not meta enough.

For all of its borrowing of classical Shakespearean elements like class-warfare and simple misunderstandings leading to big troubles and big troubles leading to fencing-duels and fencing-duels leading to Accidental Poison, this is a movie that's self-satisfied. Stoppard's approach to, ya know, "spinning the whole Shakespeare play-writing story so it's sly and aware, man" is the equivalent of a college student coming into a sophomore creative writing class and saying, "My paper is about my roommate writing a poem about his doomed relationship with a girl whose family has a house in the Hamptons."

Saying that Shakespeare didn't just write "Romeo and Juliet," bro, he lived it, isn't clever. It's child's play. Know what Stoppard should've done? He should've gone further. He should've set it in on a far-flung future space-station where a barely-human playwright repeats history and inadvertently re-write Shakespeare by living that timeless starcrossed-lovers story -- a "million monkeys at a million typewriters" meets "power of love" kinda thing (in space!). Stoppard squeezes references to so many other plays that this could have been a huge mash-up of all the Shakespearean mythos rather than just an opaque retelling with a deus ex machina that doesn't do her job. And there are references, there are Easter eggs, there is fan-service, and there are no bigger fanboys than English literature fanboys, that's for damn sure, but it isn't enough to point to a human skull in the background and assume you've just split the stage-drama atom. C'mon, that's what Family Guy does, sniggering at Optimus Prime copy-pasted into the background during a conversation about robots. Those objects in the background in Shakespeare In Love like Yorick's skull have meaning in the plays come from -- why did they make the plot run parallel to "Romeo and Juliet" if it's supposed to be a Shakespeare origin-story? Is it Shakespeare Begins or is it Batman and Juliet? Well, it's something in between and as a result, we're stuck with an imbalance. The whole message feels misdirected or unsure of what it wants to be, hence the well-documented re-shoots on the movie's ending. The sad part is that Stoppard fucking knows how to write a good, goofy spoof like he did with Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead and it's tragic that his ideas seem to be a delicious apple-blueberry crumb pie that somebody decided to drop a upside-down German bundt cake on top of, hoping to hide the sugary fruit filling dripping out of the sides and maybe win some Oscars.

Shakespeare wrote comedies and tragedies and romances and sonnets -- most of the sonnets are rumored to have actually been written for one of his male friends, by the way -- so there was obviously more to his talent and legend than one girl that he couldn't forget. He invented words! He borrowed and stole ideas! He wrote fucking "MacBeth" and "King Lear!" The fact that Shakespeare cheated on his wife with no remorse is the least interesting thing he did. Instead of being just "Romeo and Juliet" -- and yes, there were disguises, and deceptions, and cross-dressing, and a third-act turn, and those are all Shakespeare tropes -- this should have been an assembly of the major themes from many plays woven together into a story that's genuinely new. That would have been impressive. Retelling "Romeo and Juliet" has been done better, most notably by the above-mentioned Baz Luhrmann; in Moulin Rouge! The whole back-half of that movie is about them inadvertently performing an Indian version of "Romeo and Juliet" but they don't wink and nod at each other, they just added Bollywood-psychosis by way of French Absinthe-madness and actually had the balls to kill the female lead.

Shakespeare In Love is not a bad movie. It isn't as smart as it thinks it is. It isn't poorly-acted. It isn't poorly-written dialog. It isn't disrespectful of its medium. It isn't as good as Saving Private Ryan. It isn't undeserving of praise but it is given too much credit. It is award-bait. It is wasted potential. It is sugar-neutral. It is Splenda. It is a case of been-there done-that. It is a re-tread. It is like throwing a bratwurst down a hallway.

* * ½

(out of 4)

-- Ghost Little

on Twitter  |  @GhostLittle_WTF

#35.5 -- Watch Out For That Dinosaur!

"Watch Out For That Dinosaur!"

Tragic, there will be no new post this week, as it is the end of August, and it is time for a week-long holiday. In lieu of a comprehensive short story, a treatise on minutia, or a review of a recent film, book, or digital plaything, I have been instructed to play this video message, explaining the circumstances.

I hope that I have carried out my instructions to your satisfaction. Now keep calm, and carry on, we'll weather this storm yet.

Good day.

-- Caretaker Poots

on Twitter  |  @GhostLittle_WTF

#31.5 -- 4 | P0W3Я H0µЯ (Part 2)

Another special pre-update for the week of July 18th. Due to our ongoing legal battle with Axel Rose, it took a little bit to obtain the legal rights for non-revenue generating use of "Paradise City." Hence, the delay in part two of our video series going live.

Without further adieu, please enjoy a part two of "4 |  P0W3Я H0µЯ," the video tribute to drinking, music, and video games:

The other parts are cut and loaded on YouTube already, the full playlist you can find here. We'll be adding updates periodically when things get slow. Unfortunately, Part 4 is facing similar licensing issues because Jay-Z is lowballing us. Can you believe that?

Look for full update tomorrow.

-- Ghost Little and Doberman

on Twitter  |  @GhostLittle_WTF

#24.5 -- 4 | P0W3Я H0µЯ (Part 1)

A special pre-update for the week of June 5th.

Please enjoy a part one of "4 |  P0W3Я H0µЯ," the video tribute to drinking, music, and video games:

We just need to chop the other parts up for upload. Can you complete the whole hour?

Look for full update tomorrow.

-- Ghost Little and Doberman

on Twitter  |  @GhostLittle_WTF

#23.5 -- Burrito Friday

A special pre-update for the week of May 30th.

Please enjoy a short film we made detailing the intricacies of our favorite local holiday: Burrito Friday

How do you celebrate?

Look for full update tomorrow.

-- Ghost Little and Doberman

on Twitter  |  @GhostLittle_WTF

#11 -- "Princess Mononoke" Reviewed | * * * *

"...body of a reindeer, feet of a chicken, antlers like tree roots, chest plumage of an eagle, tail of a fox, face like a painted semi-humanoid African lion mask (yup!)..."

The moral of Princess Mononoke flies in the face of established western religion. Well-sketched human ambiguity flies in the face of established western religion. Taking place in a land that sort-of-isn't-ancient-Japan (further research suggests it's technically around the 1300s, but a fantastical version of the 1300s, so it might as well be in Asia-Narnia), the earth is being contaminated. Humans have been driving the soil too hard, subjugating the animals too harshly, and mining too deeply for iron to build their fortresses of sand and mud. There is societal and technological progress as a result. Humans are safer from the wild beasts. We have crude guns. The mountains are being tamed. The future is drawing closer. And somewhere in the wilderness, a princess raised by a thirty-foot wolf is plotting revenge against the fortress' governess. 

This is cinema's animated, foreign, ancient, Gaia-theory-infused, epic saga. It's better than The Godfather Part II, but maybe not quite as good as The Godfather.

The leaves are green but the rivers have begun to run brown in this place. Under the shadowy forest canopy, demons are beginning to possess the strongest animals. They leak blackened, cursed blood that writhe like lecherous worms when cut. The demons' skin is comprised of half-dissected land-bound octopi. These demons are manifestations of the earth's anger at the growing imbalance -- an imbalance that the greedy, desperate humans have brought. The very ground we walk on fighting back against the people fighting to survive? The animals have every right to the planet that we do, don't they? With both sides fighting for justifiable survival, what side doe we take?

In short: neither side. In the most un-western way possible, good and bad are not binary in this movie. Supreme benevolence and total evil don't exist in this sort-of-isn't-ancient-Japanese land. There is no God, there is no Satan. There are, however, forces of greater sentience that humans can't quite comprehend. And isn't that what a god really is? There are wicked demons that can be killed and there are kinder spirits that can also be killed. And there are people, but there is no carved set of rules. There is no infallible source of unquestionable truth. There's nothing to default to in this story. 

Goodness is not openly declared. Its concept must be explored and discovered by all of the characters, be they man, woman, or wolf-god.

The prince, one of our two main characters, capable with the bow and with the sword, rides a straight-up lovable red elk across the countryside. That red elk might be my favorite animal in any movie ever. He's mildly fantastic, but could certainly exist somewhere in the world. Throughout the movie, the elk will: get scared, face certain death, get the prince out of danger, carry him when he's injured, disobey and follows when it's told not to, and get shot with an arrow. We want one. We'd ride it to the bar. 

Traveling closer to town, the prince passes out familiar greetings to villagers. They're clearly fans of his red elk and they adore the shit out of the prince. Five minutes later though, the prince has killed a rampaging boar god and in doing so, learns he's cursed with the creature's anger -- that anger will soon kill him. Natch. So in defense of his home, the infinitely noble (and I mean that, he's honorable to a fault), the prince will die, eaten from the inside-out by worming feelings of rage. The demon, which lives in his arm, occasionally rises up, feeding on the fury around the prince, its half-dissected land-bound octopi skin showing through in the ickiest, most believable way imaginable. 

How can we root for this guy? He's damned. He's tainted and his fate is written. He can't fight back against evil, because that just speeds up the curse's consumption of his soul. But you do root for him. Because his character is not binary. He doesn't turn the other cheek, he doesn't wait for the world, he isn't complacent, he isn't self-pitying. He gears up. He gets shit done. He doesn't do this stuff to survive, he knows he's already dead. He doesn't do this stuff because he's commanded to or sent on a quest. He doesn't do it out of thoughtless devotion to something he doesn't understand (at least not at first, but then the princess shows up (but she's a total sweetie (at least not at first, again))). No, the prince does this because he looks at the problems, assesses his own shit situation, and then goes totally Flash Gordon on the rapidly eroding landscape of sort-of-isn't-ancient-Japan. 

Traveling some distance across the countryside, he eventually learns from the governess of the fortress that it was she that killed the boar god, who in turn cursed the prince. The boar god was enraged by an iron bullet she'd shot, that hatred allowed the demon to enter and corrupt the boar god (who by the way, is, like, a boar the size of an orca). The governess was defending her people from the forest beasts, she shot the boar god in defense. And then what does she do? She apologizes to the prince for being an accessory to his being cursed. Oh, also, the governess cares for lepers and rescues women from brothels in the city and gives them shelter. 

Oh, come on, man! Give us a bad guy! We have the prince, we have the governess, we demons possessing giant animals, and we have... well, we have the princess. 

The princess. We love the princess. She's a fantastic foil to the prince. She's a total spitting-cobra that meshes flawlessly with the prince's cool, focused self-confidence. Their arguments are so one-sided. She threatens to kill him the way normal people would inhale or use punctuation. And he just goes about his business -- listening to her, but focusing on the bigger issues, like the impending eco-pocalypse. He doesn't snap at her, isn't mean to her, and doesn't sass back at her. He knows she's worried, but fighting her won't improve his situation. He's just got liquid nitrogen running through his veins. Pretty soon, she realizes what he's all about. They save one another from death on multiple occasions. They're both determined, headstrong, thoughtful, sometimes vulnerable, and always capable. They rock our socks off every time. They're better than the husband and wife from The Fountain. They're so much better than Harry and Sally. They're one of the best couples you'll find in any story. 

See, the prince is basically half-hatred by the end of the first hour, so him just handling his shit is exciting to watch. You pray he won't become a self-loathing blob of a human and he doesn't! When he goes demonic, the noise fades out, he goes sort of expressionless, and moves through his troubles like a determined white dandelion. He bends swords slowly like they grass. He gets shot (bloodily too, there's a hole in his chest that's the circumference of an mature ferret at one point) and keeps walking. He saves the princess from the governess and they retreat to the woods. 

What follows is a chase across the wilderness. The governess wants to secure her power by killing the peaceful forest spirit that gives life to all the nice spirits. If it dies, then the beasts like the wolves and the boars and the apes will become docile. This keeps up with the running themes of survivalism and prickishness, in that everybody, man, woman, or wolf-god, are capable of being emotionally small. 

Eventually, we gather that the best thing we all can do is: moderation. The animals need to stop being pissed off. The humans need to be less greedy when they dig for iron or gather resources. The demons need to go and fuck right off, because they're just being tricky dickholes that want to ruin people's good times. The governess gets her arm bitten off at one point by a disembodied wolf head, which is so sudden and so un-graphic that you sort of forget it happens. 

The scariest moment occurs when the great forest spirit (body of a reindeer, feet of a chicken, antlers like tree roots, chest plumage of an eagle, tail of a fox, face like a painted semi-humanoid African lion mask (yup!)) is just chilling out, making flowers grow wherever it walks, and it gets its head shot off. It then mutates over the course of a few hard-to-watch minutes into a toxic single-celled organism. It walks like a headless emaciated gorilla. Growing a hundred feet tall, sort of amorphous, but with transparent, spidery limbs and too many fingers. It's so faceless, yet familiar and human(ish)-shaped, that you can't help but be terrified of this good thing being desecrated by violence. 

Rewind for a sec. Earlier on, when it had a head, the great forest spirit has the opportunity to cure the prince of his demonic curse when it heals the ferret-sized wound in his chest. But it doesn't. The prince wonders this aloud. Well, because that wouldn't solve anything. The prince has to go on wondering, growing, fighting, riding giant wolves, learning to appreciate the princess' passionate desire to protect her forest, and eventually realize on his own that he needs and wants to restore the balance of nature in the world. Nobody tells him to do this. Nobody tells him when he's done it. It's beautiful when he restores the great forest spirit to its rightful form with the princess' help. The gigantic spirit collapses into a lake and the water purifies the decaying forest the way a good deus ex machina should. The hatred subsides, the demons are defeated.  

And the princess has to go back into the forest. It's an optimistic but very sad ending. It isn't "boo-hoo" sad. It's more of "goddamn, we suck" sad.  

We'd knock it down a peg for being a movie for tree-hugging dipshit hippies, but we'd be missing the point if we did, and then the hippies would win. It isn't entirely about that. The truth behind Princess Mononoke is that there is no one true force of white goodness and there is no source of endless evil blackness. We aren't here on earth to please the righteous, or even attack the wicked. Ambiguity can be a tough conclusion to grasp. It's a vital lesson in life though. We're all just trying to make it in a world filled with forces bigger and stronger than ourselves. If you can't handle that, that unfairness, then you'll succumb. You'll default to an extreme -- complacent, weak goodness or rage-blinded wickedness, whichever is the path of least resistance. The prince and the princess are dangerously close to these ends of the spectrum until they meet each other. Through mutual, personal identification, they gradually discover a better truth (and it's a long-ass movie, let me remind you, clocking in at about 2.5 hours) than these simpler default settings of "this" or "that." 

They are fluctuating shades. In the end, they get it. They are much greater than the sum of their more obvious parts. 

* * * *

(out of 4)

-- Ghost Little and Doberman
on Twitter  |  @GhostLittle_WTF