Storytelling

Road Rage

Posted on:  October 24, 2011

There are fewer and fewer reasons to go to the movies these days especially in terms of good cinema stories that when a film like DRIVE comes out, it’s an event.   But this is a good thing.  It makes movie going become rare and special.

Again it’s no secret how much I love minimalism in terms of story telling and characters that reveal themselves through action. The hero story is played out and we know it.  But as Joseph Campbell notes, the hero has a thousand faces.  And sometimes there is a very thin line that separates the hero from the villain. Both are human but only one has real humanity.  It’s in action that real character is revealed and the subtext is exposed.

In terms of story telling, Drive does something I always look for in great films:  You can’t wait to see what will happen next.   It has such an simple screen story it could have easily been boring and trite (and over written) without the care of a good film maker (in this case, the talented Nicolas Winding Refn).  Because a majority of film making today is plot driven, it suffers from a plot generated cycle of patching up holes while creating new ones.  The result are scenes that only answer themselves and not to a greater theme.  No turns in the story lead to characters explaining rather than acting.

Like the nameless George Clooney character in The American.  The kid in Drive is someone who is at a crossroads.  Someone who is ready to walk the straight and narrow.  But like anything there are repercussions and consequences for our actions.  And as the movie’s slogan denotes, “there are no clean getaways”.

The heroism isn’t in what the kid actually does (in such a brutally beautiful way) It’s the fact that he is willing to selflessly give up so much in pursuit of  freedom which in a sense, is as vital to happiness as life itself.

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The Experience

Posted on:  January 1, 2011
The dawn of a new year always brings hope and vitality to everyone’s spirits.  You can forget about what didn’t happen the previous year and literally start fresh.  But with this comes even more anxiety, more pressure and the feeling that life just got even faster and therefore, more energy is needed to keep pace.
Proliferation of digital media and the omnipresent nature of communications these days has made it possible for us to connect with each other at a level never before seen in human history. Yet the interesting irony in this is that the events that we encounter have become increasingly recycled, diluted and propagated.  Living vicariously has gone from novelty to mainstream.  We keep up with the world around us through social media and regurgitated information to help us bridge the time we lose running the race.
I‘m not indicting this at all.  I am both a major user and purveyor of digital stuff.  But as a story teller, there is a danger that the well from which you draw your most raw and sincere material from gets convoluted, stale and banal.  The truths from great stories comes from not only a shared experience, but from personal interaction and from being right in the middle of it all.  You can’t do that watching web clips and video chats.  This means going out of your way and taking a bit of a gamble.  It’s listening to a country record when you don’t like country music. It’s talking to someone in line at the grocery store.  It’s typing a story on a typewriter.  It’s taking a drive somewhere you’ve never been.  These are the worlds that exist in our computers that we can experience for ourselves and don’t require an abundance of time or money.  Your eyes are the best cameras in the world so go and take lots of video.
So as I add one more bit of digital minutiae to the vast digital universe, I am ever reminded of the balance that needs to be struck living in the mainstream and the need to feed the soul of the very staple it requires:  Life.

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