You know how people will sometimes say about a big summer blockbuster flick, “It’s okay if you just shut off your brain.”
Don’t ever do that. Don’t ever shut off your brain. It’s true that when you actually analyze the typical big explody action film with your brain on, the experience can be excruciating. But you will learn a ton about storytelling. Specifically, bad storytelling and what not to do. It’s so educational to watch something like Transformers 2 and identify the many, many, many ways it went horribly wrong. (Did they really just walk from Petra, Jordan to the pyramids at Giza in five minutes? Yes, yes they did.) Also something like the Clash of the Titans remake, which had a good movie hiding somewhere around a lot of bad editing and stilted dialog. One of my favorite things to do with bad movies: I ask myself, How would I fix it? How would I do this differently? Every time I do this, I’m learning something about putting together good stories.
I also think it’s possible to have a big action spectacular that still has plot, theme, characterization, and does not require the viewer to forget that they have a brain. I offer District 9 and Iron Man as recent examples. So, I always counter the “brainless” attitude with, I shouldn’t have to shut off my brain.
I sometimes cringe when I think about how much TV I watched as a kid, when we all know watching TV is supposed to be bad for you. But I was never a passive viewer. I always had strong opinions about what I was watching, what I liked and what I didn’t, and I was always inspired to spin off my own stories from what I was watching. It turned out to be good training.
If you want to train that creative side of your brain, you can’t ever shut it off.
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I use to do this to the commercials! I stop myself from watching tv for awhile. I think I need to move the funiture again, because the tv is right side of me.
I also believe though making your brain too busy though, is not good either.
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Holy cow, I’m nodding vigorously at your use of Clash of the Titans as a case study in how to learn from a bad movie. I did an extensive review of the movie (a href=”http://lynnmcc.blogspot.com/2010/04/clash-of-motivations.html” title=”here”> wherein I talked about how the motivation shift of Perseus from the 1981 CotT to the 2010 CotT made the later movie much worse despite better special effects, actors, etc. I was so proud of myself in being able to really figure out what was wrong with the movie, IMO of course. But yes, I do like to see if I can figure out what I didn’t like and why.
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oops – sorry about the bad link postage. I’m not very html fluent so I usually mess up the code.
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Well that does it for me, then. I was going to see Clash of the Titans but stilted dialogue and bad editing is not how I want to spend time or money.
Thanks for this post!
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Great post , Carrie. And a great tip to keep thinking and learn from others . Often people try to learn from others they admire, but it’s very true that you can learn from the bad as well as the good.
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Great post Carie! And great writerly advice. I saw the recent Sherlock Holmes movie last night. There was a wonderful plot kernel there, but, it was so overshadowed by pointless character posing that it was never allowed to bloom. Very disappointing. Why anyone thought it a good idea to invest millions to get it to screen, I’ll never know.
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Oh dear!! That would be Carrie, not Carie. So sorry.
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You know, I still watch a ton of TV and movies, and I reference them all the time in my posts. But my mom was the one who taught me to be an active viewer. How would I make this better? Or even when it’s pretty good: How would *I* write this story?
So I concur with both points of this post. One, I shouldn’t HAVE to turn off my brain. And two, if you’re going to spend two hours of your life on a bad movie, at least get a mental exercise out of it!