Big Problems and Small Issues I had with Star Wars Rogue One. Spoilers.

I wanted to like Rogue One. I really did. And I try to go in without reading spoilers or gossips and only watched the trailers released..

 But I left the cinema feeling hollow and unfulfilled. Twice. 

Was it a bad movie ala Transformers or Jurassic World? Hell No! Was it a decent movie worth spending to watch it twice? Yes. The 2nd time to actually get over the jarring CGness and to try and absorb the story. So.. was it great? No. 

It is a mediocre story covered with amazing sets and visual effects well executed . That is the problem.

Or as Nerdwriter1 puts it...

Its an amusement park ride. Not a movie.

That was what I felt like when watching Rogue one. A very well-executed amusement park ride. 

Guillermo del Toro's words to live by.

From his book reading stint at Portland's Baghdad Theater & Pub. Some choice snippets.

• When asked about he assembled his filmmaking team: "I draw and sculpt, but I'm not a great sculptor, I'm not a great draftsman. So you hire people who are better than you, and you are loyal to those people... The rule is to work only with people you admire or you love. Or both."
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• "When you tackle a 'B' premise, you need to tackle it like an 'A' premise," he said, noting this is the case regardless of what you're working on, even if it's something like Blade II, which some people (incorrectly) assumed was a "paycheck movie." "I'm not postmodern," he said later. "I absolutely hate being smarter than my material." He's excited beyond belief to do The Haunted Mansion for Disney, a ride he's been collecting ephemera from for years. "The flavor of that ride is unlike anything else in the world."

• On adapting other peoples' work: "Once the material is out, it belongs to all of us." And: "Adapting material is like marrying a widow. You have to be very respectful of the late husband's memory, but at some point you've gotta fuck."

• On writing: "If you get bored with nothing to do, you are not a writer." "We are in the business of reproducing reality from nothing. We are the biggest liars in the world, seeking truth." There will be a collection of his short fiction published, at some point, by Harper Collins.
• 
  
  
• He thanks people for listening to his DVD commentaries. He prepares his DVD and Blu-ray special features "very carefully" so that they're "as educational as possible." "DVDs are the most democratic way to teach film."

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• "If you're not operating on an instinctive level, you're not an artist." Later: "Reason over emotion is bullshit, absolute bullshit." And: "We suffocate ourselves in rules. I find fantasy liberating."
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• "We live in a world that creates impossible standards... I say to all of that, 'Screw you and die.' We should celebrate imperfection, because that's the one thing all of us can achieve."

• "Do whatever the fuck you want, even if it's wrong, and then tell about it with honesty. That is filmmaking to me." And: "Success is fucking up on your own terms."

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'Ponyo' and lessons in storytelling

Afterward as we walked the few blocks back home, Luke and I recounting our favorite moments in the film, he said, "It's interesting that there weren't any real bad guys in the movie."
There are characters and circumstances which provide a temporary oppositional dynamic:

* Fujimoto (voiced in English by Liam Neeson), Ponyo's father, who seeks out Ponyo after she disappears, uses his wave spirits to 'steal' her back from Ssuke (voiced in English by Noah Lyndsey Cyrus), and stands in opposition to Ponyo's desire to become a human.

* Toki (voiced in English by Lily Tomlin), a cantankerous resident of the senior citizen's center where Ssuke's mother Lisa (voiced by Tina Fey) works.

* The maritime job of Ssuke's father and Lisa's husband Koichi (voiced in English by Matt Damon) which separates Koichi from his family.

* A huge storm that puts Ssuke and Lisa's lives in danger on a perilous car trip home, turns Ssuke's house on a cliff into an island, and represents the front edge of an "imbalance" that threatens the very order of nature.

These narrative elements basically pass the antagonist baton to generate a sense of tension, but none of them is a classic "bad guy". And yet, the story works beautifully.

Which got me wondering: What other 'traditional' movie-narrative elements are not present in Ponyo. Here is a partial list:

* A specific Nemesis character

* Hardly any conflict between characters -- apart from one funny 'argument' between Lisa and Koichi played out using Morse code signals from electric lamps and one confrontation between Fujimoto and Ponyo

* Action that builds to a big Final Struggle: Since there's no Nemesis character, there is no classic 'battle' between Protagonist and Antagonist. Rather everything builds to a 'test' - of sorts - where Ssoke has to answer a question: Where Granmammare (voiced in English by Cate Blanchett) asks Ssoke if he can love Ponyo as a fish as well as a human. He answers yes, Ponyo becomes a human, and balance is restored to nature - just like that. Moreover the biggest action in the movie -- the huge storm -- occurs well before the story's climax which also runs counter to 'traditional' models of screenplay paradigms.Ponder that for a moment: If someone came up to you with a script they had written and they said, "The story doesn't have a Nemesis, there's hardly any conflict, and the Final Struggle is carried out not through action but in dialogue," you -- and I as well -- would almost certainly be concerned about what we were being asked to read.But, as I've noted, Ponyo works as a story.

Let's take a look at what Ponyo does have in the way of narrative elements:

* Engaging lead characters with clear goals: Ssuke wants to find and care for Ponyo. Ponyo wants to go back to Ssuke and become a human.

* Emotional connection for viewers: A father (Fujimoto) concerned about the well-being of his daughter; a boy (Ssuke) who finds a new friend (Ponyo); a fish-girl (Ponyo) who desperately wants to become a human; a mother (Lisa) concerned about her son (Ssuke); a son (Ssuke) in search of his mother (Lisa); old people who wish to become young again. In sum on this score, Ponyo is a deeply personal movie.

* Mythology: The world of Ponyo is a hyper-reality infused with rich, meaningful mythic elements -- the sea as Creator and Destructor, the Great Flood, the child as Seeker, wizardry, and so on.

* Nature: The movie revels in the outdoors, both aquatic and dry land, each (and especially the sea) visualized in rich details.

* Depth: The story is an intimate one - the friendship of Ssuke and Ponyo - but also one of great depth, taking the theme of their 'friendship' and expanding on that to explore the relationship between humanity and Earth, most vitally our 'friendship' with the sea.

And there's this: "Quiet moments." Anne Thompson has a great column about Miyazaki here in which Pixar visionary John Lasseter offers his thoughts (on video) re the great Japanese animator, writer, and director - and one of the reasons Lasseter admires Miyazaki so much is, "He celebrates quiet moments":

Super_Villains__The_4_Major_Food_Groups and Why We Deserve Better Villains — And How To Get Them

http://www.ifanboy.com/content/articles/Super_Villains__The_4_Major_Food_Groups

Cant agree more.. Awesome article.

From io9.com

http://io9.com/5039185/why-we-deserve-better-villains--and-how-to-get-them

Villains do not need no reason. They are because they are evil. Explaining villains are lame-o.

How villains lose their shit: 1) They get redeemed. Like Sylar, supposedly. Or, I suspect, like Ben on Lost, who's already becoming a much more sympathetic character. (Although he still has the immoral psycho edge, as when he's willing to kill everyone on the freighter to get revenge on Keamy.) The ultimate example of a redeemed villain who loses his mystique is Darth Vader, whose redemption at the end of Return Of The Jedi presaged his whoah-TMI over-explanation in the prequels, which brings us to...

2) Too much information. Even Doctor Who's archetypal nasty, the Master, isn't immune. He went around killing and wreaking havoc for 30 years without any explanation other than "he's a sick fuck." But "he's a sick fuck" wasn't enough for writer Russell T. Davies, who had to give the Master an origin story that explained how he became evil. It was the weakest point of an otherwise great story. Sometimes, knowing why the villain is a psycho isn't the point. The best part of TDK's Joker is the fact that he keeps telling different origin stories, all of them completely fishy

3) They become analogs of real-life nasties. It's just way too easy to make your villain just like Bill Gates, or Dick Cheney, or Hillary Clinton, or Ahmadinejad or whoever. (I almost wrote "Hillary Klingon," which I would pay to see.) In a few rare cases, it can make villains creepier — as in the plethora of Margaret Thatcher monsters coming out of England in the 1980s — but most of the time, it's just a cheap shortcut.

4) We see too much of their world. James Callis, who plays Gaius Baltar, said recently that he thought bleak space-opera Battlestar Galactica made a mistake by letting us inside the Cylons' Baseships and showing us their internecine bickering and weird internal decor sense. We stopped thinking of them as the implacable masterminds of human genocide, and started thinking of them more as The Real World: Baseship.

5) Too many defeats. This is one of the things that went wrong with the Borg. (The other one being the ridiculous "Borg Queen" which I think comes under the heading of "seeing too much of their world.") When we first meet the Borg, they're so unbeatable, Captain Picard basically has to beg Q to get the Enterprise away from them. And then the good guys defeat the Borg once, against tremendous odds. After that, every victory gets easier and easier, until finally Captain Janeway is reducing the entire Borg collective to rubble with a few well-placed kicks.

6) Too many victories. This is why I'm somewhat startled that the movie version of the Joker has so much power: he's a dillweed in the comics. The comic-book Joker is a victim of his own success. Where do you go after you've killed Robin and destroyed Batgirl in the same year? Away, that's where. The Joker should have been retired in the comics after "A Death In The Family" and "The Killing Joke," and in fact he did disappear for a year or two. But it was too tempting to keep bringing him back, and he's stuck being a has-been villain who can never top his best (worst) year, which was 20 years ago now. I've read hundreds of Joker comics published since 1988, and none has left much of an impression.7) The villain that's a reflection of the hero. This is really where Iron Man and Incredible Hulk fail. (Someone emailed us about this a few months ago, and I'm afraid I can't remember who now.) You have a guy in super-powered metal armor? Who should he fight, if not another guy in super-powered metal armor that's a knock-off of his own? A big green guy? Let's create another big green guy from his blood and make them fight. A unified theory of villainy: We need good villains, for the health of our society. Good villains make great stories. A truly chilling villain makes the hero seem more important because the stakes are important, and the hero's actions matter.

cinematography notes

http://mysterymanonfilm.blogspot.com/2006/09/art-of-visual-storytelling.html

http://livingromcom.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/09/ingmar_bergman_.html

"“A motion picture doesn’t have to look
absolutely realistic,” Nykvist says. “It can be
beautiful and realistic at the same time. I am
not interested in beautiful photography. I am
interested in telling stories about human
beings, how they act and why they act that
way.”

“The truth always lies in
the character’s eyes,”
Nykvist says. “It is very
important to light so the
audience can see what’s
behind each character’s eyes. That’s how the audience
gets to know them as human beings. It opens up their
souls."

Sven Nykvist

http://classes.yale.edu/film-analysis/htmfiles/cinematography.htm
http://www.wildsound-filmmaking-feedback-events.com/cinematography-shots-and-camera-angles.html

http://www2.english.uiuc.edu/lnewcomb/English%20117/cinematography.htm

http://courses.csusm.edu/fmst300bc/kinetics.html

http://www.davidbordwell.net/essays/anatomy.php

books and dvds to buy or borrow.
vison of light http://www.amazon.com/Visions-Light-Cinematography-N%C3%A9stor-Almendros/dp/630583685X

the cutting edge http://www.amazon.com/Cutting-Edge-Magic-Movie-Editing/dp/B0009PVZEG/ref=pd_sim_d_1

cinematic style http://www.amazon.com/Cinematographer-Style-Roger-Deakins/dp/B00197POY0/ref=pd_sim_d_5

painting with light http://www.amazon.com/Painting-Light-John-Alton/dp/0520089499/ref=pd_sim_d_6

cinematic storytelling http://www.amazon.com/Cinematic-Storytelling-Powerful-Conventions-Filmmaker/dp/193290705X/ref=pd_sim_d_4

quotes from james cameron.

"But the beauty of movies is that they don't have to be logical. They just have to have plausibility. If there's a visceral, cinematic thing happening that the audience likes, they don't care if it goes against what's likely."

"I don't think anything resembling The Terminator is really going to happen. There certainly aren't going to be genocidal wars waged by machines a few generations from now. The stories function more on a symbolic level, and that's why people key into them. They're about us fighting our own tendency toward dehumanization. When a cop has no compassion, when a shrink has no empathy, they've become machines in human form. Technology is changing the whole fabric of social interaction. We're absorbing our machines in a symbiotic way, evolving to become one with our own devices, and that's going to continue indefinitely."

http://www.wired.com/entertainment/hollywood/magazine/17-04/ff_cameron#