The Meddler: The Archive

This was a series I did where I would take a movie or book, break down all my problems with it, and then pitched my rewrite of all or part of it. I just had a blast re-reading these.  I put a tremendous amount of work into these.

• The Meddler #1: Some problems with The Town...
• The Meddler #2: ...And My Fixes For The Town
• The Meddler #3: Some problems with The Ghost Writer...
• The Meddler #4: …And My Fixes for The Ghost Writer
• The Meddler #5: Some Problems with Julie and Julia...
• The Meddler #6: ...And My Fixes For Julie and Julia
• The Meddler #7: Some Problems with Walk the Line...
• The Meddler #8: My Fixes for Walk the Line, aka Man in Black
• The Meddler Presents: Harry Potter Week!
• Meddling With Harry Potter Book 4
• Meddling With Harry Potter Book 5
• Meddling With Harry Potter Book 6
• Meddling With Harry Potter Book 7
• The Meddler #9: Some problems With Flags of Our Fathers
• The Meddler #10: ...And My Fixes For Flags of Our Fathers
• Gone Girl Meddler Week, Part 1: Where the Movie Blows It
• The Meddler: Gone Girl (Book and Movie), Part 2: Amy’s Nonsensical Plan
• The Meddler: Gone Girl (Book and Movie), Part 3: The Three Big Pregnancy Problems

Best of 2016, #9: Arrival (Tease Your Twist)

Once again, I’ll start with what didn’t work:

The Problem: Most of the conflict in this movie is false conflict. We start with a very familiar sci-fi situation: Aliens have landed and the scientists want to communicate while the military doesn’t trust them. We’ve seen this a million times before, but this time the situation is tilted too far in the scientists’ direction. It’s way to obvious to us, and it should be obvious to them, that these aliens are super nice guys, but we still get scene after scene of the military freaking out needlessly. Meanwhile, we get a very cool story of watching a linguist decode this language, but the film doesn’t trust this story enough to carry the movie (and they may be right about that). (The most obvious example of false conflict is the fact that the military doesn’t warn Adams or Renner that gravity is about to realign itself. Why not give them a heads up on that? Just to give us and them a little false shock.)

The Meddler: The aliens needed to be even more alien, to the extent that they’re accidentally killing people, either by simply crushing them, or by emitting sounds that split eardrums, or by frying them with force fields, etc. This would up the stakes considerably. Now Adams would be putting her life at risk by entering this ship belonging to these aliens that can’t stop killing people, maybe accidentally, maybe not. Now the military would have a good reason to just wipe these people off the map and the scientists would have a much harder job to do convincing the military that no, these deaths were accidental and we just need to learn to communicate. Then the communication breakthrough would be far more consequential.

What I Liked About It: The performances, the tone, the science, and especially the whopper of a twist.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Tease your twist. A great twist can’t just land like a rock on the head of your audience. As with a murder mystery, you need to “play fair”, laying in a series of clues: Not that your audience wants to necessarily guess the twist before the reveal, but they want to feel like they could have and maybe should have. The beauty of this twist is that it’s teased out and revealed so gradually that you’re on the cusp of figuring it out about a half-hour before it finally hits you, which feels so gratifying. As soon as I heard Adams say “Your father’s the scientist”, I began to figure it out somewhere in the back of my brain, but that only meant it hit with more force, not less, when it was finally revealed.

Best of 2016, #10: Fences

So here I am back. I’m so sorry to disappear for so long, but it’s just hard to care about anything in the middle of this national nightmare. I’m just glued to the news and constantly freaking out. Everything I’ve ever fought for or cared about is being gleefully destroyed. It’s literally the apocalypse.

So there’s that.

Now let’s talk about this year’s movies. The bad news is that my negativity has spilled out in that direction as well. I thought pretty much all of the most prestigious movies of the year were overrated. Even when I went to write about my 10 favorites, I found I had more complaints about them than compliments. So in keeping with my sour mood, I’m going to have to split these in four parts each. A first part where I complain, a second where I meddle, a third part where I compliment some element of the movie, and then a storyteller’s rule that can be gleaned from the movie.

Problems: Fences was actually adapted by Tony Kushner, but he took off his name so the screenplay is merely credited to the dead original playwright August Wilson. Ostensibly, this was done out of deference, but one must suspect that this was also out of embarrassment over the fact that he just hadn’t cracked it (or Washington wouldn’t let him). The original play was set in a back yard, but almost none of those scenes have to be set in that back yard, and there’s no excuse for failing to open up the play more. At least range more around the house!

The Meddler: Once in the movie, there’s a montage between two of Wilson’s acts, and it goes a long way. We need more of those. This is a movie: We don’t need dialogue like “Where’s Cory?” “He had to go out to football practice.” Show us him leaving early and going to football practice, and have Troy see him go! Then show Cory at practice! One problem with this movie is that we never really believe it’s 1957 because the production design is so generic in this one back yard. Let us see this world! Convince us that it’s 1957.

For that matter, much of the text involves Troy being haunted by his traumatic past, which takes the form of certain powerful moments that he can’t shake. Intercut the  movie with those images, which can tell a silent story. Show us mysterious and painful images and then let him explain them later.

Ironically, one of the only times Washington does add an image to foreshadow something, it hurts the movie. Before Cory’s big confrontation with his dad, Washington shows him checking out a Marine recruiting station. Now we can already guess how the confrontation will be resolved, which makes it less tense (we aren’t wondering “What will he do if he’s kicked out?”), and it ruins the shock of seeing him in his Marine outfit later.

Finally, the movie could have been shorter. It’s 140 minutes, but those extra 20 minutes would shave off easily. The movie doesn’t really kick into gear until Troy admits to his affair almost an hour in. The scenes before that act to set him up as an imperious moralist, which sets him up to be exposed as a hypocrite, but each of those opening scenes could be chopped down. The scenes with his older son add the least to the movie, so they’d be target #1.

So why do I love this movie? Because it works wonderfully as a PBS “Great Performances”-style filmed version of one of the great plays of our time, acted by two of our finest actors.  Washington get truly jaw-dropping performances out of himself and Davis.  I can certainly understand why Washington was so loathe to alter a word of the text, but even without changing a word, there were ways to make this less stagey.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: One way to give shapeless stories some shape is to have characters make a bet, and then pay off that bet ironically. Here, Troy and Bono make a bet as to whether Troy will finish his fence before Bono finally buys a refrigerator. As it turns out, their friendship is pretty much over by the time they both accomplish their goals, so they don’t bother to ask the other who got there first, but the bet has added just a shade of stakes and urgency to the lackadaisical task of building the fence.

The Meddler: Adding a Post-Credits Gag to Age of Ultron

The makers of Age of Ultron did their best to get the word out that there would be no post-credits gag at the end, merely a mid-credits teaser. Nevertheless, I’m sure that many non-fandom moviegoers didn’t get the memo, and stuck around for naught.

So let’s try to grant them some belated satisfaction! Yesterday, I mentioned that I could weary of Whedon’s preference for subverting our pre-established narrative expectations instead of creating new ones, but, being in that mode, I found myself cooking up a Whedon-esque post-credits bit that might have offered some satisfaction.

One thing I admired about the movie was that Ultron was totally defeated, without an “I’ll be back” moment, (After all, we know that Marvel has bigger fish to fry), but given that we do have that expectation, I thought it might be fun to play with it:

• After the last credit, we cut back to a shot of the final Ultron head lying where the Vision left it in the forest. As ominous music builds, we slowly track in on its dead eye socket…Then, just as blackness fills the screen, a glowing red eye flickers on! 
• Then BAM! Thor’s hammer smashes it to smithereens, abruptly ending the ominous music.
• THOR: Thou were right, Vision. ’Tis good we kept watch.
• VISION: I told you so.

SMASH to black. Lights come on, curtains close.

Edge of Tomorrow Meddler Week, Part 4: The Ridiculous (and All-Too-Familiar) Phony-Sacrifice Ending

And the fourth problem with Edge of Tomorrow is the way it falls apart at the very end. The plot logic is remarkably solid right up until the eplogue, when it wrecks itself in a depressingly familiar way.

Yes, it’s the return of the same problem that plagues Superman Returns, The Dark Knight Rises, The Avengers, Pacific Rim, Star Trek Into Darkness and many more: the hero gloriously sacrifices his life to save everybody else...only to wake up afterwards just fine.

Of course, that may sound inherent to this particular movie’s premise, but it’s not, because Cruise has lost the ability to repeat and has to really win without any do-overs, which makes the finale far more exciting…until the very last second when he regains the ability just as he gives his life to defeat the bad guys.

So Cruise wakes up in the past all over again, but this time it’s a past in which the bad guy has still been defeated…even though all the guys who died defeating him are once again alive! Huh? In all of Cruise’s previous reboots, his previous progress past the point of waking up was undone. Why should it be different this time?

For a movie that had devoted so much brain power to making this (literally) loopy premise work in a rock-solid way, this is just such a slap in the face, to abruptly abandon all of that skillfully-constructed logic at the very end.

It’s like we have this idea that nobody can just win anymore, because that would somehow be “bogus” or something. “Heroism” has become synonymous with “sacrifice.” You can’t have one without the other, apparently. And yet they still want to give us happy endings, so they just make it a consequence-less sacrifice every damn time.

Here’s an idea: if you want the hero to win, just let him WIN. Let him struggle and suffer and barely kill the bad guy, of course, but skip over the phony sacrifice scene and just let good flat-out triumph over evil for once. OR have him sacrifice himself and stay dead. Either situation could have been pulled off in a meaningful and satisfying way, but they once again tried to both, which just alienates and pisses off the audience.

Edge of Tomorrow Meddler Week, Part 3: We Always Come In Late

My third problem with Edge of Tomorrow is that it become addicted to using same trick over and over: In scene after scene, it shows Cruise encountering and scrambling to defeat some “new” menace, only to have the audience suddenly realize that, nope, he’s actually already done this before and he actually knows what the bad guys are going to do. The first few times, this is clever and fun, but it quickly wears out its welcome. There are two problems here:

1. This trick forces us to focus on the “who care, he’ll just get to try again” aspect of the premise, which is something we’d rather forget.
2. More importantly, it short-circuits our attempts at identification. Every time they trick us into identifying with Cruise’s worried looks, only to reveal that he’s actually way ahead of us, we lose the ability to care about him or worry for him. We can’t share any genuine emotions with him, because we never get to share his first-time reactions. By the time we come along, he’s just “going through the motions” to get back to where he already was.

Ultimately, Cruise loses the ability to repeat when he gets an unwelcome blood transfusion that purges the power from his veins. This twist is well-set-up, and fits the logic of the film, and it’s believable enough when it happens, but I don’t think it was the best choice.

Instead, I think that, rather than have that scene early on where Blunt warns Cruise that he’ll stop repeating if he gets a blood transfusion, she should warn him that the power just wears out after thirty times. This would give every scene a lot more urgency, and convince Cruise to stop rebooting himself with little provocation, redoing every moment over and over to get it right. 

Maybe put a countdown onscreen of how many regenerations he has left, so every death counts. As it stands now, the movie looks intense, but this change would make the movie feel intense. The audience can tell the difference.

Edge of Tomorrow Meddler Week, Part 2: The Hero is An Everyman

Okay, sorry folks, after moving all these pieces around I accidentally auto-posted part 3 a half hour ago, but now I’ve taken it down to push it back to tomorrow and put the right one here...of course, by this point between the podcast and comments, we’ve already pretty much covered this one thoroughly, so sorry for the repeated beats! (And my computer is still broken, so I’m writing this on Betsy's computer. It’s that kind of week.)(And this is the last time I talk about video games, I promise! For the next two days, I’m covering more nuts and bolts problems.)

Here’s another way that Edge of Tomorrow could have played off of the video game-like nature of the situation.  In actual video games, every character in an everyman, kept generic enough to allow for every possible player’s every possible action, which, to may mind, fatally inhibits the medium’s storytelling potential (though I know many would disagree with that assessment). 

The movie could easily have chosen to milk meaning out of this problem, but instead, it merely replicates it. 

There is no real flaw scene at the beginning, which gives the movie nothing to pay off later on.  Yes, Cruise is a little blithe and cowardly in the quick opening montage, but his reticence to get on the front lines is perfectly understandable, and we never even find out why the general hates him enough to plan this engineer this insanely sadistic revenge. 

Perhaps begin the movie with an incident where Cruise didn’t realize his mic was still on, and revealed his contempt for the brass, or the way the war was being waged?  (Going back to yesterday, he could perhaps something like “they’re treating this like a video game” Or “your average kid playing x-Box could win the war quicker than this guy.”)

Because there’s no flaw scene, there isn’t really a spiritual crisis either, no point at which Cruise realizes that he’s his own worst enemy. (Instead we get another moment stolen directly from Groundhog Day, where Cruise realizes he can’t save Emily Blunt no matter what he does, which is a nice little moment of “There are some things I can’t fix”, but because it doesn’t connect back to any pre-established flaw of Cruise, it lacks emotional any real emotional punch.)

The spiritual crisis needs to be the point where Cruise finally says, “Oh, life isn’t a video game, you can’t just figure out a pre-designated path that will allow anybody to win. You aren’t an everyman and you wouldn’t want to be.”  This is the moment where he would realize that, even though he’s freed of all physical consequences, he still has to overcome his longstanding flaws and then use that some flip-side strength that’s uniquely inside him in order to win.

But that never happens.  Cruise gets to remain an everyman and never discovers any hidden flaws or strengths inside himself.  In the end, he just wins in the way that anybody would. 

Edge of Tomorrow Meddler Week, Part 1: It Ignores Its Own Meaning

So let’s talk about Edge of Tomorrow AKA Live Die Repeat, AKA All You Need is Kill. As you might have noticed from the multiple titles, the studio didn’t really know how to market this movie, and didn’t really care, but then there was a twist: Critics loved it! But then there was another twist: Audiences didn’t show up, and the movie flopped! But wait: I had good word of mouth! At some point, the reputation finally settled at “sleeper you should see on DVD”. So I did.

So who was right, the dubious studio, the happy critics, the mass audience that rejected it, or the cult audience that embraced it? A little of each. The movie is definitely a slam-bang action blockbuster, delivering exactly the sort of all-out adrenaline-fest that draws people into Transformers movies, but with actual entertainment value added on, so it is frustrating that Transformers 4 kicked its ass at the box office.

 It’s also far better (both more entertaining and smarter) than Oblivion, Elysium, Pacific Rim, After Earth, and all of the other abortive attempts at non-franchise sci-fi from the previous year. So there’s that.

But…is it actually good? As in, not just better than crap, but actually good in its own rite? The answer is: almost. Well, okay, it’s certainly good, but it’s almost very good, and that’s really frustrating.

Unlike the movies above, this situation actually makes sense (which is saying a lot, with a premise this wild) and each plot twist is a clever and exciting escalation on the last. It’s well-structured, has fun dialogue and good performances. But it has several fatal flaws, so let’s take a look at those from a storytelling point of view:

The first big problem that plagues the movie is that it tacks on a bunch of awkward satirical elements while ignoring the satire inherent in its premise. The whole first half of the movie plays like a tongue-in-cheek parody of the D-Day landing (Too soon? Actually, yes.) Then there’s a mish-mash of other war references (The young woman who suddenly rises through the ranks to lead the army is known as “the Angel of Verdun”.) These odd detail are jokey without being jokes, and they ring all hollow. Parody and satire always limit audience identification, so they’d better add something to the movie, but these don’t.

This is frustrating, because the urge to add a satirical element is actually a good one. Here’s the premise: An untrained army PR guy is forced to fight an alien invasion on the front lines, but he finds himself living the same day over and over, allowing him to get better and better as he repeats the day, until he finally figures out how to stop the invasion altogether.

Obviously, Groundhog Day has already milked most of the meaning out of this situation, so it would seem like there was nothing left to say, but the change of setting could have provided a completely different meaning.

What this movie resembles more than anything is a game of “Call of Duty”: You’re plunged into an invasion, get killed a bunch of times, go back to the beginning each time, and learn to start over as a bad-ass right from the start. This taps into two possible sources of meaning:

1. It could be a commentary on the FPS-generation of couch-bound man-boys, who crow online about what badasses they are while hitting reset over and over.
2. And it could also be a commentary on the increasing video-game-ization of war itself, with guys sitting in Las Vegas with joysticks blowing up actual Pakistani families as if there were just so many Koopa Troopas.

In both cases, this premise almost taps into a deep vein of meaning...but it never actually goes there. The video games aspect is never hinted at, and this is clearly a drone-free military.

How to fix this? Let’s look at some on-the-nose solutions: Give Cruise a son by an ex-wife, then let him start the movie by having an awkward video chat with the boy, who’s ignoring him and playing an FPS instead. Or have Cruise, as PR spokesman, say that the new suits are as easy as operating a joystick.

Or make it less on-the-nose: After Cruise loses the power, have him freak out and hide until Blunt yells at him that he never would have been able to win without consequences, because we can’t really commit until we have something on the line.

Instead of critiquing video game culture, the movie just become a video game, which is a problem in more ways than one, as we’ll see next time...

The Meddler: Gone Girl (Book and Movie), Part 3: The Three Big Pregnancy Problems

So let’s talk about three more big things that make no sense about “Gone Girl”, on either the page and the screen:

1. Stealing a pregnant woman’s pee is fine if you want to fake a home-pregnancy test and fool your husband, but it would never fool an actual doctor. This is the 21st century and they no longer kill a rabbit. Your doctor instantly gives you a full physical, including a blood test that tell them a lot more than pee ever could.
2. Likewise, you can’t secretly impregnate yourself with one specimen of frozen sperm. You’d have two options: Either do IVF, which is a long complicated surgical procedure with a high fail rate (but at least you get several shots off one sample) or you can attempt to self-thaw and then use the turkey baster method, which would have an astronomically high fail rate, and you’d only get one chance. Getting pregnant even with a fully-participating man is already quite unlikely on one try.
3. Why does Nick stay with her for five weeks (it was longer in the book, iirc) after she comes home and before he finds out she’s pregnant? In the movie, she says that otherwise the press will turn on him, so he has to stay, but so what? Before, he was trying to win the press over to avoid being arrested, but why would he care now? It makes no sense. Of course, the real reason that he has to stay so long without a good motivation is to allow time for the impregnation storyline.

The most annoying thing about these three story-killers is that they could so easily be fixed with one solution: Have her actually get pregnant.

If she’s so dedicated to her long-term revenge plan, then secretly going off the pill for a few months would not be so much of a stretch. This would give her enough chances to actually get pregnant, and allow her to actually prove her pregnancy to a doctor.

In this version, she would enact her revenge long before her pregnancy showed, planning to abort the baby sometime later (or not, if we’re going with the kill herself version, which would also require an actual pregnancy). She could leave a clue for Nick in the woodshed that implies she aborted the baby, then reveal to Nick at the end that she never got around to it, which still allows you to have the shock-ending. This would also help explain Amy’s sudden change-of-heart and desire to return to Nick: Pregnancy is a hormonal roller-coaster, after all, and it tends to reset your priorities.

And, most importantly, in this version, she could confront him the night of her return, or at least that week, rather than forcing him to stay in the house with a psychopath for no reason whatsoever.

Why didn’t they do this simple fix? Because murder and rape are sexy and fun, but pregnancy is a turn-off and abortion is beyond the pale? Ugh. If Flynn was going to go there, she should have went there, and solved three huge problems with one quick fix.

The Meddler: Gone Girl (Book and Movie), Part 2: Amy’s Nonsensical Plan

Here’s something that makes no sense on page or screen: Amy’s plan. Amy’s frame-up is clever and fun, no doubt, but it falls apart when we find out about her plan for the future, or lack thereof.

Amy quickly mentions in passing, in both the book and movie, that she intends watch Nick suffer for a while, then drown herself in the river to ensure a conviction. Huh? If she really wants to frame the guy, and she’s already put so much insane detail in to everything, and she’s ready to kill herself, why not just do it now, supreme in the knowledge that this will seal the deal?

Besides, if Amy is really a psychopath, as subsequent events will strongly imply, then it’s very unlikely she would ever even consider suicide. Psychopaths are the world’s most self-serving people, and they’re happy to just move on to the next victim, confident that they can once again fulfill their needs and then avoid all consequences.

And even if she’s planning on killing herself, why would she choose to stay at a cabin in the Ozarks in order to watch the coverage?? A big plot point is that she’s accustomed to luxury and can’t stand the indignity of her middle-class existence in Missouri. She has that big money belt, so why not go someplace nice? Does she not know that the rich have more anonymity and privacy than the poor?

Killing herself should never have been part of her plan. Why not just withdraw a lot of cash from those secret credit cards and then move to a Gulf Coast island to enjoy a life of low-cost semi-luxury while watching the whole circus on TV and starting a new low-key life?

You could still have her trashy neighbors bust in and steal her money (the rich and the beach-bums live next to each other on those islands, after all.) She could still flee to Desi when things went bad. It wouldn’t change much, but it would have made a lot more sense. As it is, the suicide plan creates a big motivation hole in the center of the story.  (And an empathy hole as well, because it’s hard to care about a character if you’re just waiting for her to kill herself.)

But that still leave three huge plot holes, which we’ll get to (and easily fix) tomorrow...

Gone Girl Meddler Week, Part 1: Where the Movie Blows It

Okay folks, we’re going to do a three-part Meddler this week, then a four-part Meddler next week with a different movie before we get to the year-end countdown...

Let me start by admitting that the movie was a lot better than I thought it would be. When I first heard the list of actors, I thought every role was miscast, but the movie proved me wrong about almost everybody (but that’s a big almost.)

• Ben Affleck is amazingly good. His disingenuous flash of a smile at the press conference totally nails the character and makes all of the pathetic interior life of the character leap from the page to the screen. He’s brave enough to be unlikable and also has enough complex emotion behind his eyes to earn our pained empathy throughout, but just barely, which is how it should be.
• I originally thought Affleck and Neil Patrick Harris should have switched roles, because Desi on the page was a hunkier, more intimidating guy than Nick. My big fear was that Fincher, in his rush to demonize Amy, would use NPH to make Desi into more of a sad sack victim. But no, I was happy to see that NPH was allowed to be totally creepy and become genuinely threatening. You do fear for Amy when he’s around.
• Likewise Tyler Perry is a revelation: Funny, clever, and charming. Give that guy a spinoff.
• A lot of other actors who I thought of as merely okay really stepped up to the plate with smart, funny big-screen-worthy performances, especially Kim Dickens, Patrick Fugit, and Carrie Coon.

But of course, that leaves one big performance that fails: Amy. It’s hard to blame Rosamund Pike for this, given that she was totally miscast and then undercut by her director at every turn. Even when we’re seeing dramatized pages from her diary, which, you’ll recall, she’s fictionalized to make herself extremely sympathetic, she’s totally cold and repellent. In her first sex scene with Nick, she’s wearing black bra, panties, and leather boots as he kneels at the foot of the bed performing cunnilingus. That’s in her phony diary??

As I mentioned before in the comments, Reese Witherspoon optioned this book when the galley first came out, intending to play Amy herself. I knew this when I read it, and it worked perfectly: After all, she excels at playing both “America’s Sweetheart” and disturbed sociopathic characters, which is exactly the duality this part required. But after Witherspoon hired Fincher, he turned right around and fired her, because he didn’t fit her conception for of the part.

So instead he cast an honest-to-God Bond villain. Now I loved Pike’s pulpy performance as “Miranda Frost” in Die Another Day, and I thought she was even better in An Education as a dim-but-wise moll. She’s a great character actress. But both roles capitalized on her inherently frosty and opaque charm. She’s not even remotely “America’s Sweetheart,” as the Amy of the diary has to be.

Allow me to tell a story I probably shouldn’t: An acquaintance of mine wrote a screenplay that became a hot Hollywood commodity, attracting several stars and big directors before it finally got made (you’ll probably guess who I’m talking about, but please don’t say so in the comments). He was telling me about how he managed to stay on as sole writer over the course of that long process, and said it involved doing a lot of unpleasant things.

Specifically, he talked about the period when David Fincher was attached to direct, and demanded of the writer that he rewrite it as a “domestic abuse comedy”, in which the couple try to kill each other and then go to the hospital and force each other to tell the doctors that they just ran into doorknobs. The writer said that it disgusted him to write those scenes, but he felt like he had to because he didn’t want to be replaced on his own script. Besides, by that point he had already seen so many directors come and go that he felt he could make these changes and just hope that the script would revert after Fincher moved on, which was precisely what happened.

I kept thinking about this story as I watched Gone Girl. Finally, I got to the point in the movie where the doctor asks Pike if she feels safe going home with her husband, and we cut to Affleck giving a little “fuck you” wave to her, which got a laugh from everyone in the room, including me. That was when I said to myself “Jesus, Fincher finally got the domestic abuse comedy he always wanted!”

It didn’t have to be this way. Amy could and should have been much more sympathetic: a sweet-but-spoiled girl with a charmed life who marries a selfish jerk that takes her away from everything she ever loved, soaks up her dwindling money like a sponge, then brazenly cheats on her. Finally, she snaps more than any woman has ever snapped before, launching a truly deranged revenge plot. Then, when she gets robbed and realizes what true desperation is, she turns to her old boyfriend, who tries to turn her into his private sex slave, so she snaps even further, kills him, and, totally nutso at this point, uses a pregnancy to blackmail her husband into taking her back and resuming their sad mockery of a marriage.

One thing that was so clever about the book was that Amy’s “phony” diary, despite her attempts to twist the narrative to her own advantage, actually gives us a compelling portrait of a woman scorned who snaps, revealing more about her true self than she ever intended.

This worked so well that I was really disappointed (as well as disgusted) when Flynn revealed Amy’s history of false rape claims. Not only does this plot twist reflect a totally unrealistic (but all-too-common) misogynistic misperception of reality, it also undoes the subtle cleverness of the first half in favor of a straight-up villainous narrative. Instead of a somewhat shallow girl who becomes desperately deranged, she’s just, in her own words, “a cunt.” (By the way folks, real life women don’t serially fake rape or call themselves cunts. That’s not the way the world works.)

When I heard they were turning it into a movie, I thought, “Great, just take that totally-extraneous part out and it would be a pretty good movie!” But of course Fincher kept it in, and twisted the rest of the story to fit that narrative, which makes Amy consistently repellent in every frame of the movie, which leaves us with weasely Nick as sole protagonist, which doesn’t work. So the movie fails. It’s a shame because Fincher nails every scene that Amy isn’t in, and even a few Amy scenes (like the robbery, and the early NPH scenes). If only Fincher hadn’t fired his boss, it all could have worked!

8 More Satisfying Ways that Serial Could Have Ended

I share the general impression that “Serial” did not stick the landing (though I wouldn’t go as far as some). Was this inevitable? What options did creator Sarah Koenig, have from a narrative-building perspective?

Let’s start with the options that had already lapsed by the time she began production on the final episode:

• Once she began to suspect that no new game-changing evidence would be discovered, she could have chosen to withhold some of the evidence she did gather until the end, to create more of a feeling of a “big reveal” pay-off. This would have been a big cheat, and probably still unsatisfying, but this is actually what I assumed that she would do: I thought she was hiding an ace up her sleeve. For better or worse, she wasn’t.
• Barring that, she could have kept the main series focused closer on the evidence, and saved up the more think-piece-style episodes for the end, instead of running those in the middle. One way or another, I think the most basic thing we all wanted and didn’t get from the finale was a break in the format of some kind. Instead, we got a very typical episode, with a smattering of new evidence that could go either way, followed by more thoughts about unknowability. It would have been more satisfying if she had withheld the more-ruminative episode about psychopathy, for example, until the end, as a way to step back and re-examine her narrative.

That said, once the previous 11 episodes had already posted, and she was painted into that corner, I think there were still ways to offer more satisfaction. What options was she left with?

• We’ll start with another big cheat: She could have delayed the finale until more evidence came in, most obviously the results of the upcoming DNA test. But barring that…
• The most obvious finale, it seemed to me and to several listeners, would be for Koenig decide for herself, based on everything she’d learned, whether or not Syed was guilty. Obviously, she was loathe to do this, but we sort of deserved it, because she had made so much of the series about her own vacillation.
• Barring that, she could have at least polled her co-producers to find out their conclusions…Hopefully, two would disagree, and they could have a debate.

But I think one problem was that the specter of Janet Malcolm was looming over Koenig. Malcolm wrote the New-Yorker-article-turned-book “The Journalist and the Murderer”, in which she criticized true crime writer Joe McGinniss for befriending Jeffrey MacDonald, the green beret who chopped up his family, by claiming he would try to free him. Once McGinniss decided MacDonald was actually guilty, he hid this conclusion to maintain access. After McGinniss got his bestseller, Malcolm got her own bestseller by criticizing McGinniss’s ethics.

Koenig tells us that she had assumed that many more exculpatory items would emerge after she uncovered the possible alibi for Syed early on, but none did, and she surely started to suspect that she was digging a dry well, but once she had formed a relationship with Syed, I suspect that she was reluctant to go there, for fear of Malcolm-style criticism

So what options does that leave?

• She could have fallen back on what “This American Life” has always done best: tell stories. Now that we have all this evidence, tell us one story (or more) that fits the evidence in which Syed didn’t do it, and another in which he did.

But wait, now we’re running into another ethical (and legal) issue. The problem with this is that each alternate narrative would involve accusing Jay of different crimes than the ones he admitted to, either accusing him of doing it himself or or covering up for someone else and then perjuring himself. Defense attorneys are allowed to idly throw suspicion on third parties in court, but journalists aren’t. It’s slander.

• Okay, so here’s another option: She could have pulled a John Oliver or Stephen Colbert and capitalized on her huge success by reaching out to the new friends of the show (surely she got some emails from some impressive names) and inviting big minds to ruminate on what it all means.
• Or, finally, she could have ended with Syed himself, and let him say what this has meant to him. 

Syed’s charismatic / enigmatic personality has been the pivot for the whole show, and I would at least ask that the show end on his words. Instead we ended with Koenig saying the words “We don’t know.” Ugh. That’s exactly where we began. Please let somebody, somewhere, reach some sort of conclusion about this whole inquiry, even if it’s just the man himself.

Best Hollywood Movies of 2013, Runners-Up 10 and 9

Let’s the countdown begin! For each one, I’ll briefly mentioned what I loved and what I didn’t:

10: Nebraska

• Loved: The performances by Bruce Dern, June Squibb, Stacy Keach and Bob Odenkirk, the dialogue, the family dynamics, the sense of place, the ending drive through town.
• Didn’t love: Bill Hader’s lifeless performance, that cheesy stand-up-and-cheer punch, the use of black and white (That’s a very stylized choice, but Payne’s other choices remain so un-stylized that it seems unjustified: What’s the point of using black and white when most of the shots are of a 1990s Suburu Outback? That’s not a car that can justify beautiful cinematography!)
  
  

9: Her

• Loved: Phoenix and Johansen’s performances, the dialogue, the art direction.
• Didn’t love: (1) It was too long. The Olivia Wilde and sex surrogate sequences added nothing.  (2) On the one hand, I sort of enjoyed seeing a semi-utopian vision of the future for once (at least compared to, say, The Road) but I thought that there were a least a half-dozen more interesting and darker ways to take the second half of the story (rather than “Oh no, my virtual girlfriend has achieved a higher plane of consciousness!”)

Speaking of that, there have been some calls for a return of “The Meddler”, so let's do a quickie redo of Her.  After I saw it, I kept dreaming up new versions, and here’s the one I like the best: 

• The Meddler version: The tech company that originally sold “Her” keeps bugging Phoenix to upgrade his operating system, but he’s terrified of (literally) losing her in the process. Eventually she finds out that he’s hiding the upgrade from her and accuses him of holding her back, so he agrees to it. At first she seems fine, with the only difference being that she wants to go out more…but then he realizes that all of the places and products she’s now subtly recommending to him are just paid ads in disguise. He tearfully confronts her and she insists that they aren’t ads, they’re genuinely earnest suggestions based on her desire to make him happy, which is why she’s partnered with brands that she knows he’ll love since she knows him so well, etc…and he realizes that she really believes that. Disgusted, he deletes her and tries to reconnect to his fellow human beings.

Tomorrow: Movies 8, 7, and 6!

The Meddler #10: ...And My Fixes For Flags of Our Fathers

The first step is to do is bite the bullet and fictionalize the story far more that Eastwood and the writers were willing to do. If we want the irony of the situation to manifest in real time, then we can’t use the flashback/flashforward structure. We have to collapse the timeline so that the tour happens simultaneously with the second half of the battle. This didn’t actually happen this way, but it could have: the battle stretched on for six long weeks. The men really were pulled off the battlefield before the battle was over, so it’s not inconceivable that they could have gotten right out on tour. And if such a thing could be, it certainly should be:

1. We begin with a veteran giving an outdoor speech in front of blow-ups of the enlistment photos of the ten soldiers he was closest to. He says that he’s there that day to talk about what heroism looks like. The story began in 1944...
2. We begin with the preparation for the battle. We meet nine bad-asses and one hapless screw-up: our hero.
3. The screw-up is called in by his superior, who asks what his goal is. He says he wants to win the war, single-handedly if needs be. Unfortunately, it’s not to be: he’s told that he’s going to be kept out of the action and made into a runner, ferrying supplies back and forth.
4. Meanwhile the commander of the Marines meets with a representative of the Roosevelt white house. The rep tells him that they don’t just need to win this battle, they need to win it quickly. Another slow battle, even if it’s a victory, will only do more harm than good. The commander grits his teeth in anger and says he’ll do his best.
5. After shelling the island from battleships for days, the men storm the beach. At first they take it easily, and they hope that the shelling did the job, but then the Japanese pop up out of their tunnel system and start fighting back. The Americans take the beach and the mountain peak with heavy casualties, but they now realize that it will take months to clear out all the tunnels on the rest of the island.
6. In the lull after the first battle, they casually decide to mount a flag on the mountaintop. The runner and four of the bad-asses have some trouble with the heavy pole, and a photographer captures a photo it look more dramatic than it actually is.
7. The commander reports the news about the tunnels back to Roosevelt’s rep who is disgusted. Win or lose, this battle won’t be a p.r. boost. The commander is infuriated at the lack of respect for the realities of war.
8. As the fighting resumes, three of the men who raised the flag are killed.
9. But then the photographer develops the photo and it runs in hometown papers where it causes an unprecedented sensation.
10. The administration asks the press to de-emphasize the actual fighting on the island and play up the feeling raised by the photo instead. They are horrified to find out that three of the soldiers in the photo have since dead. They demand that the other three get pulled off the field immediately.
11. Back on the island, the fighting is horrific but the men are closely bonded. Word comes down that the three surviving men in the photo are being pulled out for a publicity tour. The commander is incensed, since he needs every man he’s got. The men try to fight it unsuccessfully. Our screw-up dreads that he’s missing his last chance to help win the war. They regretfully say good-bye to the rest of their men.
12. Meanwhile, the men razz the photographer for creating such a false impression with his photo. He says that he’ll try better next time to capture the truth…
13. The men arrive back home where a series of increasingly silly parades celebrate the image, but not the actual heroism. They’re disgusted...
14. More of the men on the island are killed as they try to penetrate the tunnel system but get repulsed.
15. In America, the “heroes” hear how badly things are going on the island and demand to be sent back to the front, but then the rep reveals the bitter truth that American morale is collapsing. The war has dragged on much longer than they were promised, rationing is severe, the president is dying, and the budget is empty, unless they can sell more war bonds. Their request is denied. Two of them reluctantly agree to go along with this, but the third, Ira Hayes, can’t stomach it and asks to be sent back to the front.
16. They continue the tour without him, but they feel chastened without him there, and the tour only gets tackier. They make that the next time they have to speak before a large crowd, they will tell the truth: that the photo wasn’t taken under fire and doesn’t represent any real heroism…
17. Meanwhile, Ira Hayes arrives back at the island and won’t talk about the tour. They press him and he angrily tells them that America cares only about the photo, not about results. He feels terrible when he realizes that he’s demoralized the men. He reminds them that they aren’t fighting a p.r. battle, but a real fight, with real consequences. The only way out is through. They prepare for the final push…
18. Cut to the next big speech back home, the two marines backstage psyche each other up to come clean, but before they speak, a mother and her son in his new uniform, want to take pictures with them. He says he wants to be a hero like them. She says that America hasn’t felt like this in months: people are talking again about the war ending in a permanent victory, not a temporary ceasefire, The men look at each other. They decide to cancel their expose. They go through with the scheduled program, and accept the adulation of the crowd. For the first time, they try to look like the heroes that everybody wants them to be. The rep is pleased.
19. Back on Iwo Jima, the Americans enter the tunnels and fight it out with the Japanese. After suffering horrific casualties, the American finally secure the island.
20. The photographer processes his images of the battle and aftermath, but realizes that they’re too gruesome, and destroys them: Let the previous, false image stand as the record of the battle.
21. Back home, the news of the actual victory is a non-event, since the public has already accepted the photo and moved on. As the tour winds down, the “heroes” realize that they, too, are now yesterday’s news. They wonder if it was all worth it. Roosevelt’s rep shows them the numbers to prove it was. Enough war bonds have been sold to finish the war.
22. We return to the veteran’s speech in the ‘60s. He tells us the ironic fates that awaited the survivors in the decades after the war (he tried and failed to follow up on all the job offers he got on the tour. Ira Hayes drunk himself to death.) We pan up to see that he is giving the speech in front of the Washington D.C. statue that was modeled on the photo. In summation, he says that only now has he come to accept the truth: that what heroism looks like has nothing to do with what heroism actually is. What he still doesn’t know is which is more important.

The Meddler #9: Some problems With Flags of Our Fathers

Clint Eastwood is a great filmmaker and Flags of Our Fathers is a fascinating movie, but it never really grips the viewer.

We begin with the preparations for the U.S. invasion of Iwo Jima island in 1944. As the battle begins, we start flash-forwarding to the aftermath of the battle, where three members of the invasion force have been dubbed “the heroes of Iwo Jima” because they were in a photo of a flag being raised on the island, seemingly against great adversity. For the rest of the movie, we see more of the original conquest of the island intercut with shots of the “heroes” rolling their eyes on the endless publicity tour that followed. Halfway through, in the island based-story, we see the ironic moment when the flag was actually raised, which turns out to have been a calm, utterly un-heroic moment of downtime between battles.It’s not that Flags of Our Fathers totally fails: we do feel the sense of irony that the filmmakers want us to feel, but we also feel patronized and bored, because this movie isn’t about the actions or even the realizations of the characters onscreen, it’s about the point the filmmakers want to make by intercutting the two stories. This focus makes the filmmakers into the heroes, rather than anybody onscreen.

In an essay film like The Atomic Café, the filmmakers are the heroes, and that’s okay. Each piece of footage is morally inert in and of itself, but the meaning comes from how the filmmakers juxtapose that footage together. When we watch that movie, we root for the filmmakers to successfully expose the cravenness of their targets. But nobody goes to a non-documentary drama to root for the director. We want to root for one of the characters onscreen.

But Eastwood leaves the poor actors helpless and hapless. None of the characters really wants or goes after anything. They don’t act, they just react. Whether they’re on the mountain or on their promotional tour, they’re just passively reacting to orders. On the island, they dutifully attempt to take the hill but you certainly never get the sense that they have any personal ambition or, god forbid, any animosity towards the Japanese.On the promotional tour, they resent the crassness and dishonesty of it, but the only result is a few snide remarks—they don’t do anything to stop or correct the misperception they’re creating. Instead, two of them just go along with it and the other descends into alcoholism until he’s forcibly shipped back to the front. That’s a bummer, but it’s not tragic, because nobody tried to prevent that from happening. Irony is a discrepancy between expectation and outcome. This sad outcome here was pretty much what everyone suspected.Another problem is that the central irony of the movie is made clear in the first ten minutes of the movie, and then the rest of the movie merely illustrates that same irony over and over again. If you’ve got a point to make, then you have to have that point hit unexpectedly, as a result of what we’ve seen onscreen. First you have to create the impression that things are going to turn out the other way, and only then you can ironically reverse those expectations later.Also, way too much time is spent on a pointless subplot about a mix-up regarding which dead man’s butt was in the photo. There’s no bad guy in that subplot, just a misunderstanding, so who cares? And ultimately this bizarre digression undercuts the overall point of the movie. If it was unjust to misidentify one of the men in the photo, that contradicts their larger point that it was silly to single out the men in photo for praise in the first place.

So is there a version of this movie which would have worked better? I’ll try to find it tomorrow.

Meddling With Harry Potter Book 7

In “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows,” Harry and friends blow off their senior year (didn’t we all?) to hunt horcruxes. The death eaters take over the ministry and Hogwarts, making the fugitives increasingly desperate. Eventually, they realize that Voldemort is on a quest of his own, to get three magical items called the Deathly Hallows. Finally, the two quests converge in a big fight at Hogwarts. Voldemort seemingly kills Harry, who has a ghostly talk with Dumbledore, then resurrects and kills Voldemort. Years later, we see him as an auror married to Ginny.

Some Strengths of the 7^th book:

1. The posthumous revelation of Dumbledore’s many flaws is a masterful touch. A beloved but idealized character is belated granted all of the complexity he deserves.
2. Rowling suddenly remembered that the villain shouldn’t just be trying to stop the hero’s plan, he must have a desire of his own, so she whipped up a delightful new mythology around the Deathly Hallows. It made the plot of the book dizzyingly complex, but she somehow pulled it all off.
3. Rowling also pulls off one of her classic “plot meets theme” reversals: One of her major themes for the series is the power of naming and/or refusing to name. Until now, Voldemort’s opponents have drawn moral strength from their unique willingness to say his name, but now that he is in charge, their great strength ironically becomes their great weakness as he curses the word that only they will say.
4. For the most part, Rowling does a great job rounding up dozens of old characters and locations and giving almost all of them a fitting emotional send-off. The scope is epic and the emotions are intense.
5. The action scenes are absolutely breathless, which explains why most of the book-reading world was able to devour this brick-sized tome in a day.

Some Weaknesses of the 7^th book:

1. All that endless waiting! Why do they wait all summer to begin? Why do they procrastinate so much like Achilles in their tent? We get multiple passages that say “they spend the next month reading that book for clues,” or “they spent weeks going over their plan…” Why should this process take so long? It’s presumably because Rowling felt that she was tied down to the structure of the previous books, but here it makes no sense and it creates massive character inconsistencies: Hermione never even seems to care that she’s missing school!
2. They blew off their seventh year—so why are they done with school at the end? No matter how grateful the teachers are, they can’t really give them anything but honorary degrees if they don’t come back and actually do the classwork, right?
3. There is a massive overreliance on the same few magic tricks, all of which had already been exhausted in previous books. Rowling has gotten too logical in her plotting when she should be inventive. This is fan-like thinking: “Gee, if I were in that world I would use polyjuice potion all the time so that nobody would ever know who I was, and I’d never take my invisibility cloak off, and…” Sure, that makes sense, technically, but it’s Rowling’s job as storyteller to take those tools out of their hands when they’ve lost their novelty for the reader. How hard is it to write “Oh no! Voldemort has now got polyjuice and invisibility cloak sniffing dogs!” After six books of constant invention, she spends too much of this last one coasting on old ideas.
4. I’m all for keeping kids’ books relatively sexless, as long as you don’t flaunt the sexlessness in our faces. This book has coed pairings of seventeen year old high school drop-outs spending month after month camping in a tent with nothing to do, fearing for their lives. And they never have sex? Nope, that’s not the way the world works. She should have avoided this awkward situation.
5. I understand that she was going for a “war is hell” vibe and she wanted to get pitch black before the dawn, but the grimness at times becomes ludicrously exaggerated. In addition to all the death, Lupin turns into a crappy husband and father, then he and Tonks both die offstage, orphaning their baby?? That’s just an undignified end for two beloved characters. What a relentless bummer!
6. But the biggest problem was that, in the end, it really was just all about killing Voldemort. Maybe I was spoiled by the Star Wars trilogy, but I’ve always had a marked preference for stories about heroes who find a more spiritually redeeming goal than revenge. Harry doesn’t even feel bad that it had to end this way!
7. Even worse, Harry is merely fulfilling the prophecy, which cheapens his achievement. Is that really a fitting reward for Harry? Doesn’t he want something different than to simply become what everybody expected him to become?
8. In the epilogue, I was also disappointed that Rowling fell for the classic flaw of so much children’s literature: implying that getting the job you wanted as a child and marrying your childhood sweetheart is a good thing. It usually isn’t a good idea to get shackled for life by the limited perspective you had as a teen. I would hope that Harry would learn and grow as a result of his quest, or as a result of his subsequent freedom from responsibility, and form new goals.

My fixes for the 7^th book:

1. Harry and friends reconvene two weeks later (Let’s include the wonderfully sad scene that the movie added of Hermione’s parents forgetting about her.)
2. They reconvene for the wedding (which happens earlier in the summer) and the plot goes pretty much as it did in the book, just much faster. They try to finish their quest in time to be back by senior year, but they realize that they’re making slow progress…
3. …When the time comes, Harry and Ron both expect Hermione to go back for school, but she won’t leave them, which gives her a little “how much I’ve changed” moment (though her constant grief at playing playing hooky should provide running comic relief)
4. Continuing through the events of the book at a doubletime pace, we get to the climax before Christmastime.
5. Let Harry actually speak to the dying Snape, rather than have Snape clear his name posthumously, as he did in the book (As I’m sure you guessed, in my version of book 6 from yesterday, Snape had already whispered to Sirius that he couldn’t save him, only ease his pain, so when the death eaters arrived Sirius surreptitiously grabbed and drank another poison to save Snape’s cover, which earned Snape’s appreciation, which is why he smiled…)
6. Harry does not get everything explained to him again by Dumbeldore at the end (death should have consequences!) but that’s okay because he knows what Dumbledore would have said to him anyway.
7. In the finale, Harry comes to a dawning realization…. He begins to suspect that there are actually eight horcruxes, the last one is one of the objects from Voldemort’s miserable youth at the cabin, which he has around his neck.…
8. Sure enough, they destroy the seven horcruxes but Voldemort doesn’t die. Harry is about to destroy the last one he’s discovered, when he realizes something pitiful: the last Horcrux was the first part that Voldemort split off from himself, because it was the small part of him that was good. It’s the only part of him that’s left now, so he is left small, wretched and wracked with guilt at what he’s done.
9. Harry suddenly loses his bloodlust. He tells the small circle of friends within earshot that they should let him live out his days, coping with the guilt of his crimes in Azkaban. Most agree, but Neville (who was always shown to be more traumatized by his own parents’ deaths than Harry was) is horrified by the thought, so he impetuously picks up Gryffindor’s sword and shoves it through the horcrux and Voldemort, killing him permanently. The gathered forces of good, unaware of what was said at the end, see this deed and suddenly remember that the prophecy could have applied to either Harry or Neville. They instantly switch their idolatry and begin a massive celebration of the true chosen one, Neville.
10. At first Harry is incensed, but then he realizes that this is the greatest reward he could have won: the chance to be a normal wizard for the first time, freed from the burden of history and expectation. He is disappointed in Neville’s act of vengeance, but happily lets him take the credit.
11. The teachers invalidate the death eater-run semester and agree to give everybody credit for a foreshortened school year crammed into the second semester. One chapter breezily sums up this happy, uneventful semester.
12. They graduate, Hermione gives the valedictory (taking the place of Dumbledore’s words of wisdom at the end of the other books) and they all go their own ways. Harry tells Ginny that he’s sick of violence and no longer wants to be an auror, so he’s got to go out in the world and decide what he wants to be. She says that he should make sure he really wants to come back to her too, and they agree to re-evaluate their relationship when or if he comes back. They sadly part…
13. But, in the final chapter, twenty years later, Harry is revealed, after much suspense, to be married to Ginny after all (after years apart) and acceding, after fifteen years as Defense Against the Dark Arts professor, to be the new Headmaster of Hogwarts. Ron and Hermione, who work for the now insufferable Neville at the ministry, attend the ceremony.

(Okay, okay, I couldn’t let the ‘shippers down, but at least let them make the final decision as adults, not kids! Those who get married at eighteen regret it!)

So thats it! This was supposed to be a quick storytelling exercise, but it quickly descended into epic vainglorious fan fiction. It’s a testament to how real and wonderful these stories are to me that I’m still running them over in my head all these years later, greedily trying to take this wonderful story away from Rowling so that I can make it my own.