Stranger Than Unresolved Plot Thread
How come I'm the only person who walked out of Stranger Than Fiction disappointed that they never explained HOW Will Ferrell could hear Emma Thompson's voice in his head?
Try to explain it away with some surrealism if you like, but you can't do salad bar surrealism, setting one tiny surreal detail in the real world and turning it loose without explanation or resolution. You have to establish rules, then you have to follow them. I didn't get that from this film. It just seemed to have a great idea wrapped poorly. Anything could happen, free flow of ideas. No rules. No anchor for the audience. Bothered me.
I still liked it, but I'm not letting it off the hook so fast, as everyone else seemed to do so easily. No one even questions it. "The story's not about that..." Bullshit! The story wouldn't happen if not for that. Establish a catalyst for a story and then never explain it? His watch just started acting on its own one day? I dunno. The more I think about it, the more I think I could get away with anything. My world has flying rabbits, and we don't explain it.
(Note: Falling frogs in Magnolia were used as a Biblical allusion. So hush.)
Perhaps this is the next stage of writing: Generating personal stories set in a mad world and not bothering to explain the madness of the world. The world is just mad. It's an existential question, really. In a world where characters take the whole movie to figure themselves out, do we need to worry how the world got so mad?
Audiences aren't worrying about it. Shows where we are and what we like in our films. I think it's interesting, albeit partly disappointing, but still interesting.
Try to explain it away with some surrealism if you like, but you can't do salad bar surrealism, setting one tiny surreal detail in the real world and turning it loose without explanation or resolution. You have to establish rules, then you have to follow them. I didn't get that from this film. It just seemed to have a great idea wrapped poorly. Anything could happen, free flow of ideas. No rules. No anchor for the audience. Bothered me.
I still liked it, but I'm not letting it off the hook so fast, as everyone else seemed to do so easily. No one even questions it. "The story's not about that..." Bullshit! The story wouldn't happen if not for that. Establish a catalyst for a story and then never explain it? His watch just started acting on its own one day? I dunno. The more I think about it, the more I think I could get away with anything. My world has flying rabbits, and we don't explain it.
(Note: Falling frogs in Magnolia were used as a Biblical allusion. So hush.)
Perhaps this is the next stage of writing: Generating personal stories set in a mad world and not bothering to explain the madness of the world. The world is just mad. It's an existential question, really. In a world where characters take the whole movie to figure themselves out, do we need to worry how the world got so mad?
Audiences aren't worrying about it. Shows where we are and what we like in our films. I think it's interesting, albeit partly disappointing, but still interesting.