Three capsule reviews and a lecture

I make it a firm rule to try to see at least two movies in a theater every calendar year.  That is, of course, only a goal and I don’t always make it.  My living room, with an HD plasma TV, Blu-Ray player and pretty nifty sound system generally suits me just fine.

(If for no other reason, I don’t miss a few minutes of the movie if I have to visit the facilities.)

The last three movies I have watched – two at home and one in a theater – led me to think about plots, because it was pretty obvious where each movie was going after watching only a small part of it.

The movies were “District 9,” “Avatar” and “The Invention of Lying.”

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Many people have attempted to categorize the number of possible plots in fiction.  These categories – depending on who is doing the counting – range from three to seven to 20 to 36.

And that’s not counting Faulkner’s definition of fiction as “the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about.”

Very true, but that’s a reason for telling the story, and Faulkner didn’t mean it as a plot summary.

Personally, I tend to like the “seven plots” school of thought:

1. Tragedy. Hero with a fatal flaw meets tragic end. “Macbeth” or “Madame Bovary.”

2. Comedy. Not necessary laugh-out-loud, but always with a happy ending, typically of romantic fulfilment, as in Jane Austen.  Not always, but usually, the guy and gal start off at odds with each other and only gradually come to realize the blah-blah-blah.  Classic example: “It Happened One Night.”

3. Overcoming the Monster. “Frankenstein,” “Jaws,” “Alien,” “Silence of the Lambs.”

4. Voyage and Return. The archetypal structure of personal development through leaving, then returning home.  “The Odyssey,” “Alice in Wonderland,” “The Time Machine,” “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”

5. Quest. A holy grail, a whale, or a kidnapped child.  “Lord of the Rings,” “The Road,”  Moby Dick. (“Moby Dick” could also fit under “Tragedy.”)

6. Rags to Riches. The riches can be literal or metaphoric. “Cinderella,” “David Copperfield,” “Pygmalion.”

7. Rebirth. The central character finds a new reason for living.  To my mind, the most fulfilling of all plots and the closest to Faulkner’s observation that “only that is worth writing about.”  “A Christmas Carol,” “It’s a Wonderful Life,” “Crime and Punishment,” “Peer Gynt.”

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Once you have these plots down, it’s not a difficult task to figure out where a given movie may be going.

Case in point: “The Invention of Lying.”

A really neat conceit that ends as a miserable failure because the director couldn’t figure out what he wanted to do with the plot.  The plot, of course, is a romantic comedy in which boy meets girl, through confusion boy loses girl and then boy finally gets girl in the last scene.

But that’s only the plot.  You saw that coming within ten minutes, didn’t you?  The elements of the plot, however, don’t hang together.  Is being unable to tell a lie the same as being an idiot?  Seems so.  The only alleged difference between that world and our own is that in that world everybody tells the truth about everything.   But the female’s only reason for rejecting our hero is that she doesn’t approve of his genetic material, which has little to do with truth or lying.  (Not to mention that she’s a freaking twit and we never get a clue as to why Ricky Gervais wants to marry her, let alone bang her.)  And everybody else in that alternative universe is equally clueless.

Hey, Mr. Director: Do you want to make a movie about a world in which people can’t lie or do you want to make a movie about a world in which people are all twits?  Either one might be funny, but you’re linking the two.  Doesn’t work after the first 20 minutes or so.

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Case in point: “District 9.”

I should have known where it was going after the first ten minutes, but I’m a little slow sometimes.  It wasn’t until the hero grew a claw that I figured out the rest of the plot.

The plot elements don’t hold together at all.  How did the captive “prawns” get hold of their species-specific weaponry?  If the prawn hero could manage to make their space ship fly, why were the aliens stranded hovering over Johannesburg for months in the movie’s backstory?  And on and on.  Best not to think about it.  But it was a great, and disturbing commentary on race relations and the darkness of the human heart.

This one and “Avatar” fall into a sub-genre of “Rebirth:” The hero is introduced to an alien culture and adopts it as better than his own.  See also “Little Big Man,” “Dances With Wolves” and “A Man Called Horse,” among others.

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Case in point: “Avatar.”

It’s difficult to separate the cinematography from the special effects, but either way, they’re luscious.

Ten minutes into it, you know that Jake Sully will have a rebirth.  Otherwise, what’s the point?  It’s how he gets there that makes for a rollicking good ride.  The central conceit is consistent (unlike “Lying”) and we root for the non-white tribe because the white guys are what we know humans are capable of being.

The 3-D version isn’t necessary.  It just makes the viewing experience more immediate.

Subplot: “Heart of Darkness” slash “Apocalypse Now.”