Principia Filmatica

...via friend and HH Nation reader Liz. Thanks, Liz.

This hilarious video should strike knowing and painful fear into the heart of anyone who's ever thought seriously about writing a movie.

But as funny as that video is, and as skillfully as it exposes the bland repetitiousness of many movies, I still think it's important to remember something that most people seem to want to reflexively disagree with: most movie formulas are good things.

I'll give you an example of what I mean. Back when I was living in Gainesville, there was a local band I saw a few times whose name I can't remember, so let's just call them Phantom Talent.

Phantom Talent were an example of a music style called "dischord," which gets it's particularly creative name from the fact that as a rule it eschews discernible chords and progressions, and from the fact that the "singing" generally consists, melody wise, of random yelling.

You see where I'm going with this. Here clearly was a band out as much to send a message as to make music. And their message was: fuck the conventions of chords, fuck the conventions of style, fuck the conventions of singing! Indeed, fuck you, audience!

The only reason Phantom Talent was even listenable was because it featured three of the best musicians in town, and because as much as they were trying to make a point about staid musical conventions, what they actually were was full of shit, since their songs still consisted of basic verse/chorus structure, and they were well rehearsed and tight through the changes.

There's an urge you've always got to fight as a creative person, and that's the urge to defy convention just for the sake of defying convention. Just because there's a formula out there that's worked for hundreds or thousands of years doesn't mean that formula is bad. Formula's are formulas for a reason. If you set out to break them for the sake of breaking them, more than likely you will be producing intolerable shit.

One of the first big things I discovered on my own as an adult was the Blues. Like a lot of kids who discovered it in the 60s, I was drawn in initially by the music of the English Blues Boom of The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Clapton and the like, and from there immersed myself in the music of guys like Son House, Leadbelly, Freddie King and Howlin' Wolf. Especially Freddie King.

I learned to play the guitar because of the blues. And one thing you learn pretty much right away is that every blues song is essentially the same. From a progressions standpoint, from an on-the-paper standpoint, there is very little flexibility in the blues.

And there's nothing wrong with that. The Blues is fundamentally an interpretive art, rather than a creative one, if you get my meaning. Put another way, it's not really about what you're playing, it's about how you're playing it. And that how is really all that separates the dingy, talentless lounge bands of the world from it's Eric Claptons.

These same lessons apply directly to moviemaking. You do not have a movie without conflict. You do not have a movie unless people want things and obstacles stand in their way. You do not have a movie unless it has surprises. You do not have a movie unless certain things are resolved.

What separates the men from the unemployed men is how you accomplish those things.

A particularly useful example of what I'm talking about is something called "Kierkegaard's Narrative," a existential plot outline that's been followed in movies such as American Beauty, Harold and Maude, High Fidelity, Sideways and many more. Great films all, but different films. But different in the how, rather than the what.

For a more comprehensive look at Kiekegaard's Narrative, click here.

So maybe this is all just me being an old fashioned stick in the mud, but I'm firmly of the opinion that moviemakers are first and foremost storytellers, not innovators. The goal of telling the story well should always take precedence over any other factor. And if that leads to innovation from a technical standpoint (Barry Lyndon being filmed by candlelight), editing standpoint (Rashomon's repeated subjective realities), or any number of other standpoints (The Empire Strikes Back making a key character a puppet), so much the better.

But let's not take a dump on movie formulas because of those lousy hacks who follow them in ways that are completely without imagination. They've done us well so far.

The Church of TCM, plus a few words about Adam's Rib

There are many fine Religions out there. Take Sufism, for example, an ancient mystical sect of Islam whose followers believe in a return to the "primordial state of fitra," a word than translates roughly to mean "insight" or "intuition."

For instance: my intuition telling me to stop reading about Sufism.

Growing up, my folks were both fairly religious, but thankfully this didn't translate into going to church a lot. I say thankfully because as all of you who go to church regularly know, there's nothing a physicist can teach you about relative time you can't learn by going to a one and a half hour church service that clearly lasts four hours.

In my house we had another religion. One we worshipped and pledged ourselves undyingly to. And it's one I've followed to this day.

The Church of TCM

Pictured: Jesus crossed with Mr. Rogers

Since it launched on this day (April 14th) in 1994, Turner Classic Movies has become a dominant part of my family's life (I'm pretty sure we tuned in the first day). Of the 1200+ movies I've seen, it's a reasonable guess I saw 400-500 or so for the first time on TCM, and chances are if you had a time machine and picked a random day these last 16 years and walked into my parents house, a TV somewhere inside of it would have TCM on.

It's quite frankly the Indispensable Channel, and it's programming is so wide and varied you can enjoy it on multiple levels of movie knowledge, from the casual fan who wants to watch Casablanca once a month... or, like they did last month, wants to watch every Akira Kurosawa movie ever made (in honor of what would have been his 100th birthday).

But despite all of that watching, now and then I come upon a widely beloved classic that for some reason I've never seen. So, as part of this TCM anniversary I'd like to talk about how I did this recently with a beloved classic and why I, uh... hated it.

Hated Classic #1: Adam's Rib

A vehicle for Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn, who if they had lived in this day in age probably would have probably had their relationship dubbed "Hep-C", Adam's Rib is the story of married attorneys who end up on the opposite sides of an attempted murder trial.

The case: a woman has shot at and wounded her husband, who she thinks is cheating on her.

The way the movie presents the facts the whole thing seems pretty open and shut. The woman is caught at the scene, there are two witnesses, it's her gun and she admits to stalking him up to the apartment and pulling the trigger.

All is well. That is, until Hepburn installs herself as the woman's lawyer (Tracy is given the case as a prosecutor) and proceeds to throw the movie for a vomit-inducing loop.

Hepburn works herself into a real lather, gets into court and throws the following bombshell of a case at a jury: my client (the admitted shooter), a) was just trying to protect her family, and b) if a man had shot his wife under similar circumstances, no one would have a problem with that.

No really, read that again. She admits her client not only did the crime, but had motive and premeditation. Her argument is that if a man had done it, he'd go free. Therefore this woman should go free.

Obviously, Hepburn's tactics lead to marital strife, as Tracy objects to Hepburn trying to shove a traffic cone into the butthole of justice, and Hepburn not understanding why Tracy would want to stand so intolerantly in the way of a woman's right to shoot her cheating husband.

Even in the light of the O.J. trial, where some black people openly rooted for O.J. to go free just because he was black, Adam's Rib cannot be endured as anything approaching the way the justice system works. Johnnie Cochran might have been manipulative and occasionally full of shit, but even he didn't say that O.J. should go free because if it had been a white athlete killing his black girlfriend and her black lover, he'd get off no problem.

Also, that defense strategy doesn't rhyme, which would have been a problem.

Adam's Rib is not really pitched at the level of realism, though. The court scenes are not believable in the slightest and sort of treated as farce (Hepburn at one point puts a series of "accomplished" women on the stand, one of them a circus strongwoman who does backflips in front of the judge before lifting a protesting Tracy in the air with one arm).

But make no mistake, it's farce with a message: women should be equal in the eyes of law and society.

And that's a case worth fighting for... unless you cache it in a legal strategy so dangerously stupid you could use it to justify anything from speeding to, you know, actual murder.

The movie's final kick in the head? Hepburn wins the case. Maybe you guessed that by now, but it still floored me.

Yup. She wins. She fucking wins!

What a profoundly dumb movie.

Day of the Triff-vids (get it?)

This SNL-esque funny-or-die video really has nothing to do with movies, except that it stars Marion Cotillard (Public Enemies), Leslie-Anne Warren (Clue) and William Fichtner (Heat).

Thankfully not making an appearance: William Fichtner's titteas.

And while I'm just throwing a video out there for no reason, for those of you who haven't seen it, here's a magnificent collection of Arnold Schwarzenegger quotes compiled by someone with way too much time on their hands.

Yes, even more time than you, blog reader.

Next time on Hollywood Humiliation: a psychoanalytical deconstruction of the gender modes in Mrs. Doubtfire.