So super-canuck Keanu Reeve's next movie is about a lonely guy living in an empty house who ends up exchanging letters with Sandra Bullock, who also somehow lives in that same house, only two years in the future, see, so they have a long-temporal relationship going on, not merely a long-distance one.
Clever.
And Brad Pitt's new movie will be about a young actor (played by Pitt) who looks exactly like the hot young film star 'Brad Pitt', thus experiencing daily humiliations and frustrations as he's constantly compared to his better-known, better-paid lookalike.
Also clever.
That's the problem, though.
So much of modern storytelling is obsessed with being clever.
If something's not wacky, zany, odd and weird, it won't get made, or it won't be considered good, or it won't be considered, period.
So we have the movie Adaptation, which was all about the screenwriter of Adaptation writing a movie that turns out to be...Adaptation.
And we have movies like the recent Kevin Spacey directed Bobby Darin bio-pic Beyond The Sea, which is a fictional movie-within-a-movie kinda thing, where Spacey plays Bobby Darin directing a movie about himself, in which he interacts with his younger, boyhood self.
Oh, and then there's The Village, which has a big twist I won't tell you about that others guessed, but I didn't, cuz I'm not that swift, but it, too, is, altogether now, 'clever'.
Don't get me wrong. I actually really liked all of the above movies. (Even The Village. Scared the bejesus out of me. Not that I had much jesus in me anyways, but...)
It's the trend that scares me. The impulse to move beyond other aspects of storytelling, things like character, and theme, and mood, and into the more transitory, isn't-that-an-awesome realm of cleverness.
It's a matter of space and time, I think. Movies exist in two hour blocks, right, and so you better say what you gotta say, quick, or else everyone's going to lose interest. (Kind of like a blog.) That's why Norman Mailer, the great writer, once said that sportswriters are faced with the burden of being clever. Meaning, a novelist has space and time in abundance; he or she doesn't have to rely on being clever (which usually means snide) to hold someone's attention. A sportswriter's gotta prove his literary worth right off the bat.
You ever read David Foster Wallace? His mammoth novel Infinite Jest is damn clever, but it's cleverness stretched out to thirteen hundred pages. It's fiction, but there's footnotes, and when you check the footnote at the back of the book, you'll often find fifty or sixty more pages of the story, continued. So what do you do? Read the footnote, and lose track of the main text, or read the text, and wonder what the hell the footnote was all about? Clever. And genius, too, because he had the space (and the balls) to provide a not-altogether-comfortable cushion of depth to that cleverness. (Incidentally, I saw Wallace give a reading about nine years ago at the Toronto Harborfrount literary festival. As I was waiting in line for him to sign my book -- or, rather, his book -- a photographer took a picture, a flash picture, a bright picture. "If you could get that so the flash would fill my entire field of vision, that would be great," Wallace said. Clever.)
So what I'm advocating? Originality, yes. Innovation, of course. But also the other, more rounded parts of stories. The stuff that can't be pitched in a, um, pitch.
Go watch Osama, about a young girl in Taliban Afghanistan. I'm serious. I know, I know, you've seen so many Afghani movies recently, and they always disappoint you, but this one won't. You must see this movie. It's blunt and brutal and beautiful. Nothing 'clever' about it. It focuses on a girl, and her country, and her life.
I'm thinking of Cambodia. Of the street kids I see every day. Of what their lives must be like, their mornings and evenings, their childhoods and (hopefully) their adolescents. Wow. What a story it would make. Your heart would have to break.
I read and watch and love all kinds of stoires, but there has to be a foundation centred on something real and lasting. Stories have got to emerge from people and places, not from cheap gimmicks.
Now, having said all that, I've got this really cool idea for a ghost story, where the ghosts travel through not only space and the bridge between life and death but between time, too, so you'd have this situation where a new father's lying in bed, right, sleeping beside his newborn baby, barely six, seven months old, and then he sees his bedroom door slowly open, and who should enter but the ghost of his still-living child, only the ghost is a four year old boy, not a baby, so he now knows that his kid only has three more years to live...
Kind of clever, no?
