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The Hurt Locker
RallyMonkey:
I have Waltz With Bashir, but I have yet to watch it.
In terms of non-plot driven movies, you still need to have something driving the movie. For instance, characters. There Will Be Blood has very little plot, but extremely engaging characters, and is one of my favorite movies. The Hurt Locker is in no way character driven, I can't remember a single one of the characters.
I'd also argue that what you described in the Hurt Locker, while plot development, is not necessarily plot. Saying "This is a movie about the members of a military unit's relationships to one another, and how it progresses over one tour of duty." sounds like a plot, but try to write that, and you'll soon feel like there's something lacking: Drive. There's only one thing motivating the characters, and that's survival. But in good plots, the main character acts on upon others, which leads to the next plot point. You can't just have a series of things happen to the main character.
I'm making it sound like I disliked the movie much more than I did. It would definitely be in my Top 10 for this year, and I'd definitely want The Hurt Locker to beat out Avatar in any award ceremony's. But in truth it's a movie I enjoyed the first time I watched it, and I will never watch it again.
Blue Kitty:
--- Quote from: pilsner on 14 Jan 2010, 08:19 ---Take for instance Waltzing with Bashir, the animated documentary drawing on interviews from Israeli soldiers who were in the vicinity of a massacre of Palestinians by Lebanese Christian Fallengists. Even less of a plot than The Hurt Locker, but an equally significant emotional payload (and perhaps even more disturbing).
--- End quote ---
Oh god, especially that ending with the track they used from the actual event
knives:
--- Quote from: RallyMonkey on 14 Jan 2010, 11:45 ---I have Waltz With Bashir, but I have yet to watch it.
In terms of non-plot driven movies, you still need to have something driving the movie. For instance, characters. There Will Be Blood has very little plot, but extremely engaging characters, and is one of my favorite movies. The Hurt Locker is in no way character driven, I can't remember a single one of the characters.
I'd also argue that what you described in the Hurt Locker, while plot development, is not necessarily plot. Saying "This is a movie about the members of a military unit's relationships to one another, and how it progresses over one tour of duty." sounds like a plot, but try to write that, and you'll soon feel like there's something lacking: Drive. There's only one thing motivating the characters, and that's survival. But in good plots, the main character acts on upon others, which leads to the next plot point. You can't just have a series of things happen to the main character.
I'm making it sound like I disliked the movie much more than I did. It would definitely be in my Top 10 for this year, and I'd definitely want The Hurt Locker to beat out Avatar in any award ceremony's. But in truth it's a movie I enjoyed the first time I watched it, and I will never watch it again.
--- End quote ---
I won't go into a full blown list, but there are many films without character let alone 'drive', unless of course I have misunderstood what you mean by drive, and many of those are great. The skill of the creators and the interest of the audience are the only drive concerns that really should be considered. Beyond that any sort of narrative, or lack thereof, state is fine. The quatsi trilogy for example, damn I said I wouldn't mention anything, is essentially just a group of still photographs. no drive, no characters, yet it is one of the most moving experiences I've had with a movie. That's an extreme example though. For your argument, specifically "There's only one thing motivating the characters, and that's survival. But in good plots, the main character acts on upon others, which leads to the next plot point. You can't just have a series of things happen to the main character," there probably needs to be a more traditional setup for me to make a convincing counterargument. I could go with Goodbye, Dragon Inn, but I suspect that is another one of those 'extreme' examples. Instead how about Wendy and Lucy? In that film the lead's doesn't even get a drive until about thirty minutes in. Even than the drive is just find Lucy. There's other characters there, but they bounce off each other more minimally than The Hurt Locker.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that your criticism is too vague to really work.
pilsner:
Or Last Year in Marienbad or The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie or virtually all of Herzog's movies or a good half of Fassbinder's or most of Bergman's and Tarkovsky's or a hundred other movies among those considered by many critics to be the most important ever made.
While it can be said that RallyMonkey doesn't love movies without conventional plots (or indeed plots at all), an opinion to which he is certainly entitled, such movies are hardly unusual to the cinephile.
RallyMonkey:
Obviously there is a wide genre of films that very easily get off with weak or non-existent stories. Though generally these films are made using non-traditional filmmaking techniques. I.E. a series of still photographs. I know I don't go to a movie like 8 1/2 and one like The Hurt Locker with the same goals in mind. And personally, I get a lot more out of an emotionally effecting story than I do from an emotionally effective artwork that has no story.
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