FX Porn
Via Greencine via Metaphilm comes a great ’98 article from David Foster Wallace: “what’s the difference between a Hollywood special-effects blockbuster like “Terminator 2” and a hard-core porn film? Very little.” So true, so true. Perhaps we will have to wait for the cost of CG to plummet before we can expect to see action sequences re-integrated into films’ stories. North By Northwest is one long chase scene, after all. There are exceptions, but the habit now is to have the story take a break as lavish SFX setpieces explode with all the plot relevance of a ten-way gangbang.
Beyond that, there’s another trend – one I’m not sure is entirely evil – towards 6-hour films. X-Men, Matrix, Star Wars and Rings movies don’t really function as three-act films of the sort that has been bludgeoned into everyone’s heads by guru after guru and the sheer weight of repetition: deep into the second act, new characters are being introduced, and typically their grand battles come somewhere in the midpoint rather than at the end. At the same time it’s now commonplace for viewers to rent or purchase entire seasons of television, some of which are more cinematic than the typical Hollywood sludge. At the apex of MTV ADD we seem to be rediscovering entertainment of Shakesperean or even Homeric breadth.
So at the very least the form is changing rather than simply getting worse. Let that be a little light at the end of DFW’s tunnel of Inverse Cost and Quality which, in fact, has enough exceptions now to be seen seriously flawed: Titanic, for one, and all of the Rings so far, for two and three (anyone care to supply more)? Seems to me that as long as the studios get their bullet-time cyborg killer and breathtaking catastrophe scenes, they may now care so little about plot and character that they might let a few good stories slip through now and then. But those must be shepherded by directors with an entirely different skillset than that geared toward lower budgets, which is really the root cause of the “ICQL”. Possibly we should be teaching CGI in film school.