Comment on Furiosa's Box Office Opening Explained: What The Hell Happened With The Mad Max Prequel?!
hakase@lemm.ee 4 weeks agoI also think Fury Road was mid at best for an action movie. All of the people putting it on “best of all time” lists makes me feel like I’m taking crazy pills (I also think the Fifth Element was legitimately terrible btw).
rezz@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Yes, objective relative to the rules or conventions of visual storytelling in an anatomic sense. This means the literal structure of the action and its values relative to characters.
Each shot (that is not in a moment of montage) has a quantifiable beginning-middle-end that is motivated by the character’s actions on the screen, and again nested inside of the sequence or scene. The reason most people experience the pace of Mad Max as unrelentingly brisk is because due to the lack of wasted frames on characters. It is hyper efficient. There isn’t a single shot-reverse shot dialogue in the whole film. There isn’t unmotivated action. There is not an unnecessary or missing character on screen. And the framing from edit to edit does not yank your eye somewhere it’s not meant to be.
Compare this to another all-time action film, Bourne Ultimatum—which has an insane volume of superfluous or narratively unmotivated camera coverage in its action. Literally the action 50% of the time, while utterly spectacular, does not advance the characters at all, and certainly does not have an opinion of its action to infer from the camera choices.
You’re also completely entitled to not care and think it’s boring! But there are definitely objective storytelling mechanics that are binary insofar as they are present or not on a scene to scene, shot to shot basis.
hakase@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
This is a subjective determination, unless you can somehow quantifiably show otherwise. How can we objectively know when a character’s actions are or aren’t sufficiently “motivated”? And even if the beginning-middle-end is somehow determine this, how can you prove that a lack of this beginning-middle-end is objectively bad?
This is a subjective determination, unless you can somehow quantifiably show otherwise. How can “wasted” be objectively defined here? How do we know that “wasted” is objectively bad?
This is a subjective determination, unless you can somehow quantifiably show otherwise. How can “unmotivated” be objectively defined here? How do we know that “unmotivated” action is objectively bad?
This is a subjective determination, unless you can somehow quantifiably show otherwise. How can “unnecessary” be objectively defined here? Also, how do we know that “unnecessary” characters are objectively bad?
By your subjective judgment, unless you can somehow show otherwise. Also, how do we know that the camera yanking your eye somewhere its not meant to be is objectively bad?
This is a subjective determination, unless you can somehow quantifiably show otherwise. How can “superfluous” and “narratively unmotivated” be objectively defined here? And even if they could, how can you show that this is objectively bad?
Great! Back to my original question then, since nothing you’ve said here has been relevant to it: what are they, and by what metrics are they precisely defined and quantified? And more importantly, how does that objectively prove that Fury Road is a top 10 action movie?
In short, at this point it’s clear that you have no idea what objective means, so I think we’re done here.
rezz@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
With all due respect, you’re straw manning me quite a bit. I never said anything was “bad” and I never call into question taste. There is not an objective metric to enjoyment of movies or art etc.
There are objective—e.g true or false statements—about the film or story itself. A story absolutely is objectively measurable in a structural sense. You can contend that your enjoyment of a movie is totally subjective, which it is, however you nonetheless would likely agree that for some reason 95% of the stories you consume conform to common structural conventions.
You can test this by playing any number of these action movies side by side with a stopwatch if you’d like, and time when the narrative milestones occur. You could do the same for scene length relative to the purpose of each scene in the story.
There are methods of structuring story elements that absolutely will affect the way you successfully or unsuccessfully enjoy a story.
For example: it is objectively incorrect if you said John Wick follows the conventions of a body horror film. The evidence? Quite literally the actions of the characters and subsequently the mise-en-scene which is there to support your consumption of said characters.
But let’s take a much more obvious example instead of comparing Hollywood tent pole films.
The 2011 film Samsara is considered a documentary film. I would argue it is “documentary” in the most basic sense, in that it quite literally documents happenings on earth—from the directors’ point of view obviously.
Their are objective facts about this movie: it is shot on medium lenses which replicate the human eye, it has very saturated color hue, and there are 0 characters.
You can love this film and feel all sorts of things. But you definitely won’t love the main character and how he does XYZ. It doesn’t have this; it is not a story. The director may say something like “it is a story” in the meta sense, but that is interpolation ultimately, and not something he shot from a screenplay for you to enjoy.
I think if you made film and television for a living, you would likely completely change your perspective.
Rolando@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Hey, I’m a bit late to this discussion, but…
When I was in grad school I looked over the literature on discourse analysis. Basically, you get a bunch of people, you show them a text, then you ask them questions about how they perceive the narrative structure of the story. Usually you have a theory based on something like Rhetorical Structure Theory. You do statistics on their responses and measure agreement. You’re trying to find out if people will reliably agree on the structure of a text when they read it.
When people are reading certain types of highly-structured texts, people will generally agree on where the boundaries of the various components are. But that’s not the case for fiction. It’s hard to get people to objectively agree on the structure of a story.
However, you mention other features like number of shots and scene length, and those are very likely to have a high degree of agreement in human observers. It’s just important to keep in mind the difference between what we as an individual observer identify, and what a population of human observers identify.
(btw I agree that Fury Road is a killer movie, I totally need to see it again.)