5ive Girls

Found this one during my regular trolling of YouTube. Not much worthwhile to mention here although I am making a post about it because it (unknowingly) used superpowers as an allegory for outcasts and marginalized subcultures. Also, ironically, the lesbian was the only girl to survive. All five girls had a different sort of superpower gift and it had caused them to be outcasts in a society that rejected them for being different. The lead girl was telekinetic and slightly telepathic. The lesbian could heal and had this oddly interesting backstory of having had her parents use her has a faith healer for money. Then there was a girl who could move through objects (but not walls), the blind girl who could see the past, present and future and the wiccan/channeler. They all had interesting limitations to their powers which made them far more believable, but primarily they were planted and used as a means to bring them there (all as rejected outcasts, of which the Lesbian was just one, and only cursorily because of her sexuality). The pay off of their powers was minimal at best mostly because the demon and the story and the world, apart from the girls having powers, was a cluster-fuck mess. Scenes were long an confusing and not connected. The demon's power and means to its demise were not explained and generally it was just a bad film. It went way overboard on the 5 points of a star imagery and was just clunky and confusing most of the time. It was also hard to keep the girls separate and they weren't introduced well enough for us to care about them and why they were there and what they ment to each other.

I really liked the allegory of superheroes position girls as outcasts and rejects, linked to sexuality. It was very x-men like but with a more real spin. They had limitations and were restricted by these limitations to being just slighty more powerful than regular girls but just as subject to human emotions, fears, inabilities and weaknesses. I'm obviously very interested in examining society's rejects through super powers and fantasy. Everyone wants more power but what are the consequences of this power? How can the "powers" of my characters position them on the outside? What does having power do to you in a world that ignores or rejects that?

One highlight I forgot to mention earlier was a line of dialog from the blind girl, "When you're blind, packaging is less important." I can no longer remember what it was in reference to, but it was simple way to fundamentally question the power of the visual, in a film, which is all about the image. It got me thinking what is important, especially if you start stripping humans of the basic 5 senses? What is left?

Quantum of Solace

Car chases, boat chases and airplane chases, oh my! Man that airplane chase was laughable and that part just completely lost me. They fall out of a plane, the chute hardly opens and there is barely a scratch on them? Right...Yeah, it was a lot of action and not a lot of feeling or emotion. In a film about revenge, both Olga and Bond are on their own personal vendettas, but there was an awful lot of not caring whether or not they were successful or not. Or how many people they kill along the way. There has to be a way to have an empty, unfeeling Bond, hellbent on revenge, but yet have the audience still desperately care if he succeeds or not. It felt like a weak sauce version of the Bourne Sequel. If you have to motivate a whole movie based on the revenge of a woman (cliche) at least make us care. Don't tell us a sad story about your family getting burned alive, show us it in the beginning of the movie. Than we are emotionally invested in her success and Bond's interference. The boat chase scene doesn't just look pretty, it rips at my heart and builds tension. I desperately care whether or not the burned little girl finally gets her revenge. The same with Bond. They needed to take us back and show us what he was fighting for. What images were lingering in his mind during his sleepless nights? What drives him?

This has been the biggest problem with action films lately. Watchmen is also guilty. They just want to look pretty and out due each other visual but they are boring because they are so emotionally vacant. This is exactly what Braun talks about in 516. You have to lead the audience. Give them a hint of the future that plays on their hopes and fears. We have to know what Bond is fighting for so that we know the stakes and care about what he has to lose. Lay out the mission so the audience is on board. There has to be a way to point to the mission without insulting the audience's intelligence. There is a fine line from suspense of not knowing and having to figure it out (mystery for the viewer) and giving them elements of the future that play on their hopes and fears. I have to play with this in my webseries. Find this balance through trial and error if you have to.

Marc Forster has done many emotionally resonant films. I loved Stranger Than Fiction so how come he forgot about people while directing an action film?