Groundhog Day and Unexplained Magic
An observation made halfway through a five-hour meeting in Beijing: in the movie Groundhog Day, it is never explained why Bill Murray’s character is stuck in a time loop.
Yes, the emotional reason is clear: he’s a selfish asshole, and needs to learn to be less of one. But the actual supernatural mechanism is never part of the movie. There’s not a magic clock, or a nuclear wristwatch. Punxsutawney Phil isn’t secretly a wizard.
Rather, weatherman Phil Connors is stuck in a time loop because, well, he is. We buy it, and we don’t demand further explanation.1
Most movies would make a point of singling out some physical object or act that brought about the situation. The hero would find something, break something or do something (an accidental birthday wish, pissing off a witch) as an inciting incident. It wouldn’t just happen.
But maybe it should.
You can often get rid of magic items and explicit wishes/curses, even in stories that seem to require them.
Dorothy doesn’t do anything to summon the tornado that takes her from Kansas.
Clark Kent doesn’t wish he could fly; he can fly because the story says he can.2
The Connor family is marked for death not because of something they did or said, but because evil computers from the future worry about a threat. (Ditto for Neo in the Matrix.)
As the audience, we don’t demand proof. We accept the magic as part of the premise, and don’t require a prop to ground it.
To be clear: I’m not arguing to ban all magic props. Let Frodo have his ring. The Pevensie children can climb through a wardrobe into Narnia. And once in Oz, Dorothy should feel free to grab some dead woman’s shoes.
But when developing a story with a supernatural premise, fight the temptation to embody it in a thing. These MacGuffins3 get added with the aim of keeping things simple, but too often distract from the character’s real journey.
In your romantic comedy, Misfire, does your hero need to break up two ill-suited lovers, or get Cupid’s bow and arrow back? The former is funnier. The latter has more props and rules.
Always explore doing it the way Groundhog Day did: by letting magic questions go unasked and unanswered.
- According to Wikipedia, at least one draft of Groundhog Day did include an explicit reason for the time loop — a voodoo spell cast by a coworker. Not only did the movie not need it; I’d argue that being so specific would have hurt the premise by focusing attention on her rather than him. ↩
- Or more broadly, the universe put baby Kal-El on a world with a certain color of sun. ↩
- A MacGuffin is a thing or idea that serves as a focal point to the plot, but is not what the movie is really about, and could easily be substituted with something else. TV Tropes has a long list of MacGuffins, which it considers “plot coupons.” ↩
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August 15th, 2009 at 2:59 am
Great post. Just saw District 9, it’s a good example of this principle. There’s a lot to be said for simplicity.
August 15th, 2009 at 3:55 am
You need it in BIG, though, because without it, there wouldn’t be the drama in the third act where Josh Baskin is willfully making a decision between adulthood and childhood. If there were no Zoltar machine, he’d have no control over staying or going. So tangible magical portals are a necessity if you want to make the premise volitionally reversible.
August 15th, 2009 at 3:59 am
One more movie that doesn’t explain it’s magic is Benjamin Button Though some might argue that the clock moving backwards could be the magic artifact.
Oh and Pushing Daisies, too.
August 15th, 2009 at 4:32 am
Another example: Stranger Than Fiction. We never get an explanation for why the protagonist is a character in a writer’s novel, nor any soul-searching about whether the writer’s other characters/victims really existed. The movie is the story of this one guy; the science-fiction stuff isn’t relevant.
August 15th, 2009 at 5:17 am
Realized I completely dissed Danny Rubin in that comment by saying Ramis wrote the script. Rubin wrote it. Ramis revised.
August 15th, 2009 at 5:49 am
That’s exactly what I loved about True Blood when I first discovered it. Vampires are around and everybody is aware of them.
August 15th, 2009 at 6:50 am
In The Wizard of Oz, I thought that the tornado took Dorothy from Kansas to Oz, as opposed to taking her to Kansas?
In the Terminator, I thought the reason for the Connors being marked for death was quite clear, although I might be missing the point you’re trying to make with that specific example.
August 15th, 2009 at 6:56 am
“feel free to grab”?
And LOL to “plot coupons.” What a great term!
I think this is something for novelists and short story writers to consider too.
August 15th, 2009 at 7:25 am
August 15th, 2009 at 7:27 am
I would call Benjamin Button’s situation more of an ailment than a touch of magic. At least as portrayed by Mr. Pitt and Mr. Fincher.
August 15th, 2009 at 8:19 am
I’m working on a major fan project where the issue of explanations of magical phenomenon is an important aspect of the story. It’s best to think of some situations of happening because “they” can happen.
I also think it’s important to keep such things simple. In GD, Bill Murray is stuck in a time loop– and that’s it. It doesn’t get any more complex, he doesn’t go visit shamans or gypsies to find talismans or long-winded diatribes on curses. By keeping the magical premises low-key, you can get away with it easier than throwing in a large number of “random stuff” just because you can.
August 15th, 2009 at 9:39 am
Why do you need a MacGuffin’ to give the character power over their fate? Bill Murray exits the time loop once he’s “ready,” as determined by whatever magical force put him in the loop in the first place. There’s no reason why a similar thing couldn’t have happened to Tom Hanks’ character.
My mind actually went to the movie “13 Going on 30″ (which probably tells you where my mind is at :/ ) which come to think of it is basically a girl version of Big. It also has a MacGuffin’ that’s needed for the magic to happen, and just like it in Big it doesn’t really need to be there. I think in the case of “13 Going on 30″ the character arc is much more clear, and the point at which Jennifer Gardner’s character needs to go back to her youth is also very clearly defined, lessening the need for a magical contraption even more.
August 15th, 2009 at 10:16 am
Sixth Sense never explains why Cole can see dead people. Silence of the Lambs never explains why Hannibal kills people, similarly with The Dark Knight and the Joker. Children of Men never explains why everyone is infertile. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon never explains why some fighters can fly. Inside Man never explains how the bank robbers know about the Nazi diamonds.
August 15th, 2009 at 10:19 am
Hey, I’ve only seen the first Narnia movie. The wardrobe is a magical prop, but they don’t ever explain why the wardrobe is in the house or why it takes them to Narnia, do they?
RED
August 15th, 2009 at 10:21 am
An unidentifiable force deeming that Bill Murray is ready to move on with his life (even if his changed behavior is the reason) is quite a different thing than Tom Hanks having to CHOOSE to abandon love and a great job in adulthood. Bill Murray’s behavior influences whatever forces are keeping him in Groundhog Day, but he doesn’t have the agency of Tom Hanks.
Not saying BIG is a better movie than GROUNDHOG DAY (yes I am, but that’s not my main point). All I’m pointing out is that BIG’s third act is entirely dependent on whether Tom Hanks does or does not use the Zoltar machine, and there’s no way to show that if his fate is entirely out of his hands.
August 15th, 2009 at 10:24 am
@ Chris A
That would be the woeful HANNIBAL RISING which explains why Hannibal kills people. In his case, I think it was better left to our imaginations.
August 15th, 2009 at 11:49 am
@Chris A:
Good examples. Especially Dark Knight and Children of Men. Both of those movies, I feel, would have been significantly weakened by some psuedo-scientific or pop-psychological explanation.
Just for the record, however, the reason why some fighters can fly in Crouching Tiger is because they have studied the Wudan technique either at the Wudan dojo or from the stolen manual.
August 15th, 2009 at 12:00 pm
And let’s not forget Run Lola Run (or Lola Rennt in German) which I guess was a German version of Groundhog Day.
August 15th, 2009 at 12:37 pm
There’s kind of an irony to be found here if you think about it. When something supernatural is the entire premise of the movie, you don’t need to explain it. When it’s one particular element, you do. Thus, the explanation of Peter Parker’s transformation isn’t nearly as involved as Doc Ock or Sandman.
August 15th, 2009 at 12:49 pm
Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” never explains the catastrophe that has left the planet in its post-apocalyptic condition. The trailer for the upcoming movie (I can’t wait!!) suggests that the studio couldn’t resist inserting an explanation. I’m not sure why the change was made, but I sure wish they would have had the courage to leave this aspect of McCarthy’s novel alone.
August 15th, 2009 at 1:20 pm
Great post.
EVERY exec should read. As a working writer (making a living, not hugely successful) one thing I find all the time is execs overdeveloping scripts, treatments, and pitches. To the point of banality.
August 15th, 2009 at 1:46 pm
In the January 7, 1992 draft of Groundhog Day, which is available on the simplyscripts.com website (under G in Movie Scripts), there IS an explanation for what’s happening to Phil. A woman he treated shabbily puts a voodoo-like spell on him. That was obviously cut later on. The filmmakers also speak of this in the Extra Features of the recent Groundhog Day DVD, if I’m not mistaken…
August 15th, 2009 at 2:03 pm
@ Robert D
Both of those questions are answered in the “prequel” novel in the series, The Magician’s Nephew.
It was most likely a case of reverse engineering considering that Nephew was written after Wardrobe, but it dovetails nicely all the same.
**Useless trivia: the choice of a wardrobe was probably not entirely random as there is also an E. Nesbit short story that features a wardrobe in a spare room acting as a gateway to another world. This was published over 30 years before The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe. Lewis had read it as a child, so it seems likely he did a bit of subconscious borrowing to arrive at this particular prop.
August 15th, 2009 at 2:37 pm
@Dave (7):
Fixed the from/to for Kansas.
The point with Terminator is that neither Sarah nor John Connor do or say anything to initiate the supernatural chain of events. It just starts, sans wish/curse/item.
@Mcalavita (22):
First footnote.
August 15th, 2009 at 2:44 pm
@ Robert D
The wardrobe is explained in the book The Magician’s Nephew, the 6th book in the series. So, if they keep making movies…
August 15th, 2009 at 3:26 pm
My favorite example (albeit non-cinematic) is Kafka’s Metamorphosis. We never find out why Gregor Samsa wakes up as a giant beetle. His family (and eventually his boss) keep bothering him because they think he’s just trying to get out of going to work. Nonetheless, the story works without the reader knowing the reason for the metamorphosis (and may not have if Kafka had tried to give us a plausible explanation).
August 15th, 2009 at 7:49 pm
This is a long-standing truism: Never explain. The mark of crappy sci fi is the scene where the scientist/doctor/army officer explains why the horror is happening.
Trust the audience. If everything else is working, we’ll gladly go along for the ride.
The Force in Star Wars was a brilliant notion — everybody got it; everybody defined it in their own way. Then Lucas EXPLAINED IT! Oh, it’s something unpronounceable in the blood? Great, thanks.
August 15th, 2009 at 7:58 pm
@Dave in DC: Not sci-fi, but same goes for the awful coda in “Psycho.”
August 15th, 2009 at 8:56 pm
Great post – I really thought about this when I was reading up on The Dark Knight and the Nolan brothers’ strategy to have the Joker just appear out of nowhere as a criminal mastermind. I love the idea of the unknown origin, whether for a villain or for a magic spell. Results in great post-movie discussions and let’s the imagination go to work.
August 15th, 2009 at 9:32 pm
Execs/producers tend to overly fixate on explanations — but there are times when explanations are important.
For instance, if you’re redefining zombies as created by a virus instead of supernatural origin ala 28 Days Later, then you want an explanation.
And the modern vampire movie pretty much always needs an explanation early on since every vampire film has a slightly different interpretation of which myths are true and which are false in their world.
August 16th, 2009 at 1:14 am
This is SO the article I’m gonna use to shed pages on my next pass. – I got got 20 unnecessary causes right now & I know it…
But I just don’t hate MacGuffins the way other writers do. I mean c’mon– its kinda cool that we all know how many heads fit in a duffel bag. – So I’d still like the microfilm to be in the canister, the briefcases to be identical, and the baby in the center of the Labyrinth right where he fucking belongs. – Its just the orchid-based-antidotes and Waterworld-Tattoo-Maps that give this stuff a bad name. :)
August 16th, 2009 at 3:02 am
Groundhog Day definitely doesn’t explain the magic at all. I guess the other end of the spectrum of is The Truman Show where the magic (a man living in a world created entirely for him) is fully explained.
In between those extremes of how much to explain there are a lot of successful movies that choose to tell ‘a little’. A couple of set up lines and then a reference to the explanation during the resolution.
Pleasantville is an example. Liar Liar too. Both movies spend very little time on the explanation of the magic, and it never gets in the way of the story.
It occurs to me that in both movies the explanation is rarely mentioned at all in between the set up and the resolution. Maybe that’s the key to keeping the movie from being JUST about the magic.
chuck
August 16th, 2009 at 4:08 am
Just stating the obvious here: it depends on the film whether it’s smart or not to explain/have a MacGuffin.
My favourite film ever, Jurassic Park, explains in what I find an amusing way how they managed to recreate dinosaurs (both what is told and how it’s told). That particular film would have been the poorer for it if it was just another “apparently there are still dinos alive on this far away island” movie. Crighton found a new, modern, (dare I say it) plausible reason for dinosaurs still/again inhabiting a remote island.
Other good films (in my opinion of course) that use explanation and/or MacGuffin quite well are Pirates of the Caribbean 1, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind… Would this be a good moment to drag Big Fish into the conversation? The fantastic fantastical sequences are easily accepted because we know it’s Finney’s version of events that happened to him. With the nice spin of Crudup not liking that about his dad, the film itself even seems to say “weird, huh?”. But that doesn’t diminish the wonder. The end is a great moment that does not go specifically explained, but you know exactly what it means. (Though you can argue, I guess, the Big Fish fantasies are metaphorical and therefor other rules apply.)
August 16th, 2009 at 5:06 am
@Nick – while the coda of Psycho is indeed “awful” as far as how old-fashioned it is in regard to Norman’s particular psychosis, in its time I think it was interesting for Hitchcock to essentially drop in a clinical explanation at the end of a horror film. I expect it would have been quite startling in 1960 – if the rest of the film hadn’t already shocked audiences of the the time, giving a scientific reasoning goes against the traditional film narrative of “the bad guy is just the bad guy” no explanation needed. Of course, Psycho overturned a lot of expectations of character and structure.
August 16th, 2009 at 6:44 am
to NIMA – in “Big” the purpose of the Zoltar machine is to provide the Tom Hanks character with a final dilema: to stay adult with the woman he loves or to go back to be a kid and experience life growing up; whatever he chooses, he’s going to lose something. You need and external force, a character or a prop to ask the Tom Hanks character that question. Also, the Zoltar machine isn’t much of a macguffin: a macguffin would be something that seemed to move the characters and the plot -some international secret, some ultimate weapon, it’s a concept that suits well action and spy films- but that ultimately had little to no importance in the actual plot -a character deciding between loyalty to his country or to himself, a redemptio plot, whatever… The Zoltar machine plays its role twice in the film: to start the adventure and to bring it to its end providing the much necessary dilema.
to JOHN AUGUST – John Connor does something to start the chain of events that puts a Terminator after him: he becomes the leader of the human resistence in the future. That happens afterwards in a time line, but it happens previously in the line that linkes causes and effects. As to whether magic elements should not be questioned or answered, I think it depends on the kind of story: Groundhog Day is not about the time loop as much as it is about the Bill Murray character learning some lessons in life and becoming a better person; on the other hand, you can have a film where the story starts with some unexplainable phenomenon and where the whole purpose of the story is to explain it or find a solution to it. They are just different stories with a very different focus, but both can be told with quality and both can find an audience.
August 16th, 2009 at 9:12 am
100% off-topic but worth taking a look at: a French film from 2006 -although I think it was released in USA in 2008- titled “Tell no one”:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0362225/
What an amazing script it has! I don’t know how much it owes to the novel, and I don’t care: it’s almost perfect. The only thing why I would rank it together with my favorite films of all time it’s because it lacks a certain universality in the scope of its subject, universality which you can find, for instance, in the contemporary dramas of Akira Kurosawa (among my favorites films ever).
Still, it was such a refreshing film to watch, compared to the vacuous thrillers that often come from Hollywood that resemble more a videoclip than an actual film, and compared also to much of the pretentious and over-intellectual films us Europeans, and the French in particular, come up with year after year.
I wonder if John (August… Mr. August? Johnnie? Monsieur John?) wouldn’t mind sharing his thoughts about this film with us, especially regarding the, in my opinion, excepcional screenplay. Thanks in advance. I just watched the film last week and was so thrilled with it that I feel I have to share it with as much people as possible. Please, bear with me -no, not “bare”, what kind of a girl you think I am?-.
August 16th, 2009 at 9:14 am
Sorry, I meant “as MANY people as possible”.
August 16th, 2009 at 9:22 am
Chrono Displacement?
I wonder if The Time Traveler’s Wife would’ve been a bit better with a different/better explanation.
Would the story be better with no explanation?
And more importantly, why the hell is there no “i” in explanation?
August 16th, 2009 at 11:06 am
Groundhog Day is a Rom Com… The time loop/re-occuring day forces Phil’s character to arc to become a better person. He does this through his empathy for the town’s folk, caring for them and then he finally get’s the girl…
Meet girl, get girl, lose girl…
Meet girl, get girl, lose girl…
Meet girl, get girl, lose girl…
(When the loop is broken because Phil’s character has arced we get):-
Meet girl, get girl, lose girl… (finally) get girl…
August 16th, 2009 at 4:25 pm
I think this phenomenon exists in all fiction but particularly works in film because of the form’s relation to dreams.
Magic does not need explanation. Listening to the pseudo-science of time travel in a movie like Deja Vu makes the simplicity of a ‘Flux Capacitor’ – or a whimsical tone over one that pretends to be serious – a luxury.
So long as the film follows its own internal logic and emotional through line, such details are unnecessary. The plot becomes a shell for the action and any ‘holes’ in the story distracts the viewer only when it feels like the writer has somehow created a shortcut.
The Prestige, a film with both illusions that demand practical explanation and real magic, is worth debate. I think it could have been a better film if its tone had better set up the possibility of real magic instead of creating a drab palette grounded in realism. Perhaps it could have been more self-reflective, like a David Lynch film. The ending divided the audience as so much of the story hinged finding a logical solution to a trick– the problem inevitably solved by magic.
Did the movie cheat? Since all storytelling is a manipulation to begin with, to be accused of cheating is a result of not setting up the rules of the game.
August 16th, 2009 at 7:01 pm
It’s interesting that someone brought up the final scene in ‘Psycho’ because I read an interview with Hitchcock where he mentions his justification for that scene: (paraphrasing) ‘Audiences always say they want things to be believable and have a credible explanation. I wanted to show them that sometimes, the unknown is more frightening and that the real-world explanation can be a disappointment.’
If we believe these were really his intentions, then that scene and most peoples’ response to it reinforces John August’s post.
August 16th, 2009 at 7:43 pm
One thing that always gets to me is viewers that bitch about stuff like this “it wasn’t bealiviable” If you really want to enjoy a film you’ve got to be willing to give in to it. I had worked with a director who wanted everything to be spelt out and I think the more you do it the less the audience is participating. Spell broken. Gota leave some room for the imagination to wander. Great post, John.
August 16th, 2009 at 10:45 pm
I’ve been arguing the basic premise of this post for as long as I can remember, but I think John got himself mixed up somewhere between stating his thesis and supporting it. There isn’t necessarily any correlation between “explaining the magic” and involving a prop or macguffin.
The Matrix is a poor example for a movie that doesn’t explain the magic. Lengthy portions of that movie are spent defining the matrix, how it works, why it works, why it exists, why Neo is special, what he’ll be able to do, why he’ll be able to do it, and on and on. There’s no prop, but the “magic” is most definitely explained.*
On the flip side, consider Raiders of the Lost Ark. The ark is certainly a macguffin, but it exists in a world that is almost entirely realistic (action movie style realism, anyway) and yet the audience is just trusted to accept at face value the supernatural events of the film’s climax. You have a movie that doesn’t introduce a supernatural element until the final ten minutes, and the supernatural element is even a deus ex machina that saves our hero, but nobody has ever called foul on it. I think that if they had tried to “explain the magic” in that situation, it wouldn’t have been accepted so readily because it would invite questioning.
(*)To be fair, though, the explanation for the magic WAS the movie in the case of the Matrix. When your magic is that unique, you can get away with explaining the crap out of it. If Neo had simply rolled out of bed one day and found himself able to warp reality and being trailed by mysterious agents, it wouldn’t have been nearly the same movie.
August 17th, 2009 at 6:22 am
Actually, the end of The Prestige was based on science, not magic.
August 17th, 2009 at 7:34 am
RE the ending of Psycho, isn’t the psychiatric explanation at the end undercut by a subtly placed skull over Norman Bates face in the closing shot?
Oh, and sorry, can someone please tell me, what’s this Misfire story that John refers to?
Thanks.
August 17th, 2009 at 10:26 am
@Bruce– “Misfire” was just an example– it doesn’t exist. It’s hypothetical.
August 17th, 2009 at 10:49 am
This post is great in timing, because I just finished writing a short screenplay with a very unrealistic main plot, but I never once address how it could come to be or how it could work. I just write it as it does work and left it be, as this can happen within this story so it does work even though in reality the audience knows it can’t. But by not addressing it my friend who read it said before I did, that it was better reading it as something that can happen rather than reading an explanation on how something can happen.
August 17th, 2009 at 10:50 am
Steve Peterson #30: “… if you’re redefining zombies as created by a virus instead of supernatural origin ala 28 Days Later, then you want an explanation.”
Good point; also, without the introductory scene, the title would make no sense! But, after the title appears, very little attention is paid to the cause. It’s not like the characters are racing to cure the virus.
Compare Groundhog Day to its contemporaneous doppelganger, 12:01, where the hero has to stop a “time bounce” caused by a physics experiment that’s causing him to re-live the same day.
August 17th, 2009 at 12:41 pm
Another doppelganger -gosh, that word does fill the mouth- of Groundhog Day is the tv series Day Break. Again, no explanation why the main character is re-living the same day again and again. I think that in Groundhog Day this premise worked better because it had a light comedy tone. Day Break, on the other hand, is mainly of a cop thriller and, although it toys quite a bit with the way the events and the charaters are interconnected and form part of some big plan/scheme, but ultimately is not so different from many cop thrillers and the premise sits a bit oddly on it. I guess what I’m trying to say is that unexplained magic and strange phenomena work better in certain genres than in others. Also, it is a very different thing an unexplained time loop and a serial killer like Hannibal Lecter, because serial killers do exist in real life and everyone can accept such a character without any further explanation.
August 17th, 2009 at 2:10 pm
I think explanations are necessary to the extent that they serve the characters. Bill Murray’s character didn’t need to know what caused to loop to get himself out of it, or into it for that matter. But if we’re talking about curing a disease, the characters are going to have to look for a cause — if finding a cure is your character’s goal.
As for Big, the magic there is still unexplained. We don’t know why the machine came to life even though it was unplugged or why it actually granted his wish. But the Zoltar machine served as a source, rather than a cause, of the magic that the character could go back to when his journey was complete.
Any explanation should be connected to goals of the characters. If they don’t need to know why or how something happened chances are the audience doesn’t need to know either.
August 17th, 2009 at 5:51 pm
I remember Neil Gaiman making a (somewhat) related point about working with Dave Mckean on either Mirrormask or one of the books they did together. I can’t find a link right now, so am paraphrasing this horribly, but he was talking about how when it came to the is-it-real-is-it-a-dream-are-they-just-crazy aspect of the story Dave had to know one way or the other, where Neil preferred to leave the question unanswered, not only Unexplained Magic, but Unconfirmed/Undenied magic.
August 19th, 2009 at 1:30 pm
You have to be careful when doing this. If you’re writing something that the geek brigades (whether the kids who argue about vampirism specifics in Twilight or the nerds who argue Star Trek cannon) are going to gravitate to, and you choose to avoid the in-your-face causes, you need to do that all the way along. Or prepare to have any opening seized on and get a lot of people demanding explanations and an entire back story for every little tiny thing.
Battlestar Galactica did that pretty much and for the most part carried it off which was surprising for such a tech and sci-fi centric sort of setting.
August 20th, 2009 at 1:20 am
Nick II said: “The Matrix is a poor example for a movie that doesn’t explain the magic. Lengthy portions of that movie are spent defining the matrix, how it works, why it works, why it exists, why Neo is special, what he’ll be able to do, why he’ll be able to do it, and on and on. There’s no prop, but the “magic” is most definitely explained.*”
The magic for why Neo is The One is never fully explained. All we get is prophecy and everything Oracle says coming true. But why the prophecy works or why Oracle is right is not explained, until Matrix Reloaded and the Architect. Which was a huge disappointment for everyone.
August 20th, 2009 at 1:48 am
Ok maybe its just me but I hate when supernatural stuff, or any of the extraordinary things that make the story worthwhile, arent explained, or at least hinted.
Not that I want to understand everything (Groundhog day’s premise doesnt need explanation for instance, the loop isnt the point.) , but I hate movies that push my suspension of disbelief too far without anything to ground it.
I d feel like I m listening the endless nonsensical blable of a 5 year old kid. It s always cute but nobody can listen at that for 2 hours.
I strongly believe that stories, although all written out of the blue , shouldnt always make the reader believe he s the priviledged witness of something reel, or at least something credible for the time of the screening.
August 20th, 2009 at 1:53 am
… SHOULD__ always make the reader believe..
August 20th, 2009 at 6:47 am
To post #53 I’d like to add that although the Architect explains about the One within Matrix, nobody explains why Neo has powers in the real world -seen in Matrix Revolutions-, not that it need to be explained at all. Anyway, I personally don’t think that the Matrix trilogy is such great example of good writing. Most of its weight comes from all the references to previous texts, religious and sociological. And Baudrillard even said they got his theories wrong, something I agree with. What the Matrix did is closer to a literal reading than an interpretation of Baudrillard’s words -words that most certainly can’t be taken literally because , for instance, the Gulf War did take place ;)-. Another film that did something similar but with a greater degree of success, in my opinion, was Videodrome, this time reading literally from McLuhan. It’s the only film from David Cronenberg that I really like.
August 20th, 2009 at 9:20 pm
Per the topic at hand and then some, I found a superb piece about Groundhog Day a few years ago in an unlikely place: National Review, by Jonah Goldberg. A cover story, no less.
https://www.nationalreview.com/flashback/goldberg200602020835.asp
As it turns out, the film’s story has taken on philosophical life of its own far beyond its cultural influence, and I think John’s point in the footnote explains why: If the film had explained the source of the loop, especially if it was caused by another person, the motives or reasons for it would have been the focus, not the effect of the loop on Connors. It’s that effect that gives the story its transformational arc and resonance, and by keeping the cause of the loop a mystery, there’s nothing to distract from that.
August 30th, 2009 at 11:19 am
Among many of the films faults, trying to explain “The Force” in the prequel Star Wars trilogy took the air out of the whole mythology, and didn’t advance the story at all. In Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, characters are capable of all kinds of mythical like feats. No explanation is needed.
September 8th, 2009 at 3:53 am
I was watching 1408 the other day and thought of this post. No explanation as to how or why the room is evil. It just is. That made the film great for me.
September 24th, 2009 at 3:13 pm
I know it’s not exactly popular, but I love the story and acting in Frequency. But the one part of it I can’t stand is that they try to explain the why of it. If they’d cut that out (maybe 30 seconds total), they’d have been left with a much better movie.