Surprise—Part Three

For the last couple of weeks, we’ve been looking at this thing called surprise.

In any creative endeavor, the artist/writer/composer aims to surprise the audience/reader/viewer. The best stories, the best paintings, the best scripts generally have something that’s new, different—something that surprises us.

When it comes to film, it’s all about the idea. The idea is that from which all else flows and it’s never easy to latch on to that perfect idea. But taking a look at films over the last couple of years, I found three that surprised me on a deeper level than most. Let’s talk about what made them surprising.

La La Land

If you’re a regular reader, you know I devoted an entire blog to La La Land back in May. But today I want to focus on the idea and why it struck a chord with me and so many other people. The idea of capturing a place, Los Angeles, and the people who are trying to make it in acting or music through a format, the musical, that lets music help tell that story—it’s new, it’s different. It harkens back to Singin’ in the Rain a bit, but it has more depth, more weight. Plus given that Hollywood doesn’t do that many musicals anymore, it seems a fresh take on this pull between career and relationships. And do you know how hard it was for Damien Chazelle to get this movie made? Incredibly hard. This is often the case with the new and the different—people haven’t seen anything like it before so they don’t trust themselves to evaluate its potential!

Spotlight

The idea of doing a film where you actually follow clue after clue uncovered by a group of investigative reporters on a story… well, this had the potential to be pretty boring. Sure, it was about Catholic priests who were being suspected of sexually abusing minor boys, but the movie didn’t go back in time to reenact any of that abuse—it didn’t titillate or wasn’t in any way prurient. And we all knew how the story turned out, so no suspense, right? That’s what made this film so amazing—I was on the edge of my seat. How would they find the right clues? How would they be able to do this, to bring down this institution? When the movie was over I couldn’t believe over two hours had passed—it seemed like an hour to me, tops. And that’s because it was so surprising to follow all of those clues, at such a fast pace, to tell this story. There was one more surprising thing too—they chose to tell the story, not delve into the personal relationships and lives of the reporters telling the story; like a good newspaper article, they stuck to the facts.

Hidden Figures

When you look at this film it doesn’t seem that innovative or surprising—the story of some women who were called computers [before computers were invented] because their job was to calculate. But there are two surprising things about the film—first, all the women were black and second someone had the idea to DO this film. Stories like this one that, for most of us, we haven’t heard of, are gold. Especially when they’re stories that, after hearing them, we’re SO glad we’ve been told. The surprise of Hidden Figures is that it got made and that in getting made it surprised us with a terrific story about people whose story we’re glad we know.

More thoughts on surprise in film next week!

Copyright © Diane Lake

19Nov17

Email Diane a question to Diane@DianeLake.com