3. When People Say That "Nothing Happens" In A Movie That's About The Characters
Yes, yes, we've all got opinions on movies, but nothing frustrates me more than when someone says that "nothing happens" or that a movie "didn't have a point", simply because it doesn't follow an A-to-B narrative schematic, whereby the story can near enough be predicted from the first five minutes. The films that I've heard criticised for this are countless - Sideways, The Straight Story, The Big Lebowski, Badlands, Lost in Translation (one of the stronger cases, to be fair) - but the common strand is that each simply devotes more of it script to character development than forced plot strands. Unfortunately, some audiences need exaggerated incident taking place every two minutes in order to follow a story, when sometimes just being immersed in the world of these characters is story enough. Not to sound snobby or anything, mind, because I despise a
genuinely pointless film as much as anyone else; say, Terrence Malick's recent To the Wonder. Dreadful.