8 Commandments All Movies Must Follow

5. A Movie Must€ Try New Things

This is the one that is hardest to qualify. There are schools of thought that say that nothing is original, that all art is essentially a catalog of influences that the artist is synthesizing into a new shape to reflect their own interests. Every lauded film and filmmaker has deep influences that are nakedly visible on screen, whether it€™s Tarantino€™s non-stop homaging of his favorite films or Lucas and Spielberg aping the look, tone and sometimes set-pieces of old serials. All art is a pastiche in some form or another, and all anyone can hope to do is to try and do something new with it. That€™s the key. It€™s the attempt, the intention, of trying to do your own thing with your work and establish your own voice that makes art so compelling. After all, millions upon millions of children grew up watching those serials, but how many made STAR WARS? Just the one. Lucas mixed-and-matched parts from every type of film he loved and then created something totally unique from it. It€™s that €˜unique€™ part that gets left out, more often than not. Producers and directors don€™t try to create bold new visions, they€™re just trying to ride whatever wave happens to be getting traction at the moment. We get films that are identical to each other on every level except for search-and-replace plot points. €œThe reluctant hero chases the magical doo-dad, cracking jokes while the hot chick rolls her eyes but secretly smiles. Big fight. CGI. Alt-rock song on the end credits.€ The audience is complicit in this. They€™re the ones who reward the same-old, same-old by handing money over for it. And it€™s understandable. No one wants to get burned by paying money to see something that winds up being absolute crap. A movie doesn€™t even need to tell a wildly original story to have its own identity. This year, a very small movie had a blink-and-you-miss-it theatrical release. GOON, starring Seann William Scott, follows every beat in the €˜underdog sports movie€™ book. But GOON takes its characters seriously and works hard to give each major character genuine nuance and pathos. The audience comes to love the characters and care about them, which means that they wind up investing deeply in the story, familiar though it may be. The audience may have seen this kind of story, and these kind of characters, but they have never meet these characters and seen how they deal with the ups-and-downs of an underdog sports movie. GOON didn€™t get much of a release, but it arrive don home video with a cult audience already fully formed. Most movies can€™t be bothered with the €˜nuance€™ aspect. The makers are content to do a perfunctory job, hitting each beat in a professional, indistinct manner. But, speaking only for myself, I find that watching interesting directors swing for the fences, even when they whiff, to be infinitely more engaging than watching the latest Xerox blockbuster roll off the assembly line. Look at something like Sucker Punch, a movie that ends up failing on just about every level. Narratively, thematically, dramatically, etc., the film collapses in on itself. It just doesn€™t work. But it€™s still fascinating to watch and there are isolated moments in the film that work perfectly. Writer/Director Zack Snyder used the film to deal with notions such as escapism, fetishization, repression, the changing values of generations, and the sexual aspect of geek culture. Also dragons. To me, watching someone use all of the tools of modern filmmaking in service of something weird and personal, epic but introspective in equal measure, that is the really rewarding part of being a film fan. Not every thing that gets tried will be successful. And that€™s OK. It€™s the effort, the struggle to take the old and build something new that is truly valuable. That is what the film industry should foster and support. That is what every movie should strive to contain. Also dragons.