The Glade 4.0

I'm not really sure I understand why "originality" is to be so prized.

Tarantino has never made a great movie. Tarantino has made great scenes that comprise mediocre movies. Every one of his movies is a disjointed collection of awesome scenes that together, somehow fail to even equal the sum of their parts. His magnum opus, Pulp Fiction, is the perfect example: Memorable characters and scenes that will live on in people's minds forever, but the movie just wasn't that good. It's the same for everything he's done.

Cameron is a complete moviemaker. He may lack originality (Let's face it -- Aliens was a sequel, Titanic was based on historical events, Avatar is Pocahontas with blue space elves), but rather than using Tarantino's approach of dipping a bunch of neat ideas in glue and throwing them at the wall and hoping they form a cohesive whole, Cameron's more traditional holistic approach to film-making actually creates entire movies that were memorable. (I hated Titanic and the Abyss, for the record.)

Heh, I enjoyed both of those. Actually, I enjoyed everything about Titanic except for Leonard Di Caprio, who was just horribly miscast and utterly unbelievable as someone from the early 20th century.

I will say this...of all the movies I've seen this past year, or parts of movies, no matter how much I either loved them or hated them, and I actually really loved both Avatar and Inglorious Bastards, I can't think of a better single cinematic sequence I've seen in any film in years than when Christoph Waltz as the Nazi Colonel Hans Landa rode up to the family home of a French dairy farmer, played by Denis Menochet, suspected of hiding a Jewish family, and interrogated him to the point of breaking.

Sometimes all you need are a few great scenes or moments to make a great movie.

http://www.weregeek.com/2010/02/10/

>>

<<

True. There's nothing truly original, anyway. Humanity has been retelling the same stories for longer than we've had the written word. Every fable, faerie tale, epic, parable, myth...it's all derivative. We just find new ways to combine the existing elements.

I'm not really sure

The highest grossing film of all time is a reverse-gender Smurfette slash fic.

Actually, that makes perfect sense.

Originality is a fabrication at this point in our artistic history. It simply doesn't exist. What we call "originality" is nothing more than assembling parts we've seen hundreds of times already in an order that we haven't.

Personally, I'm of the belief that cliches are entirely relative to how well they're utilized. If you screw it up, it's a cliche. If you use it properly, it undergoes a mystic transformation into an archetype.

If I wrote a story about an apprentice-wizard farmboy, an old wizard, a princess, a pirate, a dark knight and a talking bear, and there's a dark castle and a mission to save the princess, the audience reaction to it is going to be based on how well executed the story is, not on how tired people might think the common plot elements are. Done wrong, it's some bit of horrible pulp that rots on an assistant editor's floor. Done right, it's Star Wars.

"Done right" generally means adding a thin coat of paint to the tired old bits, so that they look shiny and new. It's silly, but that thin coat of paint is important. I mean, it helps you flip a house for ridiculous amounts of profit, right? Same thing with stories.

Maybe I'm personally embittered, but in my experience, most people who scream about tired plot devices and sneer about exactly where something was derived from have got kind of an inward focus, and don't bother to actually think about whether or not they might be right, because they're really busy /wanting/ to be right. So the usual move is to say "THIS SUCKS, HE STOLE IT FROM X." X is generally the most recent example of something close to whatever it is he wants to tear down, and never mind that the X he's thinking of was generally stolen, and obviously so, from a previous source, which took it from a previous source which took it from a previous source, etc, etc.

The best example I've ever heard of this kind of thinking: A friend of my son's who asked me who I was listening to while I was washing dishes. I said, "That, m'boy, is Twist and Shout by the Beatles." He screws up his face and goes, "Ah, the Beatles suck. They sound just like everybody else."

He was a child, I reminded myself. He was eleven. Must not kill him. It's ignorance. Forgive him for he knows not what he does. And in my magnificent forgiveness, I turned the stereo WAY up and went back to the dishes

Where exactly is that from Numbuk? Any video proof?