I want to document, right now, before it happens again, the movie plots that are played to death and yet keep showing up, like Karl Rove at a Chinese buffet and unlike John Edwards after July 2004.
Did someone say “buffet”?
| Plot | Examples | Comments |
| Man is tormented by a mysterious stranger, who turns out to be… HIMSELF. | Fight Club, Secret Window, The Dark Half, Identity (sorta) | This worked for Fight Club because 1) it was fresh; 2) it didn’t rely on schizophrenia or multiple personality disorder or some serious (and totally played) mental condition that might, I dunno, interfere with its sufferer’s life in some other way; and 3) you got to see both the characters interacting with their world in a way that made you trust your assumptions and yet did not contradict the revelation. This is called “foreshadowing.” “Foreshadowing” is something Stephen King is not on top of, and while I understand and support his idea that if the author doesn’t know where a story is going then the audience won’t, either, I think if the story takes a radical twist it might be nice to drop some clues earlier. Come on. Take notes from Monk or something. |
| Man is tormented again and again by a past crime and finally realizes… HE`S IN HELL! | Former student’s short film, guest artist’s script, The Ben Stiller Show‘s “Low Budget Tales of Cliched Horror” sketch | I nearly fainted of vindication when I saw the Ben Stiller sketch, which was faithful to the 1992 Tales from the Crypt-type shows all the way down to the font used for the credits. Radio shock-jock Damien Faustus refuses go to hell — to complete his pact with the devil — and realizes HE`S ALREADY IN HELL! Brawwk! Ohhh, what a great sketch. Great, great sketch.
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| Young man is tormented when his girlfriend gets… KNOCKED UP. | Alla time. All. A. Time. |
Check it out — if a chick has sex once, she`ll be knocked up. If she has it a bunch of times, she won’t. Ain’t saying nobody in the real world gets knocked up on the first time, but if movies had the same effect on viewers that they did on characters then some couples would pay $90,000 to see them.
The chicks in my class don’t write about getting knocked up — only the dudes. I don’t know why. It’s almost like, for chicks, the idea of reproduction the sense of suspense at the top of every menstrual cycle and the thought of an unknown quantity developing inside you is too complex to capture in a five-minute short. But for a young dude, it comes down to very finite moments like 1) having the sex, 2) getting told by your girlfriend that she is or thinks she is pregnant, 3) taking her to get an abortion (the only outcome or possible implied outcome in these stories, which should demonstrate the authors are also white). The problem for me is, if that’s the ultimate human drama you can imagine, you do not have the depth to explore it. Yeah, I said it. This reminds me of how I want to heckle “Brick” by Ben Folds Five, which I loathe so loathingly I just want to fall back and roll in it like a dog. |
Of course, the vast majority of short scripts I’ve read and films I’ve seen kick ruthless ass, and I`ll be very lucky if my stuff is half as good. But my flimsy, hyper-competitive ego doesn’t want to talk about the the stuff that made me laugh out loud or get sneafy or anything. Especially not the three-minute short a dude made that had animation and musical counterpoint and all sorts of crazy genius shots that I still don’t know how he did and had me laughing pretty much non-stop. Newwww.
