Quote:
Lately however I'm finding they're guaranteed to disappoint.
My theory is that it's partly a consequence of technological progress. It's far easier for a small production company to get hold of the equipment and technology to create a superficially well-made product than it was a few years back. What we get has its equivalents in self-publishing where much of the "slush-pile" of under-edited, poorly thought out, badly written texts has moved from the desks and bins of literary agents out into the "published" world of Amazon and others.
Since I've dabbled in scribbling myself, I've seen dozens of scripts from fellow would-be authors, and the bad ones often have a similar feel to them. They have a shaky story-arc often with a weak resolution. Almost always they have a few well-realised passages and a handful of good ideas. It's the result of starting out with a few well-realised passages and a handful of good ideas and hoping that the story and its conclusion will somehow emerge. Well, sometimes it does and maybe one time in ten it'll be pretty good. Problem is that when you've put in the work to write 120,000 words it's SO tempting to think 'job done' instead of either biting the bullet and starting the massive task of editing, or binning the lot.
A fair few Netflix and Amazon films I've seen in the last few years have just this feeling. One hour ten minutes into the plot and the director suddenly realises the film has to end soon, so the last 50% of the story is crammed into 10% of the time. The director/screenwriter has no idea how to resolve the tangled web of clever ideas from the start, so doesn't really bother. Something terrifying is happening which we never quite see and after hours of brain-wracking nothing original emerges so it turns out to be (a) a demon from "another dimension" (b) a demon from "hell" that arrived through "a portal" (c) one or more main/secondary characters "possessed" by a or b (d) something with a very fuzzy explanation to do with technology gone wrong (e) too bored to think of any more cliched endings.never trust a man in a blue trench coat, never drive a car when you're dead |