Breaking the fourth wall is a highly diverse cinematic device. We Got This Covered looks at 13 ways in which it has been used across a range of movies.
Almost everyone who watches movies, makes movies, writes about movies, or is simply asked about movies will agree that a movie needs a good beginning. Like a sports team that scores within the first few minutes of a game, a film that gets off to a good start has a vastly improved chance of holding on to some success right through to the ending credits.
According to the 2015 Guinness Book of Records, approximately 10,048 movies were released worldwide in 2013. Chris Hyams, founder of film festival submission company B-Side Entertainment, has even guessed that the yearly figure is more like 50,000, if all the independent, short and art-house movies are included. That’s 137 movies a day – or just short of six per hour. And yet, how many of these movies are celebrated for being great? The most official/brutal answer, if we go with the powers that be over at The Academy, is 10.
In 1990, Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park appeared in bookstores around the world and promptly began a roaring trade. Within just three years, Stephen Spielberg’s blockbuster film adaptation arrived in theatres.
During an interview with Steve Merchant in 2008, Louis C.K. joked that the aspiring actors in the audience of Inside the Actor’s Studio who asked the actors the questions were starting from nowhere, and would never themselves make it into the business. “You’ll never be famous,” Louis said. “There’s no way you asked Sean Penn a question and then you’re going to be huge.” A few years later, 2014’s American Hustle (and irony) found Louis co-starring with Bradley Cooper, who had actually done that very thing in 1999. He had asked a question from the Actor’s Studio audience - and quite literally asked it of none other than Sean Penn.
It's no secret that it can take a long time to break out in Hollywood. For many, the rise to stardom was exactly that – a rise. A gradual, developing recognition that has steadily led to more and more significant roles until finally their names can reliably be associated with talent, good choices and substantial performances.
Just before Disney’s Aladdin was released in 1992, it was brought to the attention of the studio that some of the lyrics in the introductory song “Arabian Nights” were actually quite racially offensive. So the line “where they cut off your ear, if they don’t like your face” was replaced with “where it’s flat and immense and the heat is intense,” and the song merrily continues on through imagery about the desert sun and wind, and magic carpets, and on into the refrain with, “Arabian Nights, like Arabian days, more often than not are hotter than hot, in a lot of good ways.” Right, yes, excellent, right.
….Sorry – what?
The Guardians of the Galaxy are criminals [*manages to resist joke opportunity about the movie being criminally good]. Peter Quill is a thief and a self-confessed outlaw; Gamora is an assassin; Drax is on a campaign of continual violence and murder; Rocket Raccoon is a mercenary and an arsonist; even Groot has three counts of grievous bodily harm (although I think we all know whose fault that probably was). Whoever and whatever the Guardians become in the end – and however much their situations are not their own faults - there is no getting away from the fact that they come from pretty dubious backgrounds, and in a couple of the cases seem to have quite frankly enjoyed a lot of it. But really, do we actually want to imagine them being any other way?
