Were the task of Americanizing a modern Korean masterpiece not daunting enough already, the looming remake of Oldboy now has to stand toe-to-toe with not just the original film, but also Park Chan-wook's newest film, Stoker, which is something of a long lost sister to Oldboy. Chan-wook’s first English language film,Stoker trades the neon-lit smog of downtown Korea for the deciduous overgrowth of Appalachia, and takes more cues from Victorian horror than Japanese manga. Despite the differences in aesthetics though, you’d be forgiven for thinking Chan-wook’s western debut is so comfortably within his established ballpark, that it borders on self-plagiarism.
Tucked away amid last week’s love letter to Felicity Smoak/written surrender to “stupid” Arrow (AKA: How I Learned to Stop Worrying About the Dramatic Weight of a CW Comic Book Show, and Love the Blonde), I hinted at how a new show starts to come into its own once it stops feeling the need to pile on new characters, ideas, and devices every week, and starts making due with what it already has. Anything worth making an episode out of should probably be good for more than 44 minutes of material, and once writers begin combining, and recombining the elements that have already been established, stories start to form around the players, and not the other way around.
It’s that time of year again, when movies that got released months ago undertake a marketing blitz, media prognosticators come out of the woodwork, and the mound of sloughing flesh once known as Billy Crystal checks its shadow, to see whether or not it needs to rent a tux. Yes, it’s the final countdown to the 85th annual Academy Awards, AKA the Oscars. It's Hollywood’s biggest night. Our eyes will be locked on the stars, and theirs will be gazing at the industry’s collective navel. The winners walk home with golden doorstops; the losers take comfort in knowing that the same demographic doing the voting is also responsible for letting a spin-off, of a spin-off, of a spin-off of JAG become an actual thing.
When a still-gestating show not only recognizes a problem that needs fixing, but also finds the solution from within its already established toolkit, the results can be a thing of beauty. When Felicity Smoak was first introduced to Arrow in episode three, the show was still figuring itself out, and a crime procedural that frequently deals with extremely mobile super villains is going to have to do some heavy lifting to make sure the hero is always getting from point A to point B in time. As is expected of most fictional computer whizzes, Felicity has been filling the role of “plot mover,” effortlessly deciphering clues that stall Oliver’s current objective long enough to let the other tracks in the story roll forward.
As Arrow marches on towards its first season finale (CW has formally renewed the show for a second season), it’s a good time to take stock of the significant story progress the show has made in barely more than a dozen episodes. Oliver’s quest to save Starling City has gotten a lot more complicated since those simple early days of merely crossing off names on his daddy’s hit/shit list. As a result, Oliver’s relationship with his family, both genetic, and “professional,” has gotten more and more tangled each week, to a point that the Venn diagrams of each are rapidly overlapping. The truth behind many of the season’s biggest mysteries still remains unclear, but the mysteries themselves have become better defined, with clearer stakes developing as shreds of information are gradually revealed.
Among the biggest differences between network, and cable television is the presence of a unified vision. While Mad Men and Breaking wouldn’t be half the shows they are without their respective creators, network procedurals encourage outsourcing, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, When getting a bunch of different writers to take approach a particular formula, results will vary, depending on the quality of the premise, and those giving input. A lot of funny material is mined from different comedic sensibilities riffing on the same subject (see: the best scenes in any Judd Apatow movie), and coming up with an original murder mystery is something that crosses the mind of just about every writer at one point or another.
The old adage is that film is a director’s playground, and television is a writer’s. It makes sense if you look at who the big names are in each medium: when you think Spielberg, Kubrick, and Bigelow, you think director. Looking at the small screen though, the names that stick out almost always belong to showrunners, your Sorkins, your Shermans, and your Simons. While both jobs involve far more than just shooting the movie, or penning the script, the relative brevity of film means that every frame counts, while television has time to take the long view.
I’m not making the most critically sound case for The Americans when I tell you that my recommendation of it owes a great deal to a song used in the pilot. I might as well be telling you that Justified is worth watching because its ads are so consistently good, or that Terriers was given an awful name so as to not overwhelm new viewers with how amazing it was. These are peripheral elements that are completely inessential to what a show actually is, how well it’s executed, and whether or not it will be worth investing in for the long-term. Judging a show based on a song, ad, or title, is purely a matter of style over substance.
Trust is a universal element of storytelling, because it’s the heart of any interaction between living, sentient beings. We learn about it constantly, through fables about frogs underestimating the nature of scorpions, history lessons on who screwed over whom for what, and, most importantly, personal experience. Seeing as our lives are pretty much defined by what happens when we interact, most good drama comes from asking how our own perceptions of others help or hinder us, and whether those perceptions can (or should) be changed. While you’re taught from a young age to be wary of boys crying wolf, wolves dressed as grandma, or grandmas on TV pitching iron “energy” bracelets, balancing caution with belief, in people, ideas, or yourself, becomes one of life’s many ongoing challenges.
The Black List is one of the few remaining things in Hollywood that has an air of mystery about it. It’s a strange, exclusive little nook of the industry, one populated by quality film scripts that, for whatever reason, aren’t in production. The screenplays often spend years waiting to be picked up by a studio, an eventuality that becomes less likely as the scripts age, and younger, more relevant pups join them in the artistic pound. It’s a prestigious purgatory, from which movies like The King’s Speech, Juno, and 50/50 have escaped, leaving you to wonder how such fantastic writing can be left to unloved for so long.
