Many years ago my sister made her first cake. My father was so happy about his daughter's first baking effort that he decided to commemorate the event by making genuine homemade whipped cream, the kind his father put on top of the five cent banana splits sold in the family restaurant during the Depression.
You really got your money's worth with that banana split. Dad would describe it the way other men might describe a pretty woman.
Dad bought a pint of whipping cream and some caster sugar and whipped it up until there was nearly four inches of the stuff.
The poor cake was a lamentable effort, it had fallen in the oven and was only about an inch high.
Nevertheless, Dad insisted on putting ALL the whipped cream on the thing.
The frosting completely swamped and drowned the main event. "Where's the cake?" I exclaimed as I went prospecting through the gargantuan whipped cream topping.
We ate it and all got sick afterward from the superabundance of fat and cholesterol.
This misguided dessert is, to me, symbolic of many modern feature films (and some 'shorts'), where technique is the whipped cream and story is the cake.
I was going to write reviews of some films I saw recently, but found that someone else wrote a much better one years before motion pictures were a glimmer in Thomas Edison's or the Lumiere brothers' eyes.
So here are some appropriate excerpts from Mark Twain's essay, FENIMORE COOPER'S LITERARY OFFENSES, written in 1895 (the official birth year of motion pictures!) It is amazing how much these arguments apply to film stories. I am editing the word "Deerslayer" and a few points out so that Twain's argument may be applied to films. You can insert the film title of your choice in the blanks for Mark Twain Mad Libs!
1. The rules (of literary construction state that)...A tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere. But the "_________" tale accomplishes nothing and arrives in air.
2. They require that the episodes in a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it. But as the "__________" tale is not a tale, and accomplishes nothing and arrives nowhere, the episodes have no rightful place in the work, since there was nothing for them to develop.
3. They require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others. But this detail has often been overlooked in the "__________" tale.
4. They require that the personages in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there. But this detail also has been overlooked in the "___________" tale.
5. The require that when the personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances, and have a discoverable meaning, also a discoverable purpose, and a show of relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject at hand, and be interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the people cannot think of anything more to say. But this requirement has been ignored from the beginning of the "_________" tale to the end of it.
6. They require that when the author describes the character of a personage in the tale, the conduct and conversation of that personage shall justify said description. But this law gets little or no attention in the "___________" tale, as ____________'s case will amply prove.
9. They require that the personages of a tale shall confine themselves to possibilities and let miracles alone; or, if they venture a miracle, the author must so plausibly set it forth as to make it look possible and reasonable. But these rules are not respected in the "___________" tale.
10. They require that the author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and in their fate; and that he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones. But the (viewer) of the "___________" tale dislikes the good people in it, is indifferent to the others, and wishes they would all get drowned together.
11. They require that the characters in a tale shall be so clearly defined that the reader can tell beforehand what each will do in a given emergency. But in the "_______" tale, this rule is vacated.
I'll let Mr. Twain have the last word.
“A work of art? ______ has no invention; it has no order, system, sequence, or result; it has no lifelikeness, no thrill, no stir, no seeming of reality; its characters are confusedly drawn, and by their acts and words they prove that they are not the sort of people the author claims that they are...Counting these out, what is left is Art. I think we must all admit that.”
I read this in A SUBTREASURY OF AMERICAN HUMOR by the Whites when I was a kid. There was another piece in the same section with some relevance to your overall theme, title and author forgotten, which maintained (facetiously) that Edgar Rice Burroughs was the world’s greatest author by a considerable margin because his appeal was so broad-based, and gave the reasons for same. Given that the movies are the most profit-driven art form, the juxtaposition of these two essays may have some relevance. I don’t know if I ever actually read any of the Leatherstocking Saga, but I certainly read a lot of Burroughs as a youngster. (I added this, and it's not there, so here it is again: the other piece is "How to Be a Great Writer," by Alva Johnstone."