2 comments

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  Abby

  1 year ago

  Jandy, you did such a great job with this post. I have never even heard of this movie, but you introduced it well and left enough left unknown so that it was not spoiled (not that I'll probably ever see it, but you never know :) ) I love what you said about "what is the story?" not being as helpful as "how is the story told?" I mean, of course we want a good story, but an excellent story can be ruined by the way it is told. I think how it's told is definitely more helpful, because when you strip away the details, there really aren't too too many different stories to tell (this plot sounds a little like something I've heard before as most movies do), but if it is told well, if it acted well, etc. that makes for a better movie watching experience.
  
  I am looking forward to the rest of you 99 reviews :)
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  Jandy

  1 year ago

  Abby, thank you! I was writing so off the cuff that I wasn't sure the post was going to be useful to anybody but me. I actually hadn't heard of this film until it was on that list. I'm looking forward to finding some real gems by blindly following the list. ;)
  
  And yes, exactly. There are only so many stories (in this case, boy meets girl, boy goes to war, girl hopes boy makes it home, which is like, every war movie ever), so unless you find something really unconventional, like Stranger than Fiction, which I think had a very original premise, how you tell the story is going to be much more important than the story you tell. The difficulty, of course, is that it's not usually easy to describe how a story is told. I'm nearly always stymied when people ask me what a film is about (meaning what's the story). There's simply no way to do a good film justice in the couple of sentences people expect when they ask that.
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