It’s like a new marketing trend. Someone comes up with a new idea to push products – say the real time feel of a bunch of teenagers storming a busy parking lot, like a troupe of freedom loving radicals to set up an outdoor video game playing tent that wakes up and surprises all the local drones - then all of a sudden all you see is commercials or advertisements that feed off that idea until it’s cleaned down to the bone. Everyone is sick of it. It’s done. It’s become a gimmick. Film is obviously no stranger to trends, for it’s simply a money machine like everything else, which makes the whole quirk bandwagoning that much more irritating.
To clarify…‘quirk’ is generally thought of as a strange or odd habit. Sure we all love odd habits, they’re interesting and funny, but I feel the present reliance upon quirks creates a kind of plastic, gimmicky feel to things. The quirks often become the precedent through which we view and see others, which as I said before, instead of really showing us something genuine, just creates new stock stereotypes.
Before I start foaming at the mouth, I’d better actually get to what caused this uproar in the first place: Rocket Science.Now, this isn’t a bad film. It has its merits, and it didn’t bother me as much as many other films in the quirk department. The lead actor has a great screen persona and the story is well woven and heartfelt at times…but what ruins it for me in a way is a certain reliance upon quirks. The lead, Reece Thompson, is a stutterer. His brother is a neanderthal with a stealing problem. His mother drives men away. The girl he loves is obsessed with debating. His dad can’t back up without knocking over garbage cans. Now it isn’t to say that these things aren’t real characteristics of people, but what undermines their ability to be clever inroads into characters is simply the reliance upon them as the characters themselves. What I find I’m usually left with is one semi indepth character, the lead, who is surrounded by empty shells with designations. The story moves the character along as he keeps bumping into the designations again and again as they assert themselves. If I dare say, it feels like the market equivalent of ‘branding’ rearing its head on the screen.
I wanted to like the stuttering Hal Hefner as he attempted to ascend his nervous debilitations to overcome the odds, to get the girl, or his revenge, and in many ways I did. He’s what made this film enjoyable to watch for the most part. In many ways the film took me places that I was surprised about and it didn’t take many typical turns, especially at the end, and yet this too almost came around to feel like what’s becoming the typical quirk. The film was too conscious of itself, too forced to be clever, which in the end felt flat. It’s hard to care about characters when they live in a world full of quirks, because that world becomes almost a ‘wink wink’ of the filmmaking team pointing out how clever they think that world is.
If you want a good example of how quirk works, Rushmore is basically the modern progenitor of the quirk sub-genre. The Squid and the Whale is another great film that integrates quirks so that they are present but they do not take precedence. We get to see the greater depth of the characters, which is what helps us to connect with and to care about what we’re seeing, instead of relying upon simple details to tell us the whole story.
0 Yorumlar