Kids, College, Fun!

Right now I’m reading a book called 20 Master Plots (And How to Build Them) written by Ronald B Tobias. It’s an excellent book on writing, and goes deeply into analyzing the various basic plots. For me, as a writer, it is proving fascinating. However, most people would just pass right by it. The only problem I can see in it: now I’m going to be analyzing every book I read and movie I watch in accordance with the principles he lays out, trying to determine where they fall, and how well the plot has been executed. This weekend, for example, I watched a few movies, and I will only briefly analyze them here, in context of plot.

Frozen is billed as a psychological thriller. As such, it should focus on plot of the mind. My only problem with the movie was how slowly it moved, the extraneous details included about the pasts of the characters. These did nothing to propel the plot forward. For the most part, you just had a couple teenage college students sitting in a chair lift, talking about what cereals they liked, and how they were worried about their pets at home. Most action was of the eww kind, and not really suspenseful. Overall, I didn’t like the movie, mainly because there was almost nothing pushing the story development forward.

Straw Dogs was another movie this weekend, which was slightly disappointing for one main reason: the previews billed it as a plot of body, when in reality it is a plot of the mind. The build up is long and slow, developing the characters, showing you who they are, and slight ways in which they are changing. Setting the stage for the last 25 minutes or so, when those concepts of character are brought to the fore in an extreme situation. While I was bored with the build up, since I’d expected a horror film, ripe with action and gruesomeness from the beginning, when the movie was over, it was apparent why they’d had the build up. All of the action was based upon the character build up. There was nothing unnecessary in the movie after all. Just don’t watch it with the expectation of a plot of the body.

Sucker Punch is a little harder to place, but in spite of all the action, I’d say it is a plot of the mind. Everything that happens is because of who the character is. You learn these things, how strong she is, through the action. The film had a surreal feel to it, and you spend very little time in the real world, most of it is in her head. There was much character development in between the action sequences, and these were connected more to the mental aspect than as a cause/effect relationship to the previous action. This sets it in my mind as a highly action filled plot of the mind. And I thoroughly enjoyed it.

All of these movies were plots of the mind, but focused in varying degrees on action also. Frozen did not include enough action, and the character development was not well thought through. Straw Dogs was also heavily character oriented, but all of this build up led to the final action, the denouement, in the end. Without the buildup, the ending would not have made sense. Sucker Punch has a higher degree of action than either of the other two, but is still a plot of the mind.

Action movies are no less interesting, as long as the plot has been properly developed, and the story sticks to itself. One thing must lead to another, and everything must have its purpose in the story. Life is never like this, but fiction must be, or it leaves the audience feeling like something is lacking. Hence why truth is so much stranger than fiction.