I enjoy watching movies. Beyond that, I find getting an academic understanding of the movie making process even more interesting. So, when I am watching movies, there is usually a thread in the back of my mind that analyzes the story/scenes finding patterns. For example, I am very familiar with the three-act structure of story telling. So, I try to parse the story line to see where the first act ends, second/third acts begin. Naturally once you learn the grammar, movies that make use of that construction tend to become a little less fascinating. As a friend of mine once said seeing a flower as a flower is joy. But disecting it petal by petal to do research may not be fun anymore. That is true from one point of view, while understanding the meta level construction, how things are put together could provide a different sort of enjoyment.
Recently my wife and I watched Star Trek: Into the Darkness, a new release still in theaters. Though it was decent, being a safe summer block buster production, it is a case study for three-act structure. Analyzing it further, in the first act it was explained that the villain's human body cells don't die and regenerate very quickly. Then at the beginning of the third act when the protagonist is killed off, I could immediately see the villain's cells will be used near the climax to resurrect the hero again. In fact as we were watching the movie in the theater, once the hero is killed off, we were laughing recalling a Tamil movie called Sivaji that came out in 2007. It pretty much had the same sequence where a young boy killed off by electrocution is revived in the first act setting the audience up so that the same technique could be applied to revive the hero in climax. :-) All these tricks and formulas make story telling repetitive. These thoughts were flowing in when I came across this article (do read it) that explains how Hollywood has gone several steps further since there is a 15 beat formula for writing block buster movie stories now that is almost always followed. You can see this grammar/constructs being used in most Spielberg, J J Abrams type blockbusters. While the formula works overall, it sure makes audience feel "déjà vu allover again" as they watch each new movie. :-)
Movies that defy these rules and still turn out to be good ones are much more interesting. Non-linear story telling gives us a break (as in the old movie Memento with very interesting trivia about chronology at the IMDB site). Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu's Amores Perros type portmanteau movies or other variations such as the French/Polish trilogy Blue-White-Red are intriguing for interacting/intersecting across movies & story lines. In that genre, recently saw Cloud Atlas that tells 6 different stories in parallel with same actors appearing in different roles in different stories. Though we can still blame individual stories for following the good old three-act structure, weaving all the stories without causing confusion, is admirable. This is despite the fact that they are even loosely tied to each other with overlaps (unlike Iñárritu's movies where the connection is often too flimsy as in Babel making the narration totally disjointed). Kudos to writers/directors Wachowski brothers (of The Matrix fame) and Tom Tykwer.
Now there are software packages to analyze movie scripts to predict how well it will do in the box office and/or what changes will make it better/cheaper, etc.! So much for art..! :-)
