I just started writing this post as a letter to all screenwriters. It was a diatribe about character and plot development and the substance that needs to be involved in both, but it was long-winded, and I was four paragraphs in before I’d even mentioned the film. So. Bullet points instead.
- Sorry, but any film that starts with people shooting animals for fun (not hunting, not for food, not for anything, just because they can) is starting on the wrong foot. And I still don’t know what that had to do with the rest of the story.
- Also, I just have a hard time taking Shia LaBeouf seriously as an actor. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to, no matter what he does. Sorry, guy.
- Tom Hardy, you’re a decent actor, but your accent was sort of silly. Actually, everyone’s accents sounded silly. A lot of them didn’t sound like they were comfortable going all slangy like they had to, like they hadn’t practiced it enough to sound natural. Which is a bummer.
- Also, Jessica Chastain: please be in some movies that I actually enjoy. I’m sure you’re very good, I just have a hard time giving a damn about you when your entire character is written as doing for or having done to. There was potential for an interesting story there, but all we got were allusions to it and a lot of slightly worried looks across the room.
- Mia Wasikowska. Also a waste of a character. Honey baby sweetheart, I had so many unanswered questions. And they’re not your fault.
- Okay, here’s part of my letter to all screenwriters: everyone, seriously, maybe include a female character or two who are not embroiled in love interest situations. And even the love interests can take a more active role in the happenings of the story. This was “based on a true story,” so I don’t know what the real life women in this real life situation actually did, but I’m sure it was more than they were given in the script. Human beings, by virtue of being three-dimensional and layered, inherently do something.
- (Although to be perfectly fair, the men in the script were pretty flat as characters too.)
- Also. Oh my god. You know what I’d love? I’d love for there to be bad guys who walk into a place and are all “entitled entitled entitled” about the criminal enterprise but aren’t all “entitled entitled entitled” about the women in the room. I’d love for us to not have to include scenes of awkward Guy Pearce skeezing on Jessica Chastain. I’d love for him to get to be a d-bag in a whole variety of ways that aren’t that.
- But Guy Pearce does have a great face for playing d-bags in the first half of the 20th century. And as one of my people put it, he was very nicely dressed like sketchy Mr. Monopoly.
- Also… anticlimax much?
- I mean, the twangy music at the beginning was nice?
–your fangirl heroine.
