![]() Whenever I watch them, I feel caught between feeling everything in the movie is ridiculous and that, if someone were to truly attempt to portray love, then it would look somewhat ridiculous. I often feel that way when watching romance movies. Not in the sense that you’ve been transported to a fantastical location, but rather everything in the movie operates differently from how you would expect events to normally operate. Either way, storytelling becomes a lot easier and duller when characters have an excuse to splay out all their interiority for their own camera, having been forbidden by good taste to do so for ours.Sometimes you watch a movie that makes you feel like you’ve entered a different dimension. There’s an implied assumption of stupidity here, that either viewers won’t be smart enough to synthesize meaning from acting and writing, or that the acting and writing won’t be competent enough to convey that meaning. ![]() In Five Feet Apart, Stella’s vlogging represents cinema’s attempt to approximate the noxious reality TV construct of the confessional interview, in which talking-head segments allow personalities to articulate their reactions to whatever has just happened. He shares his thoughts with us through bleak koans and dense philosophizing, and we feel farther from comprehending this hardened, layered man than before. The excellent First Reformed ditched the digital element and went as far as it could in the opposite direction, using the diary entries of priest Ernst Toller as a confounding influence rather than a clarifying one. ![]() We get snatches of school weirdo Kevin McClain’s tea review vlog in an illustration of his eccentricity the audience learns who he is by watching him be himself, rather than getting told. Netflix’s American Vandal had a keener sense for the millennial-era realities of internet use than most, and contrived a method of turning telling into showing. The concept itself isn’t completely bankrupt, and the entertainment industry has already got evidence to prove it. We know she’s worried when she tells them she’s worried. We know that Stephanie’s happy when she tells her adoring public she’s happy. Again, Stephanie checks in with each new beat of the story to guide the viewer with her commentary, an oppressive method of rigid structuring. Anna Kendrick’s Stephanie is a self-proclaimed “mommy blogger” (the phonetics alone should be enough to bar this phrase from the public vocabulary) caught up in the drama of Blake Lively’s mysterious, entrancing Emily. This same oversimplification marred the otherwise enjoyable thriller A Simple Favor last year. As she nervously saunters into a pool party where she’s certain she will be the uncoolest kid on the scene, we hear the disembodied voice of her idealized YouTube-self preaching a false gospel of self-empowerment. But even so, the film also used its handful of vlog interludes to lay bare the subtext of each scene and Kayla’s reaction to them. That film had the presence of mind to interrogate why young Kayla makes these videos and the hazardous influence that constant self-presentation can exert on a young girl’s psychological wellbeing. The main offender remains last summer’s Eighth Grade, in which middle schooler Kayla regularly pontificates on such topics as “being yourself” and “confidence” through free-form oratories on YouTube. It is a scribe’s crutch, a gimmick that tries to pass off laziness as a with-it modernity. The vlog is our 21st-century voiceover, a physical occasion providing an excuse to have characters spell out everything in their head instead of leaving their words to float in a non-space. Any idiot can write voiceover narration to explain the thoughts of the character.” God help you! That’s flaccid, sloppy writing. In Charlie Kaufman’s screenwriting satire Adaptation, the script sage Robert McKee warns the pupils at his famed story seminar: “God help you if you use voiceover in your work, my friends. Writerly types talk a lot about the importance of showing and not telling – the idea being that it’s always more compelling to watch someone demonstrate their internal state than to hear them talk about it. The difference between them, however, is that Will’s artworks make him seem deep, like he’s got something going on upstairs Stella’s online journal flattens her out. Making simple videos about her daily struggles provides the hospital-bound Stella with an outlet at a time when she exerts little control over her life, much in the way that doodling makes the romantic opposite Will (Sprouse) feel a little more alive. ![]() The film opens on Richardson’s character Stella recording a vlogpost for her YouTube channel, where she explains what cystic fibrosis is and describes the many emotional trials of living with it.
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