Great World of Sound

Elliot said he wouldn't be my friend if I didn't like this movie, and we seem to still be friends, so I guess that answers that question.

I did, though, think, "And here, of all places, I've stumbled across a perfect example case for an argument against trying to make characters wholly believable. Main character guy, the skinny white guy, whatever his name was, (Martin, IMDB tells me) is, I think, supposed to be kind of blank so we, the audience, can feel like we're experiencing the movie from his POV, but he's also supposed to be a fully realized "character," possibly the only real one in the movie. He stares meaningfully into the middle distance in that way that fully realized characters do when they're experiencing crises of consciousness or when they're suffering because their girlfriends don't understand them. He is quirky but not too weird. Etc. Anyway, I believed that he was realistic enough that I couldn't figure out for the whole movie why he hadn't just left this job immediately. It was so obviously a total scam, and the only way I could figure out that he didn't notice as soon as that Shank guy started talking what an absolutely illegal scam this company was is that he must have some sort of mental problem in which he can't really pay much attention to stuff that's happening around him and maybe when total scams present themselves he's busy watching those crazy leprechaun/zebras that keep growing out of the ceiling. Really, the only reason that he keeps the job is because the movie requires that he keep the job in order to get to it's gimmick: the music audition stuff. Which there should've been more of. More music; less Martin and his black "friend" trying to talk them into signing. Showing them do it once or twice outside of the key plot ones would've been enough. So what I meant way back up there at the beginning was that if Martin was not such a total cipher and was instead allowed to be as less-than-three-dimensional as every other actor's character in the movie was, it just would've worked better, and I wouldn't have kept wondering why he was being such an idiot. But, of course, it would've been possible for Martin to be a totally believable character who was just too stupid to catch on to what a total scam everything around him was. Yeah, that would also have worked. But then the filmmakers would've been asking the audience to inhabit a dimmer fellow than themselves, which just isn't really done (and maybe it's impossible?) and they seemed to want us to inhabit the main character so we would feel more strongly the moral dilemma he finds himself in. And that was the thing I liked least about the movie. Because, really, what moral dilemma? That it's bad to scam people? I learned that one already. There was almost no point during the movie at which I thought I couldn't have made a better decision than Martin did; and by "I" here I mean actually not myself but pretty much every person I know." But I was kind of just being a jerk. So what if everything that was really good about this movie was not the main character or his life? He's forgettable enough. Just ignore him and enjoy what's left, which is a lot.

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Still trying to figure out a way to articulate my argument about main-character-guy: I do think a lot of what I find so problematic about him is that the movie makers work so hard at making him a realistic character, but his situation just isn't really consistent with him being realistic. Because he's doing something that's so obviously morally bad, and since the audience is supposed to at once like him and feel that he shares a basic moral set with them, the result is that he has to spend a lot of time in the movie being obviously introspectively tortured about the whole thing. This pops up in the meaningful blank staring that he does at various points as well as in his inability to communicate with his girlfriend: he's so conflicted about what he's doing that he can't focus on communicating with her properly, or something like that. But, again, the problem with all of that is that it doesn't really make any sense, given the presentation we're shown by the GWS folks, that he would ever go along with this in the first place. Contrast to a movie like Bay of Blood where the wife/daughter character is once shown being absolutely horrified by death and murder and then in subsequent scenes she is not at all those things and becomes the most rationally evil character in the movie, killing and encouraging her husband to kill purely for her own financial gain. Of course, the fact that her inconsistencies are not addressed and are ignored as if they don't exist makes the movie a "bad" movie, but, for me, it's just so much more interesting than all the work GWS goes through trying to resolve main-character-guy's inconsistencies. My argument is that the movie would be served better by taking that "bad" movie approach, that is, by having him apparently go along with the scheme in full force through most of the movie, and then having him, at the point of the movie where he needs to be morally superior to the GWS people, suddenly be so.