barsoomcore said:
I don't even know where to begin to respond to this. So when you see a movie, and it sucks, what's your response to that? Do you congratulate the people who made it for doing their job?
I'm not asking anyone to be psychic -- I'm just asking them to tell me a good story. If they fail at that, they are failing at their jobs.
Well, my response would be not to see anything by the writer. I'll address more below.
Take computer programming. You might say it's a programmer's job to write code, and in a certain sense you'd be right -- but the code has to work. It has to be sufficiently well-designed. It has to not suck. If the programmer types a thousand lines of code that fail to execute any of the required functionality, do you think he's done his job?
Apples and oranges. Writing produces an intangible benefit - satisfaction. Programming produces something very tangible - a program.
Of course not. The "job" of a writer isn't to write. That's nonsense. It's to write well. Anybody can put words on a page and be writing. We pay writers for their ability to do it better than we can. And when they fail to do it well enough to entertain us, we are right to say they are failing at their jobs. I mean, if your definition of writer includes "everyone who puts words on a page", then I guess if they write they ARE doing their job -- but can we at least agree that there are degrees of success? That somebody might "do their job" and still suck?
Oh, definitely. There are
huge degrees of success, and in reality there are even different ways to succeed that are equally valid, if not always equaly moral.
All this is beside the point. My argument actually wasn't that it WAS the writer's fault, it was that it's NOT the audience's. If the audience figures out the ending of the story and thus loses interest in the story, that's not THEIR fault. If it must be somebody's fault, there's pretty much only one fall guy hanging around -- the writer.
If a movie loses the interest of anyone seeing it (a la
Gigli, for a modern example), then yes, I would agree it's the writer's fault. However, if it's only one or two people out of an audience, then I don't really think there
is a fault, and that's basically the core of my argument. Sometimes things just don't work for some people.
A good example would be music. Britney Spears is
hugely successful, by almost any definition of the word. I think her music sucks; I think it's boring, predictable, and regurgitated music industry pop-crap. Lots of other people feel very different. Though I'd give my left eye to teach the world how bland and over-used a I-IV-V-I (or VI) progression is. Is that her, or more adequately, her songwriter's fault? No. Is it mine? Definitely not.
The same thing applies to movies - sometimes things just don't work for people. Obviously
The Usual Suspects didn't work for you, because you figured it out, and that's fine. But it's not the writer's fault.
Look, I know it's not fair. I'm a writer myself. It sucks. One person watches your film and says, "Oh, well, I figured that out. What a boring movie." and hey! presto! you just failed. Back to the drawing board. But then another person says, "That was awesome. When's the next part coming out?" and boom! pow! you rock. Which of those people was right? Both of them. That's the nature of art -- and if you're serious about your art, you'll spend some time listening to both of them and figuring why they felt how they did, and wondering how to improve your own work.
An artist not prepared to be told they failed has no business putting their work in the public view.
I agree with all of this. I like to compose music, though I haven't since I went to the university three years ago. Same boat - sometimes you suck, and all you can do is learn from it.
Well, thank heavens we agree on something.
Now... dark, milk, or white?
As an aside... I'm sorry my first two posts came off as a little antagonistic.
Oh, and Merry X-Mas!!!
) on someone else.
