Watched KibishiPaul's The Comeback last night. On TMU he has provided an interesting and involved description of the scenario/story involving generation of clowns and the protagonist being a very bad performer who wants to take off the makeup. However, the flick itself contains no dialog and could be easily broken down to a simple little horror story (though not a bad one, pretty fun I thought) that has none of this back story. It made me wonder if the description served to enhance the movie by adding context and secondary info or if the movie failed to explain the plot and uses the description as a crutch.
With online videos, the description is closely tied to the movie and I always read it before viewing a flick so here I tend to feel it can be used as a tool. No, the story line doesn't need to be fully expounded upon but perhaps some small verbal clues can be used to aid the visual story or is this cheating so to speak? Tag lines are used in most cinema poster promotions while expository info is often used in trailers. With online videos the description is sitting right there next to the little screen so why not use it? Or perhaps all this is pretty obvious. Thoughts?
My opinion is that a movie shouldn't rely upon a written description to tell its story. If it does, then it failed to tell the story itself.
ReplyDeleteExceptions I allow are sequels, or second parts, as I wouldn't want the whole story retold to me within the movie in those cases (especially if I just watched Part One and jumped to the 2nd part).
For me, descriptions are a good place to give a blurb about the film to entice people to watch it, or as a secondary place to give credit to cast and crew, etc.
(fyi: Generally I don't read descriptions before watching a movie...)