perfidy

Ministry Crony and recent comment grouch Phil has a fascinating post discussing opening shots in movies. He, and the people whose idea he stole, are really on to someting here, as this is truly a crucial aspect of film making. A good opening guides expectations as well as setting the stage for what follows. One of my personal favorite openings is the beginning of Raising Arizona. (The Coen brothers are genii at this - the openings of Fargo and O Brother, Where Art Thou? are excellent as well.) Raising Arizona's opening is long, but brilliant. Characters that have no role in the rest of the movie nevertheless set the stage for the drama that follows. Like the growling floor-mopping con. And the cellmate who discusses the fine art of making crawdads. And the transgendered inmate in the group therapy session. The narration, by Nicholas Cage (in his last good role) as H. I. McDonough, sets a marvelous tone to the whole movie - elevated language, redolant of the Bible and Shakespeare, combined with lower class speech. This is mirrored by the use of Beethoven's Ode to Joy recast as mountain yodeling. All in all, a near perfect opener.

However, the good opening does not guarantee a good movie. I once saw a Steven Seagall movie - the first, I think, though I can't remember exactly. This was before the dumpy martial arts hero became ever present, and certainly before he became the darling of the straight-to-video set. Anyways, the opening of this movie was tight - it had a convincing sense of verisimilitude: real-seeming CIA types in a jungle locale, violence, intrigue. My friend Jon turned to me and said, "This is going to be good." Immediately thereafter, Seagall appeared onscreen and the movie promptly went utterly to shit. The tightly edited and focused opening morphed into sloppy and garish action shots. The plot hinted at turned muddy and incoherent. The actors in the opening sequence didn't appear again. It seemed as if the filmmakers had found this awesome short movie, or an opening to a movie that was never finished, and grafted it onto their shlockfest abomination.

Anyway, go read Phil's bit, and follow the links.