Big Red's points about being involved with a story was already in my mind as I watched The Undefeated Saturday morning. John Wayne & Rock Hudson starred in this 1969 western placed after the end of the Civil War. The story is marginal but it got me thinking about many of the other great Westerns, the stories involved and how Hollywood fails to produce the same anymore. The focus is usually on the characters involved and not necessarily what happens to them but how it happens and what gets them their. It is about their beliefs, their struggles with life, and how they interact with eachother.
The biggest point I think is pacing of their story. People always talking about the pace of a story or when doing standup pacing the jokes, how fast the action moves. There are so many movies today that are "Non Stop Action" moving at a torrid pace for 90 minutes that you either feel out ob breath watching it or confused because so much happened that you can't comprehend it all. I watch these old westerns and they seemed relaxed yet are always moving along. Their pace builds the story slowly, giving you lots of back story through character interactions. Maybe that is because they had to without all the effects and abilities of movie makers today.
It seems like audiences need that now, we have to have everything packages up without anything unnecessary and we need to be out in time to do the 1000 other things on our to-do list. Maybe we can't relate anymore to the more relaxed story telling that many of the classic westerns represented or have we just past our fascination with the Old West? I just know that no matter what genre we are talking about, Hollywood doesn't quite tell a story with the same pace and dialogue as those old westerns.
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I wish you could have taken the Film and Literature course with me in college. For one, the professor rocked (he was retiring and didn't want to read research papers so all we had to do was quizes on the movies). Two I learned a lot about flimaking.
We watched Shane, an old western, as the representative of that genre. I think story pacing has fallen out of wack mostly because of the tecnology of movie making. Western's thrived because the fliming did little to break the illusion of life on the open plain. Now technology has sped up everything and the story is quite-often left trying to catch up.
I think that is part of the point I was trying to make, that we can do some much on the screen without the actors doing anything really, that it dehumanizes everything. There isnt much need for acting or a get story cause you can do it so much faster but yet unbelievable. Sometimes I think it is nice to relax through the movie and even have some black and white characters as was sterotypical of the old westerns.
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