No such thing as partial credit

As I have become more and more of an obsessive eccentric regarding my film-watching habits, I've also developed some pretty eccentric rules.

One of which is: I don't want to see part of a movie, even if it's a movie I've already seen before.

I didn't use to have a problem with this. In fact, in 2004, when I moved out of an apartment I'd been sharing with a roommate for the first three years I lived in L.A., I used to have parts of movies on in the background at my new place all the time. It was a way to be reminded of what you liked about the movie without committing to giving it your whole attention, or watching the whole thing. I was probably getting some kind of introductory package of all the movie stations on cable at the time as well, which made this little hobby all the easier.

In the five years since then, I've gone completely in the other direction. And the reason is pretty simple: I now keep track not only of the new movies I see, but of the old movies I revisit. You certainly know this, as it's been a feature on the right side of my blog for the entire time I've been writing.

It's all a question of "counting."

For example, if I watch 85 minutes of a 110 minute movie, does it "count" as a viewing? What about 100 of 110 minutes? What about 109 of 110 minutes?

Since I don't like to ask myself these questions, I just try to avoid it altogether.

Which is why, when my wife had on The Sure Thing Saturday night when I returned from the movies, I specifically tuned out. She was about 20 minutes in when I got there. She had already watched the movie, which she got several weeks earlier from Netflix, but was re-watching in order to take notes about what plot developments occurred at what junctures of the script. It was research for a road movie she's working on herself.

Now, this was not easy. I love The Sure Thing. Catching even 15 minutes of it here and there should only improve my affection for it, should show me things I might not have caught on my last viewing, or remind me of the parts that I know and love. And what's the harm in that?

But here's my unusual viewpoint on it, which you'll admit has some merit: The more I watch of it now as a partial viewing, the less inclined I'll be to sit down and watch the whole thing anytime soon. Partial credit now will delay full credit later on.

I experienced this phenomenon with another comedy I truly and dearly love, Dean Parisot's Galaxy Guest. My old roommate and I both loved this movie, and it happened to be on cable all the time in the last year or so I lived with him. We'd catch snippets of it here and snippets of it there. Though I've probably only seen the film from start to finish three times -- two of which were on consecutive days in the theater in 1999 -- I've probably seen enough parts of it for six or seven total viewings. Around that time, I also found the DVD in the store at a good price, but thought, "You know, I've seen this enough lately." And so a movie that I should by rights own, given how much I love it, has never made it into my collection, and I have yet to see it again.

I know this standard is unreasonable. But I've nonetheless lived by it probably since the middle of 2006. That's when I started keeping track of films I revisited, and the date I revisited them. That's when everything started "counting." And maybe this has made my intimacy with the films I love necessarily shallower. Maybe I can't quote lines from movies like I once could, though I'd argue that's because there are fewer quotable lines these days -- a subject for another time. But we eccentrics hold to our rules especially tightly, and this is one of mine.

I do make an exception to this rule now and again. When I find myself over at a friend's house, and the decision of the group is to catch the second half of a movie we love, I'll acquiesce. And in that case, I don't count it as a legitimate revisiting of the movie. It just goes unrecorded altogether, and, you know, that's ... fine. Of course it is, it's ... okay.

However, if it's a movie I haven't seen at all, I will do my best to put the kibosh on that particular partial viewing. Gotta draw the line somewhere.

So on Saturday, I watched about 20 minutes of the movie with my wife. Nowhere near enough time to make me wonder whether it "counted" or not. And besides, part of these 20 minutes included the sing-a-long with Tim Robbins and his wife in the car, and then John Cusack trying to freak out the dirty old man who picks up a hitchhiking Daphne Zuniga. "A guy who would rip your heart out and eat it ... just for pleasure!" Gets me every time.

But then I calmly pulled away from The Sure Thing. I got my ipod headphones, plugged them into my laptop, and listened to first some Azure Ray, then some Coldplay on my itunes until the movie was over. Making sure you don't partially see the movie is only half the battle. The other half is not partially hearing it.

Like all rules a film lover has, these too may be relaxed at some point in the future. But for now, and for me, watching movies is an all-or-nothing experience.

It's just the system I'm "partial" to.

The rule of three ... weeks

There's a scene early in Ken Kwapis' License to Wed in which Ben (John Krasinski) and Sadie (Mandy Moore) are trying to book a wedding date in the church of Reverend Frank (Robin Williams). Frank flips through his scheduling book with a look of concern on his face.

"It looks like we're booked out for the next two years," says Frank. Ben and Sadie look glum. Then, as though it were planned all along, Frank "remembers" some sort of near-term cancellation and consults his book again to verify. "Yes!" he says. "You can get married three weeks from tomorrow!"

What Frank "remembered," and what was in a sense "planned all along," is that three weeks is the exact right timeframe for the plot of a movie.

In real life, one to two years would be the perfect amount of time for a couple who just got engaged to sort out all the details, like geographical location, venue, guest list, cake decorator, musical accompaniment, and take-home novelty item with their names and wedding date emblazoned on it. But in a movie, that won't cut it. The sense of urgency can't survive one to two years of screen time.

I noticed the rule of three weeks in another wedding-related movie I was also recently forced to sit through in order to review it: 27 Dresses. There's no scheduling gridlock at the wedding venue that forces this one, but true enough, George (Edward Burns) and Tess (Malin Akerman) spring it on Jane (Katherine Heigl) that they will be getting married three weeks later.

The examples I happen to be remembering are from wedding movies, but they just jump out at me because of the unrealistically short planning period between engagement and betrothal. Numerous films you've seen take place during a period of approximately three weeks -- or at the very least, three weeks from the point in the plot when a certain key conflict is introduced.

I'm actually familiar with the need for this timeframe myself. I have no aspirations to be a screenwriter, but I have written one script, and I get ideas for numerous others every day. (I guess I share this last thing in common with most people who are big movie fans, especially those who live in L.A., which gives them the sense that they somehow have a greater chance of turning these ideas into reality). One of these many ideas of mine that took traction, and which my wife, who is a screenwriter, developed into a script, was originally envisioned by me as occurring over several years, in part because there's a key aspect of the plot that I thought necessitated it. However, she convinced me that the viewer wouldn't feel the driving sense of urgency (it's a thriller, after all) if there are large pockets of time that get skipped over on screen. Even though her version of the script doesn't totally work, in part because of the three-week time frame, I am still no less convinced that it has to be this way in order to eventually work.

What's so special about three weeks? Well, it's not a month, but it's also not two weeks. I should probably clarify that rather obvious statement. It's long enough that the characters can grow and work through their character arcs, but short enough that they've got to be on an accelerated time frame, which requires them to act instead of thinking things through. Let's face it -- when you go to the movies, you want to see characters act, not think. Look what too much thinking did to Hamlet. All the great thrillers, action movies and farces have one thing in common: Most of the characters would not do what they end up doing if they had the luxury of thinking things through.

Now you'll probably want an example of a movie in which the opposite was true: the characters had too much time, and the flow of the movie suffered. Okay, let me think.

TEN MINUTES LATER

Okay, I couldn't think of one. And it's not because they don't exist. They probably do. But see, I don't remember those movies. The rule of three weeks is so powerful, so widespread, that screenwriters seem to follow it on instinct. And oh yeah, there's probably a whole chapter on it in each of the major screenwriting books.

So what will be the happy medium between three weeks and several years in my wife's and my prospective script? If we can't find it, no one will remember our movie either, because it will never get made.

Zombies vs. vampires

I saw four movies yesterday.

As far as I'm aware, this ties a modern personal record. (I say "modern" because when I was a toddler, I regularly watched six, seven movies a day. This was before MTV killed my attention span.) I can see myself having watched five movies in a day once, but I don't recall those particular circumstances, so I won't swear to it.

I also feel pretty confident saying this is the first time I've watched movies featuring zombies (Diary of the Dead) and vampires (Let the Right One In) in the same day. Diary of the Dead -- or, George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead, depending on your level of formality -- follows the recent Cloverfield/Quarantine model of crazy events spiraling out of control, being captured by someone who'd been filming something else entirely. Let the Right One In is the 2008 Swedish chiller that's already being hailed as one of the best vampire movies of all time -- enough that they are remaking it this year as an inevitably horrible Hollywood film. (Though the director of Cloverfield is directing, so I have some hope.)

But I'm not here today to talk about the merits of these films, only their thematic similarities. As I watched them yesterday, it got me thinking how much vampires and zombies actually have in common. They are both undead creatures. They both spread their infection through the bite. They both feed off humans, though vampires are clearly only in it for the blood, while zombies like chomping whatever flesh and bone they can get their hands on. (And don't think I consider this some great revelation that no one else has ever identified.)

Of course, vampires and zombies differ in many important ways as well -- vampires are sexy and usually have personalities, while zombies are vacant and erratic.

But one of the biggest differences between them -- and this is where I think I've struck an original thought -- is what the people in their worlds know about them. And I realized something very funny about vampire movies and zombie movies:

In vampire movies, all the characters know what a vampire is.

In zombie movies, none of the characters have ever heard of a zombie.

To make this a little more explicit, vampire movies almost always contain the word "vampire"; zombie movies rarely contain the word "zombie." It's almost as though the word "vampire" refers to a known creature in the mythozoological universe, whereas the word "zombie" refers to a genre of film, meaning that using the word stigmatizes and demystifies the actual zombies in the film.

Yesterday's films were a perfect example of this phenomenon. In Diary of the Dead, the word "zombie" is never uttered. The characters refer to the happenings in generic, descriptive ways, like "People who are dying are not staying dead" or "He's become one of them." In Let the Right One In (and this is not giving much away), the little boy starts to get suspicious of the behavior of the 12-year-old girl next door, and asks her directly, "Are you a vampire?"

This familiarity/unfamiliarity extends to knowing the rules that govern both types of creatures. In Diary, they have to learn as they go. "Shoot it in the head! That's the only way it will stay down!" We've seen characters figure out the whole "shoot it in the head" thing in dozens of zombie movies. No one knows it instinctively. In Let the Right One In, the actual title refers to one of the known rules about vampires -- that they have to be invited in to a person's home. When vampires appear in vampire movies, no one needs to tell a person what they have to do to protect themselves. In under five minutes flat, they're wearing a necklace of garlic and sharpening a stake in the shape of a cross.

Now, I may be playing dumb here a little bit. There may be a very simple explanation for all this. After all, the concept of vampires, in all cultures, has been around for millenia, and the Oxford English Dictionary records the first usage of the actual term in the year 1734. Conversely, the zombie has its history in Afro-Caribbean culture, and the word itself did not enter English usage until 1871. But does the relative newness of zombies excuse the fact that no one seems to know about them?

Let's take it one step further. In movies where there are aliens, everyone knows what an alien is. If they see something they can't identify walk out of a space ship, of course it's an alien. They don't have to learn the concept of "alien." But people are always having to learn the concept of "zombie." If people know aliens from the alien stories in our collective subconscious, and people know vampires from the vampire stories in our collective subconscious, how come none of these movies posits a world where there are zombie stories in our collective subconscious? The world of Diary of the Dead does not have a single zombie movie in it?

(I should pause here to acknowledge that there are, in fact, plenty of zombie movies where they use the word zombie -- but these tend to be the ones that are tongue-in-cheek, better categorized as "zom coms" than horrors.)

This is something for a much longer discussion, but every film, regardless of genre, must first ask itself: "What exists in our world?" You could drive yourself crazy with this question. In the world of Spider-Man, does the Superman comic book exist? Or is this crazy spider dude the person who is actually introducing the characters to the concept of a superhero? If they're aware of the concept of a superhero, which superheroes do exist? I'll be interested to see how they tackle that when the Marvel characters start to appear in each other's movies, namely, the Hulk and Iron Man. If Iron Man was like nothing they'd ever seen, and the Hulk was like nothing they'd ever seen, but they both exist in the same world, which phenomenon appeared first? Let's say it was the Hulk. When Iron Man came along, why didn't somebody say, "Ah yes, this guy is kind of like the Hulk. He's an unusually strong creature who has the ability to fight bad people in a way that's beyond heroic -- almost super-heroic."

You can even extend it to real people. If Mel Gibson is playing a character in a movie, does the actual Mel Gibson exist in that world? What if Mel Gibson's character has a reason in the story to refer to Danny Glover, the real actor? Was that version of Danny Glover ever the star of a movie called Lethal Weapon? This can be dangerous territory, as Steven Soderbergh found in Ocean's 12, where Julia Roberts (playing a character named Tess) is conveniently mistaken for the actual Julia Roberts -- and it's one of the main plot points.

Sometimes these debates are better left rhetorical.