a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment
kleinbl00  ·  2702 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: When - And How - Great Movie Narration Works

    Still, even the most anti-narration snob would have to concede that the larger film canon contains some pretty notable exceptions to this rule. The Naked City, A Clockwork Orange, Sunset Boulevard, GoodFellas, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, The Big Lebowski, The Shawshank Redemption — all use narration, and far from stalling story or characterization, with them it pushes everything forward.

Each and every one of those movies would be greatly improved by a lack of narration.

Narration/voiceover indicates a failure by the creative team to properly communicate the story. ALWAYS. Know why everyone always remembers Quint's speech from Jaws? Because it's fuckin' hardcore yet doesn't convey ANY part of the story. Know why nobody remembers Tom Hanks' speech from Castaway? Because it serves solely to make Tom Hanks the actor happy while absolutely gutting every effort the screenwriter made to convey the story without putting it in Tom Hanks' mouth.

    If a diversity of type speaks anything to the value of a particular storytelling device, then film narrators definitely don’t deserve their bad reputation.

That is a heroically nonsensical sentence.