Charlie St. Cloud

[Fruitfly]

(01-15-2012 11:07 AM)d. b. wilyumz Wrote:  

(01-14-2012 01:31 PM)mirandagirl Wrote:  Did you have a favorite scene in the movie?

I'm so annoyed by the general mish-mash they made of this movie that I can't call any particular scene my "favorite." Or, to put it another way, my favorite scene wasn't in the movie. They needed to add 90 seconds establishing the split between Charlie and his mom, showing how Charlie was trapped and couldn't move on. The Ray Liotta character died; why didn't he come back and set Charlie straight about what was going on? Wasted opportunities, wasted actors.

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(01-15-2012 03:56 AM)Zacefronitis Wrote:  Re: Charlie's 'madness', everyone I spoke to found the boat in the shed confusing. Because the movie didn't show Charlie talking to himself to any great extent or people's negative responses to that; I never got a real sense that people thought he was crazy.

Yes, another feeble element. Making a movie, like writing a novel or any other form of art, is about making choices. I don't think the producer or director ever made up their minds about what was important and what wasn't. What was all that about Charlie being from the wrong side of the tracks? Didn't add anything to the story. Why even raise the question of whether seeing dead people was imaginary? Seeing dead people was what drove Charlie's story forward; questioning the reality of his experience was just a distraction and wasn't well executed anyway.

A very good analysis. In a book you can play with notions of ambiguity because internal dialogue or introspective reflection is made explicit to the reader, and he or she can make up their minds as to what they want to believe about a character. In a film, the audience isn't privy to the character's interiority, only their behavior and their words, so what they say and do has to be consistent with a single interpretation OR with two possibilities in order to maintain plausibility.

CSC's plot was not consistent with both possibilities at all times, and the critics noticed it.

A similar problem occurred in Fight Club, which was made evident when the security guards are watching the narrator being beaten up by an invisible Tyler. We are made to believe that Tyler is an alter-ego of the narrator, a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, so for the narrator to be beaten up requires him to be outside of himself (and invisible.) That didn't work for me.

And Fight Club (a modern day Hegelian Master-Slave Dialectic) is one of my favorite movies.

I love the character of Charlie, however, because he is a Romantic Hero in the 18th century sense of the word. That's why to date I think Zac's best personal work was in a director's most flawed piece.