Movies

Reverse engineering Odd Thomas

/ Movies

In Screenwriting 101 by FilmCritHulk, Hulk explains the process of creating characters by matching up specific kinds of information to the human body. You start at the feet and work your way up to the head: “You start factual, then get emotional, then ideological, and then amalgamate those details into an actual character psychology.”

He details the process and then suggests an exercise: look at an existing character and fill in the information for them.

I want to work through that for Odd, the main character in Odd Thomas (movie version, not book version). I like that this is a superhero story where the character doesn’t think of himself as a superhero, and I like the idea of pulling it apart to see how that character works.

So here I go with Hulk’s process.

Feet (Physical details and basic facts)

  • Appearance: Male, Caucasian, mid-twenties, average height, lean build, dark hair, blue eyes
  • Family: Father is police chief. Mother has been in a psych ward since Odd was 12 years old because she claimed to have psychic abilities and had violent episodes. No siblings. Middle class. We don’t know about any other family members.
  • Friends: Viola (waitress at the diner); Stormy (girlfriend)
  • Location: Pico Mundo (desert town in California)
  • Occupation: works as a short order cook at a diner. Also unofficially helps out with police investigations because he inherited his mother’s psychic abilities.

Groin (What does he want?)

  • A simple life, because his psychic abilities complicate his life
  • To keep his abilities secret (so that he doesn’t end up like his mother)
  • To be with Stormy

Heart (What does he need?)

  • Needs to have a purpose for his abilities (he believes they are a gift he is meant to use)
  • Needs to have someone in his life who accepts him as he is, despite all the weirdness in his life. (That person is Stormy.)

Throat (How does he sound and project himself?)

  • Speaks quietly but confidently
  • Sarcastic, especially with Stormy
  • Gives off a casual, easy-going vibe, despite all the danger that surrounds him
  • Is confident about his abilities and insistent when he needs his father’s help
  • Accepts his abilities as a matter-of-fact—he doesn’t brag about them and he doesn’t shy away from them.
  • Is honest when he can be (with his father and with Stormy) about what he sees and what he knows. When he can’t be completely honest, he tells people what they need to know so that they stay safe.
  • Knows how to fight and take care of himself, but he isn’t aggressive or violent unless he really needs to be (like when the bad guy is after him or people’s lives are in danger)

Left cheek (“left-brained” abilities)

  • Intelligent, sometimes more than he lets on
  • Investigates on his own and sometimes will talk through things with Stormy
  • Good observer
  • Works a lot like a detective would: figure out a suspect, piece together a timeline, go through a process of elimination until he has a clear picture of a situation

Right cheek (“right-brained” abilities)

  • Thinks outside the box (because of his psychic abilities)
  • Strong belief in justice and righting wrongs
  • BUT will break the law for a greater good
  • Acts on gut feelings as much as logical decisions
  • Doesn’t see himself a superhero
  • Believes in a higher power and an afterlife (but isn’t more specific than that)

Crown (Who is this character?)

Odd Thomas is a man with psychic abilities that he uses to solve crimes and help people. Because of the weirdness in his life, he tries to keep other aspects of his life simple and grounded. He is confident about his psychic abilities and helping people but also humble, never bragging about what he can do and never considering himself a superhero. He is intelligent and methodical in solving crimes, but he can also be impulsive. He has a matter-of-fact mindset about his circumstances, accepting his abilities and using them to help people.

Man of Steel got some things right

/ Movies, Superheroes /
Spoilers for Man of Steel.

I heard mixed reviews about Man of Steel and these two things kept coming up:

1. Way too much destruction. Buildings fall apart. Explosions. Lots of civilians in danger. But Superman wouldn’t put that many people in danger. He would take the fight away, out in the middle of nowhere (or even into space).

2. The first half of the movie feels different from the second half. Stylistically, visually. It’s like you’re watching two films mashed together, and they don’t mash well.

As I watched the movie, I thought these were valid points. Man of Steel has its flaws, but it also got a lot of things right. I’ll go through the bad stuff first, and then get to the good stuff.

The bad stuff

1. Too much destruction, and I know why it happens. This version of Clark doesn’t don the suit until he faces Zod. Clark hasn’t faced major threats before, human or otherwise, so when he fights Zod, it’s messy and desperate. Clark doesn’t have enough experience to control the situation, and that’s why there’s so much destruction. I still think it’s excessive, but I understand why it happens.

2. Stylistic changes. One issue is with the flashback scenes. I like seeing Clark at different ages, but a few of the flashbacks feel forced and interrupt the flow of the present action. I don’t know if there was a better way to include them. Another issue is all the fighting in the second half of the movie. Lots of explosions, broken glass and stone, and loud noises in contrast to (relatively quiet) scenes around the world in the first half.

3. Clark doesn’t work at the Daily Planet until the end of the movie. I have mixed feelings about this. I like seeing on-the-farm Clark, but the mild-mannered reporter is a big part of the character and usually a more prominent role for the actor. One of the best things about Superman I is seeing Christopher Reeve shift from Clark Kent to Superman, but Henry Cavill doesn’t have the opportunity to do that.

4. Zod was born to be a soldier and protector of Krypton, but we find out too late. Jor-El says that for centuries, everyone on Krypton was born for a specific purpose, but Clark was born naturally and with the freedom to become whoever he wanted. Zod was born to protect Krypton, and that helps us understand why he is willing to do whatever it takes to build a new Krypton on Earth. Clark takes away the purpose of Zod’s life, and that’s a Big Thing, but the revelation comes too late in the movie for us to care.

5. Jonathan’s death was sort of…ridiculous. In other versions of Superman, Jonathan dies from a heart attack. It’s fine if the writers want to do something new, but Jonathan’s death in Man of Steel could have been prevented so easily. Jonathan should have picked up the little girl and gone to the overpass with Martha. Clark could have rescued the dog and used the excuse that he “got really lucky” that he didn’t get hurt. I understand that Jonathan was willing to die in order to protect Clark’s secret, but this was a poor way to show it.

6. Lines that failed miserably. I’m sure there are more, but these two stuck out to me:
—Zod: “Where did you train? On a FARM??” This sounded cartoony, like a cheesy villain. What Zod meant was, he dedicated his life to protecting Krypton while Clark had relatively insignificant experiences on Earth.
—The female military officer at the end who said Superman is “kinda hot.” Completely inappropriate. Her character wasn’t even well developed and still that line was out of character.

The good stuff

1. Clark as a drifter. We haven’t seen this stage in Clark’s life on screen before, even though it’s been hinted at a few times. Man of Steel has thirty-three year-old Clark moving from place to place, job to job. He has this great power and he isn’t sure how he should use it, so he helps where he can. It’s nice to see Clark in ordinary situations. Bus boy at a bar. Part of a ship’s crew. He wears t-shirts and jeans and even though he looks ordinary, there’s an Otherness about him. He wasn’t pretending to be a bumbling reporter and he wasn’t a demigod with a cape yet. Just Clark trying to figure out what he is supposed to do.

2. Lois is an ace reporter and she respects people’s boundaries. Lois finds out where Clark lives and says she wants to tell his story. When he explains to her that the world isn’t ready to find out there’s life on other planets, she backs off. She keeps his secret and doesn’t push him. Other versions of Lois Lane (but not all of them) have her arguing for the sake of arguing. If someone says she can’t do something, that’s all the more reason she wants to do it. It becomes predictable. “Lois, don’t get into trouble.” And then oh, there’s trouble and there’s Lois. This Lois thinks about more than the news story. She realizes there are some things she shouldn’t do, even if she has the ability to do it.

3. No Kryptonite. No meteor pieces that came to Earth with Clark’s spaceship. No crutch for the bad guys to use. I like what the writers did instead. Clark adapted to Earth’s conditions and so he has a bad reaction to the Kryptonian air on the spaceship and the Kryptonian atmosphere spewing out of the World Engine.

4. Jor-El is AI you can see and trust. Russell Crowe’s Jor-El is visible (and not a translucent hologram) and integrated with the alien ships. He explains things to Clark in a straightforward way, no mind games, and Clark trusts him. What bugged me about Jor-El in Smallville was that he was always ambiguous—Clark never knew if Jor-El was manipulating him. It is so refreshing to see Jor-El as a guiding figure that Clark can work with.

5. Normal danger doesn’t faze Clark. In one of the flashbacks, Clark is on a school bus that goes off a bridge and into water. All the other kids are screaming as the bus fills up with water, but Clark is looking around, observing, because he knows he can force his way out of the bus if he has to. The other kids are scared because they’re trapped but Clark is calm because he has a way out. It’s part of his Otherness, that he can’t be hurt as easily as humans. In contrast, Clark is cautious when he fights Zod and Faora-Ul because they are actual threats to him.

6. Heat vision is uncomfortable for Clark. The skin around Clark’s eyes turns dry and veiny, which is something that might happen if searing heat suddenly burst from your eyes. In fights, Clark uses heat vision in desperate moves and it takes him a moment to shut his eyes and turn it off.

7. Superman teams up with humans. The military needs Superman’s help and Superman needs to coordinate with them in order to defeat Zod. It isn’t Superman as mankind’s savior but rather Superman as a leader. Which is how it’s supposed to be. Superman leads mankind into the light, not Superman solves all of your problems for you.

8. Lois knows Clark Kent is Superman. She tracks him down to Smallville, and then she keeps his secret. The writers completely bypassed the notion that Clark’s disguise fools Lois, and it suits the characters perfectly.

9. Coming to Earth was about repopulating Krypton. This was the central conflict: would Superman help Zod build a new Krypton or would he defend his adopted home? It’s an internal conflict for Clark and it has external effects and consequences. In theory it would work well, but the movie doesn’t quite get there.

Man of Steel focuses heavily on Kal-El’s side of the story. It’s a film about the last son of Krypton with some flaws and some highlights. I’m still waiting for a story about Clark Kent. Scenes hinted at what that would be like…young Clark suffers from sensory overload; middle school Clark risks revealing his secret in order to save his classmates; young adult Clark is frustrated about what his purpose is. I want to see a story about what an extraordinary man does in an ordinary world, but the Superman movie we usually get is an extraordinary man in extraordinary circumstances.

I want movies loosely based on novels

/ Books, Movies
The major problem with making a movie based on a novel is, most people expect the movie to be very close to the novel and it’s difficult to do that because stories in books and stories on screen work differently.

You’ll never be able to fit everything from a 300-page novel into a 2-hour movie. You have to cut scenes, maybe eliminate characters, and probably rework parts to make the story work for the movie.

I wish instead of seeing “based on “, we would see more movies “inspired by” novels. Instead of trying to recreate the book on screen, take the characters and some plot elements and run in a new direction. 

This is how the Bourne movies were made. I watched The Bourne Identity, liked it, and then read the book, expecting it to be similar to the movie but with more fleshed-out parts. But the book is so much more than the movie. More scenes, more locations, more challenges. The movie took the essential characters and one thread from the plot and that’s what you watch on screen. You don’t need to have read the book to understand the movie, and watching the movie does not spoil the book for you. They are separate but related, and each great stories in their own mediums.

That popping sound in The Sandlot

/ Movies
I’ve seen The Sandlot at least a dozen times, and it was on the third or fourth viewing that I noticed a popping sound in two scenes. The first is when the boys tell Smalls to walk over to the fence and peek through the hole. The second is when the boys are looking down at the ominous busted baseball.

To me, it sounds like bubble gum popping. We see the boys chewing gum throughout the movie. The sound could easily be one of them popping a bubble off-camera. But somehow, the sound doesn’t seem like it’s part of the film.

I like to think that the popping sound is supposed to be part of the world outside the film, part of the audience. Maybe it’s the narrator, popping his gum during a quiet moment in the story. Or maybe we’re supposed to imagine the sound coming from an audience member, someone else in the theater.

I haven’t decided where this falls on the scale of Creepy to Cool.

Hancock had a good premise

/ Movies, Superheroes

I wasn’t very interested in seeing Hancock, but it wasn’t a waste of time. It started off as an interesting, original superhero film. John Hancock (played by Will Smith) has superpowers but a bad reputation with the public. Ray Embrey (Jason Bateman) is a public relations executive who offers to reinvent Hancock’s image after Hancock saves his life. Charlize Theron plays Mary, Ray’s wife. Major plot spoilers below the image.

I like the idea of a superhero who helps out but doesn’t really care about others. Hancock saves people and stops disasters, but he doesn’t make it nice and tidy. He wrecks buildings and he causes traffic jams. It’s a nice change from Superman creating fine-tuned order out of chaos. (Watch the scene in Superman Returns where Superman zips around Metropolis during the earthquake, blasting broken glass with his heat vision and catching falling parts of buildings before they hit the pedestrians on the street below. It’s cool and only Superman could pull that off, but it’s too neat.) Granted, we don’t know why Hancock even bothers, but it’s nice to see a super-powered person who gets his hands dirty.

The movie could have stayed on that thread–a superhero who needs to reinvent his image, who needs to have a better reputation with the public and answer to the damages he causes. It’s similar to that guy suing Mr. Incredible for saving him when he didn’t want to be saved. It can be comical and it’s different. It makes you think about how superheroes would function in the real world. Will Smith could have easily pulled that off, but even he couldn’t make the rest of Hancock entertaining.

It should have ended with the new and improved Hancock, polite and available to lend a helping hand in his spiffy suit. The movie drags on though. The lame mythos, the soap-opera side-plot between Hancock and Mary (lost lovers with a dash of amnesia mixed in) and the forced sacrifices the characters have to make feel like excuses to have a few fight scenes and blood.

Hancock deserves some credit for a different take on superhero movies, but the last third of the movie should have been cut.

Scroll to Top