BEFORE: Bradley Cooper carries over from "The Hangover Part III", and have you spotted this week's unintentional running theme yet? It's all about secrets, lies and deception. First we had the Princeton admissions officer's secret shame, then the lies about personal finances the couple told each other in "This Is 40", and the deception of the fake family ruse in "We're the Millers". The third "Hangover" film had some deceptive elements in its story, and also managed to deceive audiences into thinking the franchise still had some life in it. Tonight's film seals the deal, with a writer committing plagiarism.
AFTER: There's a point late in this film where a character yells "Bullshit!" and it was well-timed, for I had just finished saying that aloud three times, in relation to this film's plot. I have to call shenanigans because it turns out that I have just two rules of screenwriting, and this film violates both of them.
Rule #1: Show, don't tell. Film is a visual medium, and any time things get too talky-talky, you should start to question if there's a better way to film it. Sure, talking reveals character's thoughts, and people have to talk to each other, just as they do in the real world. But talking can't advance a plot forward the way that actions can, so if given the choice between showing a character doing something and having a character talk about doing that thing, the first option is most often the better choice.
The codicil to this rule is that people want to see a story happen, they don't want to see a story being written. Stories about writers don't interest me because of the inevitable scenes of writers writing, or hammering away at a typewriter or keyboard, which by its technical definition is an action, but on screen might as well be inaction. Even worse are shots of writers TRYING to write, which means that action-wise, they're doing absolutely nothing. So if I see one more story about a writer with writer's block, I may throw up. I don't know why writers find writers with writer's block so fascinating to write about. Wait, yes I do - it's because they don't have any other ideas themselves.
(And the codicil to this codicil is: avoid the cliché of a writer's pages flying all over the place, and him losing everything, because that's his only copy. We have computers now, and some even make automatic back-ups, so as a plot device, this should be dispensed with. Any writer who types with an old manual typewriter because it's hip or retro or whatever deserves to lose his manuscript if he creates it in a manner that isn't backed up. There is a writer losing his manuscript in "The Words", but at least this takes place before computers were invented, and at least it just gets misplaced, without the pages flying everywhere.)
Rule #2: Avoid excessive flashbacks and other non-linear storytelling. "The Words" starts in one place, then flashes back five years, then catches up with where it started and we have to see some scenes for a second time. That's wrong, try again. Worse than that, the place it starts is actually the story-within-the-story, and it's a story being told by one author about another author, who steals his story from a THIRD author.
So let's see if I've got this straight: Author #1 writes a book about Author #2, who copied a story from Author #3, and this whole thing was written by a screenwriter - I'd love to hear that pitch, this is some "Inception"-level style of storytelling. When we see author #3's flashback, that's a story within a story within a story. And that flashback is about HIM writing a story.
Funny thing, though, about that "best-selling" story within the story's story - we never get to read it, or even hear it. It's SO built-up that nothing anyone writes could possibly live up to the hype. Oh, we get to see people's reactions to it, how it elicits great emotion from everyone who reads it. I'm reminded of Monty Python's sketch about "The World's Funniest Joke", which is so funny that everyone who hears it laughs themselves to death. The sketch never reveals the actual joke, because it can't - it doesn't exist. Instead we just see people reading the joke, doubling over with laughter, and then dying. (See also: the mysterious contents of the glowing briefcase in "Pulp Fiction")
Another example of bullshit is Author #2 visiting Author #3, prepared to pay him money for his story or atone for his sin of plagiarism somehow, not because it's the right thing to do, but because he doesn't want to get sued, and he doesn't want his new lifestyle and status to go away. When the author refuses his payoff and sends the author packing, here's the bullshit part: at no time did the plagiarist ask him to sign a release - that's the only way anyone avoids lawsuits these days!
I'm sending out releases now at work - to people who worked on the animated feature "Cheatin'", which state that the work they did on the film was a for-hire project, and they pre-waive any claims to its ownership. This seems a bit unnecessary, because I have all of their timesheets and paystubs, so as employees it would seem like a for-hire situation is implicit, but we live in a litigious society, and these releases are the sort of thing that a potential distributor would want to see.
So, I'm forced to declare a NITPICK POINT - when the author found the story, why did he just assume there would be no repercussions from copying it? Why didn't he make any attempt to track down the author, or find out if the author was dead or alive? (For that matter, why didn't the original author sign his work, or check with the train's lost and found department?) Why didn't he at least change the names of the characters so he could state that the stories were merely similar? And how did he know that the manuscript had never been published before - did he somehow check every book ever made?
There's a warning in here for me as well - what if I write my story about my circle of friends from years ago and one of them tries to sue me? I'm going to chance the names, of course, but is that enough? Am I going to need to get signed releases from all of them, even the ones I don't like or have lost touch with? Then again, I was there, so I'd just be telling MY story as I see it.
Anyway, it turns out that Hemingway's wife once lost some of his early stories in a similar fashion, and they were never recovered. So even the one bit of action seen here in the story-within-a-story is itself plagiarized from real life events, so that's either ironic, or one final bit of bullshit.
Also starring Dennis Quaid (last seen in "Postcards From the Edge"), Jeremy Irons (last seen in "The Merchant of Venice"), Zoe Saldana (last seen in "The Terminal"), Olivia Wilde (last seen in "The Incredible Burt Wonderstone"), with cameos from Michael McKean (last seen in "Whatever Works"), J.K. Simmons (last seen in "Hidalgo"), Ron Rifkin, Zeljko Ivanek (last seen in "Argo").
RATING: 3 out of 10 ivy plants
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