I saw a movie I liked this weekend: "Stranger than Fiction." I think now I should try to make sure that I've seen all the movies Emma Thompson has done, because I like her so much and she seems to choose good scripts. Anyway one of the issues in the movie was authors killing off their characters. I sometimes get irritated by deaths in stories, especially when they seem to be done for convenience, to get a couple together, for example, because one is so sad and the other offers comfort and an intimacy develops etc. I also don't like when lots of people are killed off just to make us nervous for the main character, who, luckily, lives through it all.
But then on the otherhand I once tried to read something from Indian mythology, I don't remember what it was, except that no where near the end the main character died and the story continued with some other characters, and I could see no connection between the one story and the other. I was so exasperated that I didn't finish the story. Even though it is pretty cool to read a narrative that breaks those conventions. And so I don't know where that leaves me on the issue.
But I liked the movie.
3 comments:
I saw recently a movie by Deepa Mehta, it's called "Water", and it is about the widows inprisoned in a "widow house" in India in the beginning of the last century. I loved that movie, and one of the main characters commits suicide at the end, it's sad but that's what makes a movie more dramatic and interesting to me. I love foreign movie, and dislike a lot of American films ending with a traditional "happy end", but more disappointing thing to me is that here in the US you can hardly see any non-American movie shown on TV, so a lot of people never get exposed to a foreign movie.
Dear Sevda,
We borrowed that movie, but have not been able to make up our minds whether to watch it or not. I knew it was going to end sadly. Since I got pregnant it's even harder for me to handle sad, or worse, violent movies. Maybe I'll see it now that you recommend it. I know what you mean about having access to foreign movies.
Selvi, I feel the same way about killing off characters in fiction. I hate it when it's a contrived plot device just to create drama or to get a couple together. Sad or violent is not my cup of tea, either. There is alot of great art (films and literature) that illustrates how unneccesary these qualities are.
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