BREAKING NEWS: TWIST OF FATE TAKES FIRST IN THE GOLDEN GATEWAY SINGLE TITLE CATEGORY - Manuscript Requested -
WAHOO!
Wow! What a great weekend I had. Courtney Milan and I traveled to Los Angeles to celebrate our good friend Tessa Dare's first sale. We also got to see her win the Orange Rose! Please note, Ms. Dare's divine historical, GODDESS OF THE HUNT, also took first in the Golden Gateway Historical Category!
Moving on to my actual topic...My daughter also lives in LA and happens to be the program coordinator for film at the Skirball Museum, one of the sponsors of the AFI film festival. So she snagged passes to the festival's closing gala, the North American premier of LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA. Now I'm just a hick, and not used to Hollywood, so it was quite a thrill for me to sit in a small theater and have the director, Mike Newell, bring each of the stars up in front for an introduction: Javier Bardem, Giovanna Mezzogiorno, and Benjammin Bratt among others. Benjamin Bratt is unbelievably handsome in person, but I digress.
LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA is a story of undying love and devotion (siigh), and Ben Bratt is sitting right there in the theater watching as we do, so you can imagine how much I wanted to love this movie. I really really wanted to love it. But alas, although I found much to admire--the cinematography, the music, Benjamin Bratt without a shirt--I just couldn't love it. In times past, I would have walked away feeling let down without knowing why. But last night, I knew just exactly why the film didn't work for me.
Emotion. Motivation. Character development and growth. It just wasn't there. The film opens with a scene of a young man making eye contact with a young woman. Then poof...we are now told he is desperately in love with her, and later she accepts his proposal of marriage, but her father finds the match unsuitable and whisks her away.
In order for the rest of the story to work, we must BELIEVE in this first blush of love. But I couldn't. Because the director or screen writer or whoever is in charge of STORY didn't show me who these characters were, what motivated them to feel and behave as they did. In short, I didn't care about the characters because I didn't know anything about them, and I certainly didn't feel their love. Now I realize that movies are short, but they must engage the viewer's emotions, just as we as writers must engage the reader's emotions. This drove the point home to me that I must take the time to understand my characters and to reveal them in the pages I write or no one will care.
I'll mention DR ZHIVAGO as one movie that made me truly believe in undying love. The director shows us the heroic side of the main and secondary characters, their weakness, their hopes, the way they engage one another and the world and makes me CARE what happens to them.
Can you name a movie (a love story) that made you care? What was it about the story that made you feel the love?
