Wild Goose Chase

Against the advice of Mr. BDG (you tried to warn us), S. and I went to see the latest installment in the adventures of our friendly neighborhood you-know-who this weekend. It wasn’t so bad and we had a good time going out to the movies, but as related in the aforementioned advice, the cheeseball was liberally applied from beginning to end.

I read a really interesting post about the movie at John August’s blog today that I wanted to share. John August was the screenwriter for Go and Big Fish among other things, and he has a great blog about screenwriting. I don’t imagine I will be writing a movie anytime soon but it’s fun to read about the craft from a guy who really knows his way around a… a movie making, you know, thing.

In this post he’s talking about the 5 fundamental and 8 minor coincidences in the movie.  Some spoilers included but as he says not much more than you’d get from the trailer. Pretty fun to read, plus I learned a new concept, retcon, short for retroactive continuity. That’s whenever a story goes back in time to add something or even change something that happened in the past so that the present story makes sense.

Like when Stefano got shot by Marlena and he fell off that catwalk just as the fire broke out after Roman and Marlena’s wedding. You know, the new Roman, well not the new new Roman that used to be Chris Cossechek but the middle new one who I guess is really John.  John who used to be “the Pawn.”* Then, though it was pretty damn clear he (Stefano) was dead as a doornail, they kind of changed history to let him show up in Salem again (also with his brain tumor miraculously healed). This is a terrible example, but it’s apparently called a retcon. Maybe a better example would be the whole Dallas dream thing, but too late, I have already revealed that I know the names of multiple Days of Our Lives characters and am somewhat versed in twenty-year-old soap opera plotlines. ANYWAY, the post about the movie is:

The Perils of Coincidence

*Did I just know this, or did I look it up online?

Sary and I went to the movies yesterday afternoon… we had several options in mind of things we wanted to see and at some point I chose The Illusionist, because I remembered it had a cool preview. She agreed and we headed out to see it. We got there early enough to see the pre-movie show where they plug new TV shows and movies, but not so early that we had to sit through the movie trivia slideshow which only has 2 questions over and over again for 10 minutes… but that’s a complaint for another day.

The weird thing was, we’re watching the previews and suddenly the preview starts for the movie we’re coming to see! And I am thinking… why would they show the preview for the movie we already bought tickets to watch? The obvious answer is… they don’t. We’re not going to see that movie. So what the hell are we about to see? Sary is not pleased that I chose from a list including several movies she wanted to see and brought us to some random movie.

Well, it didn’t turn out so bad. The movie I thought we were coming to see is called The Prestige with Christian Bale and Scarlett Johansson, but instead we watched The Illusionist with Ed Norton and Jessica Biel. And actually, I had seen the previews for both movies, but sort of remembered them as just one movie. They’re both set about 100 years ago and both about magicians. The Illusionist also has Paul Giamatti playing an inspector and sort of the narrator of the movie. The story was really good and we both liked it. It still seems like it must be very similar to the Christian Bale one, except Hugh Jackman does the narrator/sympathetic-antagonist bit. But what do I know, I apparently don’t play too close attention.

To sum up, I am sort of an idiot but it worked out well! Maybe we’ll just start going to movies at random and see what we get.