Would agree with that assessment. STF goes a bit further than Six Characters and is less cynical. It is also less, I want to say cliche. Pirandella's characters are more or less stereotypes - the mother, the father, the son - simplistic. Which is, and it has been more than 20 years since I saw or read that play so my memory may be off here, part of the point. The fact that the characters did not want to be those stereotypes. At the same time they depended on the writer to direct them to tell them how to behave. They didn't want to do it themselves. (Whedon plays with the idea a bit in Angel at times and I've seen other shows play with it as well.) STF is more interesting, because the character doesn't know at the outset, then discovers the voice narrating his life, then realizes that he is a character in a book yet simultaneously real and existing outside of the book. Creating several unanswered questions that Pirandella doesn't play with - "what if God didn't know that we were alive and outside it's brain - and just telling a story", "can you exist inside and outside the story simultaneously?" "Can we change the ending - is there an ending to the narrative, is it always in flux?" Fascinating film. Keeps playing with my brain. And yet another one that most of the mainstream critics didn't seem to get - they are all busy complaining about how it is a one-joke movie and not that funny. Sigh. Completely missing the point of the movie or what it was about. I've just about given up on movie critics.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2006-12-07 04:23 pm (UTC)Pirandella's characters are more or less stereotypes - the mother, the father, the son - simplistic. Which is, and it has been more than 20 years since I saw or read that play so my memory may be off here, part of the point. The fact that the characters did not want to be those stereotypes. At the same time they depended on the writer to direct them to tell them how to behave. They didn't want to do it themselves. (Whedon plays with the idea a bit in Angel at times and I've seen other shows play with it as well.) STF is more interesting, because the character doesn't know at the outset, then discovers the voice narrating his life, then realizes that he is a character in a book yet simultaneously real and existing outside of the book. Creating several unanswered questions that Pirandella doesn't play with - "what if God didn't know that we were alive and outside it's brain - and just telling a story", "can you exist inside and outside the story simultaneously?" "Can we change the ending - is there an ending to the narrative, is it always in flux?" Fascinating film.
Keeps playing with my brain. And yet another one that most of the mainstream critics didn't seem to get - they are all busy complaining about how it is a one-joke movie and not that funny. Sigh. Completely missing the point of the movie or what it was about. I've just about given up on movie critics.