Just walked out on the 2000 film “Billy Elliott,” a sequence of cinematographic cameos in search of coherence. The boy wants to dance. The unsympathetic father and older brother, each tortured by his own failings, failures, and sufferings, blocks him, weakens, finds the value of dancing, and guess what? . . .
After the umpteenth mini-climax demonstrating unbearable tensions of family life torn between bigotry and nobility, the film veers gradually, like a battleship trying to reverse course, towards a one per cent credible achievement of nobility. This melodrama finally did me in, repeatedly revving me up, for what? I asked myself, and went to my blog-writer and here I am.
Contrast it to the Alex Guinness and John Mills 1960 film “Tunes of Glory,” which I viewed recently on our amazing home movie machine, a TV set with built-in DVD player. In that film there was a beginning, middle, and end. Not that I am about to tell or even figure out where each part began and ended. Rather that the film ended, ker-plop, leaving me stunned and wondering.
A film that doesn’t have an ending artistically speaking but merely a final stop, that has merely jerked you around, plucking heartstrings or prompting chuckles and leading you nowhere that you hadn’t expected, is a viewer-exploiter. Nuts to that.
Blithe Spirit 