Klavan On The Culture

July 14th, 2009 7:20 am

Knowing

Been vulturing a lot of culture lately without much time to blog about it here. Saw the movie Knowing with Nicholas Cage over the weekend. For the first hour and twenty minutes, I was thinking, “Hey, this is good! This is way underrated!” Then, almost as the words escaped my brain, the thing tumbled into bat-crazy nonsense and became overblown garbage. One of the curses of writing stories for a living is that you find yourself coming up with alternatives for things that don’t work. I had a better ending all-but-written by the time the real ending came around. That’s no brag. A dozen monkeys with typewriters working at random for about a week could’ve come up with a better ending. My recommendation: Watch the first hour and twenty minutes, then make up the rest. Or hire a dozen monkeys and save yourself the trouble.

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6 Comments

1. W Krebs:

Heck, you could go further than that. Sponsor a contest to write better endings for the movie.

Rules are that one watches the movie up to the 80 minute mark and then writes a one-page synopsis on how to wrap up the plot.

Jul 14, 2009 - 9:20 am 2. M G Krebs:

It’s the dreaded Third Act. The writer either gets punchy and wants to wrap it up, or a dumb studio executive gave “notes.” Most execs are too lazy/stupid to give notes on the Second Act, but any moron can change the ending.

A bad ending could also be a desperate re-shoot, I suppose. “Make It Bigger!”

Jul 14, 2009 - 1:36 pm 3. Andrew_M_Garland:

The world needs a universal ending, something that can sort-of fit onto the end of any story.

Yes, it would be boring, knowing exactly what that ending was, but it might be better than 80% of the contrived endings that are in fact tacked onto stories.

Something a bit better than “After a titanic struggle and a lot of luck, they lived happily ever after”.

Disclaimer: I haven’t seen “Knowing”. I suppose I will wait for it to appear on basic cable.

Jul 14, 2009 - 1:39 pm 4. gangnet:

Spoilers:
I still don’t understand “Knowing”. The whole plot was that there was no plot? Cage is running around trying to solve a complex mystery, and the answer is that aliens/angels want to take his kid? So why not just take his kid? Why the runaround? And why did his kid suddenly start scribbling numbers in the third act? What could they possibly have been for at that point? Trouble in the new world? Repeat of the same numbers? Uh, read them then instead of taking doors apart? And I still don’t get the stones.
I liked the religious subtext, faith treated seriously for a change. But the movie was a mess. Did the aliens send the prophecies? Did they take an interest in these particular people because of their ability?
And the kids carrying rabbits was about as subtle as a brick to the head.
I really, really have to know what ending you would have put on this. I know you do this professionally, but if it’s not an out of bounds question?

Jul 15, 2009 - 4:08 am 5. Daniel Crandall:

Put it on the Netflix list and moved to the top. Gotta see what gets Klavan’s dander up.

I wonder how this will rank with another Cage stinker (I know there are a lot of them) “Next.”

Jul 15, 2009 - 11:20 am 6. Daniel Crandall:

So, I sat through “Knowing” last night. Hoo-boy, was Andrew right about the last 40 minutes or so. I guessed early on who the “men in black” were. It wasn’t hard; the hints dropped early in the movie were as obvious as Obama blaming “stupid [read: racist] cops” for the Gates incident. After figuring out why the kids could hear the voices, I realized I was watching the Richard Dawkins view of the universe. If you don’t know what I’m talking about then go watch this; you might be able to watch it streaming through Netflix if it is still available.

The movie began with a great premise and interesting characters. It ended in irrational nonsense. Andrew is spot on about the movie. Watch the first hour and twenty minutes, then turn it off and make up the rest. You’ll be better for it.

Jul 24, 2009 - 8:57 am