In Contention

Tag: Paul Schrader

  • Exhaustion of narrative

    Paul SchraderThe Guardian carries an excellent piece today by veteran screenwriter and filmmaker Paul Schrader (“Taxi Driver”) which offers a different take on the issue of Hollywood’s current penchant for narrative recycling — that the increasing number of media formats contributing to daily life is limiting our capacity for fresh stories.

    His argument is that, with everything from Twitter to YouTube to reality TV supplying us with a consistent feed of mini-narratives, it’s harder for the less spontaneous medium of feature film to maintain a sense of innovation:

    Writers have always known there are a limited number of storylines … We do tell variations of the same stories over and over. That’s not what I mean by the “exhaustion of narrative”. What is new is the omnipresence and ubiquity of plot created by media proliferation. We are inundated by narrative. We are swimming in storylines.

    Originality has always been in short supply. Does the proliferation of media mean that it is harder to be original today than it was 50 years ago? Well, yes. Today’s viewers live in a biosphere of narrative. Twenty-four-seven, multimedia, all the time. When a storyteller competes for a viewer’s attention, he not only competes with simultaneously occurring narratives, he competes with the variations of his own narrative. That’s real competition. The bar of originality has been raised. The media marketplace puts a premium on anything “new” or “fresh” and, at the same time, inundates its viewers with continual and competing narratives.

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  • BEST ACTOR WATCH: Jeff Goldblum in ‘Adam Resurrected’

    Looking at the latest contenders to muscle in on an already crowded Best Actor field, you could be forgiven for thinking it’s 1986 or something.

    First, the formerly washed-up Mickey Rourke rebounds with an apparently career-best performance in “The Wrestler” that is generating loud Oscar buzz.

    Now Rourke’s relative contemporary, Jeff Goldblum, is setting tongues wagging for another indie effort, albeit one with a much lower profile going in. As Holocaust survivor Adam Steiner in “Adam Resurrected,” the latest film from the ever-underrated Paul Schrader, Goldblum is attracting the kind of attention he hasn’t seen since, well, his career-making performance in “The Fly.”

    Writing from Telluride, where the film bowed, Cinematical’s Kim Voynar began beating the drum:

    Goldblum’s performance as Adam is complex and engrossing to watch, and while I can’t begin to fathom what it must have taken out of him to get inside this story and character to pull the performance off at this level, it’s truly a wonder to behold onscreen. The Oscar buzz circulating Goldblum’s turn in this film is far from hype; he educes the death and rebirth of a man’s soul in such a way that I’d be hard pressed to compare it to anything I’ve ever seen onscreen.

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