newcritics - Latest Comments in Juno talks back to the King of California

Re: Juno talks back to the King of California

oakling — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 17:18:10 -0000

Excellent and true - and backed up by the fact that I don't remember Juno having narration at all! In fact, I can't imagine it with narration. There's nothing worse, in my opinion, than a piece of art that relies on telling us what is going on while the story limps alongside the author/artist's pushy voice.

Re: Juno talks back to the King of California

Dan Leo — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 14:02:07 -0000

Speaking of Raymond Chandler, another movie that brilliantly uses voice-over is Double Indemnity. But let's be grimly realistic: that narration was written by Chandler and Billy Wilder, based on a book by James Cain, spoken by Fred MacMurray. Giants trod the streets of Hollywood in those days. And speaking of Billy Wilder, how about Bill Holden's great post-mortem voice-over in Sunset Boulevard? That noir era (including movies that weren't noirs, like All About Eve) had some great voice-overs, but they were written by real writers, spoken by some great actors.

Re: Juno talks back to the King of California

Lance Mannion — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 12:48:34 -0000

Thanks, Dan. You've confirmed what I suspected---the narration was there but a waste of sound and time. I didn't "hear" it because it wasn't worth listening to. I'm not a fan of Dennis Lehane's writing generally, but the detective series that includes the novel Gone Baby Gone is overwritten, over-determined, and under-interesting, mainly because the character Casey Affleck played is a dull storyteller and a pretty poor observer of life.

Murder My Sweet is an all-around good detective novel. Powell is a surprisingly good Marlow.

Re: Juno talks back to the King of California

Dan Leo — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 22:58:16 -0000

Hey, Lance, to try to answer your little parenthetical question to me: I haven't read the book version of Gone Baby Gone, so I can't say how much of the narration comes from the book. But it wasn't the narration that bothered me about that movie, it was the completely implausible plot. Y'know, Two Days in Paris aside, I think some French movies have done narration well. Like Jules and Jim. The whole trick is to have your narration add a whole other rich layer to your movie, otherwise don't bother. Y'know what I loved? Dick Powell's voice-over in Murder My Sweet. Brilliant. I also find that with a lot of so-so movies I actually prefer listening to the director's or actor's voice-over commentary to the actual humdrum dialogue of the movie. But what they never say is why they were dumb enough to spend all that time and energy making a movie with a bad script.