Indie Film Poll : What Makes a Movie Worth Watching (Page 2 of 2)

I'm not the biggest fx person if the story isn't well written. I mean the story has to make sense.

I had to go with the story first, which to me includes dialogue.  Followed by directing.

I'll use the Star Wars prequels as an example:  The overarching storyline wasn't really that good.  George Lucas gave us a slave child in the first one, who didn't seem to care that the Jedi were taking him away from his mother, and a whiney adolescent in the the later two.  Despite that there were still some moments which were good and some which could have been good, which were ruined by terrible dialogue and a wooden delivery.  Natalie Portman and to a lesser extent Hayden Christian are both fine actors, but if you have a bad director and a bad script, and a bunch of George Lucas yes men, well you see the result....Was anyone truly convinced that the two of them were in love?  It's too bad that I wasn't, because I truly wanted to believe it.  I think there's good reason why Empire is widely regarded as the best of the six.

Of course, everything else that goes into making a film (cinematography, acting, gore, etc,.) is vitally important, as well.  But I think if you can see the passion involved in making the movie, and the script is well written it's easy to overlook one or two of these things...so long as they ain't too terribly bad.

I agree with most everyone here.  In my opinion, gore is the lowest on the list.

Last edited by sMart (2006-10-20 00:01:31)

Hey guys,

This is a great poll and conversation, and i can say that yes, film makers should read this forum.

Being a film maker (still not comfortable calling myself that yet) i think its great to see that i'm not crazy in my thoughts that a shit load of hard work, a great script and decent acting are strong footholds towards a decent movie.

To me, a movie is kind of like a car... you need an engine (director), a shell (script) and wheels (actors) to even get moving down the road.  If built well with care and thought put into it, the car should last a long time and built up a great reputation.  Now, after you have the car built, there are accessories that you can add to make your car more appealing; a nice stereo (sound), power steering (cinematography), HID headlights (lighting), a hot paint job (fx).... and on and on....

My moto for my upcoming short movie is crap in = crap out, so i'm putting everything into this short, even though its only 15 mins long i've already invested close to 8 months. 

I'm going to print these two pages and keep them pinned up as a reminder to stict to a good script, have decent actors, use other shots than just the tripod or hand held shots, have a great score, and springle on the gore sparingly and in the right spots.

thanks for the great post!

TiM - exactly.... you can't neglect any one area..... but you also have to know which is more important and which ones can add more value than others.

For me to enjoy a film it usually has to have at least a capable director. Writing I think is the second most important but just look at a film like "The Woods", which had a script that really went nowhere and was over long. With Lucky Mckee though he's a strong enough film maker that the film was watchable at the very least. The only time I think that Gore or FX can be more important than directing is in exploitation films. But I think most horror fan would agree that the best films are when they do it all.

I think you don't the best acting to create a good movie although it may depend on what kind of movie you're doing. Gore and SFX are the least important of the list, after all it's the scares not the shock factor that really matter. Cinematography and directing should be higher on everyones list (my ignorant opinion) because those thing could really make a mediocre film into a great one. At last but not least, I don't think that the musical score matters that much; it creates an atmosphere but I could easily be done with ambient sounds (well, maybe not that easy). The thing about musical score that really pisses me off is the modern films in which they use a crappy wannabe-metal band to make the film a badass one.

Oh yeah, an another important thing: T&A. j/k