Plausibles

Defending, or at least discussing his generally positive review of Flightplan (a slick, creepy, don't-think-about-it-too-hard thriller) Mick LaSalle of the Chronicle notes:

"Alfred Hitchcock had a word for critics who watched movies in this way [worrying about everything making sense]. He called them "the plausibles." (Critics will never complain that a movie isn't "believable," because that sounds naive. Instead they'll use the word "plausible," which means the same thing, but sounds better.) Movies are not Aristotelian tracts. They tend to be about unusual and even improbable situations."

Well, yeah, that's true. Except when it's not. In a movie where the parts mix together well--where the acting is good, the direction moves fast, the film looks good and the dialogue is either believable or so smart that I don't care about its authenticity--in a movie that engages me, I don't stop to worry about whether it makes sense. When I saw Speed for the first time I recognized early on that I was watching a really well-done goofy movie. So by the time they ran out of highway and launched the bus across 40 feet of dead space and landed it, I wasn't saying "No!" I was laughing and saying "Hell, yes!" Because it was goofy but it was fun. The Matrix was the same sort of movie for me--a perfectly gorgeous Irish setter of a movie: dumb but beautiful. I knew better than to look at the underpinnings of the story because they were clearly made of balsa wood and tinsel, but I had fun watching it.

With films where the various parts are out of balance--where the look has been allowed to run away with the film, or the acting is crappy, or the filmmakers have seriously miscalculated what would make the movie work (like with the second Indiana Jones film), then I get stopped, and all I can see is the holes. Why doesn't something work? Sometimes because it's trying too hard (everything in Coppola's Dracula irritated me from the get-go because it was so claustrophobically overwrought). Sometimes it's mistaking set dressing for other production values (anyone but me remember the dreadful Legend, with all the dandelion fluff floating through the air, and poor Tim Curry in a Styrofoam demon suit?). Whatever it is, if the filmmaker lets me slow down enough to see the flaws, it stops me. And if I get stopped enough, I get testy, because I really-o truly-o want to be lost in that filmmaker's world for a couple of hours. When I get testy, of course, all hope is lost, because then all I see are the flaws.

This came up this weekend in my writers' workshop. We have a new member, and were discussing the kinds of critiques we give or get. My way of critiquing: I'll return a manuscript with considerable line edits if I find technical problems, but mostly I want to talk about the things that stop me, or that throw me bodily out of the story I'm reading. It can be on the level of a sentence--if I have to stop to re-read a sentence twice because the syntax is contorted or I have to spend too much time decoding it, I can lose track of where I was in the story; my emotional bond with the story gets shattered. It can be a character who irritates me, not because she's meant to be irritating, but because the author hasn't made it clear what's charming or sympathetic about the character. It can be any number of technical things. Sometimes it's just that the story doesn't work for me, and it's my responsibility to realize that and say so. I don't go to horror movies because I don't like them. If someone gives me a military SF novella to critique, I have to put aside my general disinterest in the form before I can judge whether it works on its own merits.
I guess what I'm saying is that I am a reluctant "Plausible." Give me a decent story to get lost in and I'm yours. Take me for granted and I'm lost.