I know that in the practical sense, a story can be as simple or as complex as needed, or we wouldn't have such gems as Ecks vs. Sever or any given Uwe Boll masterpiece. But for the more memorable movies in your favories, isn't there something deeper, something under the surface that carries you even after the credits have rolled off the screen and the last granules of popcorn swept from the sticky floor?
There is an enduring quality to some movies that is elusive, fodder for film school classes and those early-morning sleepless sessions when I don't really want to get out of bed but I can't quite sleep.
I'm not exactly making masterpieces here. At this point, I'm really not making much of anything (analysis paralysis ahoy!), but I do want to play with something that has at least some merit to a wider audience.
And no, you don't get to see everything I do. You should be thankful for that, really. What you see gets filtered and processed, taken out of the aether and placed into a context, trimmed and spruced to fit a mold of some sort of vague shape, hopefully with some thread of continuity that can be pulled from it. You don't get to see the messy bits, the ends and pieces, the flubs and flops and the utter crap that spills from my fingers and lips and other bits.
Does it matter? Maybe. You are probably more forgiving than the anonymous audience who might see my fiddlings on YouTube. And your opinion matters more to me than cletus the slack-jawed yokel. But I'm also well aware that I don't have the resources available to carry even the meager production sausage of Alone in the Dark or Batman & Robin, or even Showgirls.
(Pardon me, now I have this bad taste in my mouth. I don't know where it could have come from. It tastes like sweat and desperation and Elizabeth Berkeley's career.)
I think what it boils down to is this:
Much like the recalcitrant bride, I don't want to suck.
But who the hell really cares if I put something out there that's not a bit of brilliance? 99% of what's on YouTube is devoid of content anyway, the provebial sock in the turtle soup. Most of it doesn't even pretend to be anything but random crap, and at least I'd be working towards something rather than this poodling of doit/don't.
In the long run, it likely doesn't matter. When there's a project that I'm gonna feel like bleeding for, I'll be putting myself into it a lot more. I'm just feeling this really strong need to do something creative.