Word: plot
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...That's about it for the plot of this 72 min. movie. But in The Exiles, the texture is the text. Few fiction or nonfiction films nail the sense of place and time as palpably as this one does. We're in the late '50s, when TV had come into even the poorest homes and a gallon of gas cost 30 cents. We get a glimpse of the Victorian houses that had once been Bunker Hill's elitist pride and were now slum abodes. The Angels Flight railway, the movie theater, the Ritz Bar are seen in their full functioning...
...making a mint could be a struggle. The other big film musicals of this decade--Chicago, Dreamgirls and Hairspray--had casts of mostly young actors. The Mamma Mia! contingent is different, as will now be proved with a précis of the movie's plot (a knockoff of the 1968 comedy Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell) and a few actuarial stats...
...Verne story has been cinematized a dozen or more times, including a TV movie earlier this year with Rick Schroder and Peter Fonda. The one in theaters today, directed by Eric Brevig and written by Michael Weiss, Jennifer Flackett and Mark Levin, sticks pretty closely to the plot: Professor Trevor Anderson (Fraser) finds a runic inscription of an underground route inside a volcano and, with his nephew Sean (Josh Hutcherson) and an Icelandic guide (Anna Briem), locates an underworld Eden and all manner of exotic animals. And, just as in the Verne, they end up in Sicily...
...engineer, he was vexed by the structure of narrative fiction. He was especially interested in what he called "middle structure" - "at the bottom level of a novel are sentences and scenes and paragraphs," he says. "Tiny particles of the story. At the top level is the easy-to-summarize plot - it's got some twist, a climax and a denouement." But at the middle level, he says, when you look at a book, chapter by chapter, "you don't get any guidance at all. What keeps you going?" Wroblewski says that the middle level of narrative is the trickiest part...
...definitely suffered a lot from this," says Anke Wilkening, a movie restorer at the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau Foundation, which owns the right to the picture. "A great deal of the plot remained mysterious in the abridged version ... the relationships between the different characters, for example...