Casting a Pall

I watched The Pallbearer on cable last night. It's a David Schwimmer vehicle from early in Friends history, and it's not good.

It, in fact, falls into the inexplicably well-populated category of "melancholy movie featuring cast of people who are incompetent at their own lives". I use "incompetent" in this sense: Given an unusual or complicated situation, the character will never take the sensible obvious action and is seemingly unaware that one can influence the scale and nature of an interaction.

Much of Woody Allen's oeuvre is at least akin to this genre. One of Ben Stiller's character types is this guy.

If, as a writer, you ask your character "What do you do?" and get no answer, I think, probably, you should find yourself another character.

Posted by Greg at November 25, 2006 1:46 PM