Narrative Flow

Okay, I have a bit of a rant to go on concerning the lack of good narrative/plot flow in movies today. If you don't care about "hearing" me rant; tune in next time.

So, my big issue with a lot of movies and some TV shows...and possibly even some books that I have watched/read lately is that all the writers seemed to have forgotten how a proper narrative should flow. Now I'm not saying that a story has to be 100% linear; that it has to follow in a straight line or anything. I've seen plots that go from A to Z. From Z to A. From A1 to B1 to C1 to A2 to C2 to B2. From A to M then back to G then on to Q and straight through to Z. Trust me, I understand using interesting story structure and organization to enhance the storytelling. What I don't understand is the apparent trend to go from A to 7 then over to :) then randomly jump to $ then to Q and maybe take a short vacation at 384.

I just watched the third Transformers movie. I was SO confused and finally bored by this film. It seemed like there was absolutely not solid narrative flow. I was constantly like "Wait, how did they get there?" or "Why are we here?" or "What is going on?" or "How did that happen?" And trust me this was not an intellectual, subtle movie by any stretch of the imagination. At one point a bunch of characters were in a building to try and line up a rocket attack on an enemy position. Suddenly the building is under attack by bad guys. I was like "Wait, why are they attacking that building; since when are the bad guys following them or even aware of their presence?" As far as I could tell from the past few minutes of the movie the bad guys should have had no knowledge of the good guys being there and therefore should have had no reason to attack that building.

The whole movie felt like it was cutting between disjointed, poorly planned, barely connected if at all, scenes of various groups of people doing mostly unexplained actions in mostly illogical locations for mostly unfathomable reasons. My head still hurts.

I have seen this problem to a greater or lesser degree in a wide variety of media lately and it is just annoying. Another manifestation of this issue is the super quick cuts that seem to be standard fare in a lot of modern movies. Sometimes they are cutting around so quick I literally can not follow what is happening on the screen. I really wish that they would just slow things down a bit, focus more on order and structure, and realize that a random collection of scenes tossed together with duct tape and spit does not a plot make.

Anyway, rant off. TTYL.