Minute Stakes

Variety film critic Todd McCarthy says of movie trailers, “. . . you basically get an abbreviated version of the movie in three or so minutes” (“So Much for Keeping Secrets,” by Joe Leydon, July 4).

Is this not an admission of the following truth: Most movies are so thin or hackneyed of plot, lacking in depth of character or any thematic merit, that you pretty much can boil them down to three minutes of substance (from their original 110 to 150 minutes)? Can you imagine boiling down the essence of any given classic film: “Citizen Kane” or “Gone With the Wind” or “Paths of Glory,” just to mention a few, to three minutes?

Great movies are not about what happens. I can get that from a newspaper. Great movies are, first of all, great stories: What happens to whom, and why it happens to them, and how they solve their predicament, such that they learn from it. Thus we, the audience, learn something worthwhile in our lives and souls for having watched them.

All great movies found their genesis in a great story. And no lousy story ever generated a great movie.

MAUDE HAM

Burbank