One of the most distinctive and imitated hit songs of the 1960s was Jimmy Dean's country-music narration, "Big Bad John".
These tools are mostly unavailable to the screenwriter, or, when attempted onscreen, often lead to bad ends — cloying narration, excessive monologues, and visual gimmicks that strive to gin up a feeling of disorientation.
"Whatever visual poetry the film possesses is overwhelmed by the thuddingly bad and nearly ceaseless narration," Mike Hale wrote in The New York Times in 2009.
But whatever visual poetry the film possesses is overwhelmed by the thuddingly bad and nearly ceaseless narration, written by Ms. Benacerraf and Pierre Seghers.
As with this past work, in Thus Bad Begins, Marías's narration has a deceptively aimless quality, circling round apparently minor or inconsequential details that are gradually revealed to be integral to an extremely taut structure.
At times, the fetishised, HD, slo-mo combat brings to mind The Hurt Locker, Kathryn Bigelow's Oscar-winning Iraq war drama; at others, the cheap production values and portentous narration resemble a bad History Channel documentary.
A fedora-sporting Galloway distracts us with his narration, recycling banalities and bad jokes.
With a hectoring score (part fake Hans Zimmer, part bad rock music) abetting the overripe narration, "North America" is perhaps a trip best taken with the sound down.
The narration enacts the narrator's fate.
"A good prop can help a film's believability," in narration he begins simply, "while a bad one can pull you out of the experience".
