What makes GAME NIGHT a Perfectly Structured Romp?
Following is essentially Game Night in prose form, with my own commentary on what makes it efficient and story-wise. I’m using it as a sort of back-engineered guide to use alongside the film or script to learn how beats land and information is delivered. You can do whatever you want with it, I’m not yer mm. But if you use in any professional / study / public capacity please cite and let me know.
Dickinson, Empathy, and Anachronistic Adaptations
The show is Coen-esque in its metatextual acknowledgement: Dickinson is a bare semblance of a true story, and in lieu of details which have been lost to time, anyways, it serves us a fantastical recounting of oral traditions, staticked with age of generations, coloured with time and our own biases.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF QUEER CODING IN FILM: PART 3
Part 1 was thesis, introduction of queerness in film pre-Hays, exploration of what the Hays Code was and its broad impact on the film industry. Part 2 covered what ‘queer coding’ looked like in films post-Hays to today. This post digs a little into the impact of coding: its ever-rippling effects, how it has shaped … Continue reading
A Brief History of Queer Coding in Film: Part 2
Weirdly, post-Hays films were sometimes worse than Hays-era films, both creatively and in how they deal with LGBTQIA+ topics and characters! Let’s look at some of these films, from The Exorcist to First Cow.
A Brief History of Queer Coding in Film: Part 1
I was recently asked to put together a short primer about the history of queer coding. This is nowhere near exhaustive, and though chapters 5 and 6 are less egregiously white, it’s still a very pale overview; if you have film suggestions, additional thoughts and specifics, etc., would love to hear from you in the … Continue reading
A Tale of Two Macbeths
Justin Kurzel’s gritty, saturated, PTSD-riddled character study keeps a few stage conventions but mostly leans into its more filmic aspects, where Joel Coen’s hazy, black-and-white, machination-laden adaptation neatly splits the difference between stage and screen.
On Midnight Mass and Genre Expectations
The first problem with Midnight Mass is it doesn’t deliver on its promises. That’s not a problem with the show, but happens because its promises are wholly inaccurate. This is becoming a universal problem, exacerbated by handing all advertising responsibilities to detached departments wholly interested (and job-dependent) in getting people to watch a film, rather than … Continue reading
The MCU’s Most Dangerous Villain
In a different corner of the multiverse, Tony Stark could be one of the MCU’s most delicious villains; Iron Man 3 gives us his means, motive, and opportunity.
Episode Study – Person of Interest “If-Then-Else” – Using Set Design, Blocking, and Cinematography to Underscore Themes
Person of Interest‘s “If-Then-Else” is often considered one of the best episodes of the series (and I’ll argue, easily one of the best network episodes the last decade). The writing is clever and tight, playing with form and plot and time, bringing to bear character traits painfully established and romantic pairings long in the making, … Continue reading
Divide and Conquer
I’ve wanted to stay away from the C word on this blog, at least outside of practical on-set situations and discussion of how it has impacted storytelling on various shows – SUPERSTORE incorporating masks in their blue-collar cast of characters, LEGENDS OF TOMORROW creating cast bubbles and so writing fewer overlapping ventures, KEVIN CAN F**K … Continue reading
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Mel Killingsworth - Film and TV blog 