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 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.
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.
Live, Write, Repeat – on EDGE OF TOMORROW’s lead connundrum
If Edge of Tomorrow had come a decade or two earlier – say between The Colour of Money and Jerry Maguire and the first Mission: Impossible or two – Cruise may’ve been able to show other facets. But through a series of personal life and project selection choices, Cruise has created a Movie Persona who overshadows, informs, and essentially rewrites all character aspects which may be on the page.
Pilot Season: ATLANTA
Donald Glover’s Atlanta is unique in many ways: it plays with style, tone, and ancient mythology while still staying mostly grounded in reality; it evokes a hyper-specific place* but with characters you could imagine living in most US cities; it hits a dark notes most US half-hours won’t come near; it clearly utilises Glover’s experience … Continue reading
On the Unique Joys and Upcoming Trials & Tribulations of Saint Ted Lasso
Like the buoyancy of its titular character, the exact vibe of Ted Lasso is hard to pin down. It’s a family comedy with sex and swears, a deceptively simple drama about people trying real hard, dotted with very American jokes and thoroughly English sensibilities. It’s the weird characters and team-microcosm-within-a-specific-organisation-within-a-specific-town of Parks … Continue reading
In Defence of Nate Heywood
In a rogue’s gallery of runaways and billionaires, clones and scientists, ex-assassins and not-ex-thieves, nerds and stoners, demons and reformed government bureaucrats, Nate Heywood is the worst. Among examples of ever so slowly growing and learning and improving, he is also the best. Legends is the wildest, zaniest, most diverse show on television. It’s as … Continue reading
Character Introduction: Johnny Guitar
Introducing characters is an art form. I’ve been working on a TV pilot and while we’ve had the plot arcs nailed for months, making sure we get the characters across economically while being interesting and not too expository and using action while fitting them seamlessly into the plot and explaining how they relate to other … Continue reading
Character Development in The Rise of Skywalker and The Mandalorian
I recently guested on Draft Zero to talk about about how the writing of The Rise of Skywalker and The Mandalorian use fanservice differently in shaping story. You should listen to that, and all the great work Stu and Chas do. This post about fanservice in character development notes a few of those key things, … Continue reading
On Long Goodbyes and Loyalty
My upbringing was starkly black and white, everything strictly categorised as sin and acceptable, allowed and not. The massive ‘sin: not allowed’ category swallowed everything in legalism and immutable consequences. I fell in love with noir partly because it has no such hangups. I savoured noir’s evocative language and sexual undercurrent. I learned to believe … Continue reading
Mel Killingsworth - Film and TV blog 