Podcast
Sunday, April 23, 2017
Moving Days
Hey guys, we bought a house! (Directly across the street from the house we’ve been renting, so it’s a short move, distance wise, but I’m sure it’ll be a long move.) I’ll be back soon.
Thursday, April 20, 2017
Chinatown: The Archive
This was an interesting case where I closely examined the movie only to discover that it kind of fell apart under the scrutiny. Ultimately I conclude that it makes no damn sense, but that’s okay because it has just enough of a semblance of sense to be a masterpiece.
- The Ultimate Story Checklist: Chinatown
- Rulebook Casefile: Jake’s Extreme Resourcefulness in Chinatown
- Straying from the Party Line: Jake's Muddy Motivation in Chinatown
- Rulebook Casefile: How Does Chinatown Get Away with 73 Loose Ends?
- Rulebook Casefile: Thematic Details Throughout Chinatown
- Rulebook Casefile: Closing an Empathy Hole and Opening Up a Motivation Hole in Chinatown
Wednesday, April 19, 2017
The Many Ironies of Casablanca
As I update the old checklists, I thought it would also be good to take some time along the way to look deeper into irony. As we did with Blazing Saddles, let’s run through fourteen ironies you can find in Casablanca:
Your story will be more meaningful if you present a fundamentally ironic concept (which will sometimes be encapsulated by an ironic title).
Your story will be more meaningful if you present a fundamentally ironic concept (which will sometimes be encapsulated by an ironic title).
- The least patriotic American has to save the Allied cause. (The title is not ironic.)
- Rick the cynic used to be an idealist
- Rick the cynic is filled with tender heartache
- He’s too cold-blooded, but the flip side is that he’s very cool.
- Rick finds heroic fulfillment by being placed in a deadly situation and having his heart ripped up again.
- Rick has made it clear he doesn’t care if Victor makes it out of Casablanca.
- When Rick discovers that Victor is with Ilsa, he suddenly has to care.
- Rick is insulted, but says, “I stay up late at night crying about it.”
- Strasser thinks he’s very much in control, but we can see otherwise.
- Ilsa says she’ll meet Rick at the train station, but we know that she won’t have the chance.
- It’s tempting to say this movie has an ironic tone, because it’s full of cool, jaded sarcasm, but that’s not the way I use the term. This movie does not take a sarcastic attitude towards storytelling itself (as Blazing Saddles does, for instance) so I would say that it doesn’t have an ironic tone.
- Romantic love vs. love of country
- It’s important to fight for freedom, but do you have any right to endanger someone’s life by asking them to come to a resistance meeting?
- Rick finds fulfillment by sending away the woman he loves.
Tuesday, April 18, 2017
Casablanca: The Archive (and Updated Checklist)
Another early one. We’ll spend some more time on this movie tomorrow...
Monday, April 17, 2017
Bridesmaids: The Archive (and Updated Checklist)
This was the very first movie I ever did, so there’s a lot fewer posts:
Sunday, April 16, 2017
The Bourne Identity: The Archive (and Updated Checklist)
A wonderful movie:
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- The Ultimate Story Checklist: The Bourne Identity
- Straying from the Party Line: The Bourne Identity, Part 1: No Moment of Humanity
- Straying from the Party Line: The Bourne Identity, Part 2: When Invisibles Go Too Far
- Straying from the Party Line: The Bourne Identity, Part 3: Three Henchman Structure and Repeated Beats
- Rulebook Casefile: Tone Maintenance in The Bourne Identity
- Rulebook Casefile: The Bourne Identity’s Everyman that Isn’t
- Rulebook Casefile: The Way the World Works in The Bourne Identity
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Are
set-up and pay-off used to dazzle the audience (and maybe distract attention
from plot contrivances)?
|
We’re shown very
early on that the Americans are so frustrated that they’re looking up
everywhere Marie has ever lived.
When this pays off for them an hour later, it doesn’t seem dubious.
|
Thursday, April 13, 2017
Rulebook Casefile: 12 Ironies in Blazing Saddles
Hi guys, I talk a lot about irony here and in my book, but I’ve never specifically focused on all the ironies in one story before. I just re-ran the checklist for Blazing Saddles, so let’s go back and look at all the ironies in that movies. Here are the thirteen ironies I list in my book:
Your story will be more meaningful if you present a fundamentally ironic concept (which will sometimes be encapsulated by an ironic title).
…and a great flaw that’s the ironic flip side of a great strength.
Your story will be more meaningful if you present a fundamentally ironic concept (which will sometimes be encapsulated by an ironic title).
- A white old west town is saved by a black sheriff. (An ironic title is the only type of irony this movie doesn’t have)
- The black sheriff is a condemned track layer.
…and a great flaw that’s the ironic flip side of a great strength.
- He’s self-destructively defiant, which almost gets him killed, but the flip side of that is that he’s charming and funny, which saves his life many times.
- Bart finds heroic fulfillment by being placed in a deadly situation
- He clearly expects a hero’s welcome when he rides into town, but does not receive one, to put it mildly.
- Bart winds up a hostage in his own jail.
- No shortage of sarcasm: “Dare I even say, president?” “Dare! Dare!”
- The governor keeps talking about how important he is, but he has no power.
- Before Bart meets Mongo, he says that Mongo can’t be as menacing as people say, but we’ve met him and we know better.
- The ending of this movie adopts an ironic tone, and gets away with it. They ride off into the sunset, then get tired of riding and switch to a car.
- Good vs. good: Individualism vs. solidarity, standing up to people vs. winning them over.
- Bad vs. bad: Anger vs. subservience
- He saves the town but is too discontent to stay.
Labels:
Blazing Saddles,
Character,
Irony,
Rulebook Casefile,
Theme
Wednesday, April 12, 2017
Blue Velvet: The Archive (And Updated Checklist)
Probably the most arty movie I’ve done, though it does just fine by the checklist, so maybe I cheated by picking this one. I should tackle some more difficult movies. Any suggestions as to which one?
Tuesday, April 11, 2017
Blazing Saddles: The Archive (and Updated Checklist)
This is more recent, so there’s more posts per movie.
- The Ultimate Story Checklist: Blazing Saddles (updated to v6!)
- Storyteller’s Rulebook: Equal Offense Is a Tame Choice
- Straying from the Party Line: The All-Powerful All-Confident Hero of Blazing Saddles
- Rulebook Casefile: Subtext and Divided Identity in “Blazing Saddles”
- Storyteller’s Rulebook: Combine the Drama of Dog-Bites-Man With the Comedy of Man-Bites-Dog
- Storyteller’s Rulebook: If you Break a Rule, you Make a Rule
- 12 Ironies in Blazing Saddles
Monday, April 10, 2017
An Education: The Archive (and Updated Checklist!)
I do love this movie. Updated to the sixth and final version of the checklist!
The Ultimate Story Checklist: An Education
Straying from the Party Line: An Education
Denying Synthesis in An Education
Storyteller’s Rulebook: Avoid the Sorkin Stammer
Bonus: They later did a follow-up to that Sorkin Supercut. Wonderfully unbearable:
The Ultimate Story Checklist: An Education
Straying from the Party Line: An Education
Denying Synthesis in An Education
Storyteller’s Rulebook: Avoid the Sorkin Stammer
Bonus: They later did a follow-up to that Sorkin Supercut. Wonderfully unbearable:
Sunday, April 09, 2017
Alien: The Archive (and Updated Checklist!)
I’ll also go back through the Checklists, archive their posts, and update them to the current list. Again, this is a lot of work for me without as much benefit for you, but the whole point of the checklists is to create a robust data set that I can mine for all sorts of purposes, which means they all need to be the same version. We’re going back to one of the earliest checklists here, which means I had a lot fewer follow-up posts about each movie. I should go back and generate some more.
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I do kind of miss that question. Sorry buddy, that’s the price of progress!
- The Ultimate Story Checklist, v6: Alien
- Straying from the Party Line: Alien (I used to do these all at once)
- Morally Ascending in Alien (This is in reference to a question that’s no longer on the checklist, and I don’t really miss it, but it’s interesting to see what’s gone.)
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Are
unrealistic genre-specific elements a big metaphor for a more common
experience (not how life really is, but how life really feels)?
|
Yes: the horror of
childbirth, the evil of corporations, the dangers of mining, etc.
|
I do kind of miss that question. Sorry buddy, that’s the price of progress!
Thursday, April 06, 2017
The Great Guru Showdown: The Archive
It’s never a bad time to run my big-ass concordance of everybody’s structure (NEWLY UPDATED to include Dan Harmon’s Story Circle and Film Crit Hulk’s Five-Act Structure!)
The first few posts here made it into the book, but then there’s lot of good stuff that didn’t make it in. I made my own graphics for lots of these! Ah, to be young again...
The first few posts here made it into the book, but then there’s lot of good stuff that didn’t make it in. I made my own graphics for lots of these! Ah, to be young again...
Wednesday, April 05, 2017
Books vs. Movies: The Archive
Given our recent discussions of prose, it seems like a good time to archive this old series…
- Why the Oscars are Televised and the Pulitzers Aren't
- There is No "i" in "Film"
- Friends vs. Strangers
- Movies Must Be Explicable
- Movies Have Faster Reaction Time
- The Present is Tense
- Seeing is Believing
- There is Only Do
- Movies Must Climax
- All Behavior Looks Worse Onscreen
- All Behavior Looks Worse Onscreen, Part 2
- In Books, Character Can Motivate
- Sometimes Movies (Or, in This Case, TV) Can Go Places Books Can’t
Monday, April 03, 2017
How to Create a TV Show: The Archive
Now let’s go back and look at my TV posts (I’m focusing at first on those sections that didn’t make it into the book.) These have held up pretty well. I propose at one point that you should do something crazy like pitch a pirate show, years before competing pirate shows actually made it on TV...
- Spec Pilots Are Nutty
- The First Three Decisions
- Network, Cable, or In Between?
- Serialized, Procedural, or In Between?
- Premise Pilot, Center Cut, or In Between?
- Spec Pilots Can Go A Little Wild
- A Long Way To Go And A Short Time To Get There
- Why TV Loves Cops, Doctors and Lawyers
- Establish a Unique Point of View
- Identify the Hole in Their Schedule
- Create a Long-Lasting, Irreconcilable Hero
- Polarize Your Ensemble
- Master the Weave
- The Heroes Must Have Competition
- Establish the Philosophy And/Or Theme
- End With A Twist
- Create an Unsafe Space
- Build Up Potential Energy
- Give Your Main Hero a Flaw That Resonates With the Setting and Theme of the Show
- The Pilot Must Showcase the Appeal of the Show
- Your Show Must Have Appeal
- Create Sparks
Sunday, April 02, 2017
What's the Matter With Hollywood?: The Archive
Hi guys, I’ve been giving you guys a ton of new material recently, and I’ve appreciated the lively comments, but I thought I’d switch things up for a while, in a way that’s going to still be a lot of work for me but less value for you, so yay! Here’s the problem: I need to do a better job archiving my old posts. Though it no longer has a blogspot URL, I still host this site on Blogger, which means it still has their infrastructure. The most annoying part of that, for me, has always been that Blogger archives posts in backwards order, starting with the most recent, so if I create a ten-part series, and then link to that series in the sidebar (by linking to its tag), it’ll start with number ten and count down. One thing I’ve meant to do for forever is to create archive pages that I can link to for each one. The problem is that each of these has to be its own post, so I can’t just go back and do all that in the background. So here I am doing it. Does that mean that this site is going into reruns for a while? Somewhat, but hopefully you’ll enjoy rediscovering old posts. I know I have. On some of these, I have egg on my face: I predict that Netflix streaming might never make as much money as DVD rentals. I predict that the third Hobbit will be much lamer than it was (I later appended an update). Anyway, these are a ton of work for me, but I’ll try to speed through them for your sakes, or mix them up with some new material. I thought I would start with a series that I haven’t updated in a long time, since that might be more interesting to revisit...
- All Movies Must Be All Things To All People
- Potential is Worth More Than Reality
- Movies Take WAY Too Long to Get Made
- The Star System is Broken
- The Strange Disappearance of Co-Stars
- The CGI Disaster
- CGI Ruins Stories, Too
- The Real Problem with 3-D (and Surround Sound)
- Art Requires Distance
- Technical Innovation Doesn’t Require New Technology (Later referenced in my write-up of Boyhood)
- Movies Apologize For Themselves
- True Stories Are Bought From Self-Interested Hustlers
- Who's Afraid of DVDs?
- What’s the Matter with Hollywood in 2012 (Or Is It Me)?
- What’s the Matter With Hollywood: Hair Edition
- Those "American" Accents
- Empty Emotion, Consequence-less Sacrifice
- High Stakes Can Get Boring
- The Golden Geese are Dying of Exhaustion
- Filmmakers Despise Their Idealistic Source Material
- Villains are Dehumanized and Lionized at the Same Time
- Hollywood vs. The Hobbit
- America’s Vanishing National Resource: The DVD Commentary
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