Audiences want heroes to change, especially at the end, but we also have our bullshit detectors going at all times. We know that we ourse...

In her DVD commentary, “Lady Bird” writer/director Greta Gerwig says “One thing that was really important to me is that none of the act...

One thing made me a bit uneasy about “Lady Bird” as I watched it. Kyle (Timothy Chalamet) is the movie’s caddish villain, but we first me...

So I assume we’re all enjoying the “Operation: Varsity Blues” scandal, where the rich and famous got arrested for various illegal schemes ...

One last nitpick on “A Wrinkle in Time”: For the most part the book does a good job with vocabulary. L’Engle mostly uses words that 8-12...

Remember how shocked you were when I put out a new podcast episode, after more than a year away?  Well get ready to be flabbergasted, becau...

The major question that hangs over “The God of Small Things”, the question that adult-Rahel seems to be trying to answer for herself, is w...

Hi guys! So it was a pretty good year for movies. Unlike previous years, where my list had lots of idiosyncratic choices, my list is mostl...

So, funny story: I go to archive my “How to Write Dialogue” series and discover that it isn’t in the sidebar, which seems weird.  So then ...

One of the best scripts I read had one glaring flaw: the hero’s best friend was a therapist, and diagnosed his problems with insight. Aud...

I thought it might be instructive to look at a truly terrible scene. As you begin a story, it’s always tempting to just launch right into...

Does my sour mood extent even so far as this amazing movie?  It does! The Problem: On the one hand, this is a pretty much perfect movi...

Hey guys, it seems impossible to go on, but we must go on. Let’s all pretend that my silly little story advice has any meaning in post-apo...

Hey guys, time for video #2: Tricks and Traps. I’ll be honest with you, folks, I was pretty bummed to get no comments on the first video....

Okay, guys, here’s a big change six months in the making: I’ll now be posting videos!  I had to relearn Final Cut Pro (the lobotomized ve...

This time let’s talk about some of the things we covered in the Books vs. Movies series.  In some ways, novelists have it much easie...

It's ridiculous, I realize, to rank a movie like this above serious and powerful movies like The Revenant or Spotlight, but I always try...

Let’s follow up on Thursday’s piece, where I transcribed the long central scene of the “Transparent” pilot. As I said then, this scene t...

“Transparent” creator Jill Soloway has given several excellent interviews about the show. I recommend this in-depth “New Yorker” profile ...

What happens when you throw a party and the text never arrives? You have to subsist on subtext. But really well-written subtext can accomp...