The Devil Wears Prada 2 (2026) which I watched in the way that it should be watched, in the company of women, a mother and an aunt, in a packed theatre after a shopping spree;

One Cut of the Dead (2017), the most wildly low-budget film for what it’s giving back on entertainment value which deserves a shout-out, especially in the wake of the two movies we have all heard too much about;

Christian Mungiu’s Cannes darling 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007) to precede any public or private screening of this year’s Fjord;

and last but not least the legendary Barry Lyndon (1975) that I watched on a Sunday afternoon as Sunday is God’s day, and Kubrick is one of film’s most revered ones.

Getting back to it, I struggle, not in choosing but in writing, for choosing my favorite film of the month has always been easy as it usually crawls to me from some lost abyss it has been expelled to, and manages to surprise, validate and inspire me, all at the same time. This is how I feel about the Danish The Hunt (1), made by one of Dogme 95’s most precious filmmakers, Thomas Vinterberg, if you don’t know him by name. The film which earned Madds Mikkelsen Cannes’ Award for Best Actor in 2012 treats a topic so controversial it forces you to sit with a truth you don’t want to admit and an allegation you pervertedly wish it were true. Not a surprise then that it was produced by Zentropa, the company behind Lars von Trier’s most “terrible” movies.

Yes, The Hunt won’t allow you to love it because at the face of it, it sounds like a psychological rabbit hole you should skip and this is precisely the test it puts everyone through: spend two hours in discomfort or spend a lifetime blind to the face that commands the screen as compellingly as Nolan’s Odysseus should have been able to do? It’s like Vinterberg received, read and understood the memo about filmmaking and then went out there and based everything off that one poster stare.

That said, it seems like a different type of memo was sent to Mark Jenkin of Rose of Nevada (2) that dictacted pursuit of complete creative control as a writer, director, cinematographer, editor, composer and post sound mixer. Interestingly enough, Jenkin doesn’t care about a producing credit which is the route most directors and/or actors take in Hollywood and eslewhere. The third installment in his Cornish trilogy, after Bait (2019) and Enys Men (2022), also shot with a 16mm Bolex camera, the film confronts the harsh reality of a coastal town that has fallen out of favor with its main industry — fishing, and uses the time-traveling conceit beautifully to connect past and present as much as to confuse them.

On 100-foot daylight spools that run for less than 3 minutes, Jenkin was personally sneaking in this boat’s close quarters, hand-cracking his compact film camera which doesn’t record sound. An experience as intimate as film could ever be for the director and his actors, because what happens in the cabin stays in the cabin until it’s ready for the world to see it. There’s no dailies, sync problems or unsolicited pauses. And so he doesn’t deliver in discomfort but almost in fondness, offering images that were never meant to exist but rather recounted as legendary maritime stories, around a fire, at night, after a few pints of ale.

Up next is of course the movie that filmmakers have every reason to love and scholars every reason to hate, The Odyssey (3). Nolan’s filmmaking memo seems to have come as a challenge to make the impossible possible and so he tries with his set of mythical dimensions to bring back home the spectacle of Odysseia, the journey that so many have taken over the centuries to reach their destination. The format is impressive and so is the history that precedes it with 70mm movie experiments dating back to the 1920s, before the Great Depression curtailed their development.

Instead of echoing thoughts that have already been shared about Syncopy’s successes and failures, what is equally timely to explore is the innovation concocted and patented in Canada’s Quebec of all places, of the IMAX format which boldy reimagined the 70mm format changing the widescreen race forever, only three years short, in 1967, from the birth of one of its most vocal proponents, sir Christopher Nolan. For anyone still wondering how this format can inspire grandeur so immense that it inflates our expectations of what the medium can achieve, the IMAX camera design relies on a rolling loop mechanism that feeds 70mm film horizontally, creating a much larger image area than the vertically running Todd-AO system that defined large-format (65mm-70mm) cinema in the 1950s.

Now for a story that has found its way to the screen too many times after the original’s release in 2020, The Invite (4) dedicated to the late Diane Keaton whose artistic legacy and influence are all over Olivia Wilde’s tonal interpretation of it, is one great laugh.

Adapted from Cesc Gay’s Sentimental by actor-writers Rashida Jones and Will McCormack, a writing duo who went on their own dating adventure, realised it wasn’t going to work out between them, and spent the next twenty years talking about love, and directed by actress-director, Olivia Wilde, who delivers one of the most endearing performances of her career, the film proves that you can wear multiple hats in this business, as long as they fit you. It also demonstrates that some memos can and will travel around the world because their adaptation to different cultural contexts is part of the reason for their success.

Then, there’s Birth (5) by a director whose career I envy with a track record of 4 feature films and 3 short films; unique, important, and acclaimed — what else should one ever strive for? Starring a major Golden Age actress that many people will recognise as the ageless Lauren Bacall, Jonathan Glazer’s second feature film from the early 2000s, mirrors The Hunt by featuring a few distressing moments between a 30-year old widow and a 10-year old boy, played by Canadian child actor Cameron Bright.

Birth was not a script that got handed to him but instead one that he laboured over, with the help of French screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, who penned scripts as daring as Louis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour (1967). A story that came to him one day as they do, to the most privileged of us, and one that he almost didn’t cast Nicole Kidman for, worried that her star persona would cast its own shadow over the project he had spent too long developing. Confidence seems to have been written into this filmmaker’s memo, then, affording him the freedom to let his career take shape at his preferred pace.

Moving on with Red Rooms (6), coming out of one of Canada’s most creative scenes, i.e. downtown Montreal and premiering at Karlovy as well as Fantasia, this film is distinctly genre and subjectively a favorite. Written and directed by Pascal Plante who began his career in sound, his third feature is a very moody, tonally post-apocalyptic crime that finds rising star Juliette Gariépy in the middle of some really questionable conflict. It’s an independent film, one among the many, upwards of 100, low-budget indies that get produced in Canada annually, and it delivers within that very same range of expectations, following the indie memo faithfully.

I have Rachel Getting Married (7) next because Anne Hathaway, who has appeared on more screens than any other actor in 2026, declared earlier this year that it’s one of her most underrated films and so the seed was planted, period. This Jonathan Demme film by a director who has arguably documented one of the greatest concert films ever made, Stop Making Sense (1984), following the band behind Psycho Killer (qu’est-ce que c’est? Fa-fa-fa-fa, fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa), was written by Sidney Lumet’s daughter, Jenny Lumet and has been praised for its emotional rawness.

One of filmmaking’s great paradoxes, Demme gained acclaim as early as the 1970s, expanded through the ‘80s, became a household name by the ‘90s and continued working into the 2000s when this Anne Hathaway definitive anti-flick was made: an amalgamation of his pitch-perfect concert skills, his B-movie producing sensibilities — which he picked up by none other than the king of B-movies himself, Roger Corman — and his intuitive tracking camera. His memo, prolific as it was, was coming to its final pages by the time he passed in 2017, but not before he influenced and impressed a cross-generational list of powerhouse filmmakers including PTA, Spike Lee and Brady Corbet.

Moving on, there’s Sacramento (8), a film as cute and as simple as its title. Written and directed by actor Michael Angarano, it’s one of these indie films (you know the ones) that you want to put on on a lazy afternoon (the ones directed by established actors), starring Michael Cera who absolutely steals the show (yes, the slice-of-life ones that skirt their deeper emotional truths through comedy). Film, after all, is a medium of expression, and when one has the means, one will express a story of their life. That is the memo for most actor-turned directors, I am here to gauge.

Now and as we’re slowly coming to a close, The King (9), an Australian-led medieval epic from writer-director David Michôd and actor-writer Joel Edgerton, is the type that is brought about by filmmakers but is executed in studio fashion. The type that premieres in Venice but is streamed on Netflix a month later. The type whose memo was never entirely its own, but one that succeeded nonetheless.

Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry (10) found me impressed, excited and in love with some of the low-light scenes that took a different, unconventional route. Of course, this is a thriller film from the early ‘70s and so conventions had to be trampled upon. This came from a filmmaker whose memo had probably included title cards when it was first printed which only really means one thing; Siegel was a director with a capital D, raised in a Hollywood that was just about finding itself and so his Dirty Harry was always going to be Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry even though the role was offered to an array of exceptional male leads before it was offered to him, including John Wayne, Frank Sinatra, Robert Mitchum, Steve McQueen and Burt Lancaster.

And to the least remarkable of the lot, Ballad of a Small Player (11) felt like a promising watch preceded by Mr. Edward Berger’s incredible reputation after All Quiet on the Western Front (2022), only to slightly disappoint, not in its directing but in its writing. Perhaps a writer should direct and vice versa, reads this German filmmakers’ memo that he has hidden away somewhere only he knows, frolicking away, directing as he loves.

Second from last, Influencer (12) by another Canadian filmmaker, Kurtis David Harder, offered nothing to me but a lot to many others, or so it seems, as a sequel was greenlit and produced to follow this mind-numbing indie horror. The memo here comes in the form of the 21st century advice given to most filmmakers which is: go-and-make-your-movie.

And finally, the last in my selection is one I hated with passion, one which had me regretting the money I paid for the movie ticke, wishing I could escape the screening if I had a bit more spine myself: Her Private Hell (13). Turns out that films that receive long-standing ovations in Cannes don’t have to be good. It’s the artistic intention that Nicholas Winding Refn embodies that I can’t seem to get behind as he forces us to sit with feelings we’d rather not, and not in the same way that Vinterberg did with his own masterpiece. For that, Refn should be credited as this man’s memo is most definitely beyond deciphering, written in an ancient language that he and some obsessed disciples of his, only understand.

And with that, I close and bid you well.

Until next month xx

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Craft is lore and lore is craft and there is no better example to start this entry with than Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1), a near future film even if that future is now in our past, standing as testament to the wild extents of the human imagination. Philip K. Dick who authored Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? sadly passed away shortly before the film’s release but it is said that he viewed a twenty-minute screener and was enthused by how Ridley Scott’s world looked exactly as he had imagined it which is to me the biggest compliment a filmmaker can get, even when followed by an academy award nomination for Best Production Design.

This Blade Runner set, built in 1893, remained a distant memory in my imagination after seeing the movie too early in life to remember much about it apart from the imposing Bradbury Building, located in Los Angeles where another Blade Runner set, the Ennis House residence, features as an architectural gem, prompting me to think that this is probably why they don’t make them like that anymore: solid in purpose, grand in impact, indelible in memory and in celluloid.

The film is lauded for far more than the physicality of its sets: its special effects, regarded as some of the finest in the genre; Vangelis’ futuristic score; and its Metropolis-inspired visual language and concept art. Attention was paid and care was given and so we return to it, if only to remember what cinema once looked, but most importantly, felt like.

In a similar vein, another film climbed up the ranks from the dark depths of the 1980s but this time in honor of a very different tone. I found Moonstruck (2) directed by Canadian Norman Jewison to be adorable and ridiculous at the same time which probably serves the idea of a lighthearted comedy the best. Apart from Cher and Nicolas Cage who embody Loretta and Ronny to their very core, the idea behind the moon’s supernatural power to make people fall in love remains evocatively central until the end, aided by David Watkin’s innovative committments. Born in 1925, this creative was among the first cinematographers to experiment with the usage of a bounce light as a soft light source because for those friends who are not aware of it, the electrics fall under the director of photography’s responsibilities.

Is it surprising then to find out that Watkin innovated to get as close to that moon effect as possible? By using aluminized reflectors, usually found in theatrical staging and aircraft runaways, Brooklyn was lit up in a giant fay light design, allowing craft to meet theme and Moonstruck to materialize.

Continuing down a similar path but with a slightly higher intellectual intention, Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (3) holds the Guinness World Record for:

the longest constant movie shoot, lasting over 15 months, a period that included an unbroken shoot of 46 weeks.

Compared to today’s typical four-month shooting schedules, this extended production timeline would have required a level of commitment from cast and crew driven by a very different kind of motivation. Perhaps the same kind that pushed everyone involved, to see this movie released, even when its director tragically passed away by a sudden heart attack before post-production was able to wrap.

This nod is not about justifying harmul practices that brought down morale and physically exhausted everyone involved, but it’s about scope and scale and the idea of pushing further than it is imaginatively possible to create a film that almost thirty years later, can compel us to the bits. Adapted from a 1926 novella by Arthur Schnitzler, Dream Story, Kubrick’s film explores themes that are universal, everlasting and unapologetically intellectual, and this is evident not only in the film’s extreme aesthetic sophistication but in Kubrick’s intention of casting a real married couple that brought him to powerhouse stars, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman.

Now taking a giant leap into the present, The Bride! (4) is a remake of the original 1935 film Bride of Frankenstein that found both mainstream audiences and cinephiles against it, the former upset that they couldn’t connect to the story and the latter disappointed that there was no story. Even as the innovation of pushing aspect ratios usually within scenes to reflect the emotional state of the characters as well as the decision to shoot with IMAX-certified digital cameras gave the world scale and allowed Jessie Buckley to virtually steal the show.

Maggie Gyllenhaal’s vision is about reclaiming the narrative, giving voice to Mary Shelley, Ida and the bride herself in an attempt to celebrate agency and femininity, which may feel aggressively trite to some, but it’s also visually and structurally experimental and we don’t see that anymore.

Following this one up with The Thing (5) which funnily enough opened on the very same day as Blade Runner but unlike which, it flopped in the box office because an unassuming audience was probably not ready to experience the eccentric creature designs of 21-years old Rob Bottin. The Thing became the film for which a studio would spend the most money on special effects, totalling up to an unheard of $1.5 million at the time and the one with the most iconic opening title to date, created by visual effects artist Peter Kuran, who burned a plastic bag behind a fish tank and called it a day.

It aslo checks off two other important boxes: development time and on-location shooting. Yet again adapted from a 20th century novella, Who Goes There?, the best screenwriter was only found when Bill Lancaster pitched his vision for the film to John Caprenter after several writers had already worked on different drafts because good things take time and this is something we have collectively forgotten, all but indie filmmakers like Mayumi Yoshida whose debut feature, Akashi (6) is what I’ve grown into the habit of calling a Canadian Past Lives.

Saw as part of the Canadian Film Festival here in Toronto, Akashi won the Best Feature Award while its leading actress, director, writer and producer revealed that a draft existed as early as 2020 which should not be news to any of us because independent filmmakers are the ones taking the time and the risk to create something worth watching.

Then there’s Blue Moon (7), a film that Richard Linklater and Ethan Hawke kept stalling to make for the past ten years because Hawke wasn’t old enough and yet in the final film, his character appears significantly older than forty-two. Linklater’s non-chalance about waiting around for Ethan Hawke to grow older is a creative choice that we, as viewers, decide to accept at literal face value when it is likely a cinematic technique, a directing style, a creative committment to the craft of making a film by both good men. And please, all hail Robert Kaplow’s first screenplay.

K-pop Demon Hunters (8) found me where it also found two of its screenwriters when they were first approached to join the project: having no experience with k-pop. Danya Jimenez and Hannah McMechan met in film school not too many years ago and were hired to work on this script without prior credits, prior animation experience or prior knowledge of Korean popular music, because Maggie Kang and Chris Applehans may have had a story but they needed the voices of two ambitious women in their twenties. Where there is talent, time and risk is all it takes?

Next up is Cure (9) by Kiyoshi Kurosawa who is not in any shape or form related to Akira Kurosawa, apart from the fact that they are both internationally acclaimed Japanese filmmakers. This filmmaker, who has been compared to some of the best, including Stanley Kubrick, brings psychology to character and character to hypnosis while ever so subtly revealing his intentions which is why my first watch of this one deserved a better time. Like a quiet evening at home alone, perfectly matching the tone and the style of the film about to be seen which in this case was The Ugly Stepsister (10) by Emilie Blichfeldt who spurred my interest only to have me witness a level of body horror that makes looksmaxxing for men feel like a joy ride for women.

Sinners (11) was a rewatch which on the big screen made all the difference. After missing its cultural moment back in May which forced me to watch it on streaming for the first time, I can, with confidence, say that the theatres are not going anywhere. Anything more to share would be redundant apart from the fact that almost 1 million letterboxd users think this is a five-star movie which is a call for an insane metric.

And now I have arrived to one of these year’s darlings, Project Hail Mary (12) which was as fun as everyone is saying but it is perhaps here that I get a glimpse of my own taste, wishing that Ryan Gosling could be Kenough for me to love this while the truth begs me to confide that Barbie came too close to that goofy type character for the distinction to be bridged. That said, this film made good use of its transcendental budget to blend practical, digital and real-time tools, making it feel as real and as grand as possible.

Based on the acclaim it received, I’d venture that these are precisely the skills we most admire and expect of the filmmaking craft: the ability to manipulate film’s technical tools to create profound emotional experiences, bringing this entry to a close here, and on a high note. Spielberg-esque. Un-Martian like. Too light but certainly commendable.

Until next month x

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The general advice for writing film dialogue, a forthright sermon propagated first and foremost by Robert McKee, is don’t do it. Stray from the obvious, the blatant text that is awkward and lacks clarity or can turn an exciting premise into one fully boring representation of it. Instead, strive for subtext, swing everyday talk into quotable lines and mythic ideas communicated with emotion that is able to transcend the dialectic itself. Or in what translates best to quotidian mimics, be brief, be cool.

We know this, we absolutely do. The opposite is often confused with exposition, a practice found in most storytelling formats and which when heavy can be tiresome, similar to a lengthy, draining conversation. The first note on any beginner’s script, it’s perhaps the most straightforward way to assess a screenwriter’s level of writing but no matter the talent that makes itself obvious later, every screenwriter must have indulged in word-vomiting turned expository dialogue. They must have to have found their voice.

So the story goes then, for those I’ll refer to as real-life people as opposed to fictional characters because they have to find their voice too, imperatively so, to ensure their survival.

Dialogue is not conversation, preaches McKee but if one controversial movie, that may be a precursor yet is far from being the only one, Scenes from a Marriage (Ingmar Bergman, 1973), begs us to consider dialogue as a years-long conversation that flips theory on its head and shines a light on dialogue’s potential to amplify voice, bring out inner life, consolidate character and shape rhythm, then is it fair to ask: can cinematic, impactful dialogue be found in life, and if yes, are we prepared to hear it?

Perhaps the answer to the question above lies with the act of yapping or keeping the channel open. Perhaps we can divide people into two groups: the yappers and the non-yappers. The ones who hoard their words and the ones who spill them and if so, perhaps we can see where the prejudice lies when lean dialogue tries to insert itself in daily conversation and how that starkly contradicts the effortlessness with which natural chatter occurs. Perhaps my argument, then, becomes one in defense of sharing.

Dialogue is a skill that takes years of practice and those who find their way with words know this first-hand. At their personal worst, they’re emotional manipulators able to verbalise what should not be brought down into dialectics. At their professional best, they become acclaimed politicians, orators of the third kind. And at their extreme average, they wait stupefied for words that never come until a moment takes its form and mystique descends upon the lot.

Life is always action/ reaction, McKee proclaims and so all we can can hope for is dialogue that imitates those, in ways that won’t feel cheap, dramatic or overexposed.

I’ve expanded on the art of articulation in the past, finding Celine Song’s dialogue to be intentionally introspective and crediting her with taking a risk to honour film’s most frowned-upon tool as much in the one that flopped {Materialists} as in the one that astounded {Past Lives}, both lengthy and deliberate narratives framed as conversations about love. But the line is thin in between, for dialogue on screen is preceded by a contract invitation, a certain kind of poetic faith that puts critical thinking on a pedestal and waits.

In life, rhythm is not achieved in an agreed-upon context. The divide between the yappers and the non-yappers can be strained to a harmful ego ride that seeks to impose one way as better than the other, much like we, the lovers of the cinema art, feel we must declare one movie as better than another when each one is offering something completely different.

Film is a visual medium but it’s also a versatile one and it’s surprising how eager real-life people, like myself, can be to reject the intimacy that comes with words in favor of the appearance of something that ends up saying nothing. In life and in the movies.

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If you ask me, I couldn’t say with confidence that any of these films is superior to the other in craft, story, longevity or importance. What I can and will say is that films are made to be experienced, at home or in the theatre, with friends or totally alone, in the morning or in the night, as long-lived studies of the craft or for simple entertainment purposes. All is fair in movies and their lore.

In the first instalment of my monthly watching series, I explore the idea of movies as theatrical experiences during festival season. Here, I want to dive into the personal bias that becomes the reason behind our arbitrary star rankings, choosing Joachim Trier’s Reprise (1) as my favorite of the month — the first in the Oslo Trilogy that ends with The Worst Person In The World (2021), a film that shook the world and paved the way for Norway’s multiple and unprecedented Oscar nominations for Sentimental Value (2025) come last month. It’s kind of timely in a way, to acknowledge Trier for what has clearly been a strong vision, in both literal and cinematic terms, of which he openly and ever so kindly talks about in this Scriptnotes episode with John August.

If you’ve seen the Oscar darling, you know that it opens with a non-intrusive voice-over that feels like a narration out of a book, a device very much employed in Reprise as well, playfully setting up the framework of a film that will take you in a hundred different places, imparting character information and creating a vivid world, before it resumes the story it’s trying to tell. There is so much to share about the effortlessness of Trier’s directing but the script is the foundation from where the story springs and here we owe credit to Eskil Vogt who is the one who actually puts words down to paper that later inspire the cast and the crew in their respective roles and allow Trier to innovate and deviate from what belongs to the page.

Then it’s Trier’s work ethic towards both European and American cinematic traditions that allow the story to flow ethereally, like time, open our eyes to new ways of seeing the world and present deeper truths about the human experience that we would ever be so lucky to become a witness to. Reprise is a film about two men in their twenties confronting their ambitions and navigating their friendship as time goes on and facts take their form in the city that they all (cast and crew involved) love; Oslo.

Strangely so, location becomes an overarching theme for my selection this month, playing a bigger-than-usual role in the unravelling of most of these stories with Buenos Aires becoming the backdrop for a tumultuous relationship between another pair of men in Happy Together (2). This one is considered the most acclaimed and celebrated gay Asian film but Wong Kar-wai doesn’t want to tag a label on it and only if you see it you can understand why — this is a romance film imbued in colors that only celluloid allows for. More than in any other film, exposure and saturation become the main tools through which emotion is imparted and this is of course and partly in credit to cinematographer Christopher Doyle known for his applauded collaborations with the Honkongese filmmaker.

Similar to how Joachim Trier manipulates time to tell a story, Wong Kar-wai’s directing, marked by Godard-reminiscent jump cuts, breaking continuity and street-like camera movement, is deeply intertwined with the editing mastery of William Chang Suk-ping. Once all is said and done, these films including In the Mood for Love (2000) whose killer soundtrack you must have heard, are pieces of art to revel at and learn from, if there ever was a conscientious student of the seventh art. But most of all Happy Together is an example of a vision that relies on the synthesis of complicated craft that can only arise out of honest collaboration and high emotional intellect.

From Argentina traveling all the way to Tehran or rather to a small village on the border of Iran and Turkey, It Was Just An Accident’s director, Jafar Panahi, who famously got arrested in 2022, had his film No Bears (3), a meta-narrative type for which I have a soft spot, premiere at the Venice Film Festival that same year. In this politically intriguing docu-fiction work, it’s really hard to say what is true and what is not. Panahi plays himself struggling to remotely direct a film taking place in Tehran while he’s in hiding because he has been banned from filmmaking by the Islamic Revolutionary Court.

Form becomes part of the story being told as the film looks unshockingly mediocre. Framing and lighting take the back seat to allow Panahi’s intention to shine through. His actors are trying to flee the country but are they really, or is this part of a ruse? The film looks bare but it’s layered and while Panahi faces a brand new prison term upon his arrival to Iran after the 2026 Oscar season is over, we know that all he’s hoping for is new ideas on how to make more films and that’s what keeps me, at least, engaged and endeared in both his person and his art.

And now I have arrived to a controversial but gravely influential film, Scenes from a Marriage (4), not only of the 70s but of the romance genre as a whole, which may read strangely to some of you because whoever has had the patience to sit through three hours of soul-wrenching dialogue between a man and a woman who can’t decide whether they love or hate each other, would not categorise this as a romantic film.

This film from 1974 is not one to watch with your spouse, your partner, your short-term committment or your casual situationship unless you want to stir up some drama but even then, you’ll quite frankly either fall asleep or fall into depression. So why do I rank it so highly, you ask? She’s of the pretentious kind, you’ve probably decided. Pretention, as I deem it, is but another form of cultivating taste and when it comes to cinephiles, exposure brings new perspective into the game — here that being the hilarious bizzarity behind the intention of shooting this film and writing this dialogue. And yet that is not all, for the peak of this masterful psychological drama is the ability to follow laughter with feelings of grave devastation that make you want to turn it off, and run away into the safety you know exists in love.

Still, a miniseries version exists consisting of six fifty-minute episodes which is how it was initially aired on Swedish TV and is probably the most palatable way to digest the depths of this years-long discussion that is based on Bergman’s own relationship with the lead actress Liv Ullmann and which has inspired staple works in Woody Allen, Richard Linklater and Noah Baumbach among others.

From the Nordic, cold country of Sweden, its not a far jump to the remoteness and isolation of “Wuthering Heights” (5) in Northern England — the only theatrical release I will include and my honorable mention in this narrative of what makes a good movie —because I can’t but shed a little light into all the redeemable qualities of Emerald Fennel’s adaptation. Defenders of the novel feel free to skip this part.

Gorgeous costumes, extravagant production design, zany moments of kink and passion while underlying a new message for the young women of the 21st century via the hint: do you want me to stop? Yes, this is not Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights but it is “Wuthering Heights” nonetheless and while I, for one, am not a great fan of Emerald Fennel, I found this film well done in imagination and craft, I had fun and I look forward to seeing how it may end up faring on its own, when prejudice is gone and poetic license is finally granted.

Speaking of adaptations, My Own Private Idaho (6) wasn’t probably what Shakespeare had in mind when he wrote his play Henry IV but then again Gus Van Sant was smart enough not to associate the title of his film to that of the universally-loved playwright. For the American filmmaker of distant Dutch origins, this indie arthouse film is exactly what is sounds like, innovative in its parts with two striking sequences that leave an indelible mark on the curious mind, or they did, in mine at least. You’ll know them when you see them and once you do, ask yourself this: should form overtake matter (or is it just me)?

On to my favorite to date Brian de Palma’s film (I haven’t seen nearly enough of them) that goes by the name Carlito’s Way (7). This would have fit in quite nicely in my January’s male narrative but here we are and I rate it highly because it truly did subvert my expectations of its main protagonist and had me root for him until the end. I gasped at the highly-anticipated ending that is also the beginning and I fell for it completely as if a knob twisted in my brain and made everything make sense.

Unlike other characters, Al Pacino’s Carlito felt almost comical at times, trying hard to escape a fate that most male protagonists in gangster films fall pray to, displaying vulnerable qualities and defending a character who has forever changed. While Sean Penn is unrecognizable, only making me sing even more praises for his Oscar-nominated Colonel Lockjaw, it is perhaps that unique De Palma flair of calculated action and artistic sensibility that elevated this film in my perception.

It’s here in Paris, Texas (8) that location becomes again an important narrative tool. While Idaho and New York served as quintessential backdrops for these distinct (in genre) American stories, Texas features as an emotional touchpoint for the film’s main character, Travis, who is trying to navigate a journey whose origins he can scarcely remember. It’s a road film endowed with depth through its sensitive subject matter and brilliant long takes, using form to convey feeling and, in the process, creating lauded visuals that endure within the medium’s self-fashioned eternity.

While not a film I’d personally revisit, I can only ever know how much it meant to me and not how much it left its imprint on me. Similar in tone, I dare so say, Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter (9) is the first one of his I watch despite his well-known Canadian roots. This is a film that struck a chord with me because of the involuntary tragedy that it depicts and my distant but personal experience with world events that bear no answer to the question: who is to blame when unbearable loss remains unvindicated? It poses the question deeply and with care, leaving one with lingering emotions and certainly a lot of food for thought.

Here, I will bring in Mystery Train (10), a film about Memphis, Tennessee, the town, the city of the one, the only, the Elvis Presley. This is one of the most effort-driven films (to this point) of rogue filmmaker, Jim Jarmucsh, by which I mean to say that an overarching story about the phantom of the American Rock and Roll King comes together to tell a story of a whole nation and in that respect it feels kind of epic. It’s also the first American indie film to be financed entirely by a non-American entity and probably one of Jarmusch’s better received films but if you care to know, I will always have a thing for his debut feature of which my little bio was inspired: filmmaker on permanent vacation.

Onwards to a John Ford classic, Stagecoach (11), a western kind starring John Wayne as the Ringo Kid. This is a classic ninety-minute movie, as they liked to make them back in 1939, that hits a sweet length for a quite weeknight in and which features names that have long fallen out of pop culture to enter history book territory. Even so, the structure is superb and the lore is engaging as one John fought for another in order to get the picture made, Ford for Wayne, a B-list actor who had yet to make a name of himself. Equally interesting that Ford took inspiration from a painting to orchestrate the legendary stagecoach chase sequence that would have required some real stunt work back then. More on the wikipedia page of the film.

The Others (12) comes next because it is the ultimate ghost story that subverts expectations of all ghost stories here forth with a twist that I sniffed around but can’t say I could see coming. It’s at the end that the brilliance of the concept comes full circle while the film remains a slow-paced study into escalating creepiness. Not the type of tea I’d usually indulge in, but if you would, prolific and versatile filmmaker, Alejandro Amenábar, knows how to deliver.

Another oldie made it into my watching cycle. This was Peter Bogdanovich’s What’s Up, Doc? (13) with Barbara Streisand that has what I call a wonderfully hole-less plot and we love to see those once in a while. It belongs to the screwball genre, one that I became familiar with through the likes of Howard Hawks and stars Barbara Streisand. It’s not a gen z and above crowd flick, although the story still holds up but mainly to those who have a parasocial relationship to it and oh, did I mention that Barbara Streisand is in it?

Second to last is one of the first films I watched this month, Sofia Coppola’s Lost In Translation (14). I’ve heard too many people complain that they don’t get this film bestowing it the big B but I think it’s fair to say that Coppola’s tender gaze has probably influenced a generation of American indie filmmakers, crowning mood and allowing ambiguity to drive the emotion of the plot. Placing it low in my selection is only a reminder to me that nothing can replace the feeling of a first watch.

And to close with another legendary rewatch on none other than V day, Before Sunrise (15), everyone’s favorite romantic film of the past twenty-five years, placed me in a time capsule that took me back home, where Europe lives and where romance once began. Following Richard Linklater’s cues that he really picked up from Bergman’s Scenes from A Marriage, the film thankfully allows an Americanised strain of raw dialogue to prevail, sparing us the full cataclysm of lost love, and bringing us full circle.

If you’ve made it until the end, I thank you and I hope this arbitrary order made some sense as to why fundamentally acclaimed films — that can be found in the Criterion Channel, except the one, you know which one — speak very differently from one person to another.

Until next month xx

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One media outlet has called Chalamet’s media ‘act’ the hyper self-aware actor promo era. Tom Cruise has been deemed by many the last traditional movie star, while Jay Kelly, by Noah Baumbach, which came out late last year, tackles the theme at its core and prompts me to ask: is there such a thing as the performance of authenticity?

The debate around this award season and more specifically Timothée Chalamet’s efforts of self-promoting reveals a broader social tension: a highly curated obsession with realness as a brand. This piece is a deep dive into Timothée Chalamet, both on and off screen, to investigate the extent to which he deserves that Oscar win as much as we think he does, and in the process, explore the ideas of authenticity and performance in the 21st century.

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what authenticity used to be

The big shift in performance is something that Konstantin Stanislavski first talked about — a system that focused on emotional truth, instead of theatrical exaggeration. Yet it’s not until decades later that artists and society more broadly embraced this change in how we experience and manifest character.

Various world events had to coincide to consolidate the firm demand for authenticity in film performance, and fear not, they did. The authenticity that describes performance in the 1970s was explosive and interior, raw, immersive and sometimes abusive. To this day, everlasting and influential.

There was an innate need — especially of male actors — to be fundamentally involved in the psychological unravelling of a character’s needs and wants. John Yorke describes this internal contradiction as the conflict between how we wish to be perceived and how we really feel and it’s not far-fetched to say that the method masters of the 1970s took this a step too far in their pursuit of authenticity, but, to their credit, their excesses remained safely confined within the film itself.

When Kristen Stewart recently discussed method acting as being inherently submissive and unmasculine, she was quietly nodding at the innate arrogance that was sometimes attached to this type of acting, which went uncriticised. This is the age-old debate about the difference between an actor and their persona, between what someone says and what someone does. Stories from the time period forced characters to emerge from internal contradiction under pressure, with method acting feeding into a new kind of identity politics. Here for my words on the New Hollywood men.

Authenticity was interchangeable with the embodiment of spirit and the inhabitation of motive. But most importantly, it was not up for debate.

You’ve met them, surely, in life too: authentic people. They’re usually larger than life, and sometimes we like to refer to them as ‘characters’ because their presence is so effortlessly inspiring that they feel written out of a movie. Our grandparents, for one. At least mine was, uniquely unaware of her role as a grandmother but authentically present until the end.

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yes, authenticity can be demystified

In an interview at the BAFTA in 2018, Timothée Chalamet mentions that an actor’s greatest instrument is to be able to keep their heart in their sleeve and have the ability to make themselves an open wound. He’s charmingly introverted, he opens up about his craft, he’s articulate, wise and humble. How did we get here?

Visibility and accessibility are probably to credit or to blame for this fundamental shift in our understanding and expectation of authenticity. At the SAG Awards last year, when Chalamet said “this”, referring to the statue they gave him, “doesn’t signify my pursuit of greatness, but it’s a little more fuel, more ammo to keep going”, we can think of him as just another LinkedIn user who celebrates their small wins on the path of professional success.

Where, in the last century, the public display of self-awareness would not have been considered prudent on the road to success, today we reward and expect vulnerability, transparency and relatability as much from actors and public personalities as we do from each other, while the line between a public and a personal life has become increasingly blurry within the internet culture.

In that way, Chalamet’s self-promotion becomes a visible version of a broader social behaviour. Sharing is caring, they say, and he sure does care about his awards.

In the video that sparked my inspiration for this piece and had the internet split over his off-screen persona that tragically resembled his on-screen one, he expresses a quiet frustration towards the part of himself that wants him to play it cool.

At the time of his first nomination, Chalamet was 22 years old, the third youngest nominee, lining up behind Jackie Cooper in 1930 and Mickey Rooney in 1939. In his video, fellow Substacker and favourite YouTuber about all things film, Thomas Flight, neatly breaks down the differences between old Hollywood theatricality and the multifaceted, naturalistic form that performance has become, which matters here, not to invalidate history but to bring an interesting nuance to light. Had Chalamet won in 2017, he would have been the youngest Oscar winner in the history of cinema, by a big margin, as Adrien Brody, who still holds the record title, was 29 when he won the Oscar for best actor for The Pianist in 2002. By this account, he’s the most talented actor of his generation.

But if it’s no secret that we’re living in a media-saturated world, then would it come as a surprise to say that authenticity has become just another quality of self we consciously choose to perform?

no, authenticity should not be bought and sold

Chalamet trained in the Meisner technique, which dictates that actors should live truthfully under imaginary circumstances, and has been recognised, as an actor, for his vulnerability and emotional subtlety. He can aim for a Daniel Day-Lewis performance as much as he can present himself in the likes of Tom Cruise, appeasing critics and audiences alike and with ease.

In an interview with George Stephanopoulos, he admits that he was able to reconnect with a former part of himself to channel Marty Mauser’s energy and commitment to his goal. He laughs at the question, subtly betraying the self-awareness that he should win the Academy Award playing Marty Mauser, a role that his audience has no problem associating him with off-screen as well: a hustler, a do-er, a believer.

It’s due to inventive film marketing that we’re all still so invested in “going to the movies” and this is Chalamet’s goal as well, when he embarks on his promotional tour. Unprecedented, refreshing while no less authentic, his viral stunts, supported by A24, have paved the path to box office success and a strong Oscar campaign. But most importantly, the breakthrough that we witness, is the adoption of a method style act, dubbed method marketing, what Chalamet himself calls method energy, that allows him to take Marty Mauser out for a stroll, and have everyone fall for his charms, against the fiercest of critics of the method acting system.

But right on cue, stating that his campaign is not about marketing or promotion creates a crack in the thin ice he’s walking on, bringing about some valid concerns of pretentiousness from someone who should know better. Great actors are not great pretenders, for pretence refers to the act of a false show and at the end of the day, there is no grace in pretending that marketing is not a business activity. Then again, investing a little fortune of his own is a good excuse to defend his own narrative and connect with all said audiences.

The battle for authenticity becomes the most relevant in this light. Where Tom Cruise dismisses self-promoting in the hopes that his work will speak for itself, and Daniel Day-Lewis would rather be anywhere else than on the road promoting his films, the greatest actor of his generation proves well-versed in cyber culture, holding the reins to a new era of recognising greatness and filtering authenticity down to the tee.

at the cusp of change: is there a way back?

Movie stars used to be like Jay Kelly (in Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly) — always struggling between their public image and their personal life. It’s the everlasting story of ambition: you have to sacrifice something to gain something else because you can’t have both. The demands of the job are too high. This is the Marty Supreme narrative, too. Sacrifice before success. Were those tears of happiness or sadness at the end of the film?

Earlier generations often inherited societal roles, while earlier movie stars formed identities that lasted forever, doubt vaporising at the sound of a cheesecake-worthy joy ride back home. Tom Cruise is called the last movie star not because he’s the last great actor, god forbid, but because he has become a trademark, mostly associated with archetypal male roles, closely aligned to his own persona, balancing Yorke’s divide between the inner and the outer self, contributing to his enduring, of scale and spectacular brand.

Timothée Chalamet’s run for Best Actor has triggered the internet as the actor is asking us to believe in his process as much as he wants us to be enamored by his act, reminding us of how often we try hard to do the same. Fake it till you make it, isn’t what people always say?

As uncomfortable as that is, the problem is not so much about the awareness of perception, which brings with it refreshing ideas, creativity and growth, and not even about the monetisation of vulnerability, which is probably scarier than it sounds. The problem, as I see it, becomes the optimisation of authenticity, distorting a race that is supposed to reward the very same thing.

While the modern world is pushing us, both on and off-screen, to adjust to the new status quo of permanent visibility, it seems to me that authenticity is no longer a stable quality but an ephemeral condition, malleable like clay, shaped to fit the vision we hold of ourselves. Much like an actor preparing for a role.

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Research (for a screenplay) into the male psyche has brought us here. From Jordan Peterson to Robert Bly, from fairytales to psychology, and from the page to the screen, male facets never fail to express themselves in archetypal characters and conventional genres.

This selection is lacking some staple films like Scarface (1983) or other independent ones like Brother (2022) that have owned a place in my watchlist for quite some time now, but such is time and events did not allow me to watch more this month :(

Without further ado, it was Heat (1) that stole my mind and my heart this month and quite timely so as Michael Mann’s sequel that is actually a prequel is currently in development with a realistic release window somewhere between late 2027 and early 2028. Heat is a thriller, it’s a crime but most importantly it’s a film that includes a face-off between two of the most legendary actors of their generation — Al Pacino and Robert De Niro. This is the first time we see them share a screen, staring each other down at America’s favorite restaurant: a diner and for one long breath it feels like the medium of film is fully owning its power offering us an indelible moment.

De Niro plays Neil McCauley while Pacino plays Vincent Hanna, but they’re both actually playing two sides of the same male character which makes this screen encounter one for the history books, with juxtaposition working as a tool to showcase the subtleties of their performances in all their glory, representing two hyper self-aware versions of Robert Bly’s ‘tough man’; one seeking validation in his righteousness and the other owning the extents of his corruption. Good versus evil and underneath a glimpse of what a man could be.

From here, it’s quite a jump to Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy (2), the second installment in The Vengeance Trilogy that both critics and the public have unanimously agreed belongs to one of the greatest movies of all time genre. Despite what the Academy thinks is best not to bestow on him, this South Korean director is one of the most talented working directors of our times, based on my poor and humble opinion, but please go watch this year’s No Other Choice and then come back to change my mind.

A film loosely based on a manga and inspired by Oedipus Rex is less about a male anti-hero and more about the immorality and absurdity of the human experience. While it creates visceral contempt for its portrayal of female characters, it takes it all back when the final twist arrives, making this one really hard to fit into my narrative of the male psyche. But here goes, a wild ride of a watch.

I have a soft spot for this third favorite, the first one out of them all. I’m not sure if it’s because I’ve studied it at film school or because of all the growing fad around Tom Cruise and his ‘own stunts’ narrative but Brian De Palma’s Mission: Impossible (3) brought with it nostalgia for a film that I hadn’t seen before.

Coming ten years after the actor’s breakout hit Top Gun (1986), the film owes its existence as much to Tom Cruise as it does to any other creative in this project with him orchestrating the production to fit his showy action needs, and owning his producing credit. Three screenwriters were brought in with multiple credits to their names that it’s going to feel like unecessary name-dropping if I mention them here, but two of them at least had previously penned scripts for Steven Spielberg (Steven Zaillian and David Koepp) while one had bloomed out of the ‘70s and had acquired a cult screenwriting seal of his own (Robert Towne).

Ethan Hunt, if you don’t know him by name, played by Tom Cruise has matured before our very eyes over the course of the past thirty years, while the Mission Impossible series has become the highest-grossing action franchise, despite having fewer films than the James Bond series. How can I not then, I ask, retain nostalgia for an action hero that has demanded it over and over again? Let alone the fact that Ethan Hunt’s character development steers away from the timeless mythic archetype (that is James Bond) and explores baggage, consequence and age to the point that if you try to watch Mission Impossible - The Final Reckoning without prior knowledge, you won’t get too far. Take it from me.

Now for the zany stuff, Lethal Weapon (4) has to be next because this one feels like a film made by boys for other boys and there is nothing wrong about that. Its ridiculously funny flair that is most likely intentional although the film feels sincere more often than it does not, bumps this movie up in my selection.

Richard Donner may not have invented the buddy cop genre but he definitely had a hand in cementing this type of film that would later bring us Hot Fuzz (Edgar Wright, 2007), Pineapple Express (David Gordon Green, 2008) and The Nice Guys (2016) — the last one of which was written and directed by Lethal Weapon’s very own screenwriter Shane Black. Everything slowly comes together. In many ways, it abides by Bly’s musings of manhood by flipping all his ideas on their head, and presenting a version of a male character who is… unaware. Much like the film itself.

Up next comes A History of Violence (5), a Canadian film at least so much as its director and locations would allow it, the director being no other than David Cronenberg. This stands far (for me) from the director’s previous films, not in quality but in substance, but Viggo Mortensen thinks of it as one of his finest films and even though I love our long-haired hero, Aragorn, I have to agree that this was one of Mortensen’s best perfomances.

The film made its own type of history as the last film to be released on VHS as late as 2006 while its title was given an interesting interpretation by Roger Ebert as one that describes the innate violence of Darwinian evolution. In that way, we witness the portrait of a man who is naturally aggresive, nurtured by the need to protect himself and his own, by all surrounding dangers, or what Bly would call “a Wild Man in shadow form”.

Now onto a film that can really energise an audience — Hit Man (6) written by golden boy Glen Powell and one of the public’s favorite filmmakers, Richard Linklater. A great airplane movie inspired by the life of Gary Johnson, a college professor that pretended to be a contract killer while working part-time for the Houston police department. It’s one of these stories that are based on IP rights of newspaper articles and it’s a safe comedy too, giving us a charming but humble male protagonist because we need those too. This felt refreshing and fun, unlike Todd Philipps’ War Dogs (2016) comedy that I’m conveniently skipping because I couldn’t get through it.

Apollo 11 (7) was a wonder but definitely not for those who need to be overly stimulated at all times. Premiering at Sundance in 2019, the film won multiple Best Editing awards that year and as we all know editing is but another form of directing when it comes to documentary filmmaking. Todd Douglas Miller made this film going through original film footage shot at NASA in 1969, the year of the successful rocket launch that made global history. The film doesn’t have a protagonist, let alone a male one, as attention is taken away from the three astronauts to describe something much more jaw-dropping, but since we’re on the topic, I have to ask, what is it with men and 2001: Space Odyssey?

Moving on to The Outsiders (8), a film I’d been meaning to watch because when a filmmaker earns longevity in the way that he did, I have to give him grace and watch the rest of his work. This is Francis Ford Coppola directing a film starring a cult cast of young actors, including 21-year old Tom Cruise. But also C. Thomas Howell (in a leading role). Matt Dillon. Ralph Macchio, else known as the Karate Kid. Rob Lowe. Dirty Dancing Patrick Swayze. And Emilio Estevez. It’s a party made with a lingering New Hollywood sensitivity where violence is not the solution but sometimes it becomes the answer. These boys embody the psychological and mythic concerns that Bly brings up in his writings of the “American man” and so I speculate that this might have been just the film for him to prove his point: men are lost and misunderstood but capable of awakening through reflection and experience.

The grand filmmaker was gifted the idea in the form of a high-school class petition that requested of him to adapt S. E. Hinton’s novel of the same name into a movie. What’s even more surreal in this story is that Hinton, a girl, wrote this at 16, introducing the YA genre, and going on to sell 14 million copies. Still, all that could not deter me in sliding this down in my selection due to its overbearing fades and sentimental music.

Another Tom Cruise movie made my list, this one by Christopher McQuarrie who is responsible for all that Mission Impossible jazz having directed the four last movies in the franchise. But before the success of the past decade, he directed Tom Cruise in another action flick, Jack Reacher (9). Instead of the all-powerful archetype of a male hero, this male protagonist leans into stereotypical expressions of male identity as he’s a physically dominant, hyper competent, solitary man that exists to carry the plot forward, but kudos to him because he does so elegantly.

Almost at the end now with London Calling (10), a film by Canadian Allan Ungar who came onto my radar last year when I watched Bandit (2022), a Canadian production. While I wanted to love it as much as I did Bandit, I was left uninterested by the male protagonist’s moral conflict of being a fuck-up of a father. Gavin O’Connor’s The Accountant (11) comes second to last driving its message home so aggressively that it almost feels like a misappropriation of the warrior archetype, in favor of social commentary.

And last but not least, Gladiator II (12) was disappointing because it wasn’t epic — a script that’s been in the making since the original’s release in 2000 could not deliver the success of its promising prequel. They went back and forth with the story, never truly certain on the motivation behind the making of its sequel. Where Gladiator rested on its warrior, Gladiator II relied on its archetype. With great power comes great responsibility as we all know by now, thanks to Spiderman, and an audience that remembers is less forgiving than one with nothing to remember.

These, then, are some of the facets through which masculinity manifests itself, informed by Robert Bly’s romantic humanism and his reliance on archetypal frameworks.

Until next month xx

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John Truby coined the phrase, which I consider a maxim and will probably want written on my tombstone if the government of whichever country I find myself passing will allow it. Bittersweet jokes like that informed our morning exchange.

This is a relaunch, long overdue, and a guide to what to expect from reading me going forward. My niche falls under sharing screenwriting theory, in bits and pieces, in story jargon and trendy terms, to frame personal experience and provide some food for thought that could explain or at least point towards some sort of resolution, because as Truby notices, if we understand story, we have a framework for life, and it is with a framework in place that we may have a chance of making peace with death.

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Let me start from the beginning — my beginning in academia. Often when asked about it, I’ll defend film studies because it nurtures an unparalleled appreciation for the art form, but I’ll also make sure to distinguish it from filmmaking in one key way — the starting assumption.

Academia can alienate us from the very thing we’re supposed to be experts on. Asking why films resonate with us is not the same as asking how they achieve that, and consequently, choosing either leads one down a different career and/ or life path.

When I was younger, I used to watch movies out of curiosity and out of context. I often say that I’ve learnt everything I know from films, and one day I hope to write a piece about exactly what it is I’ve learnt and how it has informed my growth. But for now, let’s just say, I used the cues I picked up on the screen to draw on the whiteboard I was given. Reactions, interactions, silence, tension, movement, body language, and, ultimately, language itself took hold of me. I was using life to imitate film, but failing because resonance alone doesn’t activate the self.

My detour in academia enriched my knowledge and philosophical understanding of film, exposing me to waves, movements and cultures that I didn’t know existed, so you can imagine my surprise when, by the end of it, I realised I still didn’t have the tools to face life. Why I was looking for tools in a bachelor’s degree is a different question.

In the end, I finally arrived at the only thing that made sense to my development: storytelling in the form of screenwriting and especially the teachings of John Truby, who doesn’t ask the passive do you like the person you’re turning into?, but rather, is this the kind of person you choose to be?

Soon after I launched this newsletter, two years ago, I flew to Texas to attend the Austin Film Festival, where I walked into a room with 50+ writers, clutching their notepads tight, eager to hear from a man who finally announced:

If you want to write a good screenplay, learn how to live a good life.

The man’s name was Jacob Krueger, and I had finally found my community.

the Joseph Campbell entry to storytelling

You probably have heard of the hero’s journey, and if you haven’t, it looks like the birth chart above. If you really haven’t, Joseph Campbell is credited with articulating the idea of the monomyth — the journey of the self.

Campbell, of course, was a Jungian writer and what this means is that psychoanalytic grounding informed his thoughts about storytelling. What this really means is that he devised a framework where the hero’s actions are motivated by the pursuit of meaning, rather than moral accountability.

In a Campbell-inspired script, the protagonist is faced with a challenge. They confront it, gaining insight that allows them to see beyond themselves and recognise their fate, where meaning acts as the reward for taking up the challenge. It sounds like a good story, doesn’t it?

Retrospectively, it is a good story, empowered by the mythic model that ultimately cements it in our collective unconscious, and we have to look no further than Star Wars to witness its effect.

John Truby’s ideas on storytelling

Truby describes his experience of watching Star Wars as an epiphany because of its ability to transcend genre conventions and overwhelm an audience. But unlike the rest of the world, he doesn’t credit Star Wars’ success to Campbell and his destiny-driven storytelling.

Truby’s central critique of Western social structures stems from the way story is misrepresented: either dismissed as a mere distraction to take our minds off our troubles after a long day or elevated to a substitute for divine guidance, tasked with satisfying our need for meaning, belief, and belonging.

Instead, in his teachings, he imbues stories with ethical responsibility, christening them as the cultural precursors of the secular world. For Truby, the structure of society is mirrored in the structure of a story, and human beings are agents whose choices test, challenge, and ultimately reshape that structure.

Where Campbell emphasises inner transformation through clarity and insight, which can feel quite passive as a practice, Truby defends character agency by holding characters accountable for their choices.

In a Truby-inspired script, the protagonist has a moral problem. They take action to solve it, but this has consequences that make them question their ethics. In the end, they assume responsibility for the choice they made.

How about it? Easier said than done.

‘The Master’ as the perfect example to showcase this binary

Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master confronts this divide by summing up the debate in two sentences when Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour-Hoffman), an Orson Welles-type leader of a therapeutic cult, tells Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), a traumatised Navy veteran:

PTA came up with the idea for the script after reading that periods after wars are productive times for the growth of spiritual movements. The film defends the Campbellian model of preserving the mythmaking worldview that has made our world go round through symbolic structures for centuries, but uses the sensitivity of the post-war period as if to prove that myth is important in surviving crisis, not necessarily in idle living.

It’s after the experience of death that life needs a framework more than ever. Freddie rejects Dodd’s false authority, choosing separation over dependency, and in a way assumes partial responsibility for himself, which sounds a lot more like siding with Truby to me.

In his books, Truby cites some of the greatest movies of all time and breaks them down, creating a solid argument that this is what we (the audience) expect from great storytelling. The reasonable follow-up to this is: if this is great storytelling, why are we shying away from the same standards for ourselves?

As my case in point proves, it’s most likely because movies work subliminally on us.

conclusion

Storytelling is the primary occupation of authors, screenwriters, filmmakers and the like. At times, it echoes the practices of lawyers, politicians, and what may be the hottest profession of the metamodern era: consultants.

Story, however, belongs to everyone. From business owners to doctors and nurses, computer engineers, architects, teachers and scuba-diving instructors, identity expands and becomes the representation of a story. Each of us carries one — a way of living — and each of us can inspire those around us by our demeanour, our attitude, our point of view, our decisions and our beliefs.

EXCEPT, huge caveat ahead… each of us is also daily and consistently prone to imperfection. That’s where I hope this attempt at a newsletter can be of some value and will be making one such argument every month.

If you liked this post, consider a share or a restack to help it find its audience, and as always, thank you for reading 💛

This month, Mubi became the go-to platform once again, featuring at least one popular title, while I made sure not to miss some of the favourable releases, and, of course, Hamnet (1) is as powerful as they have all said.

If you don’t know this yet, I like to refrain from critiquing and rather examine the facts behind production, which in this case help cement the film in our collective imagination, because when Steven Spielberg signs on to no less than produce a film along with Sam Mendes, both filmmaking giants, in their own right, you realise how fruitful creative collaboration can be. Similarly, with Max Richter’s ethereal ‘On The Nature of Daylight’ track, which inspired a change of direction with the film’s ending and forced those tears to keep on falling until long after the movie was over.

While Shakespeare is the most-adapted author in film history, Hamlet must be one of the most-adapted page-to-screen stories in cinema’s hundred-year run, so to distinguish one Hamlet from another was probably an impossible task until… Maggie O’Farrell met Chloé Zhao. Adapted by the two from the novel of the former and directed by the latter, these two creatives give a different life to Hamlet, creating a fresh desire to revisit the original text, to study the rest of Shakespeare’s plays and to understand 16th-century literature better. Fascinating how one curious adolescent thought when a teacher mentioned in passing that Shakespeare had a son whose name was Hamnet, persisted in time to result in a soul-wrenching, non-stop sobbing cinematic experience unlike any of recent years.

Where does Mubi fit in with Hamnet, you may ask, and I shall argue it fits dually so, in both its thematics and its placement in contemporary culture. Hamnet is the film that all films strive to be for its artistry AND accessibility. Where Mubi seeks to elevate the cinematic experience in its goal to deliver bold and visionary films, Hamnet becomes a testament that bold and visionary films matter to a worldwide audience.

Onwards with the list, my second favourite (yet favourite Mubi) of the month was Christmas, Again (2) by American Charles Poekel from a decade ago, because ‘tis the month, and it’s always nice to live in the world of the movie we’re watching. I’ve written in the past that ‘Mubi never fails’ by which I mean that most of the films I’ve seen on the platform are authentic in their intention, and so is Christmas, Again, by knowing exactly what type of movie it is and owning that, which is where lies some principle of taste for me. Poekel disappears after 2014 with no more credits to his name, but this low-budget Christmas film that he financed with his earnings from being a Christmas tree salesman himself, mirroring the premise of his only film, remains as a testament of will and faith in independent filmmaking.

Switching gears to include Marty Supreme (3), which could at first be cited as a commercial star-vehicle sports film featuring all hail Timothée Chalamet, is nothing but. Even if true that the film’s proportions reached studio budget levels and its marketing campaign was as expensive as it was viral, Josh Safdie’s solo venture is as brave and as impressive as any project abiding by an independent agenda, and I think that’s all there is to add to the online debate about it.

Quite different from A Field in England (4) by director and editor extraordinaire Ben Wheatley, whose definition of ‘independent filmmaking’ is probably more closely tied to ‘edge’ and curiosity as it pertains to the medium, yet still working with limited money to recreate a 17th-century world that feels very much like its time during the English Civil War. Written by Wheatley’s creative partner and wife, Amy Jump, it’s the black humour of the dialogue that contemporarizes the film, bridging the gap between art and entertainment. A psychedelic wonder for psychedelic eyes.

Here I have arrived at another film that became one of those please, do tell movies of the month that everybody watched, possibly because it was released on Netflix, but then again, so were double a dozen films as well. No, my instinct tells me that Train Dreams (5) received its critical acclaim because it fits the Mubi bill - it is, after all, a Sundance film. It’s interesting how these platforms maintain distinct identities, despite frequently borrowing from one another, with Train Dreams being a prime example of a film that uses an intricate aspect ratio (3:2), a slow pace and a zoom lens and an overall delicate approach to filmmaking to make it on the Mubi catalogue. Let alone that the director Clint Bentley is heavily inspired by the work of Terrence Malick, who is himself an American auteur.

The film resonates in full circle, probably a tad too much, but then so does Hamnet, and it works. Perhaps that is the reason why Netflix ended up acquiring this one. Perhaps Lurker (Alex Russell, 2025) was a much more intriguing acquisition for Mubi back at the Sundance market this year. Or perhaps, as most of my friends would want me to admit to, there was no competition between the two in the first place, as Netflix occupies the leading forefront of streaming, and it would be silly to allege that Mubi ever had a bid on this quiet Oscar contender.

So I prove some balance here with my top five, only to upset it by bringing forth Totally Fucked Up (6) by Gregg Araki from 1993, a film that I see fitting in the vein of a John Hughes/ Richard Linklater teen-youth ensemble-oriented film. But of course, this is a film made from scraps with a handheld video camcorder. Part of a trilogy that’s called Teenage Apocalypse, this film feels like one to be studied at film school for its political and experimental qualities that can be compared to The Watermelon Woman (Cheryl Dunye, 1996), which I, in fact, did watch at film school. Yet it was fun to watch what someone can do with one overarching idea and a bunch of aspiring actors at their disposal, as Araki wrote, directed, shot, produced and edited a film that soon acquired cult status — really the peak for any film of such scale. A film that lives on Mubi for anyone curious enough to meet those artists and see how experience shapes art, which must be true of every movie.

One of my favourite filmmakers lives on the platform as well, with as many as six of her nine feature films currently streaming here, and whose debut feature, River of Grass (7), I finally watched, the only film she has not edited in her filmography. The filmmaker goes of course by the name of Kelly Reichardt. This is where I come close to the line of being considered a snob because I unashamedly love her slow cinema, and I have trouble explaining why without sounding like… a pretentious cinephile. If speculating, it is probably her non-pretentious intention that gets me, and rightly gets most of her audience, for I myself come from an extensively influenced European film background where slow is synonymous with boring in most cases, and so I feel justified in declaring her work strongly underrated. But to split the difference, where River of Grass promises the beginning of a flourishing career, her latest, The Mastermind (also streaming), is probably a better introduction to her style.

When discussing this arthouse versus entertainment binary with my go-to friend for all things film, she asked the unforgivable question: wouldn’t you want someone to make a film that is every bit as artistic as it can be, but also engages the audience? And the natural follow-up, why make films otherwise? The problem with this question is not to be found in The Fall (8) because this colorful wonder of a film is otherworldly in a Wes Anderson-type of style, so much so that had Tarsem Singh brought this film to life in the Technicolour 1960s, Wes Anderson would definitely have it cited as inspiration. The Fall justifiably achieved mega-status and had long-time film critic, Roger Ebert, praise it as a film to watch simply because it exists, which could be the most accurate compliment that’s ever been.

The problem with this question is to be found in the rest of Tarsem Singh’s filmography, which is not widely available even though he’s been active since he reached the creative gallantry of fame in 2006. Art knows no conditions, yet we (the audience) come to the theatre looking for them, reminding me of John Yorke’s famous quote:

Rare is the critic who doesn’t declare their preferences with one eye in fashion but then rare is the consumer too.

Now, bringing the juice of the argument back, I’ve been wanting to watch Die My Love (9) since its Cannes premiere, followed by its highly coveted 24 million dollar acquisition by Mubi back in May. I finally did with tempered expectations, as is prudent and quiet admiration for both Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson, not least because I looked forward to Katniss and Edward uniting on screen, but definitely because of it, an idea so repellent to Jennifer Lawrence that it struck me how much the actress cares about her craft.

We’d all be lying, though, if we didn’t admit to this stellar pairing as one of the reasons for this arthouse film’s high price. Of course, Lynne Ramsay’s work speaks for itself, and Martin Scorsese’s interest in seeing this come to life as a producer is not to be taken for granted. But events are far too loud to let this film exist without conditions. In 2025, the Academy welcomed Mubi for the first time, sitting them between Neon and A24, two of the largest independent distributors with highly prestigious, original content production arms. A few months later, Mubi signed its infamous, cynically received Sequoia Capital production investment deal.

Times are a-changing, and Mubi is seen to buy into the financial potential of popular likeness, one title at a time, always with the intent and commitment (if you ask me) to bring arthouse cinema to a worldwide audience, arguably rubbing off its influence all around.

Coming up next, Joanna Hogg’s Archipelago (10) is less endearing than the filmmaker’s debut, Unrelated (2007), but it’s a film that owns its voice. Hogg is one of those filmmakers who is largely unknown among an average audience, but who has built a reputable career walking down the writer-director route, surely to be envied by others with similar ambitions. Inspired by cinema that uses minimal camera movement and relies on extended long takes, her singular vision shows up on screen in Archipelago, not disappointing a fanbase already in place.

For the last few picks in my December selection, two of them are not featured on Mubi, yet they could fulfil the criteria for it. Small Little Things Like These (11) is one of them and was one of the Berlinale darlings back in 2024, but the project was put into motion at least a year or two before, on the set of Nolan’s Oppenheimer of all places. Air (Ben Affleck, 2023) might have been the film that properly launched Artists Equity (Matt Damon’s and Ben Affleck’s production company) but this small-scale, obscure Irish, slow-burn of a story will always be the first arthouse of their slate, penned by playwright Enda Walsh who is no other than the co-screenwriter of Die, My Love, compelling me to inquire about the film’s potential platform placement if it hadn’t been produced by the hot duo but oh, such is the work of one overly obsessive brain.

Benediction (12) was one of my most interesting watches this month, but one that I could not stand for its old-timey editing techniques of overlapping fades, a criticism that is entirely personal. Terence Davies delivers his last film to universal critical acclaim for the refreshing liberties it takes in dramatising the life of English poet, Siegfried Sassoon, making me lament the fact that his last film is the first one of his I see. Glad to have made his acquaintance, I will watch more when more there is to watch.

Making an extraordinarily cogent argument compelling, Camp X-Ray (13) was a revelation so far as dialogue-driven military films go. Highly American or anti-American, depending on how you look at it, its scope is limited on top of being controversial, which would explain why it flopped at the box office but was acquired by Mubi after its Sundance premiere. Produced for a mere million USD, this filmmaker-driven drama presents the paradigmatic case of what happens to films with grit but no market appeal.

For the filmmaker who has some of his less commercial films available on Mubi, and one of his greatest (that is, Queer), a slight disappointment befalls when watching After The Hunt (14). Coming across the film after listening to an interview with the screenwriter, the inner machinations behind this script’s orchestrated option would not be surprising to the most naive among us. With a star-studded cast, a lot of hefty, cerebral dialogue and an impossible budget to make back for a film that’s marketed as a psychological thriller but feels more like a straight-up drama, I am in accord with my friend when she says: It’s okay to take a break, Luca.

Queens of the Qing Dynasty (15) belongs to the Canadian genre, a genre created by Canada’s creative body funds that tends to be entirely cultural and remarkably slow-paced. Ashley McKenzie, herself a Canadian, is intrinsically interested in characters and situations that describe the collective Canadian experience, yet brings a psychedelic lens to this film, turning this hyper-realistic narrative into a visually unique experience of sequences. One of those films that are harder to sit through, made for those who wear the toupé of sophistication with pride.

Last but not least, I have not been able to find a redeemable quality in Alex Ross Perry’s The Color Wheel (16). Otherwise a huge fan, especially of the filmmaker’s movies in collaboration with Elizabeth Moss — Queen of Earth (2015) and Listen Up Philip (2014) — I could not in my right mind like or recommend this mumblecore film, despite its clear display of Perry’s talent. Luckily, the filmmaker has had a flourishing career, and there is no need for me to savour this bizarre attempt at storytelling.

A truly Mubi-esque month, then it was, owing to the platform for allowing us to explore auteurship, deepening our collective taste and appreciation of the filmmaking process. If nothing else, one veritable truth remains: art is where it’s at.

Until next month x

P.S. New subscribers, be aware, this is a sneak peek into my watching, crafting a monthly story around taste, older movies and new releases.

Halloween is not a North American tradition but it’s also not the first thing that got carried over and embraced by a culture of abundance, creativity and play. Come Halloween time, in this part of the world (at least), horror takes center stage in the film and media landscape with classic screenings and new releases dominating the scene and I, for one, decided to dive right into it this year.

My personal fascination with the genre feels fresh, although an everlasting relationship was established early on with films like The Shining and Rec. Horror seeks to elicit physical and psychological fear in the audience and I was not a brave kid, mainly because my imagination was too pronounced to keep the terror contained. Creaks and noises in the middle of the night were fuel for many different scenarios with death always at the end of it, the result-direction, as it is in many (if not all) horror films while in some cases, it dares to take the form of the villain itself.

(1) Final Destination, which sets up the panultimate wealthy teenager experience in suburban America rooted in a made-up familiarity for many who will either never see it or never admit to it, is one of them. It takes you in as Alex (ours truly Devon Sawa) tries to trick death and find a way to survive although he should have died on a plane destined to Paris along with a bunch of his classmates. A film with brilliant pacing that can only be attribued to James Wong who directs with clean and efficient visual storytelling avoiding chaos yet creating dread. Also one that turned into a years-long franchise which is still producing films with a loyal fanbase (latest installment just dropped). And of course, to the credit of screenwriter, Jeffrey Reddick, who has one of these origin stories cool enough to keep the American spirit relevant still, and who at age fourteen established contact with (big deal) New Line Cinema founder by his own prerogative. It makes you think, are all these prerequisites in delivering a story that has everyone I talked to about it, talk about it with the same enthusiasm?

Perhaps the most important question to ask is: will Final Destination, released in the year 2000, be considered a classic fifty years from now? (still twenty-five years to go), the same way that (2) The Texas Chain Saw Massacre holds up to a legendary 3.8 🌟 with (arguably younger) letterboxd crowds? The idea of a cult classic could begin and end with Tobe Hopper’s masterpiece. One of the most influential slasher films, if not the first cabin in the woods gone wrong scenario, is a great credit to live up to. A film of 83 minutes had me shocked to find out that what I considered to be just the start of the movie was actually its end. A rare, if not impossible take on any one movie. Intellectualizing it further, I came to the conclusion that the goal of gasing up their truck was so ridiculously simple it made me want to see it happen which of course it never did and so the film could never end. Chain Saw Massacre had me thinking: why don’t they make them like that anymore?

Naturally, next up on my list is (3) It Follows becoming the exception to the question above. David Robert Mitchell’s second feature film is one that was accepted to screen in Cannes of all places that stir away from conventional horror narratives. That’s a testament to his talent, directing with grounding tension but thrilling poeticism. If it’s hard to pinpoint what it is that makes the film own up to its critical acclaim of one of the most-praised horror films of the 2010s, I venture when I’m saying that it must be its simplicity, in concept, that allows it to hold its own among horror masterpieces. Produced for maybe less than $2M (low-budget for American standards), it made more money than it could expect and achieved a cult following in the process.

Moving forth, one quintessential watch to commemorate the lore and gore featured in the most scary month of the year was (4) Casper produced with (Steven Spielberg’s) Amblin Entertainment sensibilities in mind. A character I’ve only been familiar with through home media, if any, but also the first CGI character to star in a film. That was in 1995 and the star behind it was no other than Canadian child actor and Final Destination superstar Devon Sawa. Possibly dated, but a joy to watch, it launches me into the next phase of my movie marathon where films like (5) Barbarian and (6) Talk to Me gain prominence as provocative works of contemporary horror.

Staying up to date with films and filmmakers is a hard task in a world that produces close to ten thousand films annually. When I should have been watching Weapons (2025), I found myself watching Barbarian (2022), Zach Cregger’s debut feature, to be able to properly keep up with the horror zeitgeist. I place it here because it is a horror film that gives in horror as much as it takes in social commentary. It sets outs never to bore, and always to scare, raising questions that find answers in different interpretations. It lives up to the high expectations of a genre like that while taking a leap in saying something with its purposeful commentary.

On par, Talk to Me (2022) marks the directorial debut by the Greek-Australian Philippou brothers who in a similar trajectory released their second feature film this year and I have yet to see it too. Talk to Me excites in horror with an after credits scene that breathes franchise potential, but it probably falls shorter than Barbarian in the questions that it raises, driving us into solid brick walls with the ideas it proposes. It was a thrilling watch that had me turn on and off the lights before bed but one that didn’t stay with me longer than it scared me for.

(7) 28 Days Later came as a must-see in my wish to understand the hype around its 28 Years Later sequel that was released surprise, surprise this year, too. Impressed from beginning to end with the concept of shooting a full blown-out zombie movie on a digital camera capturing the never empty streets of downtown London as ‘actually’ empty (what a task); I was also happy to follow young Cillian Murphy along for the ride.

My obsession with (8) Companion began and ended with Yellowjackets favorite Sophie Thatcher who was either perfectly cast or perfectly miscast — still thinking on this. Then, here comes (9) The Babadook whose lingering metaphor was either a hit or miss, although it manages to maintain the sense of the supernatural alive long enough to kill any second thoughts.

Coming to the end, (10) Longlegs felt less than what was promised but mixing and matching a few genres together grew in me and in stature after the first watch while (11) Infinity Pool’s bare artistic vision achieved the alienation that it probably set out to achieve, holding me back from loving it. Isolating its parts, Mia Goth as the wacko wealthy tourist and as Pearl in (12) Pearl was on point with the season, delivering some unhinged performances. If the film didn’t feel that rushed, I think it would have made it higher on my list.

Last and also least, (13) Split was probably a 3.5 🌟 for what it wanted to be — a Blumhouse production with a capital B but it was a 2 🌟 for any and all reasons that inform my ranking process.

A lacking selection, I’m sure, but a selection nonetheless.

Here’s to next month x

P.S. New subscribers beaware, this is a sneak peek into my watching, crafting a monthly story around taste, classic movies and new releases.

Are the best watches the rewatches we never saw coming? (1) Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid lives up to unbeatable lore. The beginnings of this hugely successful, highly prestigious, art-oriented celebration of independent cinema. American? Yes, mostly, but legitimate nonetheless. The truth is, if we were to give credit where credit is due, then Sundance belongs to Harry Alonzo Longabaugh for the inspiration he granted to William Goldman, who crafted Robert Redford’s character to a legendary tee. “Small price to pay for beauty,” probably says it all in this 1969 self-aware revisionist western, which served as a great rewatch the day after Robert Redford passed away at his home in Sundance, Utah, on the 16th of September. Rest in peace.

Second in line is (2) Left-Handed Girl, a Taiwanese film by Shih-Ching Tsou, one I had the privilege to see in a private screening at TIFF where I shied away from telling the director how great her art was. Sleep deprivation had nothing on this masterpiece, which showcases many of Sean Baker's sensibilities, only to reveal that this is not the first creative collaboration between the two directors, who co-directed a feature film back in 2004. Stand-out performances bring the film to its unexpected crescendo, especially by child actress Nina Yeh. An experience remains long after a film has ended, and this one, I suspect, will stay with me for a while.

Now, to the film that had the internet explode into a million little pieces, (3) One Battle After Another still does not beat Boogie Nights (1997) for me as my favourite PTA film, but it is a wild ride and a testament to talent. If for nothing else, I’m thankful they shot these long-winded, wild-west high roads in a way that captures the emotion in question, which is how I’ve always pictured them since On the Road. And the soundtrack. Radiohead’s lead guitarist delivers hard. But it’s also the cultural impact of a big event like that which makes you want to return to the cinema with different friends and experience the movie anew.

(4) Bad Apples was a revelation in a theatre packed with press & industry delegates on a Saturday morning. These morning TIFF screenings can really make or kill the day. Thankfully, it was the former for me, who had come out of the premiere of another film the night before, which should not have opened at the festival (but that’s a different story). Small scale, refreshing, independent and yet sharp cuts, bold performances, and questionable morals. I went for Saoirse Ronan, which is to say that cast matters, but everyone in this cast and crew delivered, and I reserve a special place in my heart for these. Very different from my next favourite of the festival, a guilty-pleasure watch, (5) Nouvelle Vague by established filmmaker Richard Linklater, who unashamedly loves À bout de Souffle (1960), and we love him for it. The god of the Before Trilogy delivers a film that Godard himself would probably hate, but he hits the right spots with the right intensity that puts every single cinephile to the test, myself included. But see, my 16-year-old brain was triggered, and I cannot apologise for that.

Next up — the film that I had a tiny production role in had its North American premiere as part of the Centrepiece program, (6) Honey Bunch is ambitious and impressive and perfectly bookended. I would clap for twenty minutes in the fashion of any modern standing ovation for my favourite Canadian filmmakers. It’s psychological, it’s gory, it’s very ‘70s, it’s practical, and it’s only the right amount of quirky. It’s a great Valentine’s Day date, a film that deserves attention emerging in a Canadian landscape that doesn’t feel quite ready for filmmakers who don’t subscribe to a national cinematic identity; and of course, one that I cannot seem to be able to separate myself from for my own personal reasons.

To understand TIFF or any big festival in this day and age is to understand overwhelm, for a film is but an emotional experience and for people who savour those, it can be quite challenging. Watching (7) It Was Just An Accident on the day and the time that I did probably struck the wrong cord in me, but it is the natural follow-up in my list, no less because it won the recognition it deserved by securing the highly coveted Palme d’Or earlier this year at Cannes. Jafar Panahi directs with grace and humour, relativising an experience that most of us will never come to terms with. It is possibly for that reason that I wanted it to have a different ending, of which I remained unjustifiably stubborn, but have changed my mind since. I can’t say that the same goes for (8) Wake Up Dead Man, the third Knives Out mystery from director Rian Johnson. The Princess of Wales Theatre downtown was cracking up. It can host a great audience when it's filled, so one must brace oneself when it’s a comedy, because it is contagious. Still, it wasn’t a cheat, which is how I felt watching Glass Onion three years ago. Being of the opinion that festivals are for less commercial movies, I had to succumb to the pressure of a dedicated fandom that added to my viewing experience.

(9) If I Had Legs I’d Kick You was worth every last minute I spent waiting to get a ticket to the premiere because Rose Byrne carries, and she makes it really hard to be critical about any other aspect of the film. (A tight tracking camera on her might have had something to do with it, too.) Sometimes just one element is enough to leave an impression, as compared to a film that feels quite ‘exotic’ in its everything i.e. (10) Dead Lover — not my flick BUT a huge flick nonetheless. Picked up for U.S. distribution by a new niche company going by the name Cartuna x Dweck Productions, who reframed the concept of the theatrical experience with one single marketing stunt: the technology of Stink-O-Vision. Apart from the zaniness that describes the whole movie, a leaflet that contains odours that no one should ever smell really animated this Midnight Madness crowd and made the finale of TIFF, one for the ages.

Meanwhile — (11) No Other Choice brought the festival to a roaring applause, being many people’s favorite, one that deserves a rewatch because it has one of the funniest killing sequences in modern thriller times, while (12) The Captive is a unique watch, assuming a contemporary lens to an Ottoman-occupied Algiers in 1575. For all their differences, in genre and theme and intention, one of the things that can characterise almost every single movie in this list is a proclivity to comedy. Except from (2), (5) & (6).

Apart from hectic festival watches, some of my monthly honorable mentions include Akira Kurosawa’s (13) Ikiru (1952), which bears witness to the director’s talent with long, emotional yet pretty stagnant takes that force you to think about whatever it is that he wants you to think about. At times evoking what feels like archaic considerations, his camera captures a remarkably authentic look into his character’s life, which, even if dated or irrelevant, is to be admired. And lastly, Werner Herzog’s (14) Grizzly Man (2005) was quite the documentary — it is the spectacle to which we’re drawn, always, it has to be. In this case, the idea of a man so brave as to swim with a grizzly bear, captured on video, was the experience itself, much like Daniel Roher’s work in Navalny (2022), which delivers real-time corruption.

P.S. A story of spectacle connects those September watches and launches my new effort to spill some words on the page and document at least some part of what I’m doing.

Until next month x

Why do we love movies? Sounds like an easy question, but is it?

Why do we love movies today? Not in 1927 or in 1972, but what is it that makes the movies alluring to us today?

An executive from one of the big three (Neon, A24 and Mubi now as it seems…?) unashamedly went on stage last year and admitted that it’s not about the movie, it’s about the experience, something I’ve repeated as well and something I’ve heard being repeated by others.

You want to make art, they told me, and I do, I want to make art in the likes of Paul Thomas Anderson and Joachim Trier and Kelly Reichardt and Celine Song. Yes, Celine Song who recently made this movie, a movie called Materialists that blew up in North America.

Some people will argue its stellar cast is what sold it, and they’re not wrong in that, Dakota Johnson, Pedro Pascal and Chris Evans, all three of them are beautiful. They provide us with an ‘experience’ as the movie theatre lights up at each one’s smile. Just look.

We’re not merchandise, we’re people, a phrase that writer-director Celine Song cannot stop repeating, could also be what sold the movie because the crowd, the audience, craves to hear what they won’t allow themselves to think of.

People argued that Anyone but You was THE romantic comedy of 2023 because it carried with it a nostalgia visceral to many. The same people are the ones probably arguing that Materialists has re-ignited the rom-com, which I’m not reluctant to admit to.

There's an audience out there that cares about this genre so much; could that be it? Love is a topic that is worthy being talked about with the same philosophical seriousness as any other topic and {…} all the great filmmakers know that, Celine said, and the mic dropped on the other side of the screen (in an interview with letterboxd editor and superfan, Mia Lee Vicino).

When I walked out of the theatre, my first instinct would have me screaming in Celine’s defence because writing so bluntly about love is brave. Not everyone can do it. Not everyone has done it.

I guess, in the end, what sold it for me, was the dialogue. The dialogue’s introspection, constantly reversing my expectations by stepping out of the genre and into reality. This was life.

He’s a John, Celine said of Chris Evans when she met him and Chris said, in a separate interview, oh yeah, i’ve been this guy, this guy who is waiting tables while waiting for a kick-off that will turn his whole life around, and somehow it’s not hard to believe that. Somehow, he’s truly a John. A gorgeous-looking, living up to the fantasy of every down-on-his-luck John, but a John nonetheless.

To answer my own rhetorical question: we love movies because we love introspection, but we so rarely do it. That’s my take; we’re observers, we learn by imitation, movies are a mirror into society or vice versa?

In talking with a dear friend, though, I found that this is not an experience shared by many. I found the movie magic to be gone, giving way to an eagerness to dissect the myth, dismantle the narrative, and sell its parts for scraps. She wasn’t sure, is introspection really the right word for it?, I had to wonder. I extended my arm so far as to consult the screen on my hand - introspection is the examination or observation of one’s own mental and emotional processes.

What it came down to was this, she wasn’t sure because the dialogue was explicit, too explicit for its own sake; hollow. I would define it as cringeworthy, if I’m shying away from what a moment has to offer, but hollow? I had to think again.

The art of articulation evokes memories of my mom urging me to try debate class in school. A skill that will become a talent the more you nurture it, which leaves us with the assumption that the majority of us cannot articulate, not in the moment anyway. Suddenly, it’s dark, but the spotlight is on, the stage is alive, and we’re all just waiting for that someone who will say the right thing at the right time, validating what we’ve all been thinking of but couldn’t dare embrace.

All the screenwriting gurus will have you agree that dialogue is not more important than any other element of a script, yes. But flipping this statement on its head will have you hanging from someone’s lips as if the world would end if they were gone. Good dialogue illuminates what people are not saying (Robert Towne), yes. Can good dialogue also reveal what people are too afraid to say?

To speak the movie’s language, love is a business that everyone is familiar with. The difficulty of objectifying its full potential feels unfathomable, yet both Past Lives and Materialists resonate so profoundly that it leads us questioning their very authenticity.

How do you make a film like that? he asked me, of Past Lives, with genuine exhaustion in his eyes, an LA native and filmmaker-to-be, young and brimming with creativity, protected behind his bubblegum shield. By living, I told him with the deference I reserve for those filmmakers who enchant and startle me at the same time.

What troubles me the most is that the critique is not even against the hyperawareness of these characters, which is what inspired me to write this post in the first place. Conversations that are so blunt they betray years’ worth of psychotherapy, is what got to me. Is this the kind of dialogue that feeds an undernourished soul?

I walked out of the theatre cradling a desire to say things as they are, and at the same time, fully aware that I don’t know how things are until I’ve said them out loud. Rinse and repeat until one day, probably in old age, hopefully sooner, I’ll finally know.

Walking the line between what we can say and what we won’t say is telling for a movie being criticised for its cerebral dialogue.

It’s not real life, it’s fiction, following a deliberate emotional strategy silhouetting the perfect versions of ourselves, side by side, only and if only… It’s a romantic dramedy grounded in its introspection — but granted, probably not everyone’s cup of tea.

The ‘experience’ fades but the dialogue remains, raw in my mind. The film bakes its cake and eats it too in the service of ‘inyeon’, a connection as old as life itself.

Did you see Materialists? Spill the beans and let me know what you think.

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I’m reading Karl Iglesias’ book Writing for Emotional Impact, and in it, he presents several techniques on how to develop an idea that will, pardon me the language, sell better. At the same time, my mind wanders to faraway places. It goes to Mycenae of all places, I taste the salt on my lips, and I feel the sun burning my skin. Suddenly, the words on the page lose all their meaning, and I find myself in isolation, thinking about what it is that interested me in this book in the first place.

Without getting too wordy about it, the driving idea behind this newsletter was born when, time and again, I found myself in the intersection of life and fiction. The premise that ‘life cannot be a movie’ compelled me because sometimes movie-worthy moments sneaked their way into my life, leaving an intoxicating mark on me. There are more stories out there than there are people, and so the argument was made. My hook was established, and I had arrived. But had I?

After exploring the depths of my knowledge and cross-examining all the reasons for my interests, I felt validated in my hook, and yet not really closer to it. In fact, this is when it started slipping away from me, this is when I started losing interest in the ‘what’ and began obsessing over the ‘how’.

A new force came over me that dictated the path whispering to my ear it doesn’t matter what you write, it matters how you write it, and the more I tried to create rules and impose the new world order based on what I knew was the one true HIGH CONCEPT, the more it felt like self-sabotaging.

Speed (Jan De Bont, 1994) is old but gold, and one of the prime examples to explore what everyone in the ‘emotional business’ refers to as the hook, the gimmick, or the twist.

In screenwriting terms, a hook is a succinct premise that generates excitement. It’s every answer to the question “what’s it about?” Think of a movie that you watched recently and really liked. What was it about?

If you care about my example, Speed is about a bus rigged with a bomb that will explode if the bus’s speed drops under 50 miles per hour. It’s a HIGH CONCEPT film, meaning that the concept is the highest appeal of the script (Iglesias) because we feel the tension and understand the stakes. A strong hook in a high concept film is straightforward, leaving no room for ambiguity.

I think back to Truby’s everything is about poetics, a phrase that endeared me and one I still find self-defining to this day. This is where this writing experiment began. Then I think of the overused quote be yourself, everyone else is already taken, which reminds me of Charles Dickens in the ‘Tale of Two Cities’ who explores that very same idea but from a different, more absolute perspective.

How did I get from a Hollywood action film to 19th century literature, you might be wondering, and it’s fair. My train of thought is fast and doesn’t care too much about the passengers inside. It all comes back to this binary.

The term HIGH CONCEPT originates in the film industry and gained prominence after the New Hollywood era as studios sought marketing-friendly narratives that could generate mass appeal. Speed is the outcome of this shift.

I thought high concept was a term used for a highly philosophical premise, I said. No, you’re putting too much thought into it, I was told. High concept is the opposite of a film with a strongly embedded meaning. High concept is the framing of a problem, for lack of a better word, in a way that can be entertaining for at least an hour and a half.

Every movie has a hook, but not every movie is high concept. Speed employs a ticking bomb device in its hook, heightening the stakes and contributing to a killer high concept pitch. A one-of-a-kind.

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Thinking about the ‘how’ rather than the ‘what’, I find myself in a constant battle between honoring my hook, and delivering high concept, explanatory to a T, unambiguous essays.

I recently came across a man whose name is Paul Graham (in The Common Reader) and whose writing style is simple, yet all the same effective. Think Malcolm Gladwell. Think Yuval Noah Harrari. Posing complicated arguments in a way that can be understood by the thickest of minds. Yes, this is one way to go about the ‘how’ in writing, I agree, but it’s not my way.

I could have stayed in academia, it was an option once, but I couldn’t have really because I’m not interested in making a thesis and proving it. I’m interested in observing the elements of the thesis, together or in isolation, and arriving at no definite conclusion, the nightcup of a rhetorical question. I’m interested in literature and poetry, and what words have to offer when we try to put one next to the other. I’m interested in ‘how’ the story unfolds, rather than ‘what’ the story is about, ironic for a newsletter titled what’s the story, for much like my own life, I don’t know what headspace I’ll be inhabiting next week to know what my following essay is going to be about.

Yes, life can be a movie in more ways than one. Still, my interest has steered away from dictating how this could be towards all the ways I know it is. In doing so, I’m shifting gears in my writing, my own personal ‘how’, taking the plunge into some low-concept writing, hoping that the hook will be enough to make you stick around.

First things first, thank you to everyone who has stayed on in this endless creative drought of a period. I have too many excuses, the most recent of which is the best one to lead with: Cannes, the mecca of cinema, the place-to-be for any and all filmmakers. Walking down the old quartier du Suquet with a croissant at hand to get to the first conferences of the day, chatting with the organisers under the blazing sun, rushing to a networking brunch, while one two many networking cocktails later, I’m finally sneaking out of the hubdub to join a quieter crowd this time, in a movie theatre, exhausted but spellbound, watching with goggling eyes a film that I don’t know how to feel about because the rest of the world has yet to put it into context. This for two weeks straight, double the time to recover, and triple the time to prepare. A good excuse, a great one for most, except me, itching to get back here and write.

Many substackers will tell you that consistency is key if you want to grow your audience, but what they won’t tell you is that curating a newsletter is a full-time job that feels more like a newborn baby. A job with its own deadlines and challenges, mornings of reading and evenings of writing, talking about it as if it defines you, because it is the centre of your universe, because without you it would die and without it you would too, until, on a much-awaited Sunday afternoon reserved for you and yourself only, you decide you don’t want it anymore, you want to give it up, because it tires you, and it doesn’t let you rest, and you make yourself wonder how your life would be if you never had it. No, I’m not there.

I have engaged in a more or less unstructured lifestyle in my life, I admit it, I have been called the h***** word, a compliment to those who never grow out of it, I’ve hustled, I’ve jumped, head first, over a cliff without knowing if there’d be water, I’ve done it all or so I say, and what it comes down to is this: it doesn’t matter how but why. It doesn’t matter what kept me away, it never did, it only matters what brought me back, it only matters what the movie is trying to say.

A chronically subversive Charlie Kaufman has had years of experience before his movie career took off, and what a take-off it was with Being John Malkovich leading the way, followed by Adaptation (2002) (which I shall spoil beware), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Synecdoche New York (2008), Anomalisa (2015) and his latest I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2020), among others. Some of the most mind-blowing narratives out there, a statement supported by a challenge too hard to fathom.

This one (example) is coming from deep down the vault, from a time when movies took playful chances. It is not current nor relevant, but it is acclaimed because Kaufmann is not a hit-or-miss, no, thanks to his audacious yet utterly unfeigned relationship with structure.

“I’d want to let the movie exist, rather than being artificially plot-driven.”

“Great! I guess I’m not exactly sure what that means.”

(dialogue from Adaptation)

This post has been long overdue — I intended to write it in December and publish it just in time for the new year, but when the new year came about, next week became next month, and next month never came.

Adaptation is a film about a neurotic, self-loathing screenwriter trying to break free from the constraints that the creative industry is trying to impose on him: he is asked to adapt a novel into a screenplay, one of the most baffling, most coveted, most lucrative tasks in all of Hollywood, because IP sells, and it sells well. In this exploration of Kaufman’s own psyche, a creative decision that strips away any illusion that this story is about anyone else but Kaufman himself, Charlie Kaufman (the character), played by Nicolas Cage, repeatedly questions the importance and value of a screenplay's structure. To the well-known principle that structure is a skeleton, Kaufman (the character) can only say bull.

People say that it’s good to know the rules to break them, but Kaufman (the character) is always one step ahead, not learning them, but hyper-aware of them, nurturing a deep, visceral need to disregard them. Those teachers are dangerous if your goal is to try to do something new, and a writer should always have that goal. Writing is a journey into the unknown, he exclaims.

I was at a New Year’s party to celebrate the venture into this brand new journey into life, and upon conversation, I asked someone, what is it that you do? He shared that he was a graphic designer, creating visuals for companies to advertise their products. But you make your own stuff too, I stated more so than I asked. I draw. I draw pictures, but what I draw… it doesn’t make a story. How do I write a story?

Structure is a rigid word, hard to pronounce and dull to imagine, as stifling as an inflexible mind and as demotivating as an early morning run. So many conversations had with all kinds of people, some condemning its value, others acquiescing to its power, all of them knowingly complicit in the irony of taming the beast. An early monday morning is an early monday morning after all.

Adaptation ‘eats itself’, says Spike Jonze, by taking us on a journey through the unraveling of a man plagued by crushing self-doubt and existential angst, ironically and perfectly framed around the argument that structure in screenwriting? it’s bullshit.

‘Back to the storyboard’ carries a strange echo to the times when we used to say every scoundrel on their bench. There’s an air of reboot attached to it, shredding pages, throwing away drafts, arriving at one’s tabula rasa. The blank page. Is structure necessary? Midway into the year, and I can affirm I’m still grappling with the same question.

Kaufman (the character) finds meaning for the first time at the midpoint, when the author of the book he has to adapt speaks to him in a way that only an author of a book you love can speak to you, subliminally leading him to attend a seminar by Robert McKee, one of the most influential screenwriting theorists, and played by Brian Cox, who berates him when he asks the question: what if a writer attempts to create a story where nothing much happens?

“Nothing happens in the world? Are you out of your fucking mind? People are murdered every day, there is war, corruption, every fucking day, somewhere in the world, someone scarifices his life to save somebody else, every fucking day someone somewhere takes a conscious decision to destroy someone else. People find love, people lose it, for chrissake, a child watches a mother beaten to death on the steps of a church, someone goes hungry, somebody else betrays his best friend for a woman.

If you can’t find that stuff in life then you, my friend, don’t know crap about life.”

(dialogue form Adapatation)

Perhaps a better question to ask is: to structure or not to structure? How do you expect to maintain a relationship if you don’t make plans together?, someone asked me once.

Structure is all around you, you just may not be seeing it as structure, says John August and oftentimes, there is a lack of intention {which} we interpret as a structure problem, says Craig Mazin in episode 673 of Scriptnotes.

Structure is necessary, one school of thought will tell you, because without it, the world would crumble, on the page but mostly in life. Reject it only if you truly understand it, are McKee’s last words on this, simple in their profoundness.

In my baby boomer piece, which I naively thought would kickstart a wave of thoughts, feelings and words long before I realised I’d have to do the work myself, I maintain that change is essential in movies, while in this one, I propose, by echoing Mckee, that change is achieved through structure. In the final moment of Adaptation, Kaufman (the character) drives off from his encounter with Emilia filled for the first time with hope, as Kaufman (the screenwriter) decided to shape this achingly personal experience into a screenplay that could charm an entire audience. The meta-narrative we’ve all occasionally fallen for, and his only one strictly abiding by the rules of a structure.

Talking about structure brings to mind Greg McKeown in Essentialism when he proposes that, sometimes what you don’t do is just as important as what you do.

What are you doing or not doing these days?

As I’m entering my era of doing rather than not doing, you’ll be hearing from me again next month.

Fall is rom-com season, it’s when Harry met Sally, it’s a moment to pause and think about love, a word with a very vague ring to it. Rom-coms are not doing it right. They don’t show you the murky stuff, says a good friend of mine. Idolising love is what they do best and as dangerous as it may be we are drawn to it by some powerful pull, similar to the one that draws bees to honey and writers to a well-fitting simile. For one thing rom-coms are movies prone to stylised dramatisation but for another, they offer us a version of a hope-ridden love story holding out one rare possibility that ‘love’ may not be an artifice of fiction.

Reading through Chapter 13 of Anatomy of Genres, I can’t but see through the theory and into the likelihood of well articulated relationship advice. THE LOVE STORY is the art of happiness according to John Truby, which must be, says me, why the rom-com genre thrives on its kind.

In the best love stories, the true opponent is love itself. When a person begins to feel new love, they are afraid.

Troubles of the heart are always in vogue. Taming a feeling, any feeling, but especially the one, can feel like an impossible task at times. A strange type of pride takes over when you have to share a part of yourself with another. It’s oftentimes an instinct as primal as any, it feels complicated, ambiguous, you can’t decide. Rejection must be imminent, you have to be careful, blaming yourself for the naivete of thinking that it could even be possible…

No, not all love stories have a happy ending but you needn’t me to tell you. Most of us have been through it; a relationship, the same old journey of a fast-beating heart that time and again gets broken. Bleak and ephemeral it becomes making life feel like an Eric Rohmer flick serving us with a sentiment so fragile, so unique, baffling us by how easy it is to obtain it and how hard it is to keep it, always accompanied by a dry sense of humour begging us to accept it for what it is and nothing more. Until we turn the tv on and another type of film is on: the rom-com. Because yes, some love stories have a happy ending, one that they owe to a little, underrated technique called the double reversal.

The result of the double reversal is that the ‘I’ finally becomes the ‘us’… the profound idea that we become most fully ourselves through love, by joining in a community with another person.

In its worst but most commonplace, cynical-driven expression, a relationship is nothing but an ego-ridden situationship, serving the needs of the self and the self only. In this modern version of the world, those looking for love are tormented by their constant need for validation while jumping on every opportunity to prove their unreliability, their independence, boasting about their self-worth, which should (should it?) always come first. Messages left on seen. Scoff. Calls that serve no idle a purpose. Scowl. Everyone turns into an enemy when the trail of embarrassment becomes visible enough… because love, lo and behold, is shameful when it is out in the open.

The recipe for a rom-com relies on such great conflict - it is a game that the audience loves to watch. Drama from a third-person perspective is always entertaining; butterfly-inducing, exhilarating, high-stakes action with the greatest pay-off of all time: the love union, the most intimate society in life. A game which on the part of the characters is a gut-wrenching, soul-crushing journey, putting to the risk their very self-preservation… no, can’t take it… flipping the tabletop, racing towards survival and walking away with pride. Sweet, except a story like that would not have lasting value. The love union must materialise and it must do so through the double reversal, yielding power and conceding to emotion, taking a leap and hoping it’ll be worth it… Sally throws the ball which lands in Harry’s court. What’s it going to be?

Yet achieving ‘love’ or what Truby calls the highest capacity and experience of the human being - without it, we can’t be fully human, feels like a thought so romantic, it must be reserved for only the greatest of love stories while we, basic and simple as we are, must keep running the race, walking the pattern, protecting our pride, mustn’t we?

All great love stories involve trust and forgiveness: trust that the other will not hurt them and forgiveness when they inevitably do.

Chapter 13 is the last chapter in Truby’s book who laid out the genres in his own arbitrarily-conceived order from easiest to most difficult - the rom-com then, according to the screenwriting guru, is one of the most difficult genres to write. The most perplexing. The most intimidating. The most risky for ‘true love’ is delicate, impactful and has to land. Both in life and on the page, a line is drawn by the characters or by the parties involved. It’s invisible a promise between two people who can’t face the fear of declaring it out loud.

In a screenplay, the rules are set up from the beginning - “Can men and women ever be just friends?” is the dramatic question driving the narrative of When Harry Met Sally (Norah Ephron, Rob Reiner, 1989). Yes they can but if tempted to cross that self-set line, they must be willing to honour it - they must be willing to embrace great love and nothing short of it.

It’s a gamble to find the same cues in life which is intuitively and intrinsically less dramatic, rooted in tangible consequences and concrete situations, timeframes that we have no control over, responsibilities that take sway in our decision-making, a deviation from fatigued romanticism towards a loss of general fulfilment. Love is reserved for the movies, it must be.

We cannot be happy in love unless we are happy within ourselves.

This is where the rom-com genre falls short, driving us with full force into a glass-wall that shatters and breaks, leaving us barefoot standing on a thousand little pieces of broken glass. By idolising love, the rom-com runs the risk of making one lose perspective. Love should always be the answer at the end of the day but it is not always the solution on a case-to-case basis. In a writer’s den, the love-conquers-all moment is a crumpled index card in the back pocket of said writer’s pair of jeans but in the real world, cooking up a happy ending befitting to the story we want to see play out is a recipe for aching heartbreak. Love does not conquer all. Having a loving feeling toward the other is not enough {says Truby}… if one doesn’t love oneself.

Time is what elevates When Harry Met Sally to the shrine of all rom-coms, following their relationship through the course of a decade as they meet, separate, meet again, separate again, meet again, become friends and in the end effortlessly and naturally fall in love, ta-da! By eliminating romantic expectations, they come closer, cherishing one another without the presumption that they are made for each other, a taxing proposition for those of us with both feet on the ground because love might be simple but life is helluva complicated.

If you can’t justify losing true love, don’t try it. Viewers are much less likely to believe that there is anything more important than true love.

In the end, is there an honest answer to the question: How much can you love? Can you love in spite of differences, mistakes, desires, adversities? Can you love for the better version of yourself? If you love does that make things easier or harder? Does it make things complicated?

What it feels like is this:

When it doesn’t work, great love is a vain and desperate attempt towards idolisation. When it does work, it is a promise as good as any that happiness can be attained even if the world is falling apart. When it doesn’t work, it makes one wonder if it ever will. When it does work, it feels like the easiest accomplishment of all. When it doesn’t work, blame goes all around and it rarely finds a righteous spot to sit on. When it does work, it comes with a reminder of all unlucky occurrences that led to this particular lucky one cementing a relief so strong that only a bad writer and a fool would dare let go.

Fall is rom-com season then. Which rom-com are you watching?

If you liked this post, consider a share or a restack to help it find its audience. Thank you for reading 💛

Craving a good story is what we’re after. Yet designing a perfect one, ‘the one’, is a path riddled with challenges and expectations that are due to fall short at any moment.

Protagonists are not as clearly defined. We’re almost never aware of each other’s journey, always fighting for our place in the sun. Their biggest flaw? Who knows. Their greatest desire? Who cares. The timeline is without exception linear. Flashbacks are not really a thing and even if they were, they probably come in the middle of the night in the form of well-planned projections rooted in year-long anxieties. The acts are certainly not matching up, at least not as well as we would want them to. What feels like the end is most likely the beginning every time, throwing us off into a brand new story that we didn’t know we had in us. In the end, it is tone that becomes the most bothersome of all. A vacillation between comedy and drama, so many awkward moments from time immemorial, pushing their way through the door demanding some undeserved attention.

Life is a work in progress. Footage in an editing suite. Some of it is good. Some of it is bad, about to get discarded… but not until the final cut has been locked.

Robert Mckee wrote a book called Story. Some people cling to their bibles next to their beds. I cling to Story. Says Mckee, “Desinging story tests the maturity and insight of the writer, their knowledge of society, nature, and the human heart.” A good enough reminder to fret about structure, tone, pacing, dialogue… particularly dialogue. How many times do we say the wrong thing when we could have said the right? Is this detrimental? Can it be fixed? What’s been said can never be unsaid. Scary to realize. We don’t have that privilege so we say things that we don’t mean, often without subtext, we just blurt it out.

How do we make peace with our immaturity and our mistakes? With all the typos, the missing periods, the misplaced words which could never be erased and made for perfect? How does one make peace with the fact that they might never be Citizen Kane?

For that, I feel like the answer lies with the movie itself.

Released in 1941 and holding up to the legacy of the most cited film of all times, Citizen Kane is the first independent American film and the debut feature of the one, the only writer director Orson Welles.

A film that has bid controversy since before a single stock of film was shot and all because of: its screenplay.

Another screenplay, written by (Jack) Fincher Senior doesn’t shy away in siding with the screenwriter and as a result Mank directed by (David) Fincher Junior becomes a testimony to the genius of Herman “Mank” J. Mankiewicz - the court jester, the writer behind the ruse, the one who did not need to conceive but simply re-imagined the life of William Randolph Hearst, the once all-feared and all-powerful newspaper tycoon of the early 20th century.

Identifying Charles Foster Kane has never been as hard a task so far as Hollywood has been concerned. The profiling is accurate, the references on point. Willie as they liked to call him (in the movie anyway). A man who was a little boy once. Little Willie. Little Charles. A boy with a dream tied so tight around his neck, like the organ grinder’s monkey, that every step he took reminded him of the strain caused and the weight carried. A lonely boy drawn up to be caricatured by the likes of two tortured artists, each by their own merits, suffering in their creative dread, only making me harbor a wish to absolve them of their vanity.

Collecting the pieces of his shredded, infantile identity torn apart when he was sent away, little Charles managed to grow fast into a man and made a promise. He vowed to prove himself to the world. He didn’t want to change it. He didn’t want to lead it. He wanted to own it because owning something, owning an identity, meant something to him. It means something to everyone, a rule that comes without exceptions. And primal are the instincts that take the lead when that something is threatened. That something that we have. That piece of something that we stand for.

This is the story of Charles Foster Kane then but it doesn’t end here. Oh no, here is where it begins, seemingly with Orson, most likely with Herman as he internalised the wrath received by speaking his own mind; Herman was ousted by Hearst’s inner circle, a life event that became an inspiration to crafting a whole narrative. Herman, now the protagonist, turned himself into a foe, exposing the truth, one version of the truth, about one of society’s greatest jewels. Loneliness doesn’t sit well with the populace because whoever is lonely is probably faulty and weak and pitiful, an array of adjectives that didn’t fit well with Charles, callous to his bones, political to every avail, who must have endured it all, including years of undepleted sorrow.

It is for the merriment of that truth that what we stand for is so sacred. No one else can know the depths of our deception, fooling ourselves that who we are is so unprecedently unique that only we can understand it, instilling in us the virtues of a well-to-do protagonist. Time and again deservedly standing under the spotlight, unwilling to let go of the identity that we have so carefully crafted, leading us down the rabbit hole that any and all excuses will save the day, if only we stick to the path, the plot without a definite ending. Until…

If nothing comes undone, everything must come undone. As I’m writing, I’m pondering about all the ways that life is just about to end. It’s always about to, finite, unlike a screenplay in its drafting era. It’s done, it can be done in a blip of a second and damn for that becomes the only moment when nothing else matters apart from the chance that we even got to live it. Always a posteriori. An afterthought. A bittersweet goodbye to the sled of one’s youth with the letters Rosebud engraved on it.

Willie was an unhappy man, or perhaps that was the depth of character that Herman added to his Citizen Kane, turning him into a desperate man drowning in the pond of his own loneliness. But then again it would be criminal to think that a happy man could amount to such indecency. A shameless profiteer, unethical to excess, must have had a good enough story in him, a great story even that a happy person could never find boring but an unhappy one would rather not delve into.

Are we almost getting there? Yes, we’re here. This is the end because writing anything more about it would be to take away from it. Truly a story so fascinating turned into a piece of the seventh art, so beautiful, so new, so unique. This is Orson doing everything else but being Herman. This substack story ends with Orson Welles, the all well-known wunderkind within the circles that mattered the most. A committed actor of his very own independent Mercury Theatre who rejected Hollywood a few too many times for Hollywood to reply with the most notorious of snubs it always has in its disposal: the refusal to bestow on him their 13-year young Academy’s awards for Best Picture, Best Director or Best Actor. What they did offer him instead, and of which it is perhaps a bit far-fetched to say ‘by way of rubbing salt into the wound’, was the accolade for Best Screenplay.

Citizen Kane is Orson Welles’ baby (as filmmakers always like to call them) and he is the literal, once-living and forever-remembered protagonist that cemented his own life story through it, leaving little to no space for anyone else to revel on the credit. The damage inflicted on the ego when it has to share the space with another. It’s a shame because Citizen Kane would not be the same without either of these two men. Yet again it wouldn’t be the same without Hearst. To that I can only stand by and say that art does not precede life. Life happens and art is what we make of it.

But to the one most pertinent question, do you have an answer yet?

All characters want something but need something different. It’s sort of a paradox because a lot of the time a character will take action towards their want which will be at direct opposition to their need. Or vice versa.

This is why movies excite us. And why by the end of a film, we’ll either express like or dislike. It’s all about that vehicle that’s driving our interest.

Think of Michael Corleone (The Godfather, 1972) - “That’s my family, Kay - it’s not me.” But it is him. Because he needs his family more than he wants to stay away from them.

Lajos Egri put it perfectly:

The contributing factors are the obstacles that arise when a character is torn between two equally strong parts of themselves. This entry is about therapy - an exploration to how invaluable it could be if done properly.

As much as we think that we are in control, we are not. Our parts are and when our parts don’t communicate to find the right balance, that hurts the self, and others.

In psychotherapy this is what they call IFS —or Internal Family Systems Therapy. An approach that focuses on restoring harmony by changing the dynamics that create discord among the sub-personalities and the self. Perhaps (?) the inspiration behind Disney’s Inside Out (2015).

Directed by Pete Docter from a story he and Ronnie Del Carmen conceived written for the screen by Docter, Meg LeFauve and Josh Cooley, the animated movie is about 11-year old Riley and her ‘emotions’ as they try to help her navigate the world when her parents decide to move to a new city - from Minnesota to San Fransisco.

Riley is a happy young gal, ready to embrace her new life. Her want is to do just that, manifested by Joy - one of Riley’s most prominent emotions.

But change brings vulnerability and it can be challenging if ignored, putting forward an array of emotions, fluctuating and in continuous conflict with each other.

Joy: “Oh no! These Facts and Opinions look so similar.”

Bing Bong (Riley’s imaginary friend): “Don’t worry about it. Happens all the time.”

Very creative dialogue and a great segue to my next point: if the modern world is overstimulating, then it’s perfectly normal to feel suffocated by options, and emotionally confused by the parameters by which we should make a choice. In this context, (IFS) therapy can serve as an important tool—and what better lens is there to explore it through than that of an 11-year-old?

Sadness - one of Riley’s less-appreciated emotions - begins to act up when Riley is thrown into her new life. But Joy will not have it, no. Joy wants Riley to be happy. Immediately. The more Joy pushes, the more Sadness reacts. While these two ‘characters’ are busy being in conflict with each other, a few others must take the lead. That’s Anger, Fear and Disgust. Naturally, this sounds like a recipe for disaster.

While this is going on inside the person… it is Riley (the self) in real life and the people around her who suffer the consequences.

In screenwriting, there are usually two types of needs that a character has.

the (personal) need; what is it that the person needs in order to stop hurting and move on?

the psychological need; what is it that the person has to figure out in order to stop hurting others?

In the beginning of the film, Riley wants to appease her parents (psychological need). But the more she pushes herself to make others happy, the further away she gets from being happy (her need).

A lot of people maintain that they don’t need therapy, but as the world advances, problems have become more complex, and the path to their solutions requires greater attention. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs demonstrates the order of our personal, physiological and psychological needs, the latter of which involve other people as well.

Riley’s mom and dad want her to adapt and not be an extra source of stress for them, but by imposing their needs on her, they only intensify Riley’s inner battle between Joy and Sadness—bringing Anger to the forefront.

It’s almost always around the end of Act 2 (80% in the movie) that the consequences of the protagonist’s actions are the most palpable. As Joy and Sadness try to find their way back to Headquarters, Anger (acting out of impulse) ‘plugs in’ the idea for Riley to leave San Fransisco and go back to Minnesota.

This is so out of character for 11-year-old Riley that her internal family system shuts off. She finds herself in a bus and in a bind: to protect her own happiness, she has to run away from her parents. But ignoring her psychological need will only lead her further away from her personal need.

Even if she makes it to Minnesota, is she going to be happy? When our parts fail to communicate with each other, rationality goes out the window.

Love, belonging and a sense of connection (the third cluster of needs in Maslow’s pyramid) cannot be achieved just by the individual. We need to be loved by others. We need to find a place where we belong among them. And for that, communication is key. Therapy allows us to do that—find space to understand the self and others.

For Riley’s parents, there are two ways to deal with this situation, the easier one being grounding Riley for attempting to run away (by way of punishing Anger). Or they could try and understand.

Joy—the true protagonist of this story—finally at Headquarters, is ready to take back control of the situation. But instead of doing so, she allows Sadness to take the lead this time: Riley bursts out crying.

A normalised reaction for an 11-year-old but a suppressed one for everybody else, even though it’s an expression of emotion as vital to human communication as anything else.

“It’s not the destination, it’s the journey”, said Ralph Waldo Emerson. Therapy can be a guide in that journey and help us learn how to respectfully co-exist with one another because being in conflict is human nature.

Inside Out is the perfect example of witnessing this journey, its effects as well as its consequences and of course it comes with a happy ending—Joy learns to give Sadness the space she needs to keep Riley emotionally healthy.

Cheeky rec: watch Inside Out 2, now streaming on Disney+, if you want to witness how Anxiety manifests itself and what ‘new feelings’ it brings about as well.

Ominous. Demoralising. Comical. True.

I think Storr hit the nail in the head but so did Nietzsche when he introduced to the world the idea of the Übermensch.

THE ÜBERMENSCH

is a giant with feelings. That’s how I imagine it. Sort of like Hulk.

A textbook definition would be someone who abides by life-affirming and creative values. A literal translation is Overman or… Superman.

Coincidence? YES.

🤓 “The Reign of the Superman” is a short illustrated story published in 1933 by Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster about a homeless man who consumed an experimental drug and gained superpowers. It was the beginning of Superman as we know him today.

Yet, I think there are similarities between the Übermensch & our popular culture superheroes as they save the world from otherworldly harm.

Will Storr refers to stories as a way out of the deep dark pit of our minds that grapples with death. Says, “story emerges from human minds as naturally as breath emerges from human lips.” Giving the Übermensch some popular culture validation, we may be able to understand why superhero stories have dominated a large part of the audience for a while now.

Every superhero has an origin story. In fact, every character has one. An origin story is the backstory that informs the identity and motivations of heroes and villains most commonly but not limited to: comic book stories.

Humans, mere mortals, also have a version of an origin story… it’s called rock bottom.

Blake Snyder would call this the Dark Night of the Soul. The lowest moment in a character’s arc. A crisis of faith or a difficult, painful period in the character’s journey.

So let’s bring everyone together. The ÜBERMENSCH. The SUPERHERO. The AVERAGE PERSON WHO WENT THROUGH A HARD TIME AND SURVIVED IT.

One thing they all have in common is 1) a relationship with struggle.

In Nietzsche’s ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None’, Zarathustra (30) “left his home and the lake of his home and went into the mountains.” There he sat and pondered and ultimately came up with the ideal of the Übermensch.

Writes Nietzsche, “Man is a rope tied between beast and Overman - a rope over an abyss. A dangerous crossing. A dangerous wayfaring. A dangerous looking back. A dangerous trembling and halting.” OK. That’s one way to put it.

The guys behind Philosophy Vibe have one or two more things to say about this. In one of their dedicated Ubermensch videos, they argue that Nietzsche gives us only a vague idea of what or who the Ubermensch could be. He refers to it as a means to achieving a higher morality but without identifying what this morality looks like.

Based. Philosophy is never straightforward. Always interpretative.

“Soul is only a word for something about the body,” writes Nietzsche. From this, could we interpret that higher morality is achieved when body and spirit become one?

Andrea Towers’ book ‘Geek Girls Don’t Cry’ is all about that. In identifying the trauma behind female superheroes, she elaborates on their origin stories, crediting them for the source of their superpower.

Natasha Romanoff was trained to become a dangerous and elite sleeper agent through brainwashing and biochemical enhancements through the infamous Red Room training program. Later in life, she joins the Avengers and is able to use her training for good. When she finds out the Red Room is still active, she’s thrown into action to save an army of Widows, bound to kill (and suffer in the process).

It’s fiction but it means something. And an audience (a large part of it, dare I mention) find meaning in Black Widow’s struggle of an origin story. Says Towers, “Natasha has had to overcome her fears and trauma the same way we do - by finding ways to work through the self-doubt and anxiety that comes with accepting the idea that you don’t have to be who you were made to be.”

There’s also 2) the idea of the establishment of a new world order.

The Übermensch creates their own values and meaning, rejecting external authorities like religion or societal norms. This is reminiscent of the MORAL DILEMMA that plagues many superhero narratives: The world needs saving. Who’s going to save it and on whose terms?

For Batman, it’s simple. He is a vigilante. The death of his parents allows him to create his own value system where he deems himself responsible for restoring justice and order in the city of Gotham. In the Marvel Universe, the situation is a little bit more controlled - the Avengers are a recognised authority. They can fight crime as long as they obey the rules. Yet, the same dilemma is at the heart of most movies as the rules get broken, more often than not.

Scaling down the conflict, we can see it applies to any crisis in life. Crises are uncomfortable. To embrace them it means to abandon comfort and to do so is undeniably hard. Much like Bruce Wayne and Natasha Romanoff, one has to stand up for their trauma and establish their own grounds for a mental battle.

To leave comfort one has to be brave. To meet the Ubermensch one has to be ready. To be a superhero, one has to embrace their origin story, the trauma that holds them back and let that define their abilities.

The last link between them all is 3) a rejection of God.

Nietzsche’s text is heavy on ideas about the Death of God. By rejecting the construct of a higher power, one can become the higher power.

While Batman decides to take the blame for Dent’s death to give Gotham city the hero that it needs, Black Widow sacrifices herself to obtain the Soul Stone that restores the lives of trillions of people. OK, these are superheroes and their way of defying God is by claiming a godly authority.

Characters, too, have an opportunity for empowerment. If there is one thing that is good about being at the bottom is that you can only move upwards from there.

The Dark Night of the Soul beat comes at the end of Act II. It’s the end of an act but the beginning of another and the decision that the character will take will determine the outcome of the story (or the beginning of one’s journey).

If authenticity matters (which always should), then a Deus ex Machina won’t work. An audience always roots for the CHARACTER to make the right decision.

That’s all to say, if hitting rock bottom sounds terrifying, it’s because it probably is but it’s the only way to embrace the Übermensch. Or the superhero in you. Whatever sounds less cheesier.

Television is a medium for adventure. In sitcoms, characters are placed in situations out of which they create comedy. In drama, the world of the story defines the events to which the characters will have to respond or react. In both cases, character growth is not the most important thing in the agenda.

Film is all about change. A character is presented with a challenge that they will have to overcome or not but by the end, they’ll have been forced to face their biggest character flaw.

FADE IN.

THE BABY BOOMER STORY.

I recently read a substack about the naming of generations. The author was against the concept because as they argued it creates a limiting mindset.

They were not happy to be called a Boomer because they felt attacked and mocked by the term.

Sure, that’s one way to look at it & I would agree if we were to take these labels seriously. But we shouldn’t take any labels seriously.

Instead - as an almost millennial who is not really a Gen Z either and whose parents are probably boomers but not really? - I thought it would be fun to examine the BABY BOOMER as a character phenomenon.

• first question we need to ask: what do we know about them?

They are born between 1946 to 1964. This means they come of age in the 1970s which could have all sorts of meanings depending on which country they are born. Young Americans are preoccupied with the war in Vietnam. Greeks are fighting against the junta and the Chinese become subject to the one-child policy reform. Politics and society unfortunately become a defining character weapon in the absence of culture.

One thing they all - probably - have in common, which has defined their generation and consolidated the baby boomer term is the genuine expectation that things are shifting and life is going to improve.

This becomes their WANT.

Boomers are characters who come of age at a time when society is reinventing itself and so they too set the goal of creating a better life for themselves. The goal of prospering and enjoying life.

• why are they like that?

To find the source of the matter, we have to look back.

By generational terms, boomers are the children of the Silents (born between 1928-1945) - a population group that was caught in the middle of a transition be it technological, social, political or economical. Their time is the beginning of the end of tradition and it culminates with the second world war. Total annihilation.

It is no wonder, therefore, that boomers essentially rise from the ashes. Like the phoenix. Their GHOST is the war. They will escape it at any cost.

They know real tragedy. They see it in their parents who grew up in deprivation and fear and their grandparents who fought in the war. People who were deeply affected by a world they never had any control over. Boomers are not going to let that happen to them.

• but… how?

They have to grab the reigns and lead the way. Their world is full of possibility.

“I was surprised, as always, by how easy the act of leaving was, and how good it felt. The world was suddenly rich with possibility.” Jack Kerouac

Kerouac is one of my favourite Beats and On The Road is one of my favourite books of his. If we wanted to label Kerouac he would probably belong to the Greatest Generation (born between 1901-1927).

But to accomplish anything they have to look at it at face value.

Their FLAW or WEAKNESS becomes their reluctance to introspection.

Whatever is tangible is real. Restructuring society becomes more and more complicated and so success is measured by how well one can play the game of life. Study, work, get married, get a house, have kids, have grandkids etc.

A good life is a life well-lived. End of story (for them).

• ENTER: their kids and all the generations after them.

In the baby boomer story, this is the point where conflict arises.

In The Art of Dramatic Writing, Lajos Egri notes that a character arc has 10-12 beats throughout the course of a story or the journey of a life. But there are a few more beats that reveal themselves before the curtain opens. These are the emotions that precede the conflict. They are the moments that prompt the story to begin.

The baby boomer is the character that ignores these and continuously rejects them.

A baby boomer’s NEED is to change.

As paradoxical as it sounds - for, we shouldn’t forget these are the kids that paved the counterculture way - they are the ones the least likely to accept change, inner change, real change. But so are most people who grow old - age is a good enough reminder.

And yet, it is this paradox that makes the baby boomer different from their previous generations. We demand of them to be better. As they always aspired to be. To look into themselves. To change their bad habits and make their lives easier, first and foremost for themselves. And then for society.

Unwilling to acknowledge it, boomers resist that type of change, the same way they resist seeking help from a certified professional. They still sit at the top of the world as far as they are concerned. The world they made.

• in practice

Watching a boomer struggle through life is like watching a film that never climaxes. An arc that never materialises.

A climax requires change and if for the boomer change is not an option, then the film can’t have a conclusion.

It becomes a TV show that the rest of us grow tired of watching.

CONCLUSION.

The comfort of stability becomes more and more of a privilege as everything around us shifts and changes. A new normal that requires our cooperation. It requires us to build our self-awareness through intention and dedication. It requires us to change.

It’s hard to say which way is better: to get on with how one is or to try and change oneself? Can the best versions of ourselves be attained and if yes, is this the way to go if we want to do any good to ourselves, the people around us and to the word?

If this feels like too much to handle, we can always put it in a different context:

"Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for certainty what's going to work."

Other people have also talked about it, coming from different backgrounds and disciplines. Like film critic, Pauline Kael, who once said:

“Perhaps no work of art is possible without belief in the audience. The kind of belief that has nothing to do with facts and figures about what people actually buy or enjoy.”

Or film director, Sidney Lumet, who mentions it in his book Making Movies:

“Because the truth is nobody knows what that magic combination is that produces a first-rate piece of work.”

Even a friend of mine, who has nothing to do with this industry, made her own assumption by comparing food tasting to filmmaking as opposed to wine tasting. She said and I’m paraphrasing, “there are variables that you can count on when you evaluate wine but there’s no such thing when it comes to food. Food is subjective.” And so is filmmaking.

William Goldman was a novelist and a screenwriter. He reportedly read a screenplay for the first time at the age of 33. But he is one of those people who have “been writing ever since they can remember.” Mainly short stories that never got published.

He is also one of the people who found success later in life. Success came to him in the form of two Academy Awards, one for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and the other one for All The President’s Men (1976).

My dad always says there are three things against which success is measured. That’s hard work, ability & luck.

William Goldman died in 2018. I was only 21 at the time and totally clueless as to who he was. Today, he would be at the top of my list of the “historical figures” I’d choose to have a conversation with. I’d like to talk to him about these parameters and gauge how cynical he’d be about them.

HARD WORK is about Gladwell’s 10,000 hours. In the film industry, people will take different avenues and will arrive at the same place and when asked in interviews they will reply something like “you have to want it”. Arguably, vague.

In screenwriting, 10,000 hours comes down to reading scripts, writing scripts, re-writing scripts and reading more scripts. This is how you learn and this is all you have to do. But it is hard work because at the end of the day, a big percentage of what you write is never going to be read by anyone. Just like Goldman’s short stories.

“I think in my life I must have gotten a hundred rejection slips,” he mentions in his interview with the Writers Guild Foundation.

More than in any other profession, confidence has to come from deep inside one’s soul which brings me to the second principle of success.

ABILITY is a professional propensity which if embraced could bring someone to realise their full potential. Some people call it talent.

In a ‘safe’ situation, people are less likely to get out of their comfort zone. A person who doesn’t take risks, learns nothing new about themselves.

Ability involves risk in this industry and it’s both financial but also psychological risk. Failure can really take a toll on someone and that could very well push them away from the one thing they can count on: their ability.

Goldman was the fiction editor of a literary magazine and he would send in his short stories anonymously. He was present every time someone read his story and discarded it. He never got published in the magazine.

“I showed no signs of talent,” he said and yet he kept on. Of course, today, critics and screenwriters alike have been able to point out the skill in his craftmanship and appreciate his gift for screenwriting. But he couldn’t have known.

As corny as it sounds, sometimes persevering over what other people think is what you have to do. This might be the hardest mental battle in life. Standing your ground against what other people think in order to protect the most important story about you: the story of your life.

But rejection is not just about losing a good deal. Rejection is improbable. Sometimes unfair and it has a lot to do with luck.

LUCK is the last ingredient in the recipe for success and the most definitive one. Luck or misfortune will cement your success or failure, respectively.

Luck can turn things around. It doesn’t matter how much you’ve prepared, how much work you’ve put in and how much you care about something, if you are unlucky you have to be ready to face rejection.

The upside to this is that if you have the ability to treat this rejection and not let it consume you and you keep working hard, chances are you’re going to turn things around.

But there’s also a downside. Lucky people are aware that the second they stop working, their luck could might as well dissipate. Because luck works as an additive - it can’t create something out of nothing but it can make something bigger or better than it was before.

Truly fortunate people in the creative industry are the ones who also work hard and know their abilities.

I think that could explain a lot about Goldman’s cynicism. Carrying the burden of an alcoholic father who committed suicide when Goldman was only 15 years old, he probably never developed the mechanism to see the bright side of life. Or at least, he never set that as the beacon for his work. He never relied on his luck.

“If I were a young screenwriter now… you can only write what you give a shit about,” Goldman says. Interestingly enough, he never attempted to write about his trauma.

He only wrote about what he cared about.

IN A NUTSHELL, one thing all creatives (probably) agree on is that the creative journey is unique for everyone. Confidence is not going to over-compensate for the lack of work but it will help in realising one’s comparative advantage: their ability. If this is well and done and the right time comes, chances are, luck will make it happen.

“Nobody knows anything” struck me when I first read it on Goldman’s book Adventures on the Screen Trade because it is a type of proverb which can have both positive and negative connotations.

The negative connotation is quite pessimistic, vain and counterproductive. It wants you to quit before even starting.

The positive connotation however is hopeful and kind of reassuring. It’s telling you “You might as well try.”

William Goldman wrote a book in 1973 called The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern’s Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure based on a bed-time story that he made up for his kids and in 1987 he made The Princess Bride directed by Rob Reiner.

Screenwriters have argued since that this is a story with flat characters and unrealistic expectations and if anyone attempted a re-make in today’s film industry, it would simply flop. But it’s a marvel of the fantasy genre and a comic relief.

51 years later, The Princess Bride is considered an all-time classic.

Not knowing what’s going to work is a blessing and a curse. For Goldman, it seems like, it was definitely a blessing.

Written by James L. Brooks and Mark Andrus and directed by James L. Brooks, it follows the story of the most anxious person I’ve ever encountered on screen. Melvin (Jack Nicholson) is a renowned author but an obnoxious recluse. He suffers from OCD which coupled with his misanthropic behaviour makes for a very dislikable person.

The makeshift plot of the film also includes an exhausted mother, Carol (Helen Hunt), with an asthmatic son and a gay neighbour, Simone (Greg Kinnear), who becomes the victim of a violent robbing. Centred around Melvin’s inability to fit in, the film turns into a road trip to Baltimore as Melvin and Carol take Simone to visit his estranged parents. In the end, despite all odds, Melvin wins the girl and they live happily ever after. An unconventional story of the rom-com genre.

K.M. Weiland in her book ‘Creating Character Arcs’ breaks down story by focusing on character.

She identifies three possible characters arcs (the transformation of a character over the course of a story). There’s the positive arc, the flat arc and the negative arc.

The positive and negative arcs are straightforward. A character either achieves positive change and becomes a better person or negative change and embraces the worst in themselves.

Flat arcs are a little bit more convoluted because the character undergoes no growth but becomes the catalyst of change for the world around them.

Melvin is far from that. No, Melvin undergoes a positive change arc and becomes a better person. For the story to work, a happy ending is essential.

By principle, the film industry has always embraced a happy ending. In many cases, at the expense of the characters. Jane Campion’s The Piano is an example that comes to mind. The original ending for this film that won three Academy Awards in 1993 including Best Original Screenplay for Campion, was a tragic one.

Ada McGrath drowns herself with her piano in the ocean on their way to New Zealand. In the film, Ada lives and describes her new life in a sweet voice-over that ends the film.

The happy ending version of The Piano feels less impactful. It undercuts the importance of tragedy and as such it becomes lesser art.

Back to As Good As It Gets —

Jack Nicholson’s character is rude, disagreeable and embodies a misplaced sense of superiority. He is a renowned author but he is also a man who came of age with the wrong idea of manhood. As a result, he deeply suffers to connect with people which only boosts his egocentrism and alienates him even more from the highly-progressive world around him.

There’s a major difference between comedy and drama writing when it comes to creating character which applies to life as well.

Melvin’s story could be a sad, sob story based on this predicament. If he was aware of the hurt he inflicted on the people around him, he would either be dead inside or he would want to kill himself. Both of these would make for tragic stories.

Similarly, when we take ourselves too seriously, we become the victims of our own drama. More often than not, we can dwell on guilt and bad thoughts and create a narrative where we feel sorry for ourselves.

No one is perfect so by deduction, everyone has to deal with the bad in themselves.

We’ll usually find that adopting a good sense of humour works in these circumstances. Is it because it’s a good distraction?

I think comedy writing and creating character can teach us that humour - more than a way of expression and the occasional charm - is a coping mechanism to deal with life.

Melvin is deeply distraught and while the movie never fails to bring out everything that is problematic with him, it does a phenomenal job showing how much this guy is hiding underneath.

Does it do it at the expense of Simone’s gay character and by extent the gay community? Perhaps it leans a little bit too heavily on that and it’s justified if someone who has been constantly harassed as Simone has in the movie or has been deeply affected by discrimination pertaining their gender orientation, would not necessarily care about empathising with such a character.

Other members of the LGBTQ+ community could also stand in solidarity and not want to show compassion towards Melvin. They could dwell on the severity of the perceived implications of such harassment and reject the comedy.

This is the persistent question of: where does political correctness end and where does creative expression begin? There is no right answer.

And yet, we can’t deny the fact that by making fun of the male archetype that Melvin embodies, the film provides us with a representation of a gay man who perseveres despite consistent harassment. Without never excusing or accepting such offensive behaviour, Simone still has compassion. And that makes him not only a better man but also someone who doesn’t self-identify as a victim. I think here is progress. By the end, “a load has lifted” for Simone whereas it is uncertain it ever will for Melvin.

But if I’ve been speaking out of my depths, I can speak for certainty when it comes to Carol.

Does the movie feel like it diminishes feminism because Carol falls for Melvin in the end? I think if we want to look at it that way, yes it does. Who in their right mind would fall for a man-child with bad manners? Least of all, in 2024?

But the logical follow-up to the argument of diminished feminism, is that if Carol didn’t fall for him, she’d be discriminating against a man with mental health issues. Isn’t that worse?

As Carol couldn’t but apologise for her behaviour, I can’t but give a man, who tries to be better, my compassion. But most of all, I can’t deny myself the laughs.

While I’m usually a proponent of theme, I am also in favour of good storytelling and sometimes they are pitted against each other. In this case, I am of the opinion that there’s no moral lesson to learn. Just a film in dire need of a happy ending.

If Carol rejected Melvin, it would not be a tragic ending - it would simply be a bad ending. One of those that the film industry executives are so afraid of that they try to force a happy ending on every single film, regardless. Like The Piano.