Redlettermedia, in an old review of Michael Bay's Pain and Gain, contrasted that movie to The Wolf of Wall Street, directed by Martin Scorsese.

In the Wolf of Wall Street, the RLM guys say, there's a subtext that we're ALL capable of the mistakes the main character ...

It never really occurred to me how many of our heroes are orphans.

Superman was the last survivor of a planet that perished. He was adopted by loving Earth parents, but he's one of the iconic orphans in fiction.

His counterpart Batman, of course, lost his parents at an ...

Villains are tremendously important for a story. They set the framework and standard for a lot of things in an unsaid but definite manner: how far your villain is willing to go sets up audience expectations for how big and how dire the stakes will be in the story.

If ...

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Today we talk about an unusual type of villain, a secret type of bad guy and a particularly nasty one: the person who maliciously does nothing. This ...

Die Hard was a surprise smash hit back in the day, and became famous in some circles as a template for screenwriters to pitch their stories (“It's Die Hard on a bus”…or a boat, or a jet, or in a house).

It's also talked about as a ...

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Toxic positivity can take all sorts of forms, but I think it's most easily recognised by someone telling you to be happy about something when you ...

It's customary during the final days of a year to do resolutions for the next one or overviews of what happened in the one that's ending.

Even if we buck the system, we kinda do think back and ahead, especially during New Year's Eve, don't we ...

So this line has become famous lately since Elon Musk has been using it to reinstate banned Twitter accounts in the latest episode of the Birdsite Drama.

I'm not going to get into any opinion piece on what I think of this development but if you haven't joined ...

So I just watched the latest Trope Talk by Overly Sharkastic Productions on Youtube (high recommend if you aren't already subscribed). The focus was on Doomed Heroes, and there's not much I'd be able to add to that comprehensive essay. Go watch it.

What it did inspire ...

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If something affects or disturbs you so much that you want to respond to it through a story that you write, that can be a pretty powerful ...