Having a love of music, forming a band, struggling together, maybe rising to fame and fortune, then falling from those heights, and then figuring out what to do next…it's a version of the Hero's Journey that can be found in real life.

There've been plenty of ...

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Today we're talking about STAR TREK! Star Trek is a pretty influential piece of pop-culture. Most interesting to me is that it's a future that is NOT a dystopia. It's a large scale vision ...

On a recent Quackcast episode here on the duck, Ozoneocean made an interesting point about some older raunchy comedies.

The point was that in some of these movies, the female characters were presented a certain way, maybe not as three-dimensional as the male characters, or maybe came across more sexual ...

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 ...

During the filming of Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock was unable to be on set one day. His crew filmed the scene for that day (I believe it was where Arbogast, the detective, goes up the stairs where he encounters Mrs. Bates). Hitchcock saw the footage, and said he had to reshoot ...

A long time ago I read something, I think an interview with a respected screenwriter or something, where he brought up the movie “Rain Man”.

If you haven't seen it, it's about a struggling wheeler-dealer type guy, played by Tom Cruise, who goes on a road trip with ...

The debate on what constitutes a “strong female character”, whether having “strong female leads” or “feminism” is tanking “woke” films these past few years, is ongoing. There's accusations of toxicity on both sides. Misogyny, misandry, wokeness and brokeness, all of these terms and hot takes are fired and take ...

I was thinking about the power of books in fiction - like, secret journals, diaries, and such.

In the show Supernatural, the brothers found a lot of information, help, and intrigue in their father's journal of his monster hunting exploits. I will say that it got harder to believe later ...

The movie “Hook” is not one of Spielberg's best-regarded movies - I've always liked it quite a bit, though. One element of it that speaks to me is the main character who's forgotten his true identity and true nature. I love the story about the writing of the ...

I think many of us who make comics or write stories or are interested in writing can agree that mistake number one in writing is to front-load a story with a long-winded backstory. We've talked about it here on the site plenty of times.

There is an opposite mistake ...