What is diegetic music? That’s music that’s happening within the movie. Like John Cusack’s character bringing a boombox to play In Your Eyes in Say Anything…
What is a needledrop? That’s when the moviemaker tries to elicit a reaction from the audience by using an existing song within a movie.
Sometimes these are combined, like in these ten great examples.
I’ll explain all of this in the first entry.
Endings are hard. Even many great movies miss with their ending, especially if they aim for the kind of feelgood ending that the filmmakers sometimes seem to feel let’s them off the hook with the rest of the movie, as long as the ending makes people feel like the movie was worth seeing when the rest of the movie wasn’t working. Hell, even the best movie of all time has the main character just sitting there for six minutes (it’s actually a great ending, but out of context sounds awful.)
Here’s my immediate feeling when looking at the list of movies I’ve seen from last year: The strikes in Hollywood probably let me see many more movies from smaller studios or from around the world, which I would either have missed or maybe heard about years after. Kind of a side benefit from all that.
Spoilers. I’ll try to keep them lowkey, but at the same time, the thing about scenes is that they only work in context, so I can’t really avoid talking about that context. However, sometimes I don’t have to talk about the plot, but the character instead, so in those cases the spoilers are kind of meaningless.
I watched this video from Tale Foundry and it got me thinking:
I made a list about this five years ago (late 2018, so little bit over five years), but while I still stand behind that list, what has changed is that I’ve seen a lot more movies from female directors. And I do mean a lot. Many of them older than that list, but since women have had trouble finding visibility in the industry, many of them were movies I had never heard of before. Meanwhile, many women have found opportunities and have been able to make great movies.
Yes, that’s a weird title.
It’s been over two years since the last time I wrote one of these, but I feel I have to talk about this one.
I doubt it will ever happen, but I do think about making a movie quite frequently (and I do have pretty good plans as well, at least from the point of view of feasibility financially, because of extremely tight budgeting). I would really like to make a movie like the last two movies by Celine Sciamma. Both Portrait of a Lady on Fire and Petite maman are very cozy and secure. At the same time, I realize where my mind goes when working on ideas, my movie would end up more like one by Gaspar Noe, who makes movies about his own nightmares.