We checked out Heads of State hoping for a couple hours of stupid fun and it delivered. along with an unexpected endorsement of NATO and western multilateral engagement.

It's fascinating how you can see the sibling resemblance between Michael and Virginia Madsen despite him having had an extremely masculine presence while she has always come across as hyper feminine.

RT @JenniferTilly: Michael was one of my favorite actors I ever worked with. “The Getaway” was very early in my career and he made me feel….

If super producer Lauren Shuler-Donner @ShuDonner is still on this website, I wonder if she could speak about the process that led to an actor better known for his menacing roles getting cast as the film's tough but loving blue collar father figure.

Also, did they change the title Free Willy for the UK release because, uh. .

You all are gonna laugh, but one of my favorite Michael Madsen roles was as the foster dad in Free Willy. I always enjoy it when an actor known for being menacing plays a warm, paternal role and just nails it.

The great thing about Sing Street is how well it conveyed the experience of starting a band with your friends and your first songs either being covers or sounding like your favorite stuff before hopefully evolving into something new and original.

I see a lot of cynical "they're just doing it for TikTok engagement" replies and. who cares? Earlier generations of kids started bands to get laid. Learning how to play instruments and make music together is inherently good & will open up whole new creative vistas for them.

I mention fandom because a huge danger of being a creative who's online (I say this as someone who's been too online since the days of Usenet) is that it's easy to start thinking your primary audience is other online people who are rarely representative of the bigger viewership.

No judgment re: quality, but you can't help but notice how The Incredibles or Finding Nemo have emotional entry points for both parents and children while Turning Red & Elio stay much more closely inside the perspectives of their child protagonists.

An underdiscussed issue re: Elio and other recent animated films has been the generational passing of the torch from the younger boomer/Gen X married parents mostly responsible for Pixar's early hits to a millennial cohort who grew up marinating in online animation fan culture.

I think it behooves screenwriters to familiarize themselves with the AI/LLM tools that are out there, if for no other reason than you're gonna be working with execs and companies who use them, but you definitely need to understand their limitations as well as strengths.

It also interpreted a character releasing a vehicle's parking brake as taking blocks out from under a vehicle's tires, so. yeah. It's not putting human story boarders out of business yet.

I was messing around with ChatGPT and asked it to storyboard a suspense sequence from my new script and it did a decent job. until it added a named character who appears nowhere in the script. Which kind of felt like the experience of using AI in a nutshell.

Still my favorite gimmick account on this site.

I mean I'd love an Odyssey from Argos' POV, but it's probably Eumaeus the loyal swineherd.

I never thought I'd be nostalgic for the Michael Bay Transformers movies, but when you look at something as simple as the Autobots hanging around Griffith Observatory, the rich colors, & deliberate use of light and shadow make it look so much better than modern blockbusters.

Is that diffused lighting, milky cinematography that seems to be taking over big movies a purely creative choice or is it meant to help blend green screen and CGI elements in with the live action more seamlessly?.

I wish my film tastes were more highbrow. But if you ask me to watch a 1970s movie, I'm not popping in Five Easy Pieces, I'm watching Three Days of the Condor.

I give Newsom a lot of crap for California's sclerotic refusal to build needed housing and infrastructure so credit where due-- he used his influence and leverage to push some real reforms through.