The Weekly McGuffin

 Chapter 3: 1. Film as a medium reinforces the dominant ideology by choosing what it wishes to depict and share with its audience, most often presenting the dominant ideology as the only one. If film only ever represents one way of thinking, the audience will be convinced that it is the only way of thinking, especially if they take the medium of film at face value and internalize the lessons being taught without thinking about them. Through this, stereotypical and often negative depictions of those classified as 'other' will be internalized by the audience, 'other' and not, which leads to internalized prejudice. A most important tool for fighting this dominant ideology, proposed by many for use in the film theory journal Screen , is a counter-cinema. 2. Developing a counter-cinema was proposed as a way of fighting the ideology and cinematic conventions that had dominated cinema of the time, and still dominates today. McDonald recounts how this idea was first proposed in...

Amsterdam is a film got released to theaters about a month ago, and I've been thinking about how exactly a film can be such a monumental letdown in so many ways. It's a mystery that's not mysterious, a comedy that's not funny, the most boring "thriller" I've ever seen. The film is about three friends who get framed for the murder of a young woman in the 1930s that need to uncover a conspiracy plaguing all of New York and clear their names. having read that, that sounds like a really exciting film, right? What if I told you it starred Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, Chris Rock, Taylor Swift, Anya Taylor Joy, Rami Malek, and the list goes on? You would be super excited to see it, right? So was I. Unfortunately, the film misuses its cast and premise in such a spectacular way that it's still astonishing me as I write this a full week after having seen it. The film starts with exposition about one of the protagonists, Bale's character. 15 minutes in, we...

I've recently been watching Community... again. After having seen it twice already, my third watch is really cementing for me how genius the show can be when it comes to its various film homages. A very large percentage of the show's episodes exist as homages to specific film, film genres, or film tropes. Some of the most notable are "A Fistful of Paintballs," and "Abed's Uncontrollable Christmas," parodies of Westerns and the Rankin/Bass stop-motion Christmas specials, respectively. They stand out because they are not only funny and effective parodies of their respective genres, but because they use the framework of the parody to reveal things about and develop their characters. With that being said, I have just started rewatching season 4. For the uninitiated, Community's fourth season was plagued with production issues, mainly because the creator of the show and showrunner for the first three season, Dan Harmon, had been kicked off the show. He wa...

 I mean-- ok. Do we need adaptations of things? Like really, do we need to be adapting pieces of media into other media?  The reason I ask is because it has recently been brought to my attention that the most well-received adaptations are often the ones that are incredibly faithful to the source material and that don't take too many unnecessary artistic liberties. As they say, if it ain't broke don't fix it. But this made me think, do we need to be adapting things? My logic goes that if the best adaptations are the ones that don't change anything, what was the point of adapting them at all? This is not to say that adaptations should never change things, or that they should go out of their way to change things, this is more to ask the question of 'where is the line?' Where do we draw the line of when too much change is too much? The more I ask that question about different things, the more I realize that in most cases the answer is that it depends. One of the big...

 I'm not quite sure what I mean to accomplish by asking this question, it's just a legitimate question. Why do we love True Crime so much? One would think that learning of the most atrocious, disgusting, gruesome acts that people can commit on one another would turn people away. The horror genre of film has been relatively niche until recently, and even then it turns people away. Something seems to be different with True Crime, though. Most horror films are fictitious, even fantastical at times. True Crime, as the name would suggest, is real. Mostly filmed in a mystery/documentary style, it consists mostly of actual events that affected real people, so why is it that finding a genre that focuses on things that actually happened intrigues so many? My best idea of why is that True Crime is often more grounded than horror. As stated previously, horror has a tendency to branch into the supernatural. Whether it's the devil, another miscellaneous ancient evil, magic, or whatever ...

  You saw the title. You clicked on this post. You know it's going to be bad. We need to talk. So, with the release of Netflix's Dahmer, many audiences are being introduced or reintroduced to the story of Jeffrey Dahmer and the atrocities that he committed in the 90s. While the film has been rather influential, it's arguable if that influence is positive or negative. Due to the unfortunate proximity of the release date of the film and Halloween, there are those who thought it appropriate to dress themselves and their children as Dahmer for Halloween. Alright. Full stop. Let's get one thing straight. That is messed up, it should not have happened, and those who thought it was a good idea should be ashamed of themselves. With that out of the way, let's talk about what this means. I don't think that the people who did this should automatically be labelled idiots or monsters or whatever. Was what they did incredibly insensitive? Yes. But there's more nuance than...

  The horror genre has had a strenuous run throughout the decades. It is, of course, going to be a niche genre by design. Everyone can enjoy a good comedy but not everyone resonates with seeing someone get cut in half with a chainsaw. Horror was a staple genre of film in the 1920s with the likes of Universal Studios' classic monster movies and Murnau's Nosferatu, and it had a notable resurgence in the 1970s with Halloween and the rise of the Slasher subgenre, but after Scream in the 90s the horror genre as a whole sort of became niche again. Sure, there have been some big franchises like the Conjuring or Saw, but neither of those had quite the same mass appeal some something like Star Wars or Titanic or what have you. That is, of course, until very recently. It all began in 2017 with a film called It . It set several box office records, but most notably it set the record for the highest-grossing opening weekend for an R-rated horror film. The previous record holder was Paranorm...

Suicide Squad, The Justice League, The Eternals, and Black Adam. What do these films have in common? Apart from the fact they're all superhero films and pretty poorly made, they all have one fatal flaw. They're all films that try to use an ensemble cast without properly establishing each character first. The first time we had seen an ensemble film in the superhero genre with any presence was 2012's the Avengers, the at-the-time penultimate Marvel film that brought together characters from five different franchises released over four years and epicly showed them working together onscreen. Since then, many have tried to replicate this effect however, none of them seem to realize that in order to have the film be as compelling and entertaining as Avengers (2012) is, we need to care about the characters. Suicide Squad wasn't the first film to make this mistake but it indeed serves as a fantastic example of why not to make it. The film is begging, pleading for its audience t...