by Thom Yee

Looper images courtesy of TriStar Pictures and Alliance Films

Conventional wisdom tells us writers (one of whom I do not claim to be) that time travel stories are tricky things.  That might depend on your background or what sort of stories you’ve been exposed to, but all it really takes to write one is a basic understanding of the rules you’ve set up.  Whether you’ve subscribed to Back to the Future principles or something a little more complex, all it takes is some fourth-dimensional thought and a reasonable grasp of cause and effect.  Keeping track of what’s going on isn’t what’s difficult; rather, it’s writing a story that should involve time travel at all that’s the trick.  What does time travel as a device bring to your story?  If it’s just a way of framing it, then that’s probably a wasted opportunity.  If it serves an integral purpose, whether it’s central to your plot or drives the story throughout, then you might have something worth peoples’ time.

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By Grace Crawford

Image courtesy of Working Title Films and Universal Pictures.

Spoiler alert: everyone is miserable.

When I was in the tenth grade, my high school put on a performance of Les Misérables. It was a crazy time in my life. I was a teenager, trying to learn what the hell to do about boys, trying to succeed in school, trying to make new friends, trying to figure out who I was, and basically kind of just failing at everything. The few friends I did have, however, were remarkable women for whom I have nothing but love and respect, and most of us are still friends to this day. And together we entered that colossal time-sucking adventure that is trying to put on a musical.

“Why am I telling you this?” you may ask. I am telling you this, you darling, somewhat rude reader, so that you will understand my full meaning—well, most of it, anyway, as you can’t exactly go jamming your head into a Pensieve full of my memories and I wouldn’t let you anyway—when I tell you that I have had a soft spot in my heart for Les Mis for a long time.

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by Thom Yee

Django Unchained images courtesy of The Weinstein Company and Columbia Pictures

As Grace mentioned in her not-as-entirely-inadequate-as-usual review of The Hobbit:  An Unexpected Journey, reviewing epic-length movies can be a bit tricky.  There’re just too many things going on, literally, symbolically and metaphorically that it can be hard to get your bearings, sit down, write a review, and be satisfied with what you just wrote.  Though Django Unchained isn’t quite the epic that The Hobbit will prove to be over the course of three films… it is, at least, also a three-hour movie.   And, of course, obviously… Quentin Tarantino.

It’s nearly impossible to have a discussion of any Tarantino movie without discussing his previous films, their inspirations, and film in general.  Tarantino movies, though occupying a very insular and specific space in the movie landscape, are not at all self-contained.  Whether you subscribe to the Tarantino universe theory — the realer-than-real and movie-movie universes — or you’ve just noticed things like Red Apple cigarettes and Big Kahuna burgers coming up more than once, Tarantino films aren’t meant to just be seen and catalogued in the back of your memory.  Continue reading →