pliny the elder at 2012-01-15 21:25:55:

Capt. Malcolm Reynolds: Y'all got on this boat for different reasons, but y'all come to the same place. So now I'm asking more of you than I have before. Maybe all. Sure as I know anything, I know this - they will try again. Maybe on another world, maybe on this very ground swept clean. A year from now, ten? They'll swing back to the belief that they can make people... better. And I do not hold to that. So no more runnin'. I aim to misbehave.

TripDreamer at 2012-01-15 21:31:08:

I just read this today before coming on GITS and thought it was very interesting. PS: Just wanted to share that Jessica Lange as part of her Golden Globes acceptance speech just said the following: "I'd like to thank the writers, especially, because every year I find it more and more rare to find a piece of work that is beautifully written."

Scott at 2012-01-16 01:56:16:

tracinell, perhaps the biggest thing I take away from the article is the importance of relationships. I'll go into this more in another post this week, but we focus so much on the Protagonist attaining their goal, and yet no movie ends with that, there is always a scene after the conclusion of the Final Struggle, what is known as the Denouement where we get a chance to see the P after-the-fact. Why is that so important? I used to think it was primarily because we wanted to see the P in a 'good' place at the end of the story and I think that's still key. However it's not like they're living in a vacuum, rather there are PEOPLE and sometimes non-human characters who have become meaningful to the P along the way. And so perhaps, too, it's important to see the P in the context of all those relationships they've forged. It almost makes me want to change the Denouement designation to something like Resolution...

Scott at 2012-01-16 01:58:32:

TD, calls to mind this from the NYT article: Ms. Doran is an omnivore who likes movies light, dark and in between. But when she attended the Austin Film Festival last year, Уsomething I found both terribly sad and terribly sympathetic,Ф she recently recalled, Уis that aspiring screenwriters ask again and again, СWhat can I write that a financier wants to make?Т Not, СWhat can I write that fills me with joy?ТФ Probably some correlation between the joy a writer feels for the story they write and the beauty of their words.

pete at 2012-01-16 07:02:00:

I had this thought this past year, that the most ecstatic endings I've experienced in films have all been dream sequences, fantasies, or at least dialogue that allude to such. Let me run a list of the obvious ones - and I don't think these qualify for spoilers because they don't give away anything except that the endings allude to the characters' fantasies/hopes/dreams: 25th hour, Shawshank Redemption, Eternal Sunshine, Raising Arizona, the documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly, Rabbit Hole, The Science of Sleep, No Country for Old Men, Big Fish, Annie Hall (a play), Requiem for a Dream...etc etc. And these are movies that take themselves seriously, not Wayne's World type meta endings. The hacky thing was to claim that the whole movie's a dream, but ones that packed the punches were movies where only the ending were dreamed up.

John Arends at 2012-01-16 07:49:01:

Back in the day when TOP GUN had just been released and given Hollywood its latest mainlined shot of blockbuster euphoria, Jerry Bruckheimer was asked about brand of lightning-in-a-bottle he and Tom Cruise had just uncorked. His answer: "The emotion of triumph."