Inneresting 29
issue 29
November 27, 2020
Getting Your Characters Around The Table
While this year we’ve avoided a capacity-crowd-sized family meal, there’s no reason we can’t live vicariously through dinner in the movies.
As an appetizer, try this primer on what makes dinner scenes so effective. It’s a human moment that creates empathy between the characters and the audience, but also sets the audience up by subverting how they expect the meal to unfold.
If you’re looking to sample from a wide variety of films, check out the buffet at Cinematic Feasts, a collection of essays about food in film. You’ll find essays on food in The Martian, Matilda, Moana, and many films that don’t begin with the letter M.
Or you can drill down into the specifics of how Steven Spielberg repeatedly uses dinner scenes in his films, and the repeated motifs you’ll find in them.
There’s also “You Order For Me,” an essay by theatre critic and playwright Ava Wong Davies about her relationship to her family, food, and In the Mood for Love.
Enough Talking About Eating — Let’s Eat
Have your favorite recipes gotten stale? Are you ready to try something new? Excite your tastebuds with recipes drawn from your favorite television shows and films?
Why not start with Clemenza’s pasta sauce from The Godfather? Francis Ford Coppola said in the Director’s Commentary Track for the film that he added in the scene featuring this recipe so that even if people didn’t like the movie, at least they could come away with an idea for something good to cook.
Or take a look at Andrew Rea’s Binging With Babish videos, where he teaches you how to make different recipes including:
The Enchiladas from Schitt’s Creek — Complete with an explanation of how to fold in the cheese!
Black Friday Deal: Writer Emergency Pack
If you’re looking for a gift for that special writer in your life, or you’re just following Special Agent Dale Cooper’s dictum that every day you should give yourself a little present, the Writer Emergency Pack may be just what you’re looking for.
“When your story gets stuck, Writer Emergency Pack has the tools you need. Fix plot holes. Spice up stock characters. Rethink your themes. Writer Emergency Pack contains 26 illustrated cards, each featuring a different idea for getting unstuck. The notion of using cards to help you write isn’t new. Writers have long used tarot cards, looking for meaning in the illustrations, or decks like Oblique Strategies, with its koan-like prompts (“Repetition is a form of change”). The ideas in Writer Emergency Pack are designed to be less abstract, and more immediately useful. They’re specifically tailored to people writing fiction, from novels to scripts, poems to plays. The cards focus on story, character, and conflict. Writer Emergency Pack gives you the questions that lead to great answers.”
And this holiday weekend, Amazon has the Writer Emergency Pack for just $9.99!
Other Cool Things
A look at the career of screenwriter Leigh Brackett (famous for Rio Bravo, The Long Goodbye, The Big Sleep, and many others) from Cinephilia & Beyond.
Roman Mars from 99 Percent Invisible talking about why most city flags are terribly designed (and also doing a live performance of a podcast that feels like a mix between a powerpoint and DJing).
Have you ever wanted to be a professional musician? Well now you can feel the excitement of the most important part of that dream: contract negotiations over streaming royalties!
And that’s what’s inneresting this week!
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UPCOMING EVENTS
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Inneresting is edited by Chris Csont, with contributions from the entire Quote-Unquote team. Subscribe here.
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