Blueprints: "The Kids Are All Right"

To celebrate Pride Month, every week of June Jorge will be highlighting the script of a movie that focuses on a different letter of the LGBT acronym. For “L”, he looks back at one of the most touching family dramas of the past decade.

For years, one of the biggest goals of the LGBT community (although certainly not the only or the most important one) has been to be seen as peers by the rest of the world. As people that, albeit in a different manner, go through the same experiences and have the same types of feelings: growing pains, heartbreak, the ache to share our lives with someone special…

On film, this sentiment of “We’re just like you” has been the most prevalent in family-focused narrative. The Kids Are All Right magnificently balances the act of showing a lesbian couple as readily familiar as any heterosexual marriage, while at the same time depicting struggles unique to them. Let’s take a look at a breaking point in the story; a moment where this harmony between a pleasant exterior and the turbulence of the couple is broken, and how it looks in the page. Via a single strand of bright red hair...

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Blueprints: "Iron Man"

To celebrate a decade of Marvel movies, Jorge goes back to the movie that started it all...

On May 2nd, the original Iron Man celebrated the 10th anniversary of its release. The film as the first official movie of Marvel Studios and the one that kick started and eventually allowed the completely transformed film landscape of today. It is now ten years, eighteen films, and a multibillion-dollar acquisition later.

So to celebrate (or condemn; whatever side of the argument you land in), let’s go back to the screenplay for the movie, and examine how scripts describe and develop action scenes; sequences that mostly rely on visual cues rather than description or dialogue...

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Blueprints: "American Beauty"

Last month we dove into one of the most iconic shower scenes in cinema for April Showers. For May Flowers, Jorge takes a look into one of the most famous thematic uses of a flower in film.

American Beauty was at one point supposed to be titled American Rose. This is neither a coincidence nor an appropriate alternative. The film, a satire about American suburbia and the layers of darkness that society hides underneath their pretty but rotting exteriors, heavily uses the recurring image of rose throughout. Not just in the now iconic nude sequence with Mena Suvari. 

Roses appear through the script in many key parts, usually in places where a character is putting up a façade for the world, or when they are completely submitting to their darkest impulses. Or when those two collide. Let’s take a look at where the flowers ominously represent both the attachment and the repulsion against society’s “pretty” standards...

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Blueprints: "Tully"

For this upcoming Mother’s Day weekend, Jorge takes a look at the depictions of the hardships of motherhood in Diablo Cody and Jason’s Reitman’s latest joint.

At this point it may be an overstatement, but motherhood is not easy. As it turns out, taking care of another, much smaller living and breathing human being requires more time, attention and energy than one sole human being is able to provide. Tully, among many other things, is an examination of the mental toll that motherhood takes on a person.

Let’s take a look at the tools that Diablo Cody’s script uses to portray the everyday hassle, tediousness and exhaustion that Charlize Theron’s Marlo has to endure, before Tully comes in and rescues her...

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Blueprints: "Thoroughbreds"

This week, Jorge goes into the stables to talk a murderous teenage girl rampage.

Films come from many sources - novels, comic books, video games. The stage has been one of the largest pools of not only source material for the screen, but also of playwrights that eventually make the jump to Hollywood. 

Thoroughbreds was conceived and thought of as a play. It tells the story of two teenage girls (one without empathy; the other one with too much) plotting the murder of one of their abusive stepfathers. As the project evolved, writer-director Cory Finley realized it would be better told as a film. However, its stage roots are still very much present in the text.

Let’s take a look at a particularly theatrical moment, a monologue in which one of the girls recalls her actions, and in doing so puts forward her entire character...

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