About Us: We are not a business but a study site, looking at popular storylines as a basis for critical viewing [more here].
Below are our main feature pages online so far.

-Most Recent Blog Posts-

A Cynic’s Xmas FilmFest
The Xmas holiday break is the ideal time to kick back and binge-view. But as a reaction against the kind of relentlessly cheerful outlook that is pushed at us on xmas tv, I thought I’d adopt a Cynic's or ‘Diogenarian’ approach, with film choices reflecting a critical (some would use the word cynical) disengagement with mainstream social values. [read intro]

Left: A scene from Ride The High Country (1962), written by NB Stone Jr, showing the impoverished reality the ageing but honest lawman faced.

Upcoming Attractions
-A series of blog posts and features on upcoming film or tv releases, alphabetically by storyline. (General press coverage would suggest everything coming up is an extension of some popular franchise - another chapter of a superhero fantasy series, or a remake, but there are other works of interest in development or production.) Note that the various feature pages are updated as relevant new productions are announced.

#1: The 'American Dream Cracks' Storyline
Although this storyline being chosen first-up in this series of blog posts might seem because it's so timely, the fact is [read on]

#2 The 'Apocalypse-Survival' Storyline
This is currently a popular storyline for modern cinema, with special effects made easier via CGI. But I won’t argue there is all that [read on]

#3 The ‘Artist In The Making’ Storyline
This is a broader storyline than it might at first seem as it routinely dramatises crises and challenges not only at the start of an artistic career but in midlife and even right at the very end.[read on]

#4 The 'Away-Break Crisis' Storyline
The 'away-break crisis' storyline, where the protagonist suffers a personal crisis during some sort of break or visit abroad, is of course topical in holiday season, but its motifs go well beyond holiday romance complications. (Yes, Mamma Mia, we're thinking of you) [read on]

#5 The 'Best Laid Plans' Storyline
This ever-popular storyline, where even the best-planned crime goes wrong, is at present dominated by fact-based stories and remakes... [read on]

#6 The 'Between Life & Death' Storyline
This storyline traditionally flourishes in time of war or natural disaster when many have lost loved ones and there is an interest in spiritualism and the afterlife. So what its current popularity says about our era remains to be seen ... Is it because we are entering a more 'spiritual' age? [read on]
#7 The ‘Big Night’ Storyline
This is not a storyline that gets much attention, perhaps due to the inbuilt restraints of its time-frame, with the focus on a single evening or overnight stretch, but the dramatic unities of time and often of place can enhance a rite-of-passage story [read on].
#8 The ‘Castaway Survival’ Storyline
‘Castaway’ stories are always popular, with so many possible plot setups – shipwrecks, imprisonment abroad, etc. And settings can range from prehistory all the way to the future. We have no less than 50 current examples [read on].
#9 The 'Citizens Into Soldiers' Storyline
This storyline for obvious reasons flourishes at the outbreak of war with contemporary-set examples, but currently we have a dozen examples set in different periods of recent history, from WW2 onward [read on].
#10 The 'Civic Disaster' Storyline
The 'civic disaster' drama is often based on or inspired by tragic real-life incidents. Occasionally a work may have a feel-good finale with someone being rescued etc, but generally this is by its nature a realist strand with few happy endings. Here are 10 current examples [read on].

Don't Forget To Save The Cat!
The just-ended National Pet Month is, for film buffs, or should be, a reminder of scriptwriting guru Blake Snyder’s dictum, Save The Cat! This can be taken literally as well as symbolically, for it serves two different popular storylines [...]

World Press Freedom Day
Unesco’s World Press Freedom Day, every 3 May, is an apt time to consider some of the films which have celebrated this key component of democracy. To cite the Washington Post slogan, “Democracy dies in Darkness”. In terms of popular storylines, they are nearly all examples of the ‘conspiracy uncovered’ story, though the more realist ones, detailing the hard slog to obtain the necessary facts, also qualify as 'investigative procedural' stories. [...]

National Alien Day, April 26

-No, I’d never heard of it either till yesterday. It’s inherently odd – could there be more to it than meets the eye? Apparently the official explanation is that […]

Royal Air Force Centenary – The RAF On Film
The 100th anniversary of the founding of the RAF this year has prompted me to put together a blog item in similar format to earlier ones this year, with a list of 10 film-tv titles to mark the occasion by. (The RAF was formed on April 1, 1918; there are various commemorative events scheduled between mid-April and July 10, when there will be a Westminster Abbey service and televised parade followed by a flypast over Buckingham Palace of up to 100 aircraft representing RAF history.) To tie in with the centenary, a number of film titles like The Dam Busters and Angels One Five have been issued on DVD or Blu-ray in digitally restored form, as part of StudioCanal’s Vintage Classics collection. I've compiled our own short-list of 10 films for the occasion. Initially I thought to trace the RAF’s development through the decades, with one film per decade, but this proved unrealistic.

The 'Code Of The West' Storyline:
Setting The Scene - The Frontier Township

Prompted by the recent disastrous California brushfire which destroyed one of Hollywood's "iconic" western town sets, we've put up a feature page on this key component of the 'code of the west' storyline, here.

The 'Liberating-Relationship' Storyline:
Case Study - The ‘Getting Intimate’ Scene, Part One

The 'Submarine Mission' Storyline:
Introductory page
A-Z Titles Page
Standard Scenes page
10 Titles For Further Study

The 'Midwinter Crisis' Storyline:

Introductory page
Setting The Scene In The Bleak Midwinter’ feature page

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The 'Outpost Command Crisis' Storyline

Introductory page
InterTitle Historical Review Part 1

The Expeditionary Storyline

Introductory page
Titles A-Z Page
Case Study Page: The 'Gateway Barrier' Scene

Canadian Film Day Picks
National Canadian Film Day is held every April. This year it’s on the 18th, when there are showings of selected films all across Canada. Here, I’ve compiled an introductory-style list of 10 films from a range of storylines for a DIY filmfest. I’ve selected works made by Canadians rather than by visiting US filmmakers. This approach is akin to the difference between being a tourist and a resident, and there are no films on our list with the traditional tourism image of Canada - fur trappers, moose, Mounties, bush pilots, bears etc. [read on]

The Evolving 'Brexit' Storyline
-An evolving real-world political ‘storyline’ is being dramatised in various ways.
The Easter weekend papers have been full of speculation about ‘Brexit’ as the UK will be ending EU membership in a year, at the end of March 2019. Normally, we wouldn’t cover a political topic per se, but attempts to transform a real-world political ‘storyline’ into drama put it into our purview here. So: What’s the story? As they say in films, “It’s complicated.” [read on] (For overseas readers, there is a backgrounder section alongside the main text on our feature page.)

Valentine’s Day - Getting Intimate
For this Valentine’s Day, instead of the usual mixed-bag list of 'romantic' films such as the newspapers publish every year where the films chosen have in fact very little in common, I thought we'd concentrate on the key scene in the main storyline here, the 'liberating-relationship'.
This is the ‘getting intimate’ scene, where the protagonists shed their inhibitions, ie their clothes, at least for a shared skinny-dip nude bathe in some country pond or remote seashore. (Censorship being what it was for much of film history, this was often as far as the filmmakers could take the viewer.) There are too many examples to cover in one web-page, so to start, we're just covering the black-and-white films era from the early silents through the 1960s, when b&w film production generally died out:
The Liberating-Relationship Storyline: Case Study - The ‘Getting Intimate’ Scene, Part One

‘Tis The Season To Be Binge Watching
-007 And The 'Secret Agent Champion' Storyline
The Xmas break has become the time for boxset binge watching. Watching instalments of a series in quick succession is a useful way to gain perspective on a series' artistic development, in this case the James Bond film series, an example of the old 'secret agent champion' storyline. [read more]

1967 ... That Was The Year That Was
-1967 At 50
A year-end is always an occasion for remembrance, and thus an occasion for a film retrospective. The Oxford English Dictionaries’ odd choice for Word Of The Year, Youthquake, suggests a theme for this year. The OED’s choice has caused comment on social media as it’s not a new term but goes back to the late Sixties. This has reminded me that 2017 was the 50th anniversary of the pivotal year in this context, 1967. Hence a ‘1967 At 50' FilmFest [read more]

Days Of The Dead
-In Memoriam, 2017
The year’s notable deaths in our context are those who were creative contributors to film and tv writing. Among the less publicised deaths this past year of film-tv contributors were those of some noteworthy writers. [read more]

That Time Of Year Again
Last year, I did a series of 12 blog posts to tie in with the 12 days of Christmas (or rather 12 days of seasonal crisis). This was by way of introducing our set of feature pages on the ‘Midwinter-Crisis’ Storyline [intro page here].
Starting in November, the madness has now begun again with the onslaught of formulaic ‘heartwarming’ Xmas tv films made by the Hallmark greeting-card people, cf image at right. (There’s a review-roundup of this year’s 21 new productions here. Warning: you may lose the will to live.)
So much of this is, as the saying goes, déjà vu all over again. (To see how little has changed since last year, you can check the blog posts out yourself [with #1-4 starting here, and #5-12 here].

Don’t Look Now, But There Are 50 Shades Of Greyscale
Modern erotica has roots in the European arthouse school of cinema going back to the era of the black-and-white film [read more].

On The Long And Winding Road
-To The Month Of Writing Dangerously
To the news items about Kerouac drafting On The Road 60 years ago [see item below] in only a few weeks of fulltime typing, we can now add some other works of topical interest which were written in a few weeks - after a lengthy gestation process [read on]

On The Road At 60
-The ‘road trip’ storyline is still rolling along, 60 years after Kerouac’s classic work was published.
Sixty years ago this month, in September 1957, Jack Kerouac’s On The Road was finally published. I say ‘finally’ as it took a while to find a publisher. The 4 road trips it covered, mostly between New York and San Francisco via Denver, had occurred back in 1947-50. Using notebooks kept on these trips, Kerouac compiled his account in 1951 in a single month of almost nonstop typing on a 120-foot long roll of paper (supposedly @100wpm - he didn’t even put in paragraph breaks), reliving the experience fuelled by Benzedrine. He hoped for a film version, but it would be a long time coming - another 45 years, but in that interval, the 'road-trip' storyline became established in American cinema ... [read on]

From The Mountains Of Kong To The Mountains Of Madness
-In putting together our feature case-study page for the 'expeditionary' storyline on how writers have adapted the key 'gateway barrier' scene, it's notable how the conception has expanded from [often exaggerated] natural features, such as cliffs or gorges, to psychological, cultural or spiritual obstacles. [read on].

The Lost World Redux

The 1925 Lost World, the grand-daddy of expeditionary-storyline films, but long available only in a cut-down version, was issued September 19 on a multi-region Blu-ray which is the fullest restoration thus far. [read more]

Before ... When & Where Next Time?

Decision-time is approaching as to whether there should be another film in the ‘Before’ series, cinema’s longest-running scripted-conversation drama. And if there is to be another, what will the story setup and setting be? [more]

'Something lost ... and waiting for you. Go!'
-On the Expeditionary Storyline #1 [more]

Dunkirk x 3

A new film about the May 1940 evacuation combines three storylines - the ‘castaways’ storyline, the ‘fateful flight’ storyline, and the ‘decisive battle’ storyline. [more]