10 Years of Bitter Posts - Looking at Time-Travel movies and Sex Comedies

I had forgotten about some of my early attempts at theme weeks on this blog. In addition to deep dives on specific movies and TV shows, I also occasionally did weeklong looks at particular genres of films.

Time-travel films were the first to get this feature, starting with Lessons from The Terminator, and contrasted it with Lessons from Back to the Future. Using these two movies, I explained the difference between closed-loop time-travel and multiple timelines time-travel. A closed loop is when the movie reveals that the time-travel only made possible the history that was always meant to happen. The multiple timelines version of this is when the characters can actually alter history.

Then, to make everyone's head explode, I explored how parallel and alternate timelines worked, using J.J. Abrams's STAR TREK. If you're writing a time-travel movie, you MSUT be consistent about which type of time travel you're operating under, otherwise the audience will end up more confused than you want. (And yes, the Terminator film series doesn't stay consistent film-to-film on this, though each film is internally consistent on its own.

Sex Comedy Week took a lot of cues from bad scripts I'd seen over the years. In Furries Aren't Funny, I groaned at the overuse of the furry fetish to get a shocking laugh out of the audience. There are so many odd kinks and fetishes out there that it felt lazy to go for the same "Ohmigod! He/She is a Furry!" joke. Be creative about this - or better yet, make up a fetish whole cloth.

Along the same lines, I ranted against cheap titillation and gross-out sex gags. If you guessed this means I'm not a fan of AMERICAN PIE, reward yourself with a cookie right now. I'd seen so many gags about bodily fluids in scripts that I had to devote an entire post to it.

I kinda feel like I should go back and cover some of these topics in greater depth, but the way I blog now, I'll probably wait until the subjects are relevant to a movie or show I've just seen and go in on a deep dive.