Today's Favorite - Jeffrey Overstreet

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Today's Favorite

A collection of 9 posts

On Movies & Media

Today's Favorite: Breakthroughs in Big-Screen Visual Artistry

The Wizard of Oz enchanted audiences with a wonderland of color that made moviegoing more vivid and exuberantly engaging. When Star Wars opened in 1977, it represented a giant leap forward in the art of visual effects and sound effects. Tron gave us an aesthetic experience through computers that was

Today's Favorite

Today's Favorite: Dupery ("We're here to view the tapestries.")

What's your favorite scene of one character pulling the wool over another character's eyes in order to distract them so that he, she, or others can sneak past unnoticed? I love Fozzie Bear and Kermit the Frog posing as "The Pizza Twins" in The

On Movies & Media

Today's favorite: Reunion Scenes

I once experienced a reunion that left me absolutely speechless. I was working in a video store when I got to know an interesting young couple. Regularly, they'd visit the store and ask, "So, Jeff, what should we watch tonight?" I'd recommend something, and

On Movies & Media

Today's favorite: Kidnapped!

I'm working on a scene that involves a character who has wandered off from his traveling companions is coming back to announce that he's found what they all came looking for. He's almost there, when suddenly he's SURPRISED BY KIDNAPPERS, and he

On Movies & Media

Today's Favorite: Bullies

I've just seen Ben X, which is to movies about kids and bullies what The Passion of the Christ is to movies about persecuted messiahs. I've also just seen Choking Man, about an immigrant who suffers mockery at work because he doesn't speak much

The Auralia Thread

Today's favorite: The expository revelation speech

This "today's favorite" challenge is a tough one. It's one of my pet peeves at the movies: At the end of most whodunits, the villain corners the hero and proceeds to boastfully explain exactly what he did and why he did it. Stupid, stupid

On Movies & Media

Today's Favorite: "The Help"

I'm working on a scene that involves a powerful character's lowly, world-weary servant. He's basically a custodian. And that has me thinking about memorable custodians, service people, bank tellers, bellhops, bouncers (etc) who are not major characters but who still make an impression in

The Auralia Thread

Today's Favorite: Dragons!

Guillermo del Toro has said that he cannot wait to bring Smaug to life in the big-screen version of The Hobbit. And I've been writing about a dragon-like creature lately. (If you've read Auralia's Colors or Cyndere's Midnight, you can probably guess

The Auralia Thread

Today's Favorite - Spooky Places, Memorable Pubs

This weekend, I discovered a journal that I kept in college. In those pages, I wrote brief descriptions of my favorite big-screen moments, much the way the critics who write for FilmComment have done in their annual year-end issue. It was inspiring to read back through pages of pages of