July 29, 2014
The Creative Process: When Rewriting Means Erasing
After his friend Will Chancellor publishes his first book, Killough has a few thoughts on the rewriting process....
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July 22, 2014
Identity Theft: Never Tell a Rock God You Love Him
A typical midweek night will see me propped up in bed binge watching a premium-cable show flanked by Buster and Aussie, my butch roommate’s chihuahuas. While the show putters in the background, I’m likely also surfing current affairs online, and might have a chat-room window on an obscure gay website open, where a group of Gheys and transgendered women from all over the world I’ve been chatting with since the late 90s gather. Every now and then I might remember to check my ‘lobster traps’, as I call the half dozen dating sites where I keep profiles.
July 15, 2014
The Necessary Evils of Being Judgmental
I’ve always been a terrible snob, but almost everyone is, in one way or another. We all judge negatively from time to time, and when we judge negatively we look down, and when we look down on anything we are being snobs.
If I replay the judgments I made just this morning within three blocks while walking to the library, it’s a rather shameful catalog of intolerance. As I made my way down the hill to Santa Monica Boulevard, I was forced to leave the sidewalk and walk on the street. I was about to tweet, “Obese couple + Dogs on long leashes = Blocked sidewalk.” I thought better of actually posting it because I correctly judged it too nasty for public comment; a more balanced, tolerant judgment overrode a grumpier, bitchier one. Did I really need to broadcast my transient wrath over such a silly thing?
July 11, 2014
REVIEW: ‘Boyhood’ Is a Subdued Portrait of the Modern American Everyman
Ever since he helped lay the foundations for the American indie film with Slackers, Richard Linklater has experimented with narrative form and structure more than any director. In defiance of every dramatic convention, his personal films, such as the Before Sunrise series and Waking Life, have willfully discarded plot in favor of dialogue heavily weighted with dialectic. Slackers, for instance, follows a group of young misfits and bohemians around Austin in a relay of conversations, never lingering on one for more than a few minutes — one character hands off the dialogue to the person he’s speaking to, she shuffles off to the next person, that person picks it up and takes it on to a fourth person, and onward until the film ends.
Like all inventors, Linklater’s experiments have been hit or miss.
July 2, 2014
Production: Why Strategic Patience is Often Your Most Effective Tool
Killough reflects on what it takes to stay in the game....
June 24, 2014
Writing: Fiction Must Be Stranger Than Truth
Midway through a pitch at Showtime a few years ago I literally lost the plot. I’d flown in to Los Angeles from London that afternoon. I never sleep flying east to west, so I compensated for my fatigue by over-caffeinating. The caffeine mixed with the adrenaline rush of performance. I became a blithering idiot, human Jell-O right there in the meeting with the network’s top execs. I couldn’t remember the plot or the names of characters I had created and written myself.
Luckily, I had two seasoned producers on either side of me. “The story is autobiographical,” one of them said, trying to pick me up and carry me across the finish line. I shot him a surprised look; that was an outright lie, wasn’t it?
June 17, 2014
Content Creation: Talking to Yourself Is Healthy
I’m on Reddit about as much as I’m on Facebook. What amazes many other Redditors is we get far more comments and likes for our posts from strangers than we do from actual friends for our posts on Facebook. Your contributions also don’t appear directly on other Redditors’ feeds; you post by subject, or ‘subreddit’, and hope for the best. So why bother posting to Facebook at all? It lost whatever negligible cool it had long ago, after all.
Many of my friends and most of my small family have either never signed up for Facebook or have dropped away. “It’s a waste of time and distracting,” an award-winning writer-director friend, who cancelled his account well over a year ago, said to me the other day. This guy is so cool he can carry off a polo shirt and actually make me hesitate as to whether I might need one or two in my wardrobe as well. (I don’t.)
June 6, 2014
REVIEW: ‘Edge of Tomorrow’ is a Pastiche of Every Summer Hit Ever
If the Hollywood blockbuster were baby formula, then Tom Cruise’s face would be on the jar. Doug Liman’s Edge of Tomorrow is probably the apex of that Cruisy formula; you name it, it’s in it: Groundhog Day, Saving Private Ryan, X-Men, Robocop, War of the Worlds, Mission: Impossible, Stripes, G.I. Joe, Alien, Looper, et al. And you know what? Just as applesauce is really delicious every now and then, especially when you’re stoned, Edge of Tomorrow is a hell of a lot of fun.
There I go again: I mention ‘cruisy’ and I get all tabloid humor about Tom. I’ve also got L.A. Pride kicking off down the street, and the boom-boom wailing diva bad house music is shaking the hill I live on and infecting me with more gay than usual.
May 27, 2014
Filmmaking: You Shall Know Your Velocity
After Xavier Dolan's spectacular run at Cannes, Killough examines his own path from wannabe prodigy to late bloomer....
May 23, 2014
REVIEW: ‘X‑Men’ Hits the Spot
I enjoyed Bryan Singer’s X-Men: Days of Future Past so much that my first reaction was to write that type of non-critique they explicitly tell you not to submit in Cinema Studies 101: “I really, really liked this movie. It was a lot of fun. Everything from the script to the cinematography to the editing was perfect! I mean, for this gender of movie, of course. And Wolverine is in a lot of it, which is awesome because he’s my fave X-Man, and he’s so badass rocking that early-70s swag!”
Indeed, this is more a spinoff Wolverine than an X-Men, although strictly speaking Hugh Jackman would need to be on screen a least fifteen percent more for it to be entirely his as the hero.