This is one of the reasons I love the movie Fargo. The scene where the cop’s husband is eating cereal, she leaves and we sit with his crunching sounds for a bit, then she returns like “I forgot my keys” or something. I find that scene hilarious and the whole movie has lots of real moments like it.

I struggle with realistic dialogue where lots of people talk over each other tho, it gets very loud and incomprehensible very quickly, but that is usually the point of those scenes. I also struggle with that irl lol.

Hah that’s why I love Adventure Time

Takeshi Kitano is a Japanese director that likes to film actors when they are rehearsing scenes and then sometimes edits in those cuts as they feel more natural, he mostly does Japanese films but he did do an American gangster film called Brother, check it out

Heath Ledger Did Not Improvise in the Hospital Scene in ‘The Dark Knight’ After a ‘Mishap’

Animation does have a few good examples of this, Kipo comes to mind

I liked Sulu meeting his husband and kid in the last Star Trek movie. Not in the dialogue, not central to the plot. Just a sailor getting to spend some time with his family.

I’ve never really thought about it until now whether George Takei even responded to that scene. It turns out he did, and he was against it. Original Sulu wasn’t gay. I liked Simon Peggs answer to that also - Gene pushed us with as much diversity as he could, but a gay character was a step too far for the 1960’s.

Schitt’s Creek manages this really well, though it is a TV show and has the time to do it.

100% agreed.

I really liked Billy Eichner’s character in Parks and Rec for this. I don’t even think they mentioned him being gay directly other than his character mentioning a boyfriend or going on a date and use male pronouns or something like that. It was just a matter of fact that the was gay. There was no reveal, no plot about it, it didn’t affect the story. He was just a worker in the department that happened to also be gay.

It probably also helped that Billy Eichner is actually gay, and he was probably able to use his perspective to guide the directors and such to what he would want to see in a gay character on a sitcom rather than what the directors think the gay viewers want. Which is what I think is normally happening when a character being gay is a huge plot point. I think it comes from a good place. But I think to normalize being gay, being gay has to be portrayed as normal.

Problem is:

• You make a movie that is specifically LGBTQ themed where plot is about the characters queerness, and MFS on twitter complain.
• You have a character that just happens to be queer and does not affect the plot at all, and MFS on twitter will complain (Like Lightyear, or Strange World) and they will even lie and say that the movie has hardcore anal gay sex scenes or something.

You cant win with MFS because they just dont want to see queer people in media.

I am queer and I dont care if the series or movies is all about the queerness or if someone in the movie just happens to be queer. I want the story to be good.

Yet another thing the lord of the rings movies absolutely nail. The evolution of the Rohirrim theme from a single lonely violin when Gandalf and co. arrive in Edoras to a grand orchestral arrangement over the assembled host gets me every time.

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How about a group of villains that don’t have much care when half their members are killed? I mean some of them likely were good friends. I always find that odd particularly is the movie was more serious and accurate.

I so feel this!

We’re watching Ragnarok (Netflix) which is a Norwegian series that ran for four seasons. The lead character is flawed and unlikeable in a lot of ways we’d never intentionally do in an American production. And there’s this character arc where one of villains is slowly turning good, while the hero begins to betray his morals. I don’t know if I’m giving the producers too much credit, but I see a lot of subtlety in the characters I don’t notice in US shows - behaviors which are infuriating but make sense in the context of the character’s core persona.

A shame it didn’t do well in Norway; one of the reviews bitingly said that it was bad and “felt more like a Danish series.” We’ve been really enjoying it as a breath of fresh air in the superhero genre, and just finished season 2. It got only 3 seasons.

As a postfix, yes, I’ve seen Heroes, and yes it’s a hard divergence from the typical genre. But I feel it mostly aims for shock value, and just took a trope and switched the premise - it didn’t substantially add character depth.

Here are two examples: in Ragnarok, we’re told repeatedly by a mother that her son has always had a strong sense of law and justice. Later, when the authority figures around him are telling him to do things and he’s just passively following their orders, it was infuriating until I realized: well, what do we expect him to do? Rebel? The second example is that the hero is not a deep thinker. He’s not clever, he doesn’t have witty one-liners… he’s literally a mouth-breather - he spends much of the show mutely standing there with his mouth open, until there’s a situation where he can be violent. But he’s Thor, and not American Thor. He’s not a figure known for his cleverness. I can’t think of a case in American film & TV where the leading protagonist is so flawed, in unattractive, un-sexy ways.

You should watch Rugrats, the main cast don’t have any children, only the supporting cast.

But not isolated to ‘career women’, ‘scarred by trauma from the past women’ or womaniser men. Characters that just don’t have kids because they don’t want to. They don’t need to be cool or deadbeat uncles/aunts either.

I also really really really want the idea that women will lie down and die/accept doom unless they have found out recently that they’re pregnant, to stop being used. Women have a will to live without gestating another lifeform.

So many of my favourite shows and characters have been ruined by the ‘oh she’s pregnant’ storyline. Because the writers clearly couldn’t think of any other life changing or character building arc than impregnation.

How do you think they’d better address self harm, specifically?

Inception

If I understand you correctly, I think the following might qualify.

Breaking Bad, Imposter, American History X, American Psycho and Fight club. All pretty popular. You might have seen them.

I feel like movies, comic book movies in particular, are structured to condition people to resist changing their worldview, especially views that society wants the audience to have.

Like Batman movies are notorious for this because they’re always about pressuring Batman to kill and his refusal to for stupid reasons, even when it is obviously the morally correct thing to do. And producers do it because they don’t want the audience to think killing evil people is good – can’t enable the peasants to guillotine their masters, after all.

I genuinely wish we’d get a movie that kind of does what you’re asking; that has a character who holds socially correct worldviews and who rejects those views in a way that philosophically makes sense. A movie that sincerely questions those views.

I think the closest we ever got to something like that in modern film is Fight Club.