The ISA Podcast

"Jackie" is a daring and raw biopic that is one of the year's best films.

Biopics are tricky to write. Tell a cradle-to-grave story, and you've bitten off more than can be chewed in a two-hour film. Fail to fill in the blanks of your famous subject and the audience will see them as merely two-dimensional. Neither is a problem in the vivid new film "Jackie." It's a daring and raw portrait of First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy during the weeks following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963.

Written by Noah Oppenheim as a non-linear mood piece, directed with flair by Pablo Larrain, and acted with aching vulnerability by a never-better Natalie Portman, Jackie's grieving process here is presented as both intensely haunting and deeply moving. This character study does more than illuminate its subject, it puts us in her shoes at every moment. Jackie's fight to tell her story couldn't be more timely for our nation during this difficult political transition. And it's a must-see film for anyone interested in the advancement of cinematic storytelling.

2016 is almost over! Can you believe it? We hear it all the time, "wow how time flies", but it's actually pretty amazing how fast the days, months and years tend to zoom by us. And even though a year in review podcast episode is relatively trite and cliché, I think it's absolutely necessary to take a moment and look back on everything we experienced over the past year. We don't do that enough throughout the year, when we're in the middle of it, experiencing it all and whizzing through life and always looking forward. I personally get so caught up in the planning phases of my life, that I so easily forget everything I've accomplished and, much less, what I'm currently accomplishing and experiencing. Why does it sometimes feel easier to look ahead or gaze longingly at the past? What's wrong with the current moment that keeps us looking elsewhere? And maybe that's a negative way of looking at it. There isn't anything terribly wrong with the current moment, but we do tend to spend more time thinking about the past and future as opposed to just being in the present. We've heard it a thousand times - it's called the present because it is a gift. But, I don't want to start out this episode with too many clichés or platitudes, even though I do tend to love them. So a year in review. First, if you're listening to this in 2017, let us know how things are in the future. Hopefully we have flying cars and the ability to teleport by the time you're listening to this. But yes, I want to take a look back on some of the things I've discussed over the past 12 months. Most of my podcast episodes are so short and quick, that it makes it a bit difficult to really dive in and get to the details of every little piece of information I share and teach. So hopefully this episode helps fit things into place for you regular listeners, and for anyone who is tuning in for the first time, maybe this entices you to go back and listen to previous episodes.

SYS Episode #151

Funny man, and screenwriter (Saving Silverman and Bride Wars) Greg DePaul.

SYS Episode #149

Legendary filmmaker Paul Schrader

SYS Episode #148

Screenwriter and Hart Chart creator James V. Hart.

An excerpt from Jacob Krueger's podcast: 

"...This is a series I've been wanting to talk about for a very long time. And we're going to do so from a different perspective than we usually do when we talk about TV series.

Oftentimes on this podcast, when we've spoken about series we've talked about big picture stuff. We've talked about theme and engine and structure. But today, what we're going to do is zoom in really close on one particular episode.

We're going to look at Season 3 Episode 5, and we're going to break it down to its fundamental craft elements: the way that the scenes are actually constructed..."

"Nocturnal Animals" presents a beautiful world filled with brutality.

Tom Ford may have come from the world of fashion and beauty, but his latest movie entitled "Nocturnal Animals" is all about ugliness. Susan (Amy Adams) may be rich and glamorous, but her life is cold and lonely. Her art gallery is bleeding cash, her marriage is marred by infidelity, and she covers her shame in artifice. Then her ex Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal) sends her the new novel he's written, dedicated to her. As she reads, Susan realizes his fiction is a metaphor for their reality 20 years earlier. And the brutality in his story echoes that which ended their marriage. Tom Ford writes and directs this multi-tiered story with extraordinary attention to every word and detail. He's a true artist, provoking his audience with a controversial work as exquisite as it is unsettling.

"Westworld" is an enigmatic mystery that keeps us guessing.

The new HBO series does more than just re-imagine Michael Crichton's 1973 cult movie "Westworld" as a deeper and more philosophical examination of modern technology. It also confounds most of the rules of narrative in a television series. Almost every character at work and at play in the westernized adult theme park remains enigmatic eight hours into the 10-episode season. Multiple timelines may be at play, though they've yet to be clearly stated. And just what the maze at the center of the show means is anybody's guess. Maybe because so much is left to the viewer to decide and decipher, it's become the ‘water cooler' show of the fall season. Is it about robots becoming human, or God complexes or something else? Hard to say, but no matter where it's all going, it is utterly enthralling television. And we anxiously await its answers.

An excerpt from Jacob Krueger's podcast: 

"... So learning how to write a successful screenplay is not actually just about learning how to write a good screenplay, it's learning how to know what compromises you can make and what compromises you cannot. Which imperfections your audience will accept, which imperfections are going to pull them out of the story.

In many ways, the success or failure of your movie all boils down to one really simple concept: Feeding The Genre Monster."