Shakespeare, New Sidebar Items, and My Own Personal NaNoWriMo

Well, folks, we have 7 Shakespeare plays left. They are:

• The Two Gentlemen of Verona
• Coriolanus
• The Life and Death of King John
• Pericles
• Much Ado About Nothing
• Love’s Labours Lost
• Titus Andronicus

As you may have noticed, one of these things is not like the others. You have the legendary Much Ado and six of his most forgotten plays. The production history here, in case you hadn’t guessed, is that they let directors pick their Shakespeare plays and these are the ones nobody picked (with the big exception of Much Ado which was supposed to be done earlier but kept getting cancelled and pushed back for various reasons.) Are the six I haven’t seen all duds? I hope not. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by some I was unfamiliar with as we’ve gone through these, and I’m hoping that will happen again here.

But I’m intimidated to continue, and, more importantly, I need to rewrite by novel, so I’m turning April into my own personal National Novel Writing Month (which is usually held in November.) I’ve got thirty chapters, there are thirty days in April and I’m going to rewrite a chapter a day.

I also have big news announcing new material coming up but I’m not quite ready to announce that yet.

Meanwhile, if you’re starved for content in April, you’ll note that I’ve been doing what you should be doing, exploring the 15 years of archives of this blog, and I’ve discovered some posts that never ended up in the sidebar. Check them out in the bottom of the sidebar over there, or just click on them here:

• How to Write a Memoir (I had forgotten I’d had a series with this title. My novel is semi-autobiographical, so I’ve been studying memoirs intensely for a year, so I should expand this series with what I’ve learned.)
• Have at Least Six Big Decisions (One question I wish I could go back and add to the checklist)
• Can a Computer Do My Job?
• Secrets of Dungeon-Mastering
• My Top 20 Films! (Or at least what they were 15 years ago, the list would be different today. I was really into Tales of Manhattan at the time!)

Appearance on Jon Spurling Write in the Head YouTube Show!

Hey everybody, I made an appearance on Jon Spurling’s incredible “Write in the Head” YouTube Show! I reiterate my long held belief that the first act should most consist of a longstanding personal problem becoming acute, often though a social humiliation, then an intimidating opportunity presenting itself, then an unexpected conflict immediately arising. On in shorter form: “Problem / Opportunity / Conflict.” We discuss lots of examples and have fun. Unfortunately, I do have to apologize for the quality of the video and audio, which, entirely my fault, are not great. So sorry that a few words drop out, but you can pick them up from context clues. Check it out!

37 Days of Shakespeare, Day 30: The Comedy of Errors

The Comedy of Errors, first broadcast December 24th, 1983

• When was it written: Possibly in 1594, perhaps his fifth play and first comedy.
• What’s it about? Two sets of twins, two young lords both named Antipholus and two slaves both named Dromio, are separated at youth and know nothing of each other. When their father is about to be executed for a debt, they all end up in the Greek city of Ephesues, where there are many mix-ups but everything ends happily (except for, y’know, the two slaves who are not freed and still constantly beaten)
• Most famous dialogue: Oddly, this is a beloved and often-staged play, but no one piece of dialogue has really become famous.
• Sources: The play is a modernised adaptation of Menaechmi by Plautus, a Roman playwright.
• Interesting fact about the play: This is the only play to mention America, despite being set in ancient Greece. Jones cuts the line here, possibly because it’s so jarring.
• Best insult: “He is deformèd, crooked, old, and sere, Ill-faced, worse-bodied, shapeless everywhere, Vicious, ungentle, foolish, blunt, unkind, Stigmatical in making, worse in mind.”
• Best word: This play had no words that were unfamiliar or strange to me, which is one reason it can be staged so widely.
• Best production of this play I’ve seen: I saw an excellent production at Chicago Shakespeare Company as a play-within-a-play set during the Blitz (and I saw a fine production at Earlham College way back in the day)
• Notable Names in the BBC Adaptation: Roger Daltry of “The Who” is both Dromios! Michael Kitchen, whom you’ve seen in things, is both Antiphili. Charles Gray also returns as the befuddled judge who has to sort everything out.

How’s the cast?

• Excellent. As an actor, Daltry is only remembered for playing the lead in the movie of Tommy, but this proves that he was a very gifted comic actor who could have had a good side career if he hadn’t been so busy rocking. Kitchen does a great job playing the two Antiphili slightly differently despite dressing the same. The ladies are great, the old people are great, everyone’s great.

How’s the direction by James Cellan Jones?

• Absolutely delightful. Everything is bright and colorful, befitting the sprightly text. The town sprawls around a massive map of the peninsula and circus performers prance about at all times doing their tricks. Ultimately, Jones’ best decision was the casting, which I’ll discuss more below.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Stories are Better When Everybody Isn’t Dumb

Usually, this play is staged by casting two pairs of actors who look similar but not identical to each other as the two pairs of twins. This makes all of the townspeople who stare one Dromio in the face, and then stare the other Dromio in the face five minutes later, and can’t tell them apart, look like idiots. Jones does something different, simply casting one actor as each set of twins, dressed and styled identically.

Normally, this doubling cannot be done, because all four are together on stage for a long scene at the end, but this is, of course, TV, and Jones can simply do the ending Patty Duke-style, which works fine.

But there were complainers. According to Wikipedia: 

• “This production used editing and special effects to have each set of twins played by the same actors. However, this was not well received by critics, who argued that not only was it confusing for the audience as to which character was which, but much of the comedy was lost when the characters look identical.”

Allow me to say, those critics were bozos. I’ve seen this play many times, always with actors that looked kind-of-similar as the twins, and it’s never worked this well. Yes, every time Dromio or Antipholus appears, it’s a bit confusing for a moment about which one this is, but then the fun of it is figuring that out from context clues. It never took me more than a minute to get caught up on which one I was watching, and I’m famous for my failure to follow complex stories.

As for “much of the comedy” being lost, the implication here is that a key source of laughs in the play is that these idiotic townspeople can’t tell these not-entirely-similar actors apart. But Jones’ comedy is a more generous comedy. There are no idiots here. Anyone would be very confused in this situation, and these mix-ups are entirely understandable. The comedy arises from our frustration at understanding a situation that they couldn’t possibly understand, and I found it hilarious.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Don’t Let Yourself Get Boxed In

There’s a certain “Dylan goes electric” feel to this play, where we have an artist suddenly branching out in a new direction and hoping his audience goes along.

We’re fairly certain that Shakespeare wrote the three Henry VI plays first (in one order or another), then Richard III. That quartet has very little comedy (unlike his later history quartet, which has Falstaff to lighten things). This was a badass playwright writing brutal history plays on blood-spattered sets. Then, it’s possible that this was the fifth play, an adaptation of an old Roman comedy. The result is a brilliantly funny farce, but theatergoers must have been totally unprepared for this very silly comedy, if we’re right in our suppositions about play order.

(Curiously, there’s almost no subplot. In almost every scene the two Dromios are mistaken for each other or the two Antipholi are mistaken for each other. It’s a dozen permutations of a single joke.)

I wrote a blog post 15 years ago advocating that writers might want to stay in their lane, but this play argues the opposite. You can yank your audience in radical new directions, if you have total confidence in your genius as a playwright, which thankfully Shakespeare did.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Don’t, Y’know, Endorse Beating Slaves

My daughter just made her Shakespearean debut as Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing. It was wonderful, but watching this, I kept wondering if they should have staged this one instead. Much Ado is the better play, of course, but this one is, I would say, funnier, and certainly shorter (It’s Shakespeare’s shortest play). The only reason not to stage it is that owning and beating slaves is not condemned, and the “happy ending” leaves the Dromios still enslaved. (And one of the two without a love interest.)

And how do you cast it according to modern gender-blind and colorblind casting? It’s tempting to not have the four of them be white men, but as soon as you change either pair to women or another race, then the constant beatings the Dromios receive at the hands of the Antipholi become something that’s much harder to take.

Ultimately, I think you’d have to take out all the beatings, which I think would work fine. Ideally you would free the slaves at the end too, but I don’t think you could do that without altering the text, which I usually do not endorse.

Personally, with a large cast of 8-13 year olds, I would have done Midsummer, but this one would have been tempting (the lack of unfamiliar words would also help) but, in the end, it’s probably too problematic.

37 Days of Shakespeare, Day 29: Macbeth

The Tragedy of Macbeth, first broadcast November 5th, 1983

• When was it written? Nobody knows. Probably after 1603, because the new King James saw himself as a direct descendent of Banquo and the play seems to have been written to flatter his bloodline. Possibly written in 1606 during the Gunpowder Plot trials, from which some language may have been drawn.
• What’s it about? Scottish thane Macbeth is told by witches he’ll be king. He tells his wife, who convinces him to go ahead and kill the king to speed the process along.
• Most famous dialogue: Probably the “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” speech
• Sources: Holinshed’s Chronicles, of course, and Hector Boece’s History of the Scottish People, but also The Daemonologie, a pamphlet written by King James himself.
• Best insult: “Not in the legions Of horrid hell can come a devil more damned In evils to top Macbeth.” “I grant him bloody Luxurious, avaricious, false, deceitful Sudden, malicious, smacking of every sin That has a name.”
• Best word: “Aroint thee, witch, the rump-fed ronyon cries!”
• Best production of this play I’ve seen: I just saw one unmemorable production, and I’ll be missing it in Stratford this year. (I’ve also seen the Welles, Polanski and Coen films, all of which are very good.)
• Notable Names in the BBC Adaptation: Nicol Williamson from Excalibur is Macbeth

How’s the cast?

• Williamson and Jane Lapotaire as Lord and Lady Macbeth are both captivating but a little broad for TV. I’ve been sticking to this one series of plays, but on YouTube you can apparently watch Ian McKellen and Judi Dench in the parts, and it was tempting to watch that one instead.

How’s the direction by Jack Gold?

• Everything feels a little cheesy and tacky, from the sets to the lighting to the camera movement. It feels a bit like an old Doctor Who episode. I enjoyed watching it, but there are better options for viewing this play.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Not All Killers Are Psychopaths

On the surface, Macbeth has a lot of similarities to Richard III. They both kill to gain a kingship, then keep killing women and children to hold it, finally dying on the battlefield as the proper order is restored. (In fact, Richard’s rise was also prophesized by a witch way back in Henry VI Part 2, wasn’t it?)

But it is a sign of Shakespeare’s greatness that the characters are so different. The easy reading of it is that Richard is a psychopath whereas Macbeth is not. Killing is easy and fun for Richard, whereas it’s torturous for both Macbeth and his wife. They’re riven by indecision, horrified by the act, and wracked by guilt afterwards. Each blames the other for getting them into this mess, and can’t forgive them or themselves. She is driven mad and kills herself, and he comes to feel that his life is a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

To paraphrase Twelfth Night, some are born murderous, some become murderous and some have murderousness thrust upon them. The Macbeths are clearly not in the first category, but it’s probably too generous to put them in the third. The witches don’t even tell them to kill the king, the Macbeths just pretend they did.

Ultimately, this is a greater play than Richard III because Macbeth is so torn up inside. Richard III is an excellent portrayal of how unreserved evil works, but this is an even better portrait of how evil is waiting to swallow any of us up at any time.

 
Storyteller’s Rulebook: Unsex It, Please

 
There is much debate about how bawdy Shakespeare really was. We have many dirty interpretations of his work today that may or may not have been what he intended. Was he really making a c-word joke in Hamlet? We’ll never know.

But undoubtedly many directors take moments in Shakespeare that were not intended to be sexual and make them sexual. Lawrence Olivier turned Hamlet’s bedroom scene with his mother into a real bedroom scene with his mother. (This would have been daring if he had cast someone old enough to be his mother in the role, but instead he cast an actress who was 11 years younger than him!)

In this series, I haven’t been focusing on these moments but they’re here and they’ve been annoying me. In the BBC All’s Well That Ends Well, the scene with the king is made very sexual even though there seems to be no justification for that in the actual text.

In this play, Lady Macbeth calls on spirits to “unsex her”, by which she means just make her more like a man and less like a woman, but they could stand to unsex her in other ways too, because she’s quite hot and bothered at times. When she says “Come to my woman’s breasts And take my milk for gall, you murd’ring ministers,” she starts to build to a fit of emotion that can only be described as orgasmic.  When she concludes the speech with “Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark To cry ‘Hold! Hold!’” then falls back on the bed, she leaves little to the imagination. 

Lapotaire has fun with it, and it almost works, but ultimately it tips over into the unintentionally comic. Not everything is a sex scene, people, and injecting them into Shakespeare where he didn’t intend them is not doing him or yourselves any favors.

37 Days of Shakespeare, Day 28: Cymbeline

Cymbeline, first broadcast July 10th, 1983

• When was it written? Around 1611. Perhaps his 34th play
• What’s it about? Cymbeline is an ancient British king who is tired of paying tribute to the Romans. His daughter Imogen has a husband named Posthumus, who has been banished to Rome, where he makes a bet with Pisanio about Imogen’s faithfulness. She is faithful, but Pisanio convinces Posthumous she’s not, so Posthumus orders her killed. She flees into the forest dressed as a boy, where she meets the king’s exiled brother and two stolen sons, who have no idea they’re princes. One of the princes beheads Cloten, a would-be suitor of Imogen. She takes what she thinks is medicine and passes out. The princes bury her and the headless corpse together. Imogen wakes and assumes it’s Postumous’s headless body. There’s a war for a while, then everything ends up back in Cymbeline’s (remember him?) throne room where everything is happily sorted out.
• Most famous dialogue: None
• Sources: Holinshed’s Chronicles and the play Philaster by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
• Best insult: There are no really juicy insults here, but Cloten calls the prince a “mountaineer” and the prince, who is clearly a mountaineer, gets so insulted he chops Cloten’s head off immediately. So I guess that must have been a pretty harsh insult back then.
• Best word: ‘ods pittikins
• Best production of this play I’ve seen: I saw a rather bugnuts production at The Stratford Festival last summer, with lots of gender-swapped roles (Lucy Peacock played Cymbeline)
• Notable Names in the BBC Adaptation: Claire Bloom returns as Queen, Helen Mirren returns as Imogen, Michael Gough is Belarius.

How’s the cast?

• They’re okay. Mirren plays a very similar role to the one she played in As You Like It, and once again she makes no attempt to feign maleness when in “disguise,” which makes it bizarre when people who knew he well don’t recognize her. Everybody else is okay, but they play this ridiculous play too seriously.

How’s the direction by Elijah Moshinsky?

• Entirely inferior to the production that I saw in Stratford. This one cuts out all the warfare, which was quite rousing on stage. The stage version had a very amusing Cloten that was allowed to steal the play, but this one had no standouts, and I blame Moshinsky for that. Worst of all the ruffs are back! I just don’t agree with the idea that plays set in ancient times (though there are many anachronisms) should have Elizabethan dress.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Just Retire Already

We are fairly certain that this play came very late in Shakespeare’s career, and to say that it recycles old material is an understatement.

• As with Othello and Much Ado About Nothing, the heroine is framed for adultery through a very complex plot, and her heretofore-doting lover now decides to kill her.
• As with As You Like It (which also starred Helen Mirren in the BBC adaptation) the heroine, whose relationship is not approved of by her royal father, goes into the forest dressed as a man to live in exile, where she meets other formerly royal exiles who have become earthy forest dwellers.
• As in Romeo and Juliet, the heroine takes a sleeping draft that makes her very convincingly dead for 24 hours, with disastrous results.

Is Shakespeare wittingly or unwittingly repeating himself? Harold Bloom conjectured that this play might be self-parody on Shakespeare’s part, hauling out his old plots so that he could poke fun at himself. Of course, that only works if you treat the play as a comedy, but this production plays it as a tragedy until the very end, when a happy ending arrives out of nowhere. We’re supposed to just take it seriously and not notice all the repetition.

Bizarrely, the play was quite popular during the 18th century, with John Keats himself saying it was one of his favorites. By the end of that century, it was going out of favor. George Bernard Shaw (not entirely incorrectly) said the play was:

• “stagey trash of the lowest melodramatic order, in parts abominably written, throughout intellectually vulgar, and, judged in point of thought by modem intellectual standards, vulgar, foolish, offensive, indecent and exasperating beyond all tolerance.”  

But then he rewrote the ending and changed his mind, saying that, other than that fifth act, it was “one of Shakespeare’s finest later plays.”

I’ve now seen this twice in the last year. The Stratford production worked better than this one, but neither made the case that this was a great play. I haven’t finished making my way through these yet, but surely, Keats’s feelings aside, this is one of the worst. Just retire already, Will!

Best of 2024, #1: Will and Harper

Putting this here now feels like a protest against Emilia Perez, but I already had my list drawn up before I saw that one. Nonetheless, it is impossible not to compare and contrast the two. One of the many offensive things about Emilia Perez was that, as with The Crying Game, it was stuck in the mindset that trans people are trying to trick us all. Those movies focus on the question of whether they get away with it. This doesn’t jibe with my experience. Is it possible that I have post-transition trans people in my life that are passing? If so, that’s fine, but it seems to me that that’s just not what being trans is about.

This documentary is a much more touching story of a trans person who just wants to be accepted, so she goes on a road trip with her friend Will Ferrell. It’s at this place on the list because, more than any other movie this year, it made me laugh and it made me cry.

At this point, if you poll all Americans, you won’t find a majority who say they hate black people, or any other race, or gays or lesbians. And that’s been true for many years. The only minority group that a majority of Americans will flat out state that they hate is trans people. Trans hatred is a majority opinion. Trump hates black people, but he didn’t say “Vote for me because I hate blacks.” Instead, he said “Vote for me because I hate trans people, just like you do.” Previously good people like J.K. Rowling get infected with trans hate and it destroys them from the inside. Elon Musk was supposedly turned to the far right by his hatred of his trans daughter.

Why?? Why? Why all the hate? I don’t understand it. These are just the nicest people! They’ve done nothing wrong. As far as I can tell, the hatred is because the idea of trans-ness just seems so weird to cis people. Is that enough reason to hate?

Interestingly, Harper, despite expectations, does not encounter any face-to-face hatred in her roadtrip. But after she leaves each place, hateful trolls pop up on the internet to ridicule her. In person, she’s disarming and inoffensive. It’s the idea of her that inspires retroactive hatred.

I think most Americans have never met a trans person. What this movie does so well is give everyone who watches it a trans friend. Please watch it.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: They Don’t Have to Be On All the Time

I say that it made me laugh and cry, but I didn’t laugh as much as I thought I would: An interesting thing about the movie is that, despite starring a comedy giant and one of his head writers, it’s only mildly funny. These are comedy professionals who aren’t “on” all the time, and this movie shows us what they’re really like in their downtime. That turns out to be pretty fascinating. This is not a “Will Farrell” movie. Instead, it’s just a Will Farrell movie, and I loved it.

Best of 2024, #2: A Complete Unknown

Last time they tried to make a Dylan movie, it was called I’m Not There, and indeed he was not. This time they went with a similar title, “A Complete Unknown,” and indeed Dylan largely remains unknown at the end. There are no flashbacks to formative episodes in small-town Minnesota, no glimpse of parents or siblings, no flashforwards to times when he had more things figured out. The movie follows a very young man with delusions (?) of godhood from age 20 to 24 as he blazes his way into and out of the world of folk music. He goes electric and the movie’s over. He doesn’t even wreck that motorcycle at the end, because that happened two years later.

So what did I think of this film? I loved it. Timothée Chalamet and Ed Norton give astounding performances as Dylan and Pete Seegar, utterly transforming into their characters. The feel of Greenwich Village is just as good as the Coen Brothers’ movie about the same scene, Inside Llewyn Davis, which is a huge compliment. Limiting the scope of the movie so tightly was a brilliant move, saving us the annoyance of old age makeup or flashback kid actors who don’t look like the adult actors. The best thing about the movie is that it’s packed with music. The movie knows full well that the music, not his life, is his legacy, and it gives us a ton of it.

Is it a problem that Dylan remains a complete unknown at the end of the movie? No, because the movie makes the case that he’s unknowable. This is the same Bob we get in the documentary Don’t Look Back, a novaburst of talent, who is also a very private, antisocial guy that is determined to keep his secrets hid. Letting him do that was this movie’s most brilliant conceit.

Let me add, my favorite moment in the movie was Bob saying “It’s Bob, Bob Dylan” to his good friend Johnny Cash, who is on a bender. Johnny, like Woody, doesn’t recognize Bob. The two men he has the most respect forget who he is. That’s such a painful moment

Storyteller’s Rulebook: You Have to Choose How Much You Can Re-Arrange Events

The order of events of Dylan’s life are inconvenient for a screenwriter. The writers of the biopic Ed Wood (Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski) were in a similar position, and complained in the intro to that published screenplay about being constrained by the actual order of events of Ed Wood’s life:

• Finally, we had to figure out how to create a satisfying third-act climax and resolution. In a perfect world, Glen or Glenda would have been Ed Wood’s final film – the man cranks out numerous silly monster movies, before learning his lesson, turning to personal honest film-making, and creating his autobiographical valedictory masterpiece. But unfortunately, Glen or Glenda came first. So we had to turn Plan 9 from Outer Space into a climax.

Even though most people don’t know the life of Ed Wood, they felt they could not flip the order. They preferred to be honest.

More people know about the life of Bob Dylan, so Mangold could never have gotten away with it, but it must have been even more tempting to flip the order with a Dylan biopic. Surely it would be more satisfying to start with Dylan making electric records, then he meets a girl working in civil rights, realizes how much injustice is going on, switches from electric to acoustic (his fans call out “Judas” but he sticks with it) and then the triumphant ending of the film is when he performs at the March on Washington.

Indeed, the most bizarre element of this film is when Dylan performs at the March on Washington but it’s just a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment, with terrible CGI, playing a little snippet of a song without even pausing a different song that’s playing on the soundtrack.

This is the story of a man breaking out of his box, and the March, though it remains the most heroic moment of Dylan’s life, was nevertheless part of that box, so that’s all it’s shown as here. It’s amazing that original screenwriter Jay Cocks and rewriter James Mangold made it work.

Best of 2024, #3: The Brutalist

First of all, let me just say that this movie had many wonderful aspects, but the best aspect of all was the intermission. Every long movie needs one, and this one was glorious. I stretched my legs, I used the bathroom, I thought about the first half, then I returned to the second half refreshed and ready.

Killers of the Flower Moon had gorgeous cinematography that I would have loved to see in the theater (and a great score I would have loved to hear on good speakers) but there was no way I was going to see it in the theater without an intermission, which it bizarrely lacked. Just add an intermission!

This movie isn’t at the top of my list because it’s a little too similar to The Fountainhead. The politics are much less loathsome, but there’s still an element of worshiping architects that I found problematic. It reminded me of two documentaries from 20 years ago about children struggling with the legacy of their architect fathers. My Architect was good, and was somewhat of a hit as documentaries go, but I thought the subject was too enamored of his asshole Brutalist dad. I preferred a movie that barely got distributed called My Father the Genius, where the director had a more jaundiced view of her dad’s hair-brained architectural visions.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Not Every Story Needs an Unpredictable Plot

One interesting thing about the movie is that it contains few surprises. By an hour in, you can see that Guy Pierce will be a bad boss and you can guess that the movie will end 2 ½ hours later with the project ending badly, and indeed that happens, very gradually. It is somewhat surprising just how bad things get at the end, and what happens as a result, but I still felt like I was well ahead of the movie. As my manager once said, it all runs downhill.

But this shows how to make such movies work. The movie is all about moments, not plot. With amazing cinematography, score, and especially performances, we just enjoy living in this world, feeling for these people. The greatest asset this movie has is just Adrian Brody’s face, which is enough to sustain this giant runtime. I don’t know why Brody never became a major actor, despite being the youngest Best Actor winner for The Pianist, but all I know is that you put this guy together with surviving the holocaust and you’ve got gold.

Rulebook Casefile: Leave Big Holes

After sprawling for 3 ½ hours, this movie just kind of ends. Mid-crisis, we suddenly jump 20 years ahead, and we find out a little about what happened to some of the characters, but not all. There are huge holes. But I didn’t mind. It gave me something to talk about with my wife as we left the theater. Audiences actually enjoy unexplained gaps, which just make a movie feel real and lived-in.

Best of 2024, #4: Inside Out 2

We saw this movie when my daughter was away at sleepaway camp, which was silly, because my daughter had just turned 13 a week before, as the heroine does in the movie. As soon as she was back from camp, my wife took her out to see it as a mother-daughter thing. I can only hope it helped my daughter deal with her own turbulent transitions, because that’s not the kind of thing I could talk to her about.  I’m not in her head and can’t fully understand what she’s going through, but this movie seemed uncanny in its understanding of teen girls and its ability to craft an entertaining story out of it.

(And of course, as with last year’s list, I think this movie proved that Maya Hawke, who plays Anxiety here, is an undervalued treasure.)

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Don’t Overextend Your Metaphor

Here, too, I thought the first Inside Out was overpraised and the sequel was underpraised. The first one was very well made, but I kept thinking “This metaphor is overextended and somewhat incoherent.” The metaphor is even more complicated here, as five new teenage emotions are introduced, but I thought this one tracked a lot better than the first. Whereas the first felt strained, this one felt effortlessly clever.

I also just found the previous movie’s “tweens need to accept their own sadness” moral to be way too much of a bummer. This movie, about learning to overcome anxiety, felt more uplifting. I understand what the first one was saying, and I guess it was worth saying, but I never enjoyed watching it in the many times I watched it. I look forward to rewatching this one more.

Another thing I didn’t like about the first movie was the glimpses of the father’s manly emotions and the mother’s feminine emotions, as if our fathers and mothers wouldn’t have gender-mixed emotions just like we do. There was less of that here.