Tag Archives: tropes

The genre of a film determines a lot, from typical plot points and character arcs to visual style. It’s no surprise then that trailers follow a similar pattern. It might sound obvious that the trailers for comedies and thrillers follow ...

Watching – and thoroughly enjoying –  The Grinder has prompted me to think about sitcoms and their use of ‘gimmicks’ as both a set-up for an entire series as well as for singular jokes. The Grinder is built around the gimmick of lampooning tropes ...

Fans of SFF works have a bad reputation for being nit-picky, especially when it comes to the details of world-building. Strong world-building, however, is a big part of why readers are drawn to science fiction and fantasy. If we were ...

Were you missing watching a regular TV series that was kitsch, embraced clichés, and was hopelessly over the top? Ryan Murphy – as always – has the answer. Following his success with Glee and American Horror Story, Murphy (along with ...

Science fiction in general is an awesome genre to mash-up with pretty much any other genre. Actually, I defy you to come up with a scifi genre mash-up that doesn’t work (I realise this is a dangerous game to play. After challenging ...

You would be excused for having blinked and missed The Guest during its cinema release. The closest place I could have seen the film was either in London or Milton Keynes during its very brief UK cinema run. It had fairly ...

An inexperienced young filmmaker had a big idea – an idea that had come to him in a nightmare during a bout of food poisoning. That idea – of a killing machine coming from the future to assassinate him – ...