Cartoon Gravity 41

Every year, Hollywood execs select their favourite unproduced scripts of the year to form "The Blacklist". Previous blacklist scripts have included Argo, American Hustle, Spotlight, Hell or High Water, Slumdog Millionaire etc etc. This is heady company, so I was very surprised to be told that Bad Memories had made the 2025 Blacklist.

I've been told that being on the Blacklist is "life changing". I don't really need my life to be changed, but I'm interested to see what happens. The movie itself is set to shoot next summer.

On a walk yesterday, I was pondering the notion of existentialist characters. We are dropped into the world, life happens to us, and we respond to events. "She's the kind of person who..." is not a useful approach from an existentialist point of view; no one has traits baked in. Wherever we meet our character, a bunch of stuff has happened to them in the past and they reacted however they reacted and now, as the story starts, more stuff is going to happen and their response to it may or may not be coloured by previous experience. Thinking about characters this way seems to be quite a free and open approach. In terms of backstory it means you're compiling a resumé of events, rather than a limiting list of personality ticks. it means that the in-the-moment reaction of a character can hold more possibilities, and it provides a much greater opportunity for the audience to project themselves onto a character. I might write more about this when it's better-formed.

I re-watched James Gunn's Superman movie yesterday. I really like the script and performances, but it's hard to get immersed in the world of the movie because, in common with a lot of modern studio movies, it looks like it was shot on a phone. This reminded me of "Why Movies Just Don't Feel 'Real' Anymore", which is really worth watching to understand how the brain processes images as "perceptually real" and how movies like Superman keep you perpetually on the outside, looking in.

Related to this is the urge that a lot of photographers have (I've been there) to open up the lens aperture as wide as possible to create a shallow depth of field. We LOVE that bokeh effect, but it doesn't actually make for great photographs, it just makes average ones look a bit better. Most of the all-time great photographs were shot with narrower apertures and had much greater depth of field. I've found recently that the old adage of "f8 and be there" has a lot to recommend it.

This piece by Lev Grossman has got me back into the world of His Dark Materials. I'm currently re-reading the first Book of Dust, and then I will be going back over the original trilogy and then doing the second and third Dust books for the first time. Being back in this universe is every bit as good as it was the first time around.

How to Cope with 2026 is having its last day out in the wild before it heads behind the paywall. 2025 has been a weird old year, certainly not my favourite. And there's no reason to expect that 2026 will be anything other than different. But we're always moving forward, with no option other than to tackle the obstacles as they arrive.

Fuck it. Send.