I’ve been fascinated by Charlize Theron’s career since her bold performance in Diablo Cody’s under-appreciated YOUNG ADULT. Theron plays a sad, lonely woman who peaked in high school, whose toxic obsession with teen culture and her glory days has warped her sense of reality. Charlize’s performance was pathetic, delusional, mean and so, so funny.
Steve Coogan and Larry David have built careers out of playing misanthropic, self-obsessed comic heroes, but when a woman does the same thing, suddenly everyone’s concerned about her “likeability” – a word I’ve come to loathe.
In YOUNG ADULT, and in this ridiculous Funny or Die series, Charlize Theron’s intensity makes the comedy so much funnier. She clearly doesn’t give two shits about being likeable, and that makes me love her all the more.
“It’s such a low bar to limp over, but so many films fail …”
Is the Bechdel Test still relevant? How about a DuVernay Test? It’s pretty sad that we’re using a joke from a 1985 comic strip to determine a standard of feminism, but with so few tools available, it seems any measurable criteria by which to measure equality is helpful. Otherwise we’re stuck talking about how decision-makers FEEL, and we all know change feels scary.
Posted by:Kate Melville on Aug - 31 - 2017 - Filed under: Snitch Pictures -
ENDGAME was a short-lived, beloved-by-geeks tv drama about an agoraphobic Russian chessmaster who lived in a hotel and solved crimes. I wrote for this show through the rainy winter of 2010 in Vancouver, in a writers’ room so tiny we all had to stand up if anyone needed to leave the room. It was here I first met a cool cat named Graeme Manson, who was in the midst of pitching a seemingly-impossible clone show called ORPHAN BLACK.
ENDGAME’s crime stories all had a slightly screwball edge, so there was a lot of laughter in the writers’ room – the showrunner Avrum Jacobson introduced us to Old Jews Telling Jokes, and co-writer Jeremy Boxen (another OB alum) introduced me to webseries The Maria Bamford Show. (Writers find the best stuff online because of a very important creative process called procrastination.)
Most Proud Of: My Dr. Who chatroom joke.
Insider Secret: I still don’t know how to play chess.
Posted by:Kate Melville on Dec - 3 - 2012 - Filed under: Snitch Pictures -
The 2012 Whistler Film Festival (WFF) announced yesterday that Kate Melville’s feature film directorial debut, Picture Day, a brutally comic coming-of-age film won the $15,000 Borsos Award for Best Canadian Feature Film. The Borsos jury commented, “This year, we are delighted to recognize a filmmaker whose work is revelatory: universal in its specificity, soulful, heartfelt, raw, intelligent, profoundly human and so much fun. Kate, Philip Borsos is smiling.”
Picture Day garnered a second laurel when Tatiana Maslany won WFF’s new Best Performance in a Borsos Competition Film Award for her role in the film. The Jury commented that Maslany’s performance is “fearless, honest, unapologetic, heartbreaking, and hilarious… and, in our opinion, is a force of nature.”
The 2012 Whistler Film Festival (WFF) announced yesterday that Kate Melville’s feature film directorial debut, Picture Day, a brutally comic coming-of-age film won the $15,000 Borsos Award for Best Canadian Feature Film. The Borsos jury commented, “This year, we are delighted to recognize a filmmaker whose work is revelatory: universal in its specificity, soulful, heartfelt, raw, intelligent, profoundly human and so much fun. Kate, Philip Borsos is smiling.”
