Gwen Roger's Blog

         This past year, I have become OBSESSED with business scandals. Am I interested in business - absolutely not. I graduated from art school. I am interested in human psychology and good stories, and a juicy business scandal has all that and more.  It started here and there with a few podcasts and sitting in on shows my mom was watching. But it really blossomed when The Journal started posting their daily podcast about the SBF trials. I was (and still am) at a job where I'm expected to wake up early and drive up to 100 miles to whatever location we're at for the day. Naturally, audiobooks and podcasts have become my friends. My mom had been going on about SBF and the cryptocurrency trials for a while. I ignored it. My experience with cyrpto had been bad. I didn't understand it, and whenever someone tried to explain it to me online, it usually somehow involved unsolicited dick pics and a quick report and block from me.  Out of boredom, I decided to...

  Have you ever noticed that Early 2000s movies, especially kids movies, loved to end with dance sequences that were completely irrelevant to the plot? I took 11 movies and ranked them according to how good (or bad) the dance sequence was. 

The old adage "A Hundred Channels and Nothing to watch." is still very much true in the age of streaming. How many of us have sat on our couches, in a trance, scrolling through the brightly colored tiles of movies and not actually selecting anything. I can spend an entire hour doing this, until I look at the clock and realize I blew my time to watch a movie. Luckily for you, I'm a total film nerd, and I've watched plenty of unusual movies. Four years of film school certainly exposed me to a lot - most of it depressing. Here I've curated a ragtag list of movies that I feel didn't quite get their fair chance in the world. Some are truly indie, others are mainstream studio films that just got passed over. I hope you watch one of them and enjoy. The 100 Year-Old Man Who Climbed out the Window and Disappeared Imagine if Forrest Gump was Swedish. That is The 100 Year-Old Man who Climbed out the Window and Disappeared . Really the title says it all. The film follows ...

  “What’s your favorite movie?”  This is a question that fills me with dread. I know it’s an innocent enough question. But for film students, it’s practically a psychiatric evaluation. Your favorite movie defines who you are, both as a person and artist. And, let’s face it, most of the movies I like aren’t exactly deep films. The types of movies I’m drawn to tend to be family movies. Don’t get me wrong here, I can appreciate new wave films and counter cultural films just as much as these commercial films. But as an aspiring comedy writer/director, I focus on family movies because these are the kinds of movies I want to make one day. So, what is my favorite movie? I can’t exactly say, because honestly I have a few that I really like. So for this essay, I’ll focus on one that doesn’t get a lot of critical attention. Night at the Museum. The author, being a nerd Night at the Museum was released in 2006, with an all-star comedy cast (including a monkey, who did walk the red carpet...

(Originally published May, 2021)  I tend to get excited about movie musicals — more often than I care to admit — often geeking out to unfortunate listeners, who tend to have the same criticism: “Yeah, musicals just aren’t realistic enough for me.” To that end I could argue that there is no such thing as a realistic film. Even the most dogma style film takes liberties with reality. But in a sense, you’re right! Movie musicals aren’t realistic. They inhabit their own unique versions of reality, making it possible for filmmakers to explore themes like love and loss, and offer powerful commentary. Yes, you heard me right: powerful. Why? Because they’re not like any other genre out there. To me, musicals offer a way of looking at life that other films can’t. The primary goal of any film is to give us insight into the main characters’ emotions and how they change throughout the course of the story. Movie musicals do this through song. Each song in a musical provides the audience a unique...