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Sex and violence are key components of popular entertainment. Both scratch a deep itch within the human psyche. However, if all a given audience wants to watch is sex, they can indulge in pornography; if they only want to watch violence, they can turn on a fight or play a video game. Within the context of a scripted feature film, scenes of sex and violence, by the nature of the medium, work best when incorporated in the story. If we have a fight scene, the fight can be exciting and awesome, but it should equally and concurrently work as an...

Every once in a while we’ll see a film in which the protagonist dies at the end. It’s a tricky maneuver to pull off, but by looking at movies that make this bold move, we can see some patterns in what works, and in which types of stories this kind of thing tends to occur. We most often see dead protagonists in period action-adventure, typically in the key of “epic.” In this very specific genre we find several examples: BRAVEHEART, SPARTACUS, GLADIATOR, 300. There is a certain high, bloody drama to seeing the protagonists of films of this nature die...

In this series of articles, we’re going to do a deep-dive on one knockout scene from a great movie. Today’s movie is GLADIATOR. The scene is when Russell Crowe’s Maximus reveals himself to Joaquin Phoenix’s Commodus (here’s a link to the scene as a refresher: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKn-Agk-yAI). The scene starts with Maximus stashing an arrowhead in his hand. Commodus confronts Maximus in the Colosseum. Commodus praises Maximus and asks him his name. Maximus says his name is Gladiator and turns his back on Commodus. Commodus, offended, addresses Maximus as “slave” and demands he take off his helmet and tell him his...