The ramblings of a wannabe cineaste. Join me as I dissect the art of storytelling in films, comics, TV shows, and video games.
O'GRADY FILM

Villains That Love Being Bad: Clarence Boddicker, Robocop
When you get right down to it, the sadistic sociopath (indirectly) responsible for the creation of the metal-headed hero in Paul...
Villains That Love Being Bad: Edward Pierce, The First Great Train Robbery
The dashingly handsome protagonist of Michael Crichton’s 1979 heist movie (played by the always-charismatic Sean Connery) isn’t...
Villains That Love Being Bad: Alex, A Clockwork Orange
Robbery. Rape. Murder. To Alex DeLarge, it all adds up to a day well spent. This common thug with delusions of “culture” loves torturing...
Villains That Love Being Bad: Harry Lime, The Third Man
Played by Orson Welles at his charismatic best, cinema’s most memorable black marketeer manages to charm nearly everyone he...
The Villain Protagonist
When I first learned that a significant number of Shakespeare scholars consider Iago–slimy, scheming, irredeemably evil Iago–the...
Villains That Love Being Bad: Wint and Kidd, Diamonds Are Forever
Of all the henchmen and hired killers buried by suave super-spy James Bond, few are more gleefully sadistic and psychotic than Mister...
Villains That Love Being Bad: Putnam, The Wizard
In terms of storytelling, what really defines a character as a villain? His actions? Well, consider Putnam, who spends the entirety of...
Villains That Love Being Bad: Stuntman Mike, Death Proof
In the process of developing a personality for the charismatic killer in Quentin Tarantino’s throwback to ‘70s low-budget cinema, Kurt...
3 More Villains That Love Being Bad
4. Suganoichi, Blind Menace: Unlike Zatoichi, Shintaro Katsu’s more famous blind masseur, Suganoichi is rotten to the core. As a boy, he...
Top 3 Villains That Love Being Bad
I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder if Orion. I’ve watched c-beams glitter in the dark...
The Poetry of Violence: Anatomy of an Action Scene
A good action scene does not exist for its own sake; rather, it is the culmination of the screenwriter’s meticulously-laid groundwork....
The Poetry of Violence: Breaking Rick Grimes
By the end of The Walking Dead’s seventh season premiere, Rick Grimes is a broken man. And it’s his own damn fault. And as I watched the...
The Poetry of Violence: Fruitvale Station
From the opening frame to the end credits, a cloud of impending doom hovers over Fruitvale Station—not only because the visual language...
The Poetry of Violence: Red Dawn (2012)
The remake of Red Dawn truly is a war movie for the Call of Duty generation, too preoccupied with the spectacle of bloodshed to...
The Poetry of Violence: Starship Troopers
Man, woman; white, black, Filipino; farmer, college boy–under the leadership of Earth’s “Federation,” all are finally equal....
The Poetry of Violence: Vendetta of a Samurai
It ends with a tight close-up on the sweat-drenched face of fencing instructor Araki Mataemon (Toshiro Mifune, a far more versatile...
The Poetry of Violence: Elephant
On the morning of April 20, 1999, teenagers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold armed themselves with semi-automatic handguns and improvised...
The Poetry of Violence: Dissecting the Western
In the Coen Brothers’ adaptation of True Grit, corpses litter the (rapidly declining) Old West. They swing from nooses, decay in coffins,...
The Poetry of Violence
Ever since Edwin S. Porter had his great train robber fire directly at the camera, the landscape of cinema has been drenched in blood....



















