John Wick
Last night I sat down and re-watched John Wick, ’cause I have this idea for a story in my head and I wanted to wrap my head around the minutia of the genre I like to call killing your way to the truth of things of which Wick is the most recent high-profile example. There are others on my list. I mainline a lot of media, in the build-up stage of writing. I’ve also been immersed in the creation of a short story course for work, where I try to pull apart the microstructure of scenes and lay out things like narrative beats and action/reaction rhythms, giving people a toolkit for pulling apart the minutia of narrative of figuring out how it does what it does. And it’s interesting, having these two things in my head, ’cause John Wick plays with narrative contrast on a scale that very few films manage. Nearly every major scene is contrasted against something else through the use of
