The Take
Video Essays & Snapchat Scripts
How Angelina Became The Most Hated Hot Girl
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Why Megan Went From Sex Symbol to Weird Girl
This is the Take. It's where you come to understand more about your favorite movies, shows and culture. Our video essays make the story worlds you enter richer and deeper. So here's our Take.
Why Everyone Hates When Shows Do This
People Are So Mad About This, But Actually...
This is the Take. It's where you come to understand more about your favorite movies, shows and culture. Our video essays make the story worlds you enter richer and deeper. So here's our Take.
The Disposable Black Love Interest - A Tokenistic Cliché
The "Disposable Black Love Interest" functions as an obstacle along the way to the protagonist’s real (white) love. Fundamentally, this trope is a form of tokenism – an attempt to “check the boxes” of diversity, without actually casting people of color in the main roles audiences are encouraged to identify with and care about.
The "Quirky Black Character" - How Black Creators Challenge Stereotypes
The Quirky Black Character dares to be dorky, imperfect, and most of all, themselves. Their nerdy obsessions and screwball antics are deliberate rejections of the one-dimensional, often offensive Black caricatures that long dominated film and TV. But the history of the Quirky Black Character’s rise is one of having to constantly fend off criticisms of whether or not they’re perceived by audiences as “Black enough.”
Black Swan - A Cautionary Tale about Perfectionism
Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan is a cautionary tale about toxic perfectionism. In the final moments of the film, Natalie Portman’s Nina thinks she’s destroying her rival ballerina, Mila Kunis’ Lily, but in reality, she’s destroying herself. On stage, we see her at last fully become the black swan, now free from the controlling repression of the “white swan” within herself. So, what are we to make of this ending?
