TOM FRANCIS
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Hello! I'm Tom. I'm a game designer, writer, and programmer on Gunpoint, Heat Signature, and Tactical Breach Wizards. Here's some more info on all the games I've worked on, here are the videos I make on YouTube, and here are two short stories I wrote for the Machine of Death collections.
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By me. Uses Adaptive Images by Matt Wilcox.
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Easy A
I remember hearing something vaguely positive about Easy A, but to be honest I watched it because I have a weak spot for trashy coming of age movies set in high schools. I wasn’t planning on ever telling anyone. I didn’t realise it was going to be excellent.
It’s nothing to do with grades – the title’s a nod to The Scarlett Letter. It’s about a girl who gets a false reputation for sluttiness, and decides to wear it with a corset and a Hawthorne reference. Accordingly she’s funny, smart, and like an unprecedented proportion of the characters, likeable. I’ve never liked so many people in one film before. This is her dad:
It wants to be an eighties feelgood movie – explicitly at times – but is slightly too knowing and witty to feel like one. So instead it just references them, somehow incorporating Say Anything, Ferris Beuller’s Day Off and the Breakfast Club into its ending.
The biggest laugh, though, was not a clever reference to anything.
Quiznos guy: Try the honey mustard chicken at Quiznos!
Olive: Not now, Quiznos!
Quiznos guy: You’re a slut.