Loglines for Famous Movies – 2025 Edition – Human vs. AI — Part I
Here’s another round of the loglines for famous movies series. You can find the other examples here and here.
What I like to do in these cases is to go through some films so you get a good example of what makes a good logline–to wit, a Hook, an obvious Conflict, and the potential for Change–and see how these are illustrated in each of the examples.
If you want to write your own loglines for your own work, the best way to practice is to take films that you know and write loglines for those. Your job is to distill the essence of a film into something that gives us an idea of the main appeal of the film (Hook), what the primary struggle of the film (Conflict) is, and–crucially–makes the reader interested in how this will ultimately play out.
First, we’ll go run this through Chatty to see what the plagiarism machine has to say about it. Chatty, as you might remember, has a bias toward summarizing the film—and that’s actually not what we’re after.
Nevertheless, Chatty might have some occasionally useful things to say, so I’ll note this and give credit where credit is due. (And by that I mean to whoever wrote the material that Chatty is plagiarizing.)
In this edition, rather than digging through the archives for a bunch of famous films that a lot of people probably ought to see (but often haven’t), I’m going to go through five films from 2025 that are worth our attention, at least in terms of a logline: Pillion, Materialists, No Other Choice, Rental Family, and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. Some of them I’ve even liked.
Let’s get started.
1) Pillion (2025)
Lets start with one of my favorite films of the past year. I assure you, you don’t have to be into gay BDSM to enjoy this film—although I’m sure that helps. Hell, maybe if you are it’s full of errors.
Regardless, Pillion still, to my knowledge, has a 100% on the Tomatometer, so it’s likely doing something right. Even The Guardian sort of liked it, and that’s saying something given how much that place loves to Middle Class all over every interesting film that comes out.
Let’s see what Chatty has to say:
A timid office worker becomes the submissive “pillion” to a dominant biker, discovering liberation, danger, and unexpected intimacy within London’s underground leather scene.
OK—this isn’t going to work. I’ll give Chatty credit for writing a somewhat engaging logline, but as is its wont, Chatty is making some shit up that simply doesn’t exist.
First things first: Colin is not an office worker; he’s a parking warden; that’s the local council officer who writes parking tickets, for those outside the UK.
Second, the word “pillion” is all cute, but is actually inessential to the meaning of the logline. For those who aren’t familiar with motorcycle terminology, the pillion seat is the rear seat of the motorcycle—that is, the passenger, not the person who’s at the controls. There’s a reason the film is called this and it’s full of subtext. The problem is that you simply don’t have the time to explain it in a short logline.
In fact, the word is actually never explained within the film itself. So don’t feel it’s necessary to improve the reader’s vocabulary here. You’re not a riding manual.
Then: liberation, maybe. Danger, well—not really. Unexpected intimacy—I’m not sure how it’s unexpected if you’re in a relationship with someone. Just going to flag that.
Then: “London’s underground leather scene.” There is a small coven of leather-clad bikers in this film, but the London leather scene is certainly vastly larger than the small group represented in this film. The film is really about Colin and Ray’s relationship. It’s important to stick to the scope here.
Here’s my take.
Logline Example 1: Pillion (2025)
A timid young man finds a new meaning in life as the submissive to a leather-clad biker.
/17 words
This is simpler, shorter, and more to the point. It sticks to the two people in the relationship, and gives us enough of a Hook—“wait, as what!?”—to want to see how a film like this plays out.
2) Materialists (2025)
This is a likeable film in many ways. It’s not perfect, but that’s OK.
I appreciate the messiness of the characters, although the messiness seems to be reflected a bit in the plot as well. Still, I’m glad that we’re past the point of expecting films to adhere to arbitrary and pointless structures.
Perhaps one of the things that saves this film from skewing into “cloying” territory, paritcularly given its resolution, is the excellent performances from the three leads. I often don’t really like Chris Evans’ characters, even if he’s a capable actor. In this case, I really believed him, and that counts for something. The other two I always expect to be good. Just saying.
Let’s see what Chatty makes of this film:
A high-powered New York matchmaker who treats love like a calculated transaction finds her carefully ordered worldview unraveling when she’s torn between a wealthy suitor and her imperfect ex.
First off, this is too long. I asked for 25 words and got 29. Shows how much Chatty listens.
I’ll admit it’s not far off the mark. This is one of the better ones Chatty has spit out recently. We need to shorten and sharpen a bit, but I think Chatty did a decent job of nailing the main point of the film.
What we’re seeing in the movie is a love triangle that forms between a woman who thinks that love can be reduced to numbers. Of course that is a relatively new lifestyle—in the past 5 or so years—because, although a romantic at heart, she finally grew sick of dealing with the poverty and fecklessness of her actor ex.
As someone who’s been broke, feckless, and got fairly sick of it, I can sympathize with her.
So the issue here will be to boil that idea down. Chatty isn’t wrong to include the numbers thing: she’s a matchmaker, and her job is all about figuring out what looks good on paper.
Logline Example 2: Materialists (2025)
A cynical matchmaker, for whom romance is reduced to a number score, meets the perfect man–on paper–just as she reconnects with her wildly imperfect ex.
/25 words
The key thing here is to pack the essential information into as few words as possible. We need to get the ideas across more clearly. As much as I hate using adjectives in most cases, sometimes that’s the only way to get the point across.
In this case, the “cynical” is important; it works more effectively than “high-powered” because it gives us a sense of her problem and potential for change. We could theoretically use a word like “jaded” here as well, but that would be almost too negative. She actually likes her job, but there’s no getting around the fact that she’s jaded.
“The perfect man” is because we don’t understand from Chatty that “a wealthy suitor” is necessarily someone tempting. Perhaps so for you, but that might not be true for other ladies (and gentlemen) out there. So “the perfect man” allows this measure of subjectivity.
For punch, I burned a word on “wildly” here, because a 37-year-old man in the financial state he’s in is a really shitty bet on paper. Even if he’s a good dude and the love of her life, one of the main points of the film is that there is little objective reason that she should go with him.
That is, “imperfect” might mean that his second toe is longer than his big toe, but “wildly imperfect” gives us a better sense that she’s making a serious trade-off here.
The “carefully-ordered worldview” is just fluff. Unnecessary. It’s actually better to propose that she is faced with a choice between these two men. The fact that they are cued up as opposites implies a struggle for her. In this sense, saying just enough is important. Saying too much is how you get fluff.
3) No Other Choice (2025)
Here’s what Chatty has to say. Funny enough, Chatty spit out two loglines and asked me to pick.
Logline 1: A disgraced executive, laid off after decades of loyalty, spirals into desperation and violence as he convinces himself that eliminating his competition is his only path back to dignity and work.
Logline 2: A desperate factory worker, laid off after decades of loyal service, spirals into morally unthinkable decisions as he fights to reclaim dignity in a society that has quietly discarded him.
How about neither? Both get a couple of things right, but both need some major work. The first step is to think about what the film actually discusses in practical terms. Man-su is 50 and laid off from his job at a paper company–an older man in middle management in a dying industry–and struggles to find work for a full year. He ultimately becomes convinced that in order to secure one of the few available jobs, he has no other choice (get it?) but to kill his competition.
Several of these things are important and not dealt with. Not least the fact that Man-su is middle-aged and in a managerial role. Let’s see if we can do better.
Logline Example 3: No Other Choice (2025)
When a rare position opens in his industry, an unemployed middle-aged man decides to secure the job by murdering fellow candidates for the role.
/24 words
In this case, we again must return to getting the essence here. Words such as “disgraced” and “desperate” might seem to add color, but they beg more questions than they answer. A lot can be said with little here.
Notice how we get across that positions in the industry are rare. He is unemployed as if that’s a condition (now he does technically have the warehouse job, so I’m fibbing a little bit–but bear with me), so we can see that it has been some time. It’s not like the man has been out of work for three weeks.
Chatty pulls punches both times here. The interesting thing about the film is that Man-su fucking murders people. “Eliminates competition” doesn’t really get that across. I mean it’s a type of eliminating competition, but a fairly extreme case. I’d think. Similar with “morally unthinkable decisions.” Does that mean he eats Oreos whole? Voted for Brexit? You get the point. These woolly statements have little place when we’re trying to get the point across.
I’d argue that we have enough idea that the man is desperate simply from the chronic lack of work. The guy needs to be in a bad position–and somewhat unhinged–for murder to be on the table. You can say more with less in a case like this. Do so.
4) Rental Family (2025)
Here’s another film that The Guardian decided to abuse unnecessarily. I’m undecided. It was a bit twee, of course, bordering on cloying, but there were genuine moments of interest in it. The Guardian criticism, in typical tone-deaf Middle Class fashion, was all to the effect that the film didn’t deal with the darker aspects of the “rental family” phenomenon in Japan–plus, Werner Herzog got there first with Family Romance, LLC.
The second part is indisputable, while I think the first is. This film didn’t dwell on the unpleasant aspects of the phenomenon as much as it could have, but this did become key to every major plotline in the film. So–maybe I’m giving way too much benefit of the doubt here, but perhaps The Guardian watched the same film as Chatty (see below).
(After all, we can’t all be clutching our pearls at the fact that other cultures have practices that we might consider odd; it’s nothing to get your Lululemons in a twist over. Go have a nice dinner on Upper Street and leave the adults to our business.)
I would say Rental Family was a soft positive for me. Not the best film I’ve ever seen, but a couple of memorable performances from the supporting cast (Akira Emoto and Mari Yamamoto) as well as a fine turn from Brendan Fraser himself, who also did a remarkable job with the Japanese–even if he was faking most of it, as he claims.
Let’s see what Chatty has to say:
A lonely widower hires a company that provides stand-in relatives, but as the fabricated family grows convincing, he risks losing himself inside the beautiful lie.
WTF this isn’t even the right film. LOL “ChatGPT can make mistakes. Check important info.”
What crack is Chatty smoking? I think we’re going to have to throw this one out entirely. Also, phrasing: “the beautiful lie” makes me want to vomit a bit in the back of my mouth.
So… let’s back up a second. First, the film is about a struggling American actor in Tokyo, who takes a job with a “rental family” company that hires actors to pose as loved ones for social purposes. This is something that actually happens in Japan, although I’m unclear as to how common it actually is.
Of course there are all sorts of ethical concerns that this sort of behavior might raise–hence The Guardian’s charming little bourgeois hissy fit–but the simple fact of the matter is that such places exist. Our man, a struggling American actor, gets hired to play the token “white guy” and soon enough starts to develop ethical qualms about his role. Of course he ultimately develops sincere feelings for more than one of his clients–an old man and a little girl–and violates company policy by doing what he feels is right by the client, if not by his job.
So how can we get this into 25 words? It’s going to be tricky to address the concept of the rental family company as well as get the plot across. Here goes:
Logline Example 4: Rental Family (2025)
A Tokyo-based American actor takes a job as a social stand-in, smoothing awkward real-life situations; his attachment to clients soon threatens to violate company policy.
/25 words
Not going to lie; this one was tricky.
We need to get across some sense of the rental family phenomenon because otherwise the idea makes no sense. Note that if someone doesn’t know about the phenomenon we can’t just say “rental family.” We need to find something that gets the oddness of the practice across: “social stand-in” describes fairly literally (not figuratively) what the job is. The “smoothing awkward real-life situations” is there to clarify if necessary. This is all Hook.
So… from here what we need to do is get across where the Conflict lies. It makes sense that anyone with more than a sociopath’s ethical sense would wonder it’s possible to navigate such waters without hurting people. The answer is it probably isn’t, or at least that there need to be some boundaries.
Change is definitely implied: he’s going to have to find a way to square the ethically dubious job with his own good nature. (To be fair, Philip’s geniality seems like an underwritten character; this is salvaged primarily by Brendan Fraser’s excellent performance.)
That’s where the conflict between him and the company comes in. If it was merely conflict with himself or with the clients, then he could simply leave the job. The objective problem of course is that he needs to do the job properly in order to keep the job, so he’ll definitely end up in hot water with his boss. I could have used “standards” or something instead of “policy,” but I figured the policy gives it a little bit of an edge even if it’s fairly informal policy. After all, the point of the film is about all the employees developing a better sense of their own boundaries–and, interestingly, finding a new equilibrium in the old job rather than condemning the practice the way, say, our friends at The Guardian might.
5) If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (2025)
This isn’t a bad movie, exactly, but I found it unpleasant. Out of the list, it’s the one I’d be least likely to agree to watch again. There are so many things to recommend it on paper, but I never really felt that the film comes together well. There’s a lot of stuff that tries real hard to be metaphor, but I’m skeptical as to how much of it lands. There’s a lot of, erm, interesting camera work and I am not certain whether that’s to the film’s credit.
It’s basically the sort of movie that film school people want to love because it seems like they should, not because it has any substantial redeeming value. (See Black Bear (2020) with Aubrey Plaza or the majority of de Palma). If I remember this film in five years, it’ll be a miracle.
On the other hand, Rose Byrne is great as always and Conan O’Brien, in a rare straight acting role, provides a bright spot in a difficult-to-enjoy film.
So, back to Chatty. So first Chatty gives me this–”When a fiercely independent woman loses the use of her legs after a sudden accident, her rage, dark humor, and fractured relationships force her to redefine autonomy and love.” Again, obviously the wrong film.
(Seriously, I hope you aren’t using this thing to generate loglines for your own promotional decks. At least make sure it’s talking about your movie before sending docs out.)
So I pushed back about which film we were talking about. Chatty didn’t even bother to act contrite (shameless little prick), but it did give me this:
A worn-down mother juggling her chronically ill daughter, crumbling home, absent husband and own unraveling sanity must survive a surreal spiral of caregiving, anxiety and dark humour.
OK, well, something here. There’s a little bit of summary but the ending falls apart. I sort of like the demented nature of “a surreal spiral of… dark humour,” but I’m pretty sure that’s just hallucination randomly providing something interesting.
Let’s give it another shot:
Logline Example 5: If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (2025)
Forced into a seedy motel when her ceiling collapses, a psychotherapist tends to her invalid daughter, unstable clients, and her own tenuous grip on reality.
/25 words
I don’t like this because the part about the ceiling collapse is basically just happenstance. We don’t need to describe the first five minutes of the film. We might as well otherwise describe the daughter’s feeding tube, the doctor worried that she’s an unfit mother, the mysterious hole in the ceiling, the pointless dark web stuff, etc.
Here’s my second attempt. Notice how I’m going for the abstract here more than the concrete. In this case, I’m thinking like a sales document: I’m trying to get the listener to say “tell me more.”
A harried psychotherapist struggles to navigate the care of her invalid daughter–and her own grip on reality–as personal and professional crises pile up around her.
/25 words
In this case, it’s worth keeping that she’s a psychotherapist worried about her own sanity. The personal and professional struggles are myriad, so it’s actually not helpful to list them the way Chatty did. Then it becomes almost as much about what we don’t have as what we do have.
Conclusion
One thing that’s worth noting here is how difficult a couple of the loglines were. Particularly in the case of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, the messiness of the story translates into messiness in the logline. This of course says something about the story itself, and it’s no surprise that the film itself is rather messy.
One can always make the (sometimes true, sometimes not) argument that messy structure fits messy characters, but personally I remain skeptical. It’s just as easily used to excuse poor writing.
So when you’re working on your own writing, make sure to consider the logline long before you start drafting. If you have a solid, compelling logline–look at how short the Pillion one is, but it gets the basic idea across well–then that means the inherent interest of the film is likely to grab readers. Loglines for famous movies tend to work easily because the overarching appeal of the story gets the reader’s attention quickly and keeps it.
Remember, you’re trying to boil this down to the essence of what’s interesting, but even in cases like No Other Choice or Rental Family that require a certain amount of setup, it’s possible to get them at or near 25 words with some massaging.
Thanks for reading the Loglines for Famous Movies series and I’m just writing this for SEO!
