Every day, Opening Acts highlights the best pieces of writing on film, television, and literature published around the Internet. Please share if you like what you see.
For your reading enjoyment …
Strong Female Lead: A Feminist Golden Globes Show by Megan Garber. Garber takes a look at how the Globes did towards respecting women.
Last night’s Golden Globes show was the exception that proved the rule: It featured not a single, notable moment of politics-laid-bare, but rather an ongoing infusion of those moments.
Hollywood’s ‘Je Suis Charlie’ Hypocrisy: A Hotbed of Censorship Champions Free Speech by Marlow Stern. Stern suggests that Hollywood’s support of Je Suis Charlie is strange for them.
Je Suis Charlie. The solidarity slogan sprouted up in the wake of the horrific massacre at the Paris offices of newspaper Charlie Hebdo that left 12 people murdered at the hands of jihadists. French for “I Am Charlie,” it morphed into a mantra symbolizing those who stood in support of the slain satirists at Hebdo, and their right to freedom of speech and expression.
The Greatest Non-Kiss in the History of Cinema by Troy Patterson. Patterson looks at La Dolce Vita and the classic scenes featuring the late Anita Ekberg.
With La Dolce Vita (1960), director Federico Fellini submitted a singular classic. True, considered strictly as a film—as a three-hour film starring Marcello Mastroianni as a gossip reporter with perfect hair—it is tediously baggy, a movie “about the boredom of boring people” provisionally employed in “the various whoring professions,” to quote David Thomson.
Great Faces of American Darkness: Joaquin Phoenix and Benicio del Toro by Chuck Bowen. Bowen examines how wonderful it is having both Phoenix and del Toro share a scene together.
One of Inherent Vice’s most satisfying scenes is one of its simplest and most quietly absurd. The ever-wayward P.I. Doc Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix) and his attorney-in-spirit, if not quite in practicality, Sauncho Smilax, Esq. (Benicio del Toro), are sitting at a police desk opposite of its owner, Det. “Bigfoot” Bjornsen (Josh Brolin).
With Win, Amazon Shakes Up Yet Another Industry by Emily Steel and Jonathan Mahler. Amazon doesn’t just control the book industry anymore. They have reached into television. Steel and Mahler report.
Among the usual names invoked during the acceptance speeches at Sunday’s Golden Globes — Harvey Weinstein, Scott Rudin, Les Moonves — was an unusual one: the tech billionaire Jeff Bezos, founder and chief executive of Amazon.
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