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 …
1. Foxcatcher Subject Mark Schultz Recants Criticisms: ‘I Was Temporarily Insane’ by Marlow Stern. Stern reports on Foxcatcher’s subject having a change of heart, providing context for the uninitiated.
After two days of letting the positive news sink in, the film’s subject, Olympic champion wrestler Mark Schultz, has decided to recant his scathing criticisms of the movie and sing its praises on Twitter, claiming he was suffering from a bout of temporary insanity.
2. Academy President Responds To Oscars ‘too white’ Firestorm, by AP. Academy President Cheryl Boone Isaacs gives her view of events following this year’s Oscar nominations uproar.
Boone Isaacs declined to address whether she and the academy were embarrassed by the slate of white Oscar nominees, instead insisting that she’s proud of the nominees, all of whom deserved recognition.
3. Why Hitchcock’s Film on the Holocaust Was Never Shown by Abigail Jones. Jones explains the history behind filming of German Concentration Camps Factual Survey and how it will be seen 70 years later on HBO.
Dead bodies are strewn across plots of land, some in heaps and others lined up like a carpet of human carcasses. When the camera zooms in, we see limbs, as thin as bones, tangled together like pretzels. Skulls cracked open by puncture wounds. Gaunt, hollow eyes and gaping mouths frozen in silent screams.
4. Drumatic: A History Of Drummers In Film by Anne Billson. Billson looks at cinema’s drummers following the Oscar nominations given to Whiplash.
You could substitute another instrument, but it wouldn’t be the same, because drums are primal, physical, brutal in a way that other instruments are not. They signal war, sex and violence, life and death – sometimes all at once.
5. If Hermione Were The Main Character In Harry Potter (Hermione Granger and the Goddamn Patriarchy) by Daniel Dalton. Dalton provides his comical alternate version of the Harry Potter universe focusing on gender bias and girls kicking butt.
It wasn’t just the boy wizards… grown-up wizards were equally terrible. Professor Snape completely ignored her in favour of the boys in the class. Hermione did not like being ignored, nor did she like institutional gender bias. So she set that bitch on fire.
