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 …
Being in Time: Aging Onscreen Part Two – Adulthood and Old Age by Anders Bergstrom and Asher Gelzer-Govatos. Bergstrom and Geler-Govatos discuss Boyhood, Francois Truffaut, and Aging in a fascinating series.
You’re right that the presentation of time is one of Boyhood’s main attractions.. It’s both bracing and disorienting to move from age to age with so few indications of time’s passage. With the Harry Potter series there is at least the built in separation of different films. Linklater has no such safety net. In the case of Boyhood, having Ellar Coltrane on board the whole time proves immensely important, as his changing but still recognizable features act as signposts for the viewer.
Gestures: Nuri Bilge Ceylan by Michael Pattison. Michael Pattinson takes a closer look into the works of Nuri Bilge Ceylan, the director of this year’s Palme d’Or winner Winter Sleep.
Nuri Bilge Ceylan doesn’t need any introduction these days, but if he did, we could do worse than looking at the opening scenes of his films—because goodness, this is a director who knows how to set a scene and tell a story. If Winter Sleep’s Palme d’Or win at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2014 affirmed Ceylan as a quantifiable master taking the storytelling craft of narrative cinema to its present limits, the film’s current theatrical run gives us occasion to look back at three of the six features the Turkish auteur made immediately before it—all of which are viewable here.
America’s long obsession with “Downton Abbey”: How the show became a satire of Britishness by Sonia Saraiya. Sonia Saraiya investigates the American interpretation of Downton Abbey.
Downton Abbey is not even trying anymore. Why should it? It’s a worldwide hit, drawing in viewers from countries as diverse as Cambodia and Sweden with its frothy melodrama and its period costumes. It has a formula, and it sticks to it: The hapless folk belowstairs marvel over some new technology. Abovestairs, the aristocrats practice selfless noblesse oblige.
How ‘Goodbye to Language’ beat ‘Boyhood’ at National Society of Film Critics by Glenn Whipp. Glenn Whipp takes a look at the controversy behind Goodbye to Language being called Best Picture by NSFC.
Nobody was waiting for Godard. The National Society of Film Critics closed down the pundits’ phase of awards season this past weekend by giving its best picture prize to Jean-Luc Godard’s “Goodbye to Language,” catching many — including some of the group’s voters — by surprise. Most had expected Richard Linklater’s “Boyhood” to win, as it did with the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn. and the New York Film Critics Circle.
How Disney Disneyfied an AIDS Parable by Scott Beggs. Scott Beggs looks into how Disney modified Into The Woods for their best interest.
In the depths of the 1980s AIDS crisis, a show premiered on Broadway that featured Cinderella quizzically singing about whether to marry a prince, a witch cursing the man who stole her beans and two bakers trying to find a white cow. By the end of “Into the Woods,” a lot of people are dead, most are homeless, morality is shoved into a stagnant gray area, and grief gives way to muted optimism.
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