Every week, With a Little Help from Our Friends highlights the best pieces of writing on film, television, and literature published around the Internet. Check out the links, and feel free to share more good stories in the comment section.
For your reading enjoyment …
“Investing in Fantasy to Save a Fraying Reality” by Elisaetta Povoledo
“In its nearly 80-year history, the Cinecittà film studio lured the world’s greatest directors and biggest movie stars to this Italian capital, earning it the title of Hollywood on the Tiber. Now the studio, its fortunes in decline and its edges fraying, is hoping to attract some less famous visitors when Cinecittà World, a new theme park dedicated to its golden era, opens on Thursday.”
“Radiohead’s motion picture soundtracks” by David Ehrlich
“Radiohead is the greatest rock band of the last 30 years; even people who disagree with the sentiment can appreciate that it has more than a whiff of objectivity to it. Like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones before it, Radiohead has consistently relied upon unique imagery to deepen its mystique and complicate the meaning of its music.”
“GLAAD Report: Hollywood Doing More Harm Than Good With LGBT Representations (Especially Paramount and Warner Brothers)” from /bent blog
“The report maps the quantity, quality and diversity of images of LGBT people in films released by the seven largest motion picture studios during the 2013 calendar year, and found that of the 102 releases from the major studios in 2013, 17 of them included characters identified as lesbian, gay, or bisexual. Worse, the majority of these characters were minor roles or cameos, and GLAAD felt that many of them were outright defamatory representations in films such as ‘Pain & Gain’ and ‘Riddick.’”
“The Sadness of Watching a Woody Allen Movie” by Stephen Marche
“Not that Woody Allen has stopped making intellectual references. It wouldn’t properly be a Woody Allen film without a reference to the Jazz Age or Freud. But the allusions, like everything Allen does now, feel hollow, routine, like the indulgence of a memory from his youth when he still had real feelings and innocent emotions.”
“7 Reasons Weird Al Won the Internet and Topped the Charts” by Jesse David Fox
“Music is another bit of #content now. Just like Weird Al needed MTV to become a star in the ’80s, the popularity of web videos was essential. He had people ready to share each video and, equally as important, sites ready to post them.”
“Learning in the Flesh: Why Disney Sends its Animators to Life Drawing Classes” by Susan Karlin
“In the ensuing decades–while other animation and visual effects studios in the U.S. and Europe intermittently followed suit, pending budgets–Disney’s classes have not only continued unabated, but expanded beyond features to its TV animation, theme park, consumer products, and straight-to-DVD divisions.”
“Passing of a Video Store and a Downtown Aesthetic” by Tom Roston
“’Kim’s was this portal into New York City I never came back from,’ Eddie Huang, the restaurateur, author and television personality, wrote in a blog post. ‘Everything in my life, I can somehow attribute to finding Kim’s.’”
“Jersualem Film Festival Head Explains Why Palestinians Won’t Show Films at the Festival” by Laya Maheshwari
“By any metric, the CEO of the Jerusalem Cinematheque has had an eventful first year at her new job.”
“Simply Do It: Talking With Woody Allen About Directorial Style” by Simon Abrams
“I feel the same way: I want you to sit back, relax, and enjoy the warm color, like take a bath in warm color. It’s like how I play the clarinet with a big, fat warm tone as opposed to a cool sound that’s more liquid, or fluid. I prefer a thicker, richer, warmer sound. The same with color; I feel it has a subliminal effect on the viewer in a positive way.”
“The Decline of Harper Lee” by Boris Kachka
“It wasn’t just infirmity that kept Nelle from basking in those 2010 celebrations; it was disillusion. Allergic to both attention and commerce, she’d always found the Mockingbird industrial complex tacky and intrusive, but had managed to carve out a separate existence in its shadow.”
