Every week, With a Little Help from Our Friends 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 …
“The Affair Advances Hollywood’s Heated War-Between-The-Sexes Conversation” By Jace Lacob
“While we can attempt to empathize, it’s impossible to truly ever know every crevice of someone’s psyche, whether it’s the stranger you pass in the street or your own spouse. Other people are innately unknowable. Gone Girl, whose gender politics have been hotly debated, takes this notion to an operatic and hyper-intense place as the audience is forced to contend with the unreliability of two narrators…”
“The Tenuous State of Writing in the Information Age” by Max Winter
“That phrase, “what is happening in the world,” could mean a number of things: news events, cultural trends, or, most poignantly, remnants from one’s own past. These pieces, then, often shear very close to subject matter which could be considered emotionally “hot” for their writers—content which could either inspire elation or deep rage. Because of this, the task of the writer is doubled: the root subject must be addressed, and then what lies behind the root subject, the context, must be addressed.”
“It’s time to stop freaking out about movies we haven’t seen” by Tasha Robinson
“Because the demand for details about upcoming movies—even wrong or fake details—is so vast, it pushes outlets to report on the faintest rumor or wildest speculation, blowing theories out of a single set photo, or an anonymous tip dating back to an outdated story meeting, or a celebrity’s flippant, “Sure, why not?” response to a highly leading question. When the movie in question comes out, and the rumors are all proven false, the invective moves on to the next target with no apparent sense of irony—or betrayal at having been fed a thin gruel of half-invented facts and thin-skinned moral superiority.”
“Marvel didn’t create the first expanded universe. That very term was earlier most associated with Star Wars, for instance, although now that stuff is no longer canon so it barely counts. Way before that were the Universal Monsters, which were initially independent of one another but then wound up mashed into a shared continuity with various team-ups in the 1940s (which is why it’s strange the new Universal Monsters mega-franchise is often talked about as if it’s copying the MCU).”
“How Clowns Became Terrifying” by Sophie Gilbert
“Clowns, it’s fair to say, are not currently having the best time of it, PR-wise. The fourth season of American Horror Story, which debuted Wednesday, features Twisty the Clown as the primary antagonist: a terrifying perversion of the profession with a mask of grinning, oversized teeth and distorted black lips. In the opening episode, Twisty bounds up to a young couple in broad daylight, knocks them both out with juggling clubs, stabs the young man over and over again, kidnaps the woman and locks her up with a young boy in a decrepit old school bus, and forces them both to watch him craft balloon animals (there being clearly no limits to his malevolence).”
“The 10 Greatest Vampire Movies” by Rob Humanick
“From Bram Stoker to Anne Rice, from Nosferatu to Buffy, it’s safe to say our cultural fascination with the blood-sucking undead isn’t going away anytime soon. Not unlike zombies, those other revivified metaphors that feast on the living, the template afforded by these folkloric beings allows for no shortage of insights into the human condition, with the topics of sexuality, addiction, and mortality chief among them. By far the most famous of these, Dracula, is often cited as the most popular fictional character in all of cinema, with nearly 200 separate film appearances according to IMDb.”
“Claire Dennis” by Darren Hughes and Michael Leary
“The vast majority of writing and conversation about the films of Claire Denis is inspired by post-colonial theory, strains of social memory theory, and the sexual or racial politics of the body in cinema. These bits and pieces of commentary exist in a kind of theoretical constellation around her work, which has become a standardized or even canonized reading of what is happening in her cinema. There is much value in thinking about Denis’s films from these perspectives. But I do not want to limit ourselves to these traditional perspectives here, because I think those conversations have missed a lot of formal and expressive detail in her work.”
“Bill Murray and Robert Downey Jr.: Great actors trapped in dumb fables” by Andrew O’Hehir
“On balance, I’d rather see Robert Downey Jr. playing a metal-clad superhero than striking a lot of actorly poses in a superficially meaningful “human” drama like “The Judge,” in which he plays a soulless big-city lawyer who reluctantly returns to his picturesque Indiana hometown, where – surprise, surprise – he encounters a measure of redemption. It’s less like a story than an oft-told fable, or at least a simulation of one, a set of familiar gestures meant to engage a set of audience reflexes and unconscious yearnings. Here’s the star looking pensive in a shot held for several seconds – that alone is supposed to pierce us to the heart – while whimpery pop music plays.”
“We Are Family: Jeffrey Tambor on His ‘Transparent’ Transformation” by Kory Grow
“Most recently, the 70-year-old actor, best known for playing the sheepish Hank “Hey Now” Kingsley on The Larry Sanders Show and two elder Bluths on Arrested Development, has taken on a role in a family drama where his character lets go of a secret. On the Amazon Instant dramedy Transparent (the entire binge-worthy first season is available now), Tambor plays Maura Pfefferman, née Mort Pfefferman, who has shocked the family by coming out as transgender.”
“At the recent Toronto International Film Festival, where Miss Julie — the latest adaptation of August Strindberg’s 1888 upstairs-downstairs dramatic play — had its world premiere, I had the rare opportunity to sit down with the 75-year-old for an hour-long interview about her remarkable life, career and latest project. It did not disappoint.”
