Clytie’s Recommended Entertainment Articles (September 28-October 4, 2018)

Here are the articles I wish to share with you for the past week. They feature interviews and information on film, television, books, music and even poison.

Enjoy!

On the 28th, Angela Morrison at Film School Rejects discussed the influence of Lois Weber, particularly her film Shoes for Film School Rejects:

“Considering Shoes more than a century after it was released offers insight into Weber’s incredible career and offers a perfect example of the kind of writer and director she was. Shoes demonstrates her commitments to telling specifically feminine stories, to drawing attention to real socioeconomic issues, and to using the wordless visual medium of cinema to communicate complex ideas and emotions.”

Also on the 28th, Steve Appleford spoke to David Lynch about his many mediums an artist for the Los Angeles Times:

“I find that every medium talks to us, if you just start doing it. Watercolor paper is a certain way, and watercolor paint is a certain way. You say, “Oh, this is different from oil painting on a canvas.” Different things happen. You start to get a dialogue and a feel for what it does. It’s the same with every single medium. They’re infinitely deep. You can’t exhaust it.”

The 28th was a good day for pop culture journalism because that’s the same day that Olga Segura explained why Bob’s Burgers is one of the “best shows on television” for the magazine America:

“The jokes in Bob’s Burgers are never at the expense of someone else’s experience. ‘In comedy, you want people bouncing off each other. You want a little disagreement,’ Bouchard told NPR, ‘but for all of us working on the show, it ends up being more funny to just assume that they accept each other, the members of this family, and that the conflict comes from elsewhere, something more circumstantial.'”

For the October issue of Vanity Fair, Mark Rozzo talked about Little Women for it’s 150th anniversary, and how it helped shape young adult literature:

“September 30 marks 150 years since Little Women came out and the world first met the March sisters: conventional Meg, tomboy Jo, shy Beth, and spoiled Amy. A century and a half later, Alcott is a Victorian pop-culture hero whose celebrity thrives in the Internet era, as the aptly named Web site Louisa May Alcott Is My Passion suggests. Her work resides on the nightstands of tween girls and on the syllabi of Ivy League colleges. The legion of women writers who cite Little Women as their inspiration includes J. K. Rowling (whose Hermione Granger is a total Jo), Simone de Beauvoir, Nora Ephron, Maxine Hong Kingston, Jhumpa Lahiri, Margaret Atwood, Doris Lessing, Zadie Smith, Gloria Steinem, and Patti Smith, who wrote, ‘It was Louisa May Alcott who provided me with a positive view of my female destiny.'”

Elena Gooray analyzed why poison is the woman’s weapon of choice onscreen for bitchmedia on October 3rd:

“It’s a blistering Missouri morning, and Adora (Patricia Clarkson) is standing at the stove, boiling a concoction from elixirs in glass bottles while two of her daughters lie in bed, pearly with sickness. When her husband, Alan (Henry Czerny), tells her to leave the girls alone and let nature do its healing work, Adora replies: “I’m just helping nature along.” She omits that she’s “helping” nature with rat poison and antifreeze, the same ingredients she used to kill her daughter Marian (Lulu Wilson) many years before. This image of a woman calmly mixing murderous substances to feed her loved ones comes from HBO’s Sharp Objects, a miniseries adapted from Gillian Flynn’s 2006 novel. It also reinforces an old stereotype: Poison is a woman’s weapon.”

On October 4th, Simon Hardeman interviewed Dave Davies in honor of the 50th Anniversary of “The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society” for The Independent:

“Yet there’s still the sense that The Kinks are outsiders. ‘It’s rooted in Kinks history, that feeling apart,’ says Dave. Fifty years ago Rolling Stone’s reviewer, Paul Williams, after praising the ‘genius”’ of the album (‘It would be unbearable that the song’s over, but here’s another’) says in his last two sentences: ‘I’ve never had much luck turning people on to The Kinks. I can only hope you’re onto them already.’ Perhaps we are now, at last.”