Happy December, my lovelies! Can you believe it’s December? Also, that it’s only 19 more days until Cats is released? Anyways, on with the articles….

On the 29th, Madison Brek talked about the collaboration between Paul Thomas Anderson and Jonny Greenwood, on Film School Rejects:
“But in so far as the last decade goes, Anderson has had one key, steady collaborator who has left an indelible mark on all of his films: Jonny Greenwood. While best known as the lead guitarist of the British band Radiohead, Greenwood is also an incredibly accomplished composer, having written music for the BBC Concert Orchestra and the London Contemporary Orchestra (and, of course, his arrangements are featured on many Radiohead tracks).”

Also on the 29th, the writers of The Daily Grindhouse shared their favorite dinner scenes in movies:
“Back in high school, I was a typical teenager. Well, typical closeted teenager. Ok, typical closeted teenager who didn’t really know how to feel and lived in the center of the country where it wasn’t okay to be gay. It was the time of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. The misunderstood AIDS crisis. Matthew Shepard.
Basically, I was often sullen.
And dinners, where I was forced to deal with parents who didn’t understand me, lived in their own heads and would sometimes casually say absolutely dreadful things were the worst. Which is why the dinner scene in HEREDITARY hit me in the gut. The way the conversation seethes with unsaid malice. It’s a masterclass of acting and passive aggressiveness. And it culminates not at the dinner table, but with a dream where Annie (Toni Collette) tells her son, ‘I never wanted to be your mother.'”

Puja Prakash of Vogue, ranked the best episodes of Gossip Girl, also on the 29th:
“Of course, the very first episode of Gossip Girl has to be on this list. It’s the introduction to all of the characters and their basic plotlines throughout the six seasons: Serena, who bites her lower lip and falls for guys within five minutes; Blair, who pretty much hates Serena but still acts like her best friend; Daniel/Lonely Boy (imagine that being your nickname, yikes), who’s creepy, stares longingly in the background, and is low-key miserable; Nate, who doesn’t really serve much of a purpose but is beautiful; Chuck, an odd 50-year-old in a 17-year-old body (he eventually does undergo a rebrand); Jenny, who longs for nothing more than to be a Manhattan elite; and Vanessa, who…I’m not sure, but she always looks amazing.”

Andrew Nette looked back on Vietnam War inspired pulp fiction, on Crime Reads, on the 3rd:
“But while Vietnam equipped numerous fictional characters with the skills to combat the Mafia, terrorists or various other threats, few books in the late 1960s and ’70s focused on the war and its consequences as anything more than a background or reason for why a character was as confused/damaged/homicidal as they were. Removing reportage and autobiographies, fewer still were actually set in Vietnam. Given the lengthy U.S. involvement in the war—the first major deployment of combat troops took place in May 1965—and pulp’s time-proven ability to riff off the latest prominent issues or newspaper headlines, we can only speculate as to why writers and publishers were loath to sensationalize the conflict with the enthusiasm they did with everything else. Was it a case of self-censorship? Or was the conflict simply too close to the bone, given the deep divisions over the war in West that grew as the conflict dragged on?”

On the 5th, Andrew McRae of Cracked, talked about classic Hollywood sex scandals:
“If you’re wondering at what point Hollywood became a haven for sexual predators, scandal, and depravity, the answer is that it happened before it was even called Hollywood. Sex scandals were rampant in the supposed Golden Age; they were just way easier for fixers and publicists to cover up. Seeing how these incidents played out will actually tell you a lot about the era, and I don’t mean that in a good way.”

Also on the 5th, Rob Sheffield revisited “Let it Bleed” in honor of its 50th anniversary, over at Rolling Stone:
“The Stones spent the summer of 1969 making it with producer Jimmy Miller, starting in London but wrapping it up in L.A., where Mick and Keith Richards crashed at Stephen Stills’ Laurel Canyon mansion. It captures the L.A. moment Quentin Tarantino depicts in Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood, with lost souls roaming the streets. The Stones caught the sordid desperation in the air like nobody else. On the album, as in the movie, you never know when the wrong acid-dipped cigarette might explode into a late-night orgy of awaaay-we-go violence. And you never know when the guitars will turn into a flamethrower blast: The Fourteen Fists of Keith.”

Finally, also on the 5th, Michael Riedel of Vulture talked about how Cats changed Broadway, NOW AND FOREVER!
“So snicker and snipe all you want to at Cats, “Memory,” the movie trailer, the CGI fur, Taylor Swift’s perky kitty boobs. Broadway today, with its robust ticket sales, long-running hits, and worldwide stature, would not exist had Andrew Lloyd Webber not tamed his frustration at a technical rehearsal by putting some notes to T.S. Eliot’s line, ‘And when you reach the scene of crime Macavity’s not there!'”

Enjoy!