My favorite of The Dissolve‘s (RIP) many great regular features was the daily roundup of essential film writing. It cultivated the best stuff on the web and put it in one convenient place.

Now, I will be your tastemaker and will provide you with notable entertainment articles from the past week. Soon, y’all will all be watching soap operas and reading serial killer biographies.

Now, on to the past week!

On September 18th, Brad Gullickson interviewed Greg Hildebrandt on the magic of illustrated movie posters over at Film School Rejects:
“Cinematic illustration has fallen a touch out of favor with Hollywood these days. Walk into any theater in America, and the posters staring back at you are generally constructed of a cloud of floating heads or some other egregious Photoshop session. The golden age of movie art has faded into the realm of the limited collector’s market. Companies like Mondo, Gallery1988, and Nakatomi, Inc offer a wide range of gorgeous screen-prints celebrating most of your favorite cinema, but they’ll set you back a bit.”

On September 19th (which was my birthday btw!), Rathan Krueger took another look at the marriage between and carnage in David Cronenberg’s Crash for the Daily Grindhouse:
“Sex. The only thing that disturbs an audience more than violence is sex. Some readers might even hesitated to continue after seeing the word. Sex. Everyone has it; some are good, some are bad, some get paid, some are thieves. Yet there’s embarrassment hanging over sex, and the smattering of ways to show it in cinema is a bummer compared to the variety violence has. I love horror, and it’s a genre of violent delights and ends. But horror can also be those things for the sexy, beyond the pleasant T&A. The best change comes from within, so it’s fitting that an attempt to do more with sex in movies was from the Baron of Blood, by way of adapting Crash.”

Also on the 19th, Bree Kessler analyzed the neoliberal bent of home makeover shows for bitchmedia:
“The formula is to take a stressed working- or middle-class family, give them hardwood floors, a neutral paint color with an accent border, and a flat-screen TV. The result: To the outside world, the family appears to be more successful, though nothing about their situation has changed. The smoke and mirrors are literal, and they’re meant to distract both homeowners and viewers from the policies that really do keep American families in financial straits. Which is not to say there’s an engineered Republican home-design conspiracy afoot. But these shows are premised on an idea central to the field of environmental psychology: There is a strong relationship between individuals’ behavior and their built environments; modifications to these built environments influence those who live in them, and vice versa.”

On the 20th, Zack Sharf looked at a study that logged every reference to drugs and alcohol in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia for IndieWire:
“It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia takes place largely in Paddy’s Pub, an Irish bar located in South Philadelphia, so it shouldn’t be too surprising to hear the series’ characters consume or reference drugs and alcohol a lot. However, a new study from Alcohol.org puts the long-running FXX series’ love of substances into perspective.”

Enjoy!