Hi, my darlings! I have lots of good stuff for you this week…

On the 8th, Brian Raftery talked to Lindsay Ellis for Wired about her life, YouTube and dealing with internet harassment:
“Ellis’ deftly edited essays are in a genre all their own. She rarely focuses on the big-name new releases of the moment. And she doesn’t care much for what she calls ‘thing-bad’ videos, in which someone piles on the bile toward a beloved film. Instead, she approaches movies, even the ones she doesn’t especially love, with a combination of scholarly rigor, film-history acumen, and reliable wryness.”

Joy Press explained the current conflict between writers and agents for Vanity Fair on the 11th:
“For the last month, Hollywood has percolated with anxiety over a brewing battle between two huge swaths of the entertainment industry: writers and agents. On April 6, the 43-year-old legal agreement that regulates business between TV and movie screenwriters and their talent agencies will terminate unless the two sides can forge a new agreement. The two sides plan to sit down on Tuesday to negotiate. Hundreds of millions of dollars and a chance to reshape the way the industry works are at stake, and nerves, it is fair to say, are a little frayed.”

Also on the 11th, Peter Sobczynski interviewed John McNaughton for RogerEbert.com about his films, what it’s like directing legendary actors and the loss of Luke Perry:
“McNaughton, best known at the time for his grisly horror classic ‘Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer’, may not have seemed like anyone’s first pick to handle this material. But he gets everything right from deftly handling the shifts from drama to comedy to romance to presenting Chicago in a way that feels as if it was done by someone who is more interested in getting a real feel for the city than in capturing all the familiar visual landmarks to be had.”

On the 12th, Katie Rife interviewed Penelope Spheeris about her work, the difficulties being a female director, and leaving Hollywood for The AV Club:
“Pioneering punk film director Penelope Spheeris ran out of fucks to give a long time ago—around the time she started getting script notes from Harvey Weinstein, as she recalls. There’s visible disgust on her face recalling the disrespect the Weinsteins showed her on the set of her 1998 movie ‘Senseless,’ which would end up being her last studio film after a successful—if unexpected—run as a comedy director that began with the smash hit ‘Wayne’s World’ in 1992. Senseless was a flop, and ‘as a woman, when you do a movie that doesn’t do well, then you’re done. You’re in director jail,’ she says.”

Also on the 12th, Ben Norton, over on The Gray Zone, explained how Captain Marvel is military propaganda:
“Captain Marvel was marketed as a feminist blockbuster, a rare superhero movie featuring a female lead. As the women-centered magazine Elle trumpeted, ‘Captain Marvel’ Is Now the Highest Grossing Movie With a Female Lead Ever.’
As is so often the case in Hollywood, however, ostensibly progressive breakthroughs in cultural representation were seamlessly blended with US militarist propaganda.”

Finally, on the 13th, Inkoo Kang discussed how Netflix is using tropes from TV miniseries over at Slate:
“Prestige cable networks like FX and HBO have been playing with the time between seasons for years, though usually in the opposite direction. The long breaks between seasons of ‘Game of Thrones’ and auteur-driven comedies like ‘Louie,’ ‘Atlanta,’ and ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ did make their returns feel like minor cultural events and may have even made us miss them more. But in an ever-more-crowded TV landscape, those breaks can allow a series’ strengths to fade from our memory. I loved the first season of Amazon’s serialized crime drama ‘Sneaky Pete,’ but its sophomore year relied so heavily on specific details from the previous season, which aired two and a half years prior, that watching it felt a lot like navigating the world as an amnesiac.”

Enjoy!