The Week You Will Preserve:

• the youth faction
• fan fiction
• indie action
• Russian author attraction
• a familiar beloved soap opera!

Save some thanks for scb0212, Casper and Drunk Napoleon for contributing this week. Send articles throughout the next week to ploughmadplods [at] gmail, post articles the past week below for discussion, and Have a Happy Friday!

The future has arrived! The Hollywood Reporter profiles their 12 rising stars of the year, such as Everything Everywhere All at Once performer Stephanie Hsu:

MOST HOLLYWOOD THING THAT HAS EVER HAPPENED TO ME “Recently at the Academy Gala, I step out of my fancy black car, and there’s like paparazzi and fans outside. A lot of this is all really new for me, and it was like the first time where someone was like, ‘Stephanie!’ A fan screamed my name. Then I walked onto the red carpet, and a photographer was like, ‘Lana? Lana Condor? Could you just step on the sticker?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah.’ But, to be fair, my mom also thinks I look like Lana Condor. She literally texted me a photo once of Lana and was like, ‘You look like this woman.’ That moment was very Hollywood — the ups and downs in literally one minute.” 

At Film Comment, Genevieve Yue talks to documentarian Frederick Wiseman about the debut of his third fiction film A Couple, about the relationship between Sophia Tolstoy and her husband:

It’s just different, that’s all. In my other films, nothing is staged. Here, everything is staged. I never ask anybody to do anything in the other films. Here, there was a written text. I don’t like the word “documentary” because it comes with a tradition of something that’s meant to change you and be good for you and wake you up. I much prefer the word “movie,” but that’s a minor point. In my documentaries—for lack of a better word—I try to create a world through showing many people. In a movie like In Jackson Heights or At Berkeley, there’s at least a hundred people, or probably more. Whereas in the fiction films I’ve done, it’s the reverse: I try to create a film from the life of one person.

Polygon gives a primer on the work of Eric Jacobus, indie stunt coordinator legend and motion-capture stunt performer for Kratos in the God of War game series:

The perfect starting place for jumping into Jacobus’ non-Kratos work is his excellent pair of “Groundhog Day, but martial arts” shorts, Rope a Dope and Rope a Dope 2. It’s a clever premise, it’s very funny (and without a word of dialogue), and the fights kick ass. […] Eagle-eyed viewers may spot director and rapper Boots Riley in Rope a Dope — Jacobus and Riley later worked together again on Sorry to Bother You, where Jacobus was a stunt coordinator and performer. 2018 in general was a big year for Jacobus as a fight choreographer, action director, and stunt coordinator, with his work on Sorry to Bother You (Netflix), Blindspotting (Tubi), and the Hindi action-comedy The Man Who Feels No Pain (Netflix) all released that year — not to mention God of War.

Slate‘s Jay Costello reports on the project to scan and save thousands of pages of fan fiction from aging print zines and newsletters:

“It means not being forgotten,” said Maggie Nowakowska, the co-editor of Geek Elders Speak, an anthology of essays by older women in fandom. (Nowakowska herself is 73.) One key reason for preserving and celebrating that history is the fact that so many of the franchises key to fandom history, like Star Trek and Star Wars, have a reputation of being for boys, whereas fanfic and fanzines have traditionally been a space dominated by women. “They don’t think we ever existed. They don’t know that women did all these things,” says Nowakowska.

Beloved Australian soap Neighbours is returning – for real this time, it seems – having been saved by the world’s favorite neighbour, Amazon:

In a strange twist, it seems that many of the soap’s stars were unaware of the show’s return. Takaya Honda, who played Neighbours’ Dr David Tanaka for six years, posted an Instagram story featuring a photo of Fletcher, Woodburne and Moloney claiming that “apart from these three and Stefan, the rest of the cast are finding out with you. Please give us time to process.”