I Think There Be Six Articles in the Field:

• Sir Richard III
• Lady Bendinger the Athletic
• Sir Ryan the Shameless
• Sirs Harold and Kumar the Hungry
• Sir Gemini the Incapable
• Lady Lambert the Wise!

Thanks to scb0212, wallflower, Miller and Casper for riding to the rescue this week. Send articles throughout the next week to ploughmanplods [at] gmail, post articles from the past week below for discussion and Have a Happy Friday!

At The Guardian Ian McKellen and Richard Loncraine talk about making the film version of Richard III:

[McKellen] Thank God, we managed to get Richard Loncraine instead – Richard II, as I called him. He knew nothing about Shakespeare but the partnership was perfect. He gave way on any point I made about the text and I conceded on visual things because he knew how to tell the story cinematically. […]

[Loncraine] On the first day, I knew we only had enough money for half the shoot. We went bankrupt after a few weeks, so I put my fee in, Ian put his in, and my assistant put her own money in. It was stressful. I remember laying detonators myself at Battersea power station in London because we didn’t have enough crew members to do it. I was setting up explosives while giving notes to actors, which isn’t the safest way to run a shoot.

Vulture‘s Devon Ivie talks to Jessica Bendinger on the experience of making Stick It, “the only great gymnastics movie“:

In most conventional stories, you have the personification of a villain or a character who’s the villain. In Bring It On, the villain is socioeconomic inequality. The sense of unfairness is the villain. As I worked on Stick It, there was a pervasive unfairness that was bothering me, which was similar to Bring It On: Why are these people, who can’t do the thing they’re assessing, in charge of the outcome? It’s fucking insane. It’s the tyranny of small preferences that’s very narcissistic and picayune. There’s something so petty there. When you think of the grandiosity of the sport of gymnastics, there’s a huge moment of humanity triumphing over gravity and fear. It’s a metaphor. It’s a powerful and glorious thing with all the things we struggle with — negativity, fear, inner voices, lack of discipline, fear of humiliation and death. It encompasses all the fears, and yet these women transcend it and get out there. It requires a lot of blind faith. And yet this great human endeavor is assessed by bureaucrats. It’s so funny when you think about it. It’s so American. It’s a funny contrast.

Israel Daramola denounces the cinematic and spiritual crimes of Ryan Reynolds at Defector:

Reynolds thinks he’s a Bill Murray type despite possessing none of Murray’s charm or relatability; his is the unearned confidence of turn-of-the-’90s Chevy Chase, the self-congratulatory sense of humor of a lacrosse guy who got lost on his way to an Abercrombie shoot and ended up at a Second City improv class. But what is it that makes Reynolds evil, rather than just terrible? Well, beyond that he is apparently bomb-proof, it’s what his particular ascent reveals about the state of movies. …This kind of Hollywood is a private equity dream, strip-mining culture and studio libraries for every nickel they can yield, and this Hollywood loves Ryan Reynolds. Reynolds is bankable, Reynolds is familiar, but most importantly Reynolds has no shame. There isn’t a piece of shit so stinky that Reynolds wouldn’t preen and “So, that happened” his way through, as long as there’s a Brinks truck backed up to his front door.

While Rolling Stone talks to Kal Penn, John Cho and others for an oral history of the cult comedy Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle:

Penn: I remember the trailers were all about race, and they should have been about friendship. The first cut of it mentioned that this movie starred “the Asian guy from American Pie and that Indian guy from Van Wilder.” I said, “I would love for you to not refer to us with racial signifiers because the movie speaks for itself.” They refused, and instead added the line, “From the white guy who directed Dude, Where’s My Car?” I mean, if you’re looking for a movie to laugh at with your friends on a Friday night, that’s not necessarily a calling card.

At NPR, Linda Holmes inveighs against AI a Google ad touting its fan capabilities:

I do not like generative AI, but for the sake of research, I fed this prompt – this very prompt! – into Gemini. I am not going to post the result here in full, but I can assure you that if you ranked all the middle managers of your bank from most to least inspiring, went to the one at the bottom, and asked them to write a draft of this letter for you, this is what you would get. The result is obligatory, desultory, boring and obviously machine-made. It contains sentences like, “You’ve shown the world that with determination, anything is achievable,” a toothless flop of a sentence that is, for the record, false. The only – the only! – spark of personality comes in the machine’s dutiful inclusion of “sorry not sorry,” which Ad Dad put in the prompt. That is not artificial intelligence, it is a program taking the one piece of yourself that you included and spitting it back out, unchanged.

And at Last Donut Of The Night, Jordan Iannucci interviews former Pitchfork and Grantland writer Molly Lambert about her career in online media:

I try to do things that I think I can find something interesting in, but I’ve also done things where I thought it was going to be interesting, and then it really turned into something else in the editing. Once I realized, “This is like advertising”…but, then, it’s like, “Well, they should pay us like advertising!” If I’m gonna do something that’s essentially an ad for somebody’s show, then I should be getting paid more. But, you know, you talk to people who worked in magazines in the ’90s, and they will tell you they just spent all the money because they were like, “It’ll keep replenishing forever.” When you hear about how they spent the money, you’re like, “Wow, it seems like you could’ve avoided this by not, like, buying caviar every day.”