Look what we found on YouTube! That’s right, a video essay totally fucking over YouTube with every bit of the quality usually found only in New Yorker criticism.. You don’t have to be a Lindsay Ellis fan to enjoy this:
Category: Opinion
PJ McIlvaine: In The Zone
by PJ McIlvaine
Writing can be a long, rough, exasperating, never-ending, demanding, heartbreaking slog. Anyone who claims that they were an “overnight” success, ahem, I’d take that with a grain of Himalayan pink salt.
Writing is lonely. The only people speaking to you are the voices in your head. And if you don’t listen to them, man, do they get cross.
Writing is physically demanding. If you wait for inspiration to strike, you may end up as old as Methuselah. I have written through flu, sinus attacks, kidney stones, the kids throwing up in pots beside me, and other untold miseries and tragedies…you name it, I’ve done it, survived and even thrived. I’m not saying I’ve done it well or that it’s easy. That’s a story for another day.
Gerry Conway on the Live Action ‘Dumbo’ – “Burton’s Revenge”
Live Action Dumbo Can Only Be Tim Burton’s Revenge
by Gerry Conway
After a miserable time at the movies last night, I’ve come to the conclusion that Tim Burton’s grim and joyless “Dumbo” is an auteur triumph.
SPOILERS AHEAD. (Though for this movie, “spoiler” is descriptive as well as a warning label.)
I don’t recommend “Dumbo,” but I admire it. Burton has accomplished something almost startling with this film: he’s made a movie that is about as unsubtle a “f**k you” to both his corporate sponsors and the audience as one could get without actually superimposing “F*CK YOU!” on every frame. Contempt for Disney and for the audience that gobble up the company’s live action remakes of classic animated films oozes from every shot, every scene, and in particular, from the entire second half of the movie. If some films are a love letter, this is hate mail. Tim Burton clearly hates how Disney is exploiting the animated films he cherished as a child, and “Dumbo” is his bitter revenge.
How We Screwed Up Showbiz Culture – and How We Can Fix It
Remember when show business was a cottage industry run by fans dedicated to producing the best films, TV shows, plays, whatever, for the enjoyment of just about everybody in the world?
We don’t either. But we can dream, can’t we? Here’s something to get you started:
by Tennyson E. Stead
Before I delve into the chronic misdeeds of our industrial showbusiness community, forgive me a paragraph or two to establish my credentials as your professor in this matter.
WGA Members Approve New Agency Code of Conduct
We’d say it’s fair to call this a landslide:
