Happy Valentine’s Day and welcome to my Weekly Links. This is a new type of post I’m trying out to share links to articles I come across that are related to pop culture & examine it from interesting perspectives. Hoping you find a good read here.
I can’t say I’ve enjoyed a biopic in a long while and part of that is the very rigid formula that Hollywood seems enamored with. Little White Lies writer Callie Petch addressed The Great Biopic Brain Drain in the shadow of the recent Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown.
I enjoyed this perspective from George Tsakraklides about the disturbing ways popular entertainment has encroached on news so that we’re given distorted depictions of reality. I was reminded of the keen observations made by Paddy Chayefsky back in Network. Check out the full essay, The Unbearable Lightness of Entertainment.
Warner Brothers uploaded several films from their back catalog to watch for free on YouTube. These aren’t all necessarily the greatest films ever made, but some interesting selections like the original Dungeons & Dragons film, The Bonfire of the Vanities, The Year of Living Dangerously, Waiting for Guffman, True Stories, and more. It looks like they have added films to the playlist since this article was published, so something to keep an eye on.
Rascal News, a great tabletop RPG news site, shared this article about a tactical skirmish game put on by some Warhammer fellas to “recreate” the January 6th 2021 attack on the US Capitol. It’s something I don’t think I would want to participate in and people who were there have lots of thoughts about it.
Criterion put out this good article on Stephen Frears’s first US film, The Grifters.
There’s a Frederick Wiseman retrospective happening at Lincoln Center which includes 4k restorations of 33 of documentaries. IndieWire sat down with the filmmaking legend which provides a lot of insight into his methods and thoughts about his films today.
PopCult Reviews 