This Week In Film Writing: March 13th Edition

THIS WEEK IN FILM WRITING is a weekly feature that highlights the best film journalism we could find from around the internet. These are the cinema articles you can’t afford to miss! Check it out, every Friday @ Noon!

The Dissolve‘s Genevieve Koski (@GenevieveKoski) on why Sony’s announcement of an all male Ghostbusters film is a huge problem:

“Having two Ghostbusters, one led by women, one by men, is just a new form of an old sort of brand extension: the distaff counterpart. The Hardy Boys begat Nancy Drew. The Chipmunks begat The Chipettes. Hercules begat Xena. One for the boys, one for the girls, double the merchandising opportunities. Everyone wins, but Sony especially wins—if winning just means making all the money. But with this announcement, Sony has turned what’s unfortunately still a revolutionary action—rebooting a franchise with an all-female cast in place of a male one—into the same sort of tired gender-line toeing that’s kept the entertainment industry chugging for decades. “

The Vulgar Cinema‘s Willow Maclay examines the transgender allegory in Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin:

“The opening scene of Under the Skin is a birth, but the curious thing about this sequence is her arrival isn’t through infancy, but adulthood. There was no childhood for Scarlett Johansson’s character (who I’m going to call Amy for the sake of brevity) that would represent any sense of girlhood so she had to adapt to being a woman very quickly. The complete blank slate of her arrival is represented by the sheer whiteness of the colour palette in the opening sequence. She has nothing except the hand-me- down clothes of the girl brought to her with her arrival to earth, and she seems to take on the identity of this woman. In a later scene, she goes to the mall and seemingly shops for the clothes that this woman would have bought. That line of thought isn’t incredibly different from young trans women finding their footing in womanhood.“

Little White Lie‘s David Ehlrich (@davidehrlich) went to a porn film festival so you wouldn’t have to:

“3:54pm: The person at the press table can’t find my name on the list. I wasn’t embarrassed about the idea of going to a porn film festival, but I am super embarrassed at the thought of being turned away from a porn film festival.

3:55pm: “Fidelio?” Nothing.“

i-D/Vice‘s Sarah Raphael (@Sarah_Raphael) talks with Noah Baumbach about his upcoming film While We’re Young:

“The movie is a comedy and I was structuring it in a traditional comedy structure. In the 30s and 40s, comedies were almost Shakespearian in the way that they would often start with people who were married or together and they would go on all these detours and find each other again. I kinda wanted to do that in a contemporary setting.“