Author: ArtsJournal2

America Ferrera Says Everyone Deserves To See Themselves Reflected Onscreen

Ferrera, star of the How to Train Your Dragon series (movie and TV) and – relevant to this conversation – of Superstore, says, “The issues that we talk about on the show are timeless and completely relevant to what it means to be working-class in America. One of my favorite episodes has been the maternity-leave episode where Amy has to come back to work 48 hours after giving birth, which sounds like a ridiculous sitcom setup. And yet when the episode aired, I heard from so many women about how that was a reality for them.” – The New York Times

The 20-Year-Old Who Recreates Iconic Film Scenes On His Instagram

He plans for months but sometimes has to do things as prosaic as waiting for a train with the correct color poles, or taking a coastal bus to a random Welsh beach. “In the last 18 months, Thomas estimates he’s visited 150 film locations. He posts the results to Instagram, where he’s built an audience of nearly 15,000 followers.” And so far, it’s all for fun. – BBC

Hey City Ballet, Wait A Second: Why Isn’t Wendy Whalen Co-Artistic Director With Jonathan Stafford?

Great that Whalen and Stafford are leading New York City Ballet. Super. Getting closer to equality, clearing up some of the past months’ terrible news, and so forth. But … problem: “Elevating the job title of a man over a woman seems like a regressive, shortsighted and even cowardly act. It’s also a confusing one given that in an interview in The New York Times the two said that ‘they intended to work as partners.'” – The New York Times

The Murky World Of Literary Plagiarism

With new accusations of plagiarism for novelist AJ Flinn and Danny Boyle’s film Yesterday, it’s time to revisit what can – and cannot – be proven in literary theft. True, “it has long been claimed that there are somewhere between three and 36 basic plots in all forms of storytelling,” but that can’t account for specific details. Still … “legal action is very tricky in cases which don’t concern actual language copying but rely on copying of themes, plots or structure.” – The Guardian (UK)

The Real Pianist Behind The Movie ‘Green Book’

The filmmakers didn’t line up Don Shirley’s original music with Mahershala Ali’s fingers; instead, they got a Julliard-trained pianist to play it. Kris Bowers “had never heard of Don Shirley. Bowers immersed himself in Shirley’s recordings. That made him nervous. ‘I was pretty scared actually once I listened to it because of how intricate it was, how difficult it was,’ Bowers says.” But he transcribed all of the music and then listened to it repeatedly, practicing for up to nine hours a day for the part. – NPR

The Worst Best Picture Winner Since ‘Crash,’ But Maybe Worse Than That One

Justin Chang of the LA Times: “Peter Farrelly’s interracial buddy dramedy is insultingly glib and hucksterish, a self-satisfied crock masquerading as an olive branch. It reduces the long, barbaric and ongoing history of American racism to a problem, a formula, a dramatic equation that can be balanced and solved. Green Book is an embarrassment; the film industry’s unquestioning embrace of it is another.” – Los Angeles Times

The Somatic Genius Necessary To Dance With Hundreds Of Hula Hoops At The Same Time

Yes, one woman can hula with up to 200 (200?!) different hoops. And that’s not easy: “A quick primer on the physics of this stuff: For a Hula-Hoop to continue spinning, one must apply force to the hoop in both the fore-aft and up-down directions. ‘The Hula-Hoop stays aloft thanks to conservation of angular momentum, but the system is extremely unstable—one little hiccup, and the hoop comes tumbling down.'” – Wired