The Full Clip #3

It’s that time again. Here we go with another whirlwind whisk through my browser history. Onwards!

Oh, Cineworld, what have you done? Thanks to Craig Skinner for bringing this to my attention via Twitter earlier today, and for posting a PDF of this fantastically ill-conceived questionnaire on his website. On one level, it’s difficult to take it too seriously, due to mangled grammar and rudimentary spelling mistakes. But that’s not the real problem. The real problem is the pernicious casual everyday sexism dripping off the questions from Question Six onwards. I can’t believe an adult wrote these questions. The questions sound more like the sweaty ravings of a hormonal, priapic teenage boy. I could just shake my head and laugh, but someone signed off on this atrocity and gave the all-clear to send out a laughable, inappropriate and skeevy selection of questions to a substantial user base. I’m now just counting the minutes until Cineworld apologise whilst blaming an unpaid intern who no longer works for the organisation. Seriously, Cineworld, you done fucked up Big Time.

Whilst I’m on the subject of professionalism or the lack thereof, there’s a great piece by Paul Tucker at The Quietus on the way that thoughtful, detailed articles are routinely cannibalised by lesser writers (or, if we’re being honest, “content monkeys”), who cynically strip them down to tweet-length soundbites in a brutally reductive way just so that they can chase click-throughs and page impressions. Killer line of the article for me: “journalism without a basic and objective curiosity is not journalism at all.”

That’s more than enough of me railing against bad writers. Let’s talk about a good writer instead. Tying in with the release of Iron Man Three, Kyle Buchanan at Vulture looks back at the scripts of Shane Black, in particular his unorthodox, inventive, playful scene-descriptions. “The most famous thing Black ever wrote isn't even a piece of dialogue ... instead, it's this description of a setting from Lethal Weapon, structured as a muscular meta boast that practically defined the swinging-dick attitude of mid-eighties action movies”

From Thailand, here’s an astonishing sweded Iron Man Three trailer:

I can’t really say too much about this next link without blowing any surprises if you don’t already know the story. But it’s good. Really good. Trust me. At The Daily Dot, Kevin Morris tells the strange tale of the mysterious Yuri Gadyukin and The Greatest Movie That Never Was.

At The Atlantic, Thomas Pierce’s beautiful short story The Critics, about a father, a daughter and a movie review website.

For the Los Angeles Review of Books, Howard Chaykin writes a terrific obituary for comics maestro Carmine Infantino.