Editor’s Note: Projecting features a selection of great film and television focused writing from around the internet.
Jeff Overstreet rethinks Dead Poets Society on the retirement of a beloved professor, for Christianity Today:
Looking back at authority figures who have inspired my respect, and at those who have been driven by ego and a desire to control, I’ve come to suspect that anyone who seeks to instill character in another person by force will produce an equal and opposite reaction. Those Dead Poets boys aren’t anarchists or hedonists. They’re human beings pushing back against forces that would press them into dehumanizing molds.
W. Kamau Bell discusses the struggle and need for a different kind of late-night host, for Buzzfeed:
But Arsenio proved that the brown-faced actors, comedians, bands, singers, and (GULP!) rappers that he put on his show made money for late-night TV. Then the networks took them, their disciples, and their audience and assimilated them all into The Borg that is late-night television — which meant that the type of booking on Jay Leno’s show that would have seemed weird on its face in 1989 was only weird in 2009 because Jay insisted on making it weird.
Joe Berlinger responds to Michael Moore’s 13 rules for documentary filmmaking, for Indiewire:
Let’s not define cinema by the screen size and how many people see it in a movie theater — this is the problem of the latest rules for documentary eligibility for the Academy awards, which favor better known films and filmmakers and discourages theaters from playing smaller, more social issue driven films, in my opinion. I agree we shouldn’t be lecturing but the word “entertain” scares me a little.
Kate Erbland looks at how Jeremy Renner the action star didn’t seem to happen, for Film School Rejects:
Let’s take a journey back in time. The year? 2010. Hot off The Hurt Locker (and reasonably hot off The Town), Jeremy Renner looked poised to break out in a big way. He was going to be Hawkeye. He was going to be the new Jason Bourne. He was going to take over the Mission: Impossible franchise. It was going to be Jeremy Renner’s world, and we were all just going to live in it (and buy lots of movie tickets while living in it). It was going to be great.
It didn’t happen.
