This Week You Will Find:

• a historic historian
• Oscar yays
• Oscar boos
• violent series
• violent sports
• Woo! Live Music!

Thanks to scb0212, wallflower, and Miller for contributing this week (and see bonuses below). Send articles to ploughmanplods [at] gmail throughout the next week, post articles from the past week below for discussion, and Have a Happy Friday!

A tribute to the life and career of David Bordwell as posted to his blog earlier this week:

When Bordwell launched his career in the 1970s, film studies was just entering academia, and over the course of three decades at the UW-Madison, as well as a remarkably productive post-retirement, he helped the still-young discipline achieve new levels of respectability and intellectual rigor. Indeed, his scholarly productivity reset the bar for the discipline of film studies. He authored, coauthored, or edited some 22 books and monographs. These included two foundational film studies textbooks written with his spouse and intellectual partner, Dr. Kristin Thompson […] Professor Maria Belodubrovskaya (University of Chicago) speaks for generations of former Bordwell students in recalling the sense of participation available to all members of a Bordwell class. “What struck me about David’s teaching was that in the classroom he did not behave as a big-time scholar but as more of a leader,” she recalled.  “Everyone was treated as no less curious and observant than the instructor himself.”

Andrew Pulver anticipates a big Oscar night for Oppenhemier by ranking the Nolaneuvre in The Guardian:

Batman Begins (2005) It might be hard for young ’uns to understand just how nervous Warner Bros was about reviving Batman after its 90s implosion; it just had to get it right. Nolan’s vision was a handbrake turn from Schumacher’s second effort, Batman & Robin. He put up a furrowed-brow Bruce Wayne – incarnated by Christian Bale, the scowliest actor of the era – who goes on a Wagnerian journey across the globe to find himself, before returning to Gotham, the Batsuit and Batmobile. Gloomy and self-involved, this was a Batman who gave the film a seriousness the fans seemed to demand. It paid off handsomely.

Related: A.S Hamrah empties both barrels in his annual Oscar round-up for n+1:

The film is more literature than cinema, elevated mumblecore for graduate writing seminars, the opposite of, for instance, Hong Sangsoo, who makes low-budget films about writers and filmmakers without worrying about prizes, and whose films don’t seem written at all. With its expensive-looking cinematography, Slowdive-sounding score, and fancy editing, Past Lives is designed to win awards, which it has. Like Nora, Celine Song made a conscious choice to leave one life behind and start another. Her film is the result of a series of other professional choices, too, and it shows.

For Vulture, Roxana Hadidi goes trope by trope to explain how Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen ports his sensibilities into the small screen:

That approach ends up working like gangbusters in an episodic format, with eight briskly paced installments that each take on a few of Ritchie’s specific quirks, interests, and preferences: boxing and gambling, Traveller communities and no-nonsense brunettes, speed-ramping and Vinnie Jones. The Gentlemen even pulls off making some of Ritchie’s most annoying predilections less so by … spending even more time with them over a full season and letting the ideas wear themselves out? It shouldn’t make sense!

The Guardian’s Shaad D’Souza tracks the various artists who have released Dune-inspired music over the years:

You can understand why an artist like Grimes would be so interested in reinterpreting Dune: Herbert’s book is set in a post-technological world, requiring anyone trying to capture its sound to look beyond hackneyed “futuristic” ideas. And for all its seriousness, Dune is also kind of ridiculous – perhaps the only sci-fi property that can cause its fans to gravely discuss the politics of sandworms or superhuman nun cults without a trace of irony. (Fatboy Slim’s Weapon of Choice might be the only Dunecore track that’s totally tipped the source material on its head, reinterpreting the nomadic Fremen tribe’s “sandwalk” and the Bene Gesserit nuns’ power of “the voice” into calls to the dancefloor.)

At Awful Announcing, Andrew Bucholtz investigates the sale, gutting and deletion of Bloody Elbow, an MMA site that made a lot of enemies with its investigations of shady business practices:

But the deletions are interesting. We don’t know the particular details of Bloody Elbow’s web hosting situation, but in most cases, there isn’t a significant cost to keeping site archives up if they’re not drawing extensive traffic loads. […] And trying to transfer archives from one domain to another is often even more difficult and expensive. However, Nover’s piece there goes on to note that it’s possible to download static archives of sites with free software like WebRecorder and then host those instead for  a “very cheap” price. It’s unclear why a solution like that wasn’t contemplated here, as that certainly would have diminished the conspiracy theories around UFC involvement here. And at any rate, it does look like a lot of solid Bloody Elbow work on serious MMA topics is gone, which is a loss for readers.

Max Levin talks to McLusky’s Andrew Falkous about the difficulties of touring and what it means to play live music at AuralWes:

But sometimes, if you’re just playing to a bunch of guys in their thirties and forties, you feel rightly (or wrongly, sometimes) that you’re just singing to yourself. And when you’ve got a range of people — younger people at the front, a selection of more veteran bastards in the pitches behind them, and then older people fanning out at the back of the venue — that’s when it feels special, I think, because it feels like you’re not just singing to yourself in the mirror. I mean, I wouldn’t do that for a start; I’m not a huge fan of looking at my own face. … It’s not just about a moment in time: there’s a deeper substance to it, even if that substance is silly as fuck. It is a substance, and it does speak of the personalities involved in the band. I think that’s why it probably has longevity, because the music isn’t cookie-cutter; it has a personality, which can help, uh, piss its way from the records to the live shows.”