70s cop films! An actor reaches his 80s! A movie and a cartoonist from the 90s! And a sitcom from today!
Send your articles throughout the next week to ploughmanplods [at] gmail, post and discuss articles from the past week below, and have a Happy Friday!
Zach Vasquez at Crooked Marquee posits the 70s as cinema’s strongest confrontation of the American police state, citing intriguing deep cuts like Top of the Heap (1972), Electra Glide in Blue (1973), and Report to the Commissioner (1975):
Born in the bloody aftermath of the Civil Rights and Anti-War movements, and calcified during the Watergate scandal, the movement known as New Hollywood carried an essentially defeatist ethos—“We blew it”—while presenting America as a failed experiment lorded over by sinister forces and broken institutions and populated by alienated and doomed lost souls. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the cop dramas of the day.
At GQ, Sam Schube profiles Andy Samberg, discussing the new Lonely Island movie Palm Springs, his rise from Internet goof to SNL cast member, and his thoughts on how to handle a new season of Brooklyn Nine-Nine:
Samberg has been thinking about the limits of the show’s effectiveness, its power to do what it set out to. “We’ve done, quote-unquote, ‘the best we could’ so far,” he says. “Could we have done more? Of course. Anytime anyone’s in a position where they’re asking themselves, ‘Could I have done more?’ the answer is always yes. It’s about what the goals were, and for us, the goal, maybe naively so, was more about laughs. We were making a workplace comedy and we tried to acknowledge the things about policing that were not ideal along the way.” He knows they’ll have to do more.
Actors of the stage and screen share memories and pay tribute in The Guardian on the occasion of Sir Patrick Stewart’s 80th birthday:
William Shatner: He’s a love and he is an intellectual in an athlete’s body. We had a long horse scene to do together once, and I recommended him wearing women’s silk stockings to avoid chafing and he nodded his head as a thank you. When he came out of his dressing room, he was wearing the lace stockings outside of his costume. “No, no, Patrick, underneath your costume!” We laughed, as we ordinarily did. I didn’t know he was so old.
Vulture hosts an oral history of the 1995 movie adaptation of The Babysitter’s Club:
[Ellen] Burstyn: After I made the film, quite some time after — I’d say a good seven or eight years after it came out — I was walking on Broadway, and a young girl got out of a car and she looked at me and she went, “Oh! Oh my God, you’re that woman in The Baby-Sitters Club!” I was very surprised. And she didn’t even say “actress”; she said “woman.” Which meant that it was like I was the character come alive. She totally believed in it.
And speaking of the 90s, a clogged pen leads cartoonist Gary Larson to try digital drawing tools and lo and behold, we have the first new Far Side comics in 25 years:
The “New Stuff” that you’ll see here is the result of my journey into the world of digital art. Believe me, this has been a bit of a learning curve for me. I hail from a world of pen and ink, and suddenly I was feeling like I was sitting at the controls of a 747. (True, I don’t get out much.) But as overwhelmed as I was, there was still something familiar there—a sense of adventure.