This Week You Will Open Your Arms for:

• Sofia
• Babak
• Rachel, Ayo, and Molly
• Sinead
• the tweens!

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

The Guardian excerpts Sofia Coppola’s upcoming book Archive where she looks back over her filmography and her process:

 Across all my films, there is a common quality: there is always a world and there is always a girl trying to navigate it. That’s the story that will always intrigue me. […] While I was working on the script for Lost in Translation, I started adapting Antonia Fraser’s biography of Marie Antoinette. I was going back and forth between them, moving to the other when I got stuck on one. I was so drawn to the world and Lady Antonia’s empathic take on Marie Antoinette. Before, she had always been villainised, and here she was portrayed as human – a teenage girl – in an overwhelming situation. I really wanted to make the point that she and the people around her were teenagers, and for it to feel like you were living alongside them in their world, not looking back at a dusty period.

The Ringer‘s Jodi Walker tracks the “Zillennial Cult Comedy Cinematic Universe” as Bottoms starring Rachel Sennott, Ayo Edebiri, and Molly Gordon sets to open wide:

In addition to other frequent collaborators like Patti Harrison and Mitra Jouhari, Sennott, Gordon, and Edebiri are the kind of generationally defining comedians that make you want to impulsively declare exactly when you first discovered them, in case—just maybe—you were the first person to recognize their genius. True street cred is remembering where you were when you first got Rachel Sennott’s heightened hot girl satire. Was it before the viral L.A. video? (Nice.) After? (Cool, do you also still tell “You might be a redneck” jokes?) Did you discover Ayo Edebiri somewhere before her star turn on The Bear? Do you believe that her skyrocketing career is proof that women in Hollywood really can have it all: roles as horny, loser teens; kind, ambitious chefs; and the human caretaker to several mutated teenage turtles? Did you, for example, see Molly Gordon in the off-Broadway premiere of Alice by Heart even though you definitely had a sinus infection and had to suck on a series of pre-unwrapped throat lozenges the entire time because you, like her, are a true theater nerd? (If this seems overly specific—no it doesn’t.)

At Rolling Stone, Carlos Aguilar writes about the continuing power of Thirteen 20 years after it was made:

There’s a visual energy to Thirteen that comes from Hardwicke observing Reed’s chaotic home life. Rather than looking at other teenage movies, she watched war movies. The Killing Fields came to mind, given the way the camera at times misses a bomb going off while on the move. Hardwicke hoped to place the audience in the middle of these “battles” that the kids have with each other and with their parents. “A lot of scenes have that energy,” says Hardwicke. “I really wanted to have moving master [shots]. I wanted to play the scenes out as long as I could, so that it would be more real, not made in the editing room — if I could help it.”

Matthew Eng reviews Fremont from “London-raised, Rome-based Iranian writer, director, and editor” Babak Jalali for Reverse Shot:

Donya is quick to diminish her condition, to avoid looking her survivor’s guilt in the face. Refreshingly, Jalali and Cavalli refrain from spelling out all the horrors Donya has witnessed; they allow mournfulness to suffuse the film in other indirect ways, like the discordant gusts of a rusty baritone horn as it shares space with a sitar on Mahmood Schricker’s jazz-inflected score. In one scene, Joanna trills an airy rendition of the influential British folk singer Vashti Bunyan’s classic “Diamond Day” on a karaoke machine; when the song ends, Donya is seen quietly weeping. What raw nerve has this tune touched inside the character? Where has it taken her? We don’t need answers; it is enough to know that she is moved.

For Crooked Marquee Chelsea Spear recalls the time Neil Jordan cast Sinead O’Conner as the Virgin Mary in The Butcher Boy:

When Jordan and casting directors Maureen Hughes and Susie Figgis began work on The Butcher Boy, their first choice for the role of the Blessed Virgin Mary—who comes to Francie in a series of visions—was Sinead O’Connor. At the time, she was still actively recording and performing music, but her reputation had taken a hit after she ripped up a picture of the pope on Saturday Night Live. The website Industry Central described this casting as “an in-joke,” but Jordan defended his choice: “She’s obviously a very spiritual person, and she understood exactly where that character was coming from. I think Sinead’s a very good actress. She’s very beautiful, and she looks like the statues I remember as a kid.”