Get Your Blood Boiling Over:

• dramatic fender-benders
• music criticism
• child exploitation
• fast zombies
• the boob tube!

Thanks to the level-headed contributions of scb0212, wallflower, and Miller for cooling things down. Send articles throughout the next week to ploughmanplods [at] gmail, post articles from the past week below for discussion, and Have a Happy Friday!

Crooked Marquee‘s Edwin Arnaudin looks back at the the times director Roger Michell got dark, after becoming best known for Notting Hill:

Among them is his masterpiece, Changing Lanes, which Kino Lorber gives the 4K + Blu-ray treatment on March 19. Released in April 2002 yet filmed in a New York City where the Twin Towers still stand tall in the Manhattan skyline, this knotty thriller about the day-long repercussions of a fender-bender between high-powered attorney Gavin Banek (Ben Affleck) and hard-luck alcoholic Doyle Gipson (Samuel L. Jackson) carries an extra ominous layer in its straddling of the pre-post 9/11 line. Under this fascinating shadow, the artist behind the camera doesn’t feel like the same man who guided Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant to romantic glory three years prior. The fast edits, wide variety of angles, and the interplay between gritty, street-level tensions and expensive Wall Street office drama recalls Spike Lee, John McTiernan, and Joe Carnahan — filmmakers willing to get a little dirty in order to expose society’s seedy underbelly.

At Slate, Dan Kois, Nitish Pahwa and Luke Winkie assemble the definitive oral history of the (not quite yet) defunct Pitchfork:

[David] Turner: Pitchfork was a very different site post–Arcade Fire.

[David] Moore: After one month of writing there, I got this huge review mostly because things were not super professional yet. I was like, “Hey, is anybody reviewing this Arcade Fire album? I really like it.” And Ryan was like, “Well, I kind of want to write about it, but I don’t think I have time, so yeah, you should definitely do it.” Then the deadline got pushed up—they wanted to get it out before the album release. I was 20 and I wrote this crazy review. I suggested giving this thing a 10, and a lot of people were against it because it was actually a divisive record on the staff message board.

[Eric] Harvey: There’s a venue in Louisville called the Southgate House. I saw Arcade Fire there, I want to say, early 2005. The place was packed, and there was an absolute explosion of noise when the band hit the stage—the kind of thing you’d expect for a legacy act with a devoted fan base, not a band that no one had heard of two months prior. I was like, Oh, OK, this is the effect that Pitchfork is having.

[FAR note: The Dissolve is mentioned exactly once, the same number of times as the peeing monkey.]

Related: at the New York Times, former Pitchfork staffer Marc Hogan sounds the alarm about private equity’s smothering of music:

Buying up rights to a proven hit, dusting it off and dressing it up as a movie may impress at a shareholder conference, but it does little to add to a sustainable and vibrant music ecosystem. Like farmers struggling to make it through the winter — to think of another industry upended by private equity — we are eating our artistic seed corn. Like the major Hollywood studios that keep pumping out movies tied to already popular products, music’s new overlords are milking their acquisitions by building extended multimedia universes around songs, many of which were hits in the Cold War — think concerts starring holographic versions of long-dead musicians, TV tie-ins and splashy celebrity biopics. As the big money muscles these aging ditties back to our cultural consciousness, it leaves artists on the lower rungs left to fight over algorithmic scraps, with the music streaming giant Spotify recently eliminating payouts for songs with fewer than 1,000 annual streams.

A.A. Dowd takes to Vulture to talk about the shocking opening 10 minutes of Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake:

Once upon a time, the divisive director favored kinetic speed over the glacial hero-pose crawl that’s come to define his rock-chord epics. In fact, the most common complaint lobbed at his first feature was that it was actually too fast — or, more specifically, that it took movie monsters renowned for their dreadfully deliberate shuffle and gave them the velocity of Olympic sprinters. […] There’s also a certain video-game quality to how Snyder orchestrates this pre-credits doomsday crescendo. He emphasizes the labyrinth-like precarity of the neighborhood’s layout in godlike overhead shots and locks the camera in place on Ana’s getaway car once she starts navigating the ravaged streets (a shooting strategy that can’t help but look like a precursor to the superficially similar prologue of the Playstation best seller The Last of Us and its recent HBO adaptation). Far from diminishing the thrill of the sequence, his style lends it the unreality of a nightmare from which you can’t awaken.

At The New York Times, Schivani Gonzalez writes about the new documentary Quiet of Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV which details the working environment of Nickelodon (CW for article, reports of sexual assault):