Coffee and Irony

Kenneth Branagh has started shooting the live-action Cinderella movie and I am weirdly excited for it. “It is impossible to think of Cinderella without thinking of Disney and the timeless images we’ve all grown up watching. And those classic moments are irresistible to a filmmaker. With Lily James we have found our perfect Cinderella. She combines knockout beauty with intelligence, wit, fun and physical grace. Her Prince is being played by Richard Madden, a young actor with incredible power and charisma. He is funny, smart and sexy and a great match for Cinderella.”  RT

Slate has a wonderful article on the backslapping insularity of literary culture. “Instead, cloying niceness and blind enthusiasm are the dominant sentiments. Critics gush in anticipation for books they haven’t yet read; they ❤ so-and-so writer, tagging the author’s Twitter handle so that he or she knows it, too; they exhaust themselves with outbursts of all-caps praise, because that’s how you boost your follower count and affirm your place in the back-slapping community that is the literary web.” RT

The CEO of Fast Company swaps offices (and desks) with a startup. “During a catered lunch with the Studiomates, I polled the group to find out how many of them had worked in a more traditional office setting. Eight of the dozen people at the table had. None of them think they will ever go back. Offices, a couple of people agreed, were built to create barriers to new ideas and getting things done.” RT

Bethany Joy Lenz returns to television with a pilot about a songstress! One Tree Hill fans like me are instantly on board. Plus, we need to fill the void left by Bunheads. RT

Liberate has a brilliant article on what binds up broken relationships. “When Babu Bhatt tells Jerry Seinfeld that he’s a “very bad man,” Seinfeld is stunned. ‘Was my mother wrong?’ he wonders. We’ve all been told our whole lives that we can do and be anything we want — in short, that we’re wonderful — and that we just have to overcome those external obstacles in our lives. If we can just fix those people (or remove them altogether from our lives), alter our circumstances, elect a different President, get a new job, and so on and so forth, then — and only then — will we be free and happy. James’ words — that we’re the problem — are horrifying.

Unfortunately, they’re also true.” RT

Finally, Entertainment Weekly has an A-Z Guide on How I Met Your Mother. Time to catch up for you newbies RT