The Friday Article Roundup
Have you heard the good word of the week's best pop culture articles?
This week, you will get into the spirit of:
May Lauren have a blessed day for her contributions! Send your own picks throughout the next week to magpiesfar [at] gmail, post articles from the past week in the comments for discussion, and have a Happy Friday!
Bilge Ebiri considers the Pope’s message on movies for Vulture:
The pope was also doing something necessary and surprising with these words: He was speaking on behalf of those audiences. Critics and high-minded, navel-gazing essayists often like to blame ordinary people for what’s viewed as their incuriosity and inertia (I basically just did two sentences ago). However, the pope’s words serve as a reminder that audiences themselves are at the mercy of what is fed them. The man still sees himself as a shepherd. And he is not admonishing viewers; he is reminding filmmakers that, despite what the trends or the numbers say, the mission of art is to “open up what is possible.”
At Decider, Jordan Hoffman talks to Nugs CEO Brad Serling about concert streaming:
At this point I am not signing every band anymore. I’m dealing with the artists that require attention at a white glove level. Sometimes I see bands pop up and I think “who the hell is this and why is it cluttering up my feed?” Then I go listen to them, and I see why. I have a team and I trust their ears. It’s all about “are they a good live band?” An internal joke has been “Jammy Buffet”, a Jimmy Buffett group in a jam band sense. At first I got really upset about that. And Buffett used to be a client of ours before he passed away. My guy was like “just listen to it.” And I was like, “okay, they can play, this guy can sing.”
For Passion of the Weiss, Son Raw turns the tables on Pitchfork’s 100 best rap albums by finding their equivalent rock albums:
Pitchfork’s mid-2000s pivot from backpack rap to trap was a pivotal moment for me as a young music writer, not because I disliked southern hip-hop or thought the east coast was delivering a ton of great music at the time (it wasn’t), but because the sudden hipster appreciation for coke rap felt flippant and surface level. Moreover, the site was either ignoring or bashing similarly brash metal and emo music from the same time period, in favor of rock’s intellectual side, which always struck me as agenda-driven. Twenty years later, I now get my vengeance by swapping in Jeezy for Papa Roach–the timelines don’t match up exactly here, but this comparison gets to why hip-hop fans have never really been able to fully trust the site’s coverage. This is also where I point out that My Bloody Valentine didn’t make the cut on my list, but then again, neither did Ice Cube’s Death Certificate on Fork’s.
Edo Choi considers Nouvelle Vague in the context of Richard Linklater’s larger themes for Reverse Shot:
Ironically and fittingly, the narrative shape of Nouvelle Vague echoes that of Slacker, as well as of its spiritual sequel Waking Life, most of all. Those films enact a kind of Platonic dialogue by way of surrealist automatism, one random soliloquizing human encounter following and answering another to form a stream of perpetually transferred consciousness. While Nouvelle Vague is far more linear by outward appearance, telling the straightforward story of how a film came to be within its milieu, the movie likewise consists of such a chain of encounters, following an emotional logic just as unreal, dreamlike, and wonderful.
And for New Scientist, Benjamin Taub describes how new research determined that cave paintings and rock art were designed to have audio accompaniment:
Another clue about the sorts of sounds prehistoric people made at these decorated rock faces comes from the painted Isturitz cave in France, where 35,000-year-old flutes made from vulture bones have been found. By playing replicas of these prehistoric instruments inside the caverns where they were discovered, Till became the first person since the Stone Age to experience their ritual potential. “Previously, I’d only ever heard these bone flutes in classrooms or in concert halls, where they have quite a polite sound, a small sound,” he says. “But then you take them into the cave and they produce this enormous, soaring sound, which transforms the cave into a space that sings.”
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More articles by Dave Shutton
Double Features
Considering the comedy in The Phoenician Scheme and The Naked Gun.
The Friday Article Roundup
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The Friday Article Roundup
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The Friday Article Roundup
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The Friday Article Roundup
Out of the mists of history, the best pop culture writing of the week.
Department of
Conversation
Hey, good news for people who have my taste in TV comedy and aren’t the type of obsessive to have the DVDs yet: Get a Life is coming to streaming!
https://www.avclub.com/get-a-life-streaming-release
Also, if you at the very least wasted your time with this show and wonder if it holds up even a little, Drew Carey is finally on Tubi. Though I bet half the music is missing.
What did we watch?
Babylon 5, Season Three, Episode Fourteen, “Ship of Tears”
This is a great Bester episode; Babylon 5 is, in spite of its narrative and moral complexity, a good vs evil narrative, which naturally makes its more evil characters more interesting. On a scale of one to five (with five being most evil), Bester sits at 4 (compare him to Qwark over on Deep Space Nine). One thing that makes this series interesting is that it reverses the whole ‘mutants with deadly powers are oppressed’ angle, where the telepaths are explicitly tied in with fascism, right down to Bester proudly declaring himself genetically superior and ‘mundanes’ as disposable. This even goes down to him having a marriage based on genetic convenience, which of course he fucks up when he falls in love, and which also makes him useful to the heroes (Bester being thrown off his usual smugness is great).
Meanwhile, Delenn makes a utilitarian argument to G’Kar, which a) owns, b) owns in a particularly Minbari way and c) is definitely calculated by Straczynski to be a blow to G’Kar in particular, who is incapable of taking anything impersonally. The Minbari are often played as mystical and spiritually superior (much to Dave Shutton’s consternation), so having them actually take a bigger picture perspective in a meaningful and bloody fashion is fantastic. We’ve seen Minbari commit to this kind of thing in a personal fashion before, especially with Lennier, but now we’re seeing it both personally and systematically affect someone else, which is even tougher.
It’s extremely admirable when Lennier eats shit for a bigger cause, but now Delenn is making G’Kar eat shit for a bigger cause, which is often harder to justify to someone. I see it as being kind of like destroying coal mining jobs for renewable energy; an individual – even a lot of individuals – not being able to feed their families for the sake of long-term security for the planet and species. This is what makes life hard; trying to secure long-term security for people who just want to be comfortable now.
Vivid and fucked up image of comatose telepaths. Ahahaha alien abduction story in a space opera! This show has so many of these things.
Co-sign everything about Bester, who is just the best — Koenig’s smugness rules because it is earned, he does have this ability and power (the politically) and he will use it. He’s almost disgusted with himself for being thrown off by love, but he accepts that. Some parallels with G’Kar, who understands but does not forgive and Delenn knows that is what she deserves.
A big part of my distaste for the Minbari is aesthetic, their spiritual superiority is coded in mall crystal woo woo shit while the Narn and Centauri (and humans for that matter) have lived-in worlds. Them getting their hands dirty is definitely a plus.
In a Lonely Place – Lauren mentioned this in the AHP post, so it seemed like a good moment to watch it. (It’s on Tubi, of course,) All the elements are here for a great noir (and indeed it’s considered one) but this never came together for me. Is it Nicholas Ray’s direction? A somewhat underwhelming story? The supporting cast? No matter. As a Bogey-driven character study, it works, but the rest is just pretty good.
The Practice, “Day in Court” – Boy, a lot happens here. The trial of a drug dealer accused of murdering a customer – he insists it’s self defense, and as presented there is room to for doubt it was full on murder – and things get ever more chaotic. But for all that is happening, this never feels overstuffed. Weird, a bit absurd, and an utterly exaggerated view of the criminal justice system, but this is close to a textbook demonstration of how to write and direct a standalone hour of television. I think in the age of serialization, we might have lost something by insisting everything has connective tissue with everything else. Guests include everyone’s favorite guest star Mark Sheppard as the drug dealer (oddly, Mark loses his Boston accent by the end of the show, what’s up with that?); Ed Begley Jr. as a medical examiner who isn’t so reliable; and Paul Dooley back as grumpy and worn out Judge Swackheim, and stealing the show. We also have the best closing argument yet by Dylan McDermott.
Frasier, “Hooping Cranes” – Frasier is gifted basketball tickets, takes his dad and Niles, and Niles is the lucky fan who gets to make a half-court shot at halftime. Which Niles makes. There isn’t much to this one. And given this is the third game Niles has been to, given that Frasier must have seen the Celtics regularly at Cheers, it continues to make little sense how little the brothers know of things. The one highlight? Roz briefly dates a handsome man who only speaks French, and asks Frasier to help her dump him. The conversation between Frasier and the man is quite funny. (PS: Seeing the Seattle Supersonics invoked by the show is a reminder of a bygone day. Or a harbinger of the future.)
I’m curious what you’d think of the original novel In a Lonely Place, if you come across it (or indeed if you’d read it already). I love the doomed romanticism of the film, which does click for me better than it does for you, but the novel is a very different beast and has a peculiar dark energy that may bring the spark this lacked.
Should look for the book.
Someone on IMDb points out the irony that the movie is about a screenwriter hired to adapt a novel but who changes everything.
I liked In A Lonely Place quite a bit, where it loses me is a point near the end that walks back from the point of no return and I really don’t think that’s how what’s happening there goes down. But Bogey is superb here, I love how he pretty much figures things out early on because he’s enough of a dick to go where other people are too polite to.
An interesting side to Bogey’s character is how he became a dick. Someone says that he “was different when he came back” from the war. I think PTSD is, at least, part of the reason for who he now is.
And, for me, the noir atmosphere feels powerful enough that the narrative can get away with the moment “near the end that walks back from the point of no return.” Bogey’s character, and what he does or doesn’t do, remains complex.
There’s the great touch that he anonymously sends flowers to the murdered girl’s family.
The PTSD angle here is much better than in Crossfire, that’s for sure. And for me the walk-back is more about the act itself, how far he goes before he stops. The fact he does stop and how the ending is more nuanced than simple tragedy is very interesting.
The Lowdown has overall been really strong, especially in the plot department in Ep. 6: feels like we’re getting to the theme of “There’s nothing worse than a white man who cares” and you immediately see why (and as a white man who cares, fucking ouch.) We try too hard and we trust the wrong people. Sterlin Harjo and the writers are also great at capturing not only how Lee awkwardly navigates Native circles and how Reverend Mark (Paul Sparks who is decidedly not playing a version of Mickey Doyle) carefully avoids spelling out what he’s obviously doing with a bunch of racist convicts with guns in the middle of nowhere.
The Great, pilot – Mostly really liked it though the characterization of the French Enlightenment as inherently good is a bit annoying* and has mild “everyone is dumb except me” energy. Those are mere quibbles though, overall this is an excellent pilot that neatly gives a good hook for the show and has many dark, dark laughs. Hoult as Peter is particularly a great TV character: he’s an entitled frat boy (“Huzzah!”) and asshole who, because he has literally no filter, is pretty good at processing his emotions and observing the weaknesses of others in real time. (“You’ve very judgmental! You really should do something about that.”) We were talking about Homer’s moments of intelligence on Ruck’s discord and this is the kind of trait that makes idiot characters more interesting.
*I also KNOW this is anti-historical accuracy, but…Peter’s court already was big on Rousseau and the like thanks to the Empress! Then again, Peter’s aunt (not his mom) was still alive, so I must respect the show’s disinterest in reality.
Babylon 5 — there is a very nice moment of the show’s heroes doing something in a mode that the show has explicitly shown as bad over the past several seasons, the text is straight up good news but the context is unsettling. This is something that I think the show has been trying to build all season but with limited success, maybe it would hang together better on a rewatch but the dispersed stories here have not let it accumulate as it should. This plays into the main plot of Garibaldi doing something clearly stupid but for reasons that he can justify as necessary, these reasons have been mostly told more than shown but they’ve become more pressing now.
Crossfire — John Anderson’s excellent writeup (https://www.the-solute.com/year-of-the-month-son-of-griff-on-crossfire/) talks about the source material’s gay subtext and how that was stripped out of the movie and replaced with a very blunt antisemitism message. This winds up weakening the story quite a bit, George Cooper as our wrong(ed) man would make a lot more sense as a closet case but as it is his anxiety is a weak version of shell shock and Cooper himself is a wet blanket, the movie revolves around him but he’s largely passive. Mitchum is cool if also a bit underused and Ryan of course owns, but the real stars are Gloria Grahame and Paul Kelly as a sex worker and her husband — John talks about the liminal and menacing urban spaces of the film and noir in general and how the soldiers are not of this world, Grahame and Kelly are and the movie feels like it has overlapped with their own film. Grahame especially is fantastic here, Cooper’s wife is nonjudgmental about how Cooper went back to Grahame’s place, she just wants to know where he is now and Grahame is furious at this — she can see how this covers a general unconcern with her existence, how she’s a small part of someone else’s story, and she demands her own recognition.
A Better Tomorrow — “Do you believe in God?” “I believe I am a god.” Chow Yun-fat is the fucking king, this would never have happened for numerous reasons but he would’ve been an incredible Roland in a Gunslinger adaptation. Interesting to watch this in proximity with Crossfire, which is a subtler movie in a lot of ways but shares its era’s general bluntness in dialogue that is performed and portrayed in a way that creates something powerful from that simple foundation, Woo’s dude melodrama is similar in how he makes something straightforward — a look, a clasp of hands — mean everything.
The X-Files, “Unruhe”
Pegged this as a Vince Gilligan episode before I got to his name in the credits, purely because this opening–a tense excerpt of an in-progress crime story with a hard turn into the supernatural–slaps.
The psychic photography feels less developed than the show’s genre elements usually do, but it works dramatically and on a number of levels: it gives Mulder a strangeness he can chase that’s as concrete as Scully’s more traditional investigation, letting the episode show them both productively working their own ends; it sets up a suspenseful sequence where Mulder’s clever idea to use the photo booth delays him from preventing Scully’s abduction, which is exactly what the photo will prove is on Gerry Schnauz’s mind; it opens up an opportunity for the climax, where Gerry believes the photos are documented proof of the “howlers,” but Scully, who knows they’re only proof of his fixations, disconcerts him enough that his new pictures of her show his own death instead.
My one complaint about this episode is that it doesn’t use that last idea enough. It’d be cooler if it felt more like Scully had intentionally weaponized his unconscious psychic photography–but then again, maybe that’s more of a Mulder move, and she was doing all she could her way, empathizing and reasoning and reaching out with both strength and compassion. Even when she can’t really argue with the phenomena Mulder’s identifying (there’s a cute early scene where they both recognize that her quest for a scientific explanation of the photos sounds exactly as farfetched and absurd as his usual flights of fancy do, and Mulder’s so obviously tickled by it), it doesn’t resonant with her. Her sense of wonder and horror comes from different sources but are just as present and vital to her, and this episode leans into that, letting the destruction of these women’s full sense of self–and her own risk of same–hit her hard and then arguably letting the psychological weight of her appeal to Gerry hit her even harder. So never mind, this was a quality decision with good characterization, and I’m just a nerd.
Good Scully (I don’t mind Scully-in-peril when it’s this well-used), good Mulder, good Mulder-and-Scully, and a good case.
You can always spot a Gilligan episode because it managed to hit all the basic necessities of an X-Files at above average – his episodes rarely hit that absolute height of genius or ambition (like how distinctive a Darren Morgan episode is) but they’re always highly entertaining.
Planes, Trains and Automobiles – Some foggy memories of this going in. It’s more John Hughes than I remembered. The actors are older than typical Hughes high schoolers. There are reused actors in bit and support roles, 80s music and the comic beats that all fit in with Hughes’ oeuvre. While it’s older in life it still has the bent of a coming of age snob versus slob story, with Martin learning a life lesson during a trip from hell. He’s good at being a jerk who instantly regrets losing his temper. It’s of course John Candy who is the heart and soul of the film, managing to be both an obnoxious slob and incredibly touching. Somehow it manages to get more cartoonish toward the end while pushing the drama to more heartfelt places.
The cartoonishness here, thinking of the car in particular, is really interesting — does this even exist anymore? That scene is certainly not “realistic” but it doesn’t go into full-bore Looney Tunes violation of physics, we laugh at its exaggeration while not being taken out of the movie. This kind of thing seems particularly screwed by CG effects, even basic ones, replacing the tangible props and sets, those are real even if they are not used for realism and they give the audience something to hold onto.
We as a society really lost something when skeletons stopped appearing in movies, and I’ll say that every chance I get.
William Castle knew what was up!
Thing is, it’s not that, as William Goldman said, “nobody knows anything,” it’s that no one cares that no one knows. CG effects are just another shortcut, going back to even the so-called golden era of the 70s. I remember reading that studio musicians working on scores for film/TV in the 70s would have to get used to calmly responding to directions, such as, “get me that Dirty Harry sound.”
Something that comes up a lot and I don’t know enough to confirm but suspect is true is that no one literally knows how to light anything anymore — certain technologies (which can be useful!) have become a shortcut that means that craft is not used and thus forgotten, and movies all look like dogshit now. Styles are also things that fall away and I am sure critics of 80s middlebrow comedies trashed their slickness and mix of glib and heartwarming tones compared to I dunno 30s screwball, but there is a difference between something no longer being in vogue and not having the wherewithal to bring it back should you be interested.
I was dragging my feet on posting this in the FAR. But maybe it fits here? An interesting video essay on why movies don’t feel real anymore.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvwPKBXEOKE
What did we read?
8-Bit Theater, 0300-330, Brian Clevinger
There isn’t much new introduced in these strips – the only real new thing is Jeff, a counterpart to Akbar*, who sells extremely dangerous objects with complete honesty (in this first outing, Deathtraps as opposed to Akbar’s Airships that are definitely not deathtraps). Otherwise, the majority of these are cleaning up both the Elfland arc and the Matoya nightmare arc; at the end, Thief announces his intention to leave the group, but I’ll get to that next week, and they introduce no new elements for now, leaving me to analysing specific scenes and jokes.
*These being named in intentional homage to Matt Groening’s characters in Life In Hell.
There’s commentary on Tolkinesque haughty elves in one of these strips (coming from elves themselves), which draws a lot of attention to how few directly satirical elements there actually are in 8BT as a whole; the only other example I can think of off-hand is when King Steve remarks on the inefficiency of rule-by-birth that is largely making fun of then-President George W Bush. Otherwise, much of the comedy is dissecting petty ego.
Absolutely brilliant joke where Garland, Bikke, and Drizz’l are arguing over who should be leader; Drizz’l points out that Bikke’s leadership is defined by incompetent acts of treachery, to which Bikke replies that if you have a treacherous leader, it’s better for him to be bad at it.
The LW try calling for a vote of no confidence on Thief. Thief vetoes every vote, and when asked to justify this, pulls out their contract with paragraph 84-B: “Yes it is”, which is part of the All-Purpose Prove Them Wrong Clause” (84-A is “No it isn’t”).
There’s an extremely great strip where Thief is talking to Matoya about his law ninja while we’re watching them get slaughtered in the background – blurred out, just like the actual background.
“I shouldn’t have to live in a world where all the good points are horrible ones.”
Great moment: RM realises, impossibly, they’re falling twice the speed of terminal velocity (“When I say deathtrap, I mean deathtrap.”).
Gemini: Stepping Stone to the Moon, the Untold Story by Jeffrey Kluger – This was recommended by historian and YouTuber Amy Shira Teitel, who is a massive fan of the Gemini program. But I found little here that I didn’t know already (in part because Amy has done a really good job with her vids about the space program). I would go so far as to say that there is about as much detail on an average wiki as in here. But the author wants to insist that no one knows about Gemini anymore, which might be true. Anyway, it’s reasonably well written, if yet another book in desperate need of better editing (two pages after we’re told a capsule splashed down near Japan, we have the astronauts breathing Atlantic air!). He is also selective about what parts of the narrative he uses, especially ignoring the speech JFK made in October 1963 suggesting ending the space race and going to the Moon with the Soviets. That would not serve the story he wants, would it? There are good biographical sketches of most of the astronauts, and good detail about the Gemini missions and so forth. So I would recommend it for entry level space buffs but not for anyone who’s read (or tries to read) everything out there.
Mrs. Palfrey At The Claremont, by Elizabeth Taylor — no, not that one. I think American prose is more varied and vital but it pains me to say on a purely sentence-to-sentence level the Brits whip our ass, they just have a crispness and elegance to their structure that I assume is not just taught but in the larger literary atmosphere over there. And Taylor is exemplary in this regard. This is classic literary fiction where not much happens — it’s a year in the life of an older woman who moves to a hotel that has a fixed clientele of similarly situated elders along with the revolving guests — but Taylor describes it happening with cutting humor and sometimes just cold cuts (the food is something we will always stomp the British at, at least). And the style is the substance, “not much happens” is life — etiquette at the sitting room, a terrible party, a small subterfuge becoming a complicated relationship — and Taylor’s detail and depiction is clear-eyed about how this winds down. One secondary character in particular is incredible, a mix of loathing both self and other directed that is concealed in precise condescension and self-sacrifice, you hate and pity her at the same time. No one is happy and everything just goes until it stops, but Taylor makes this straightforward book very rich, I think Pico recommended this way back in the day and I am passing that along.
I need to get around to this–the collection of Taylor’s short stories that I read was incredible. For sheer crystalline (and often ruthless) prose, it’s hard to beat mid-century British writers.
Wuthering Heights, which was a delight to read again and analyze as an anti-romance, where the love in question is so toxic, and Heathcliff so vengeful and devoid of affection, that he and Cathy’s bond pretty much poisons everything around them until…love wins? The genius of the structure, going through two generations of Lintons and Earnshaws, is how it robs Heathcliff of his ultimate revenge, or at least points to the futility of his schemes. He effectively “wins” yet is shocked to find he loves Hareton because he reminds him of Cathy (and arguably himself), and that he has no interest in pulling Hareton and Catherine apart. For all the wind-swept “epic” romance of the movies, the images here are bloody, nasty, and as rough as the accents. Love isn’t a positive or a negative, merely a force to be reckoned with, same as the dead. (The last sentence is gleefully ironic.)