The Friday Article Roundup
Get uncomfortably aroused with the best pop culture writing of the week.
This week, you will feel the heat of:
Hot stuff contributed by C.D. Ploughman and Bridgett Taylor! Send articles throughout the next week to magpiesmedia [at] gmail, post articles from the past week below for discussion and Have a Happy Friday!
Eva Holland writes at Defector about how the Heated Rivalry books and TV show have brought hockey back in her life:
Instead of being a bummer, the engagement with hockey’s dark side(s) in [author Rachel] Reid’s romances offered me a kind of unexpected solace. There’s something soothing and hopeful about watching Reid’s characters struggle to create space to be themselves. To take care of themselves and each other, to break down barriers and demand acceptance, and to hold their teammates to account. The series is a specific sort of wish fulfillment—that there could be a better NHL, a better reality for hockey players and fans—but in granting that wish, Reid’s books helped remind me why I had it in the first place.
While Frankie de la Cretaz is not buying the NHL’s co-opting of the Heated Rivalry show:
NHL ratings and viewership has been plummeting for a while….If [the league] wanted to appeal to a wider audience in order to grow the sport, they could have done so long before a TV show made it impossible for them not to. But they’re cowards who feared that speaking up for LGBTQ+ people would cost them their audience, while ironically failing to realize that it might have actually grown it. This audience has been here the whole time, but the league has shown absolutely no interest in appealing to it at all.
Eli Enis interviews Karly Hartzman of Wednesday about her musical past and her journey into hardcore:
It’s just not something I ever connected with at the time when I should have, so I’m kind of just trying to go back and rebuild at least a little foundation if I’m going to be influenced by that music at all [going forward]. It’s more fun to play a higher energy show, because I kind of want to make music that caters to that. I don’t want to get more singer-songwritery. I kind of want to just curate a space for people to go nuts at a show.
For the New York Times, Julia Jacobs examines the MPAA rules against the F-word in movies, with its impact being defended by august men of letters like Tony Kushner and the guy who directed Billy Madison:
Screenwriters bat around ideas in competition for the funniest or most dramatic deployment. Actors angle to be the one to say it; fans delight in tracking it. In test screenings, filmmakers note which utterance gets the biggest laugh. “You typically have a handful of options and then you pick the horse you want to ride to the finish line,” said Rawson Marshall Thurber, the director of “Dodgeball” and other PG-13 comedies.
For Time Out, Die Hard scribe Stephen E de Souza gives his definitive ranking of films in the “Die Hard in a X” genre, including Passenger 57:
One of the earliest entries, and one of the best: Unlike Bruce Willis’ ‘wrong guy in the wrong place’, Wesley Snipes’ airline security expert hero is a little-too-on-the-nose for an airline emergency, and the British villain (a bemulleted Bruce Payne) a little-too-on-the-Hans-Gruber-nose as an opponent, but the greatly compressed field of combat and time frame – 1200 square feet of airplane versus 34 floors of office building, and five hours of flight versus Die Hard’s overnight siege – adds enough tension to mitigate these minor deviations from the model. If only the awesome, gripping and astonishingly profound Die Hard 2: Die Harder hadn’t done the airplane thing first.
And in a new translation for Mubi by Jawni Han, Park Chan-wook extols Tom Waits and “Christmas Card From A Hooker In Minneapolis”:
Yes, the song’s inert, umami-flavored piano is incredible. But what really steals the show is the lyrics. The words that Tom sings, I mean, “harps on,” are set to a pretty monotonous melody, but this simplicity moves me greatly. The lyrics describe the desperate lives of pathetic losers, and the song is more beautiful than any melodrama I know. What even needs to be said? If I were an American director, I would make an eponymous movie based on the song’s lyrics in a heartbeat.
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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
Going on the record with the best pop culture writing of the week.
The Friday Article Roundup
A cowardly and superstitious lot? No, the best pop culture writing of the week.
The Friday Article Roundup
No kings, of pop or otherwise, just the best pop culture writing of the week
The Friday Article Roundup
Out of the mists of history, the best pop culture writing of the week.
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
M*A*S*H, Season Three, Episode Eight, “Life With Father”
“Trying to muscle in on our pony, Father?”
“Living in tents like animals.”
“I didn’t know animals live in tents.”
This is the one where Father Mulcahey organises a bris for a Jewish man’s newborn; it’s amazing how clear-eyed this show is about its concepts. You also have a subplot about Hawkeye and Trapper looking for pictures of presidents in a puzzle with the ostensible prize being a pony – a brilliant little bit of meaningless fluff that still feels so specific as to be worthwhile – and, even better, Henry being horrified to learn his wife cheated on him; Mclean Stevenson portrays Henry crumbling like normal but in a totally different context.
Great gag where Henry gives Hawkeye a letter from his wife and tells him to read between the lines, so he puts it up on the X-ray thing.
There’s a classic TV gag where Mulcahey and Henry have two entirely different conversations.
Babylon 5, Season Three, Episode Twenty, “And the Rock Cried Out, No Hiding Place”
You could tell me that was a parody of a B5 episode title, and I’d believe you. Like, it did make sense in context, it just came off absurdly pompous next to all the other pompous episode titles. Anyway, this went from a functional episode (lots of continuity here) to a real turn, slightly in terms of plot and definitely in terms of story – I saw Londo’s scheme coming from the moment Vyr got arrested, but I didn’t anticipate the extent to which he would be throwing olive branches to the Narn; I’m particularly touched by his freeing Narn prisoners (and amused at him doing a ‘half now, half when the deal goes through’ thing over humanish lives).
LONDOWNAGE! It may be predictable but the execution (ho HO) is great. Except! The intercutting with the religious ceremony is extremely weird and off, Straczynski was apparently raised Catholic and became atheist and he is attempting to use Protestant language (or at least musical traditions) here that he does not grasp at all, so whatever irony he’s shooting for clangs badly — as you note, the episode title is an indicator here.
Ugh. Lost my post and no time to recreate it.
In short…
Murder by Decree is a pretty good Sherlock Holmes pastiche.
When Harry Met Sally is terrible and Billy Crystal’s character is insufferable. Why is this a classic?
Two episodes of The Practice kind of go nowhere, and Ted McGinley is a guest star, which is really on the nose.
Two episodes of Frasier are pretty okay but how Frasier treats a “junior agent” played by Kristin Cheneworth is uncomfortable.
And MASH left Hulu, meaning we need to find, er, other methods to watch it. And we also cancelled Disney Plus and Hulu again.
Watched most of The Wizard of Oz (I was very tired post-NYE) and I don’t know why I hadn’t seen this in probably twenty years. What a wonderful, weird movie that zips along quickly and yet easily reduced me to tears (“Over The Rainbow” makes me sob like I’m three all over again). It’s like the Bible of movies in that everyone knows the references and they’ve seeped into every part of the popular consciousness without losing their power – the songs, the visuals, the story, all work together in harmony with or without a main director. (The movie’s a pretty good retort to the auteur theory with the studio system pulling everything together to create an idiosyncratic and surreal experience.)
And yet is not a faithful representation of the book. I don’t know of any purists but my wife, though.
I live near the house of a woman who wrote Oz sequels, fun fact! I’d have to look up her name but it’s a nice looking place. I can’t say I’ve read the books myself other than picking up the old editions to look at the illustrations.
That might be Ruth Plumly Thompson. And don’t get my wife started on her, either.
The Baum books are a bit silly but also full of weird imaginative stuff that appealed to me when I was a kid. Book Dorothy is younger and far spunkier than Judy Garland.
I like the movie, but I’m sort of a purist about the books too. Every other Oz-like thing is so far off the beam that it annoys me. Don’t get me started on Wicked!
Marty Supreme – what a rush! This is the killer new movie I’ve been waiting for all year, just non-stop fun with one of the most wonderfully, hilariously infuriating characters I’ve experienced in a long time and a hell of a soundtrack. My final cinema visit of the year and easily the best thing I saw in 2025.
Frankenstein – the sad Tim Burtonification of Guillermo del Toro continues. This isn’t without merit but it’s such an odd collection of bright colours, over-the-top performances and visceral gore. I enjoyed the Monster half more than the Victor half but the whole thing feels a little redundant, del Toro has made a ton of “but what if the real monster was MAN?” movies and this one doesn’t have much to add.
Inherent Vice – NYE rewatch, girlfriend hadn’t seen it. It’s such a killer vibes movie to spend a few hours with, still my favourite PTA. Every time Doc writes something in his little notebook it’s hilarious: “something spanish” especially.
The Girl with the Needle – astonishingly bleak Danish historical horror, what a way to start the year. Gorgeous cinematography and strong performances but probably a little too far into feel-bad cinema for my tastes.
Seinfeld, season 5 episodes – “The Conversion”, “The Stall”, “The Marine Biologist” all wonderfully funny. “The Dinner Party” a bit of a dud, which is odd as it’s the one Larry David credit from this batch. Carol Kane turns up in “Marine Biologist” which is always a pleasure. George becoming obsessed with Elaine’s “cool guy” boyfriend in “The Stall” was very funny indeed.
Has anybody on the socials made a joke about Marty Supreme just being a remake of Marty but with sour cream on it? If not, please deliver this on my bagels..
Much as I love Marty, I definitely believe Marty Supreme to be the supreme film about Marties.
George’s plot in The Marine Biologist is a very basic sitcom staple, Guy Lies And Then Is Forced To Act Out The Lie, but the execution — especially the fact that it’s not shown but told perfectly by Jason Alexander, with fantastic reactions from the gang and the studio audience — is one of the show’s highlights. The golf ball reveal!
It’s incredible, and I love that in his moment of triumph he still managed to ruin everything by picking exactly the wrong moment to be uncharacteristically honest.
Ella McCay – Batshit in a way that detracts from the charm. I don’t think I can underline enough how crazy it is that this harried career-woman’s profession is being governor of an entire state. They treat the position as if she were the somewhat under qualified manager of a Denny’s, not one of 50 people on the planet in charge of a piece of the national economy. It feels very much like the plot concocted by Zoidberg’s uncle in Futurama (“He has a son that doesn’t want to go into the family business. And that business is being president of earth!”) and the distraction it wages tips things even farther out of whack than the usual James L. Brooks hallucinations of average people. Not without its benefits, but in a world desperate for theatrical comedies with wit, this is not a triumphant return of anything.
What did we read?
Finished the latest Rebus novel. As ever, the solutions to the mysteries are the weakest thing. Rankin does characters and procedurals well but not whodunits. And wow, he really tore down Malcolm Fox, a character created to replace Rebus but whose novels flopped, and now the character is an utter nothing. Weird.
Started the recent translation of Yukio Mishima’s short story collection Voices of the Future. Only on the third story and the second is the closest he comes to horror other than The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea, focusing again on youth in a violent and strange ritual.
Stainless by Todd Grimson blew my fucking MIND – I picked it up in the local coop bookstore because of the pull quote from James Ellroy, and while the last “act” falls apart a bit, the romance and sweep of this post-modern vampire novel pulls everything together. Follows a formerly heroin-addicted rock star turned vampire familiar in LA, helping her find victims. (At this point a 500 year old immortal, Justine rarely needs to kill, instead hypnotizing people, making small cuts, and keeping them none the wiser. Naturally my friend who likes erotic hypnosis found this idea very hot.) I read it in two days, as lulled by Grimson’s creepily dulled prose and bloodcurdling imagery (eyeballs shoved into cocks, stunned crust punks getting decapitated one by one) as Justine’s victims.
Old School, by Tobias Wolff
I always start the year off with a beloved reread, and this has served that purpose more than once. A slender (just shy of 200 pages) but deep novel about a boy at a prestigious prep school (in the early ’60s) that prides itself on its literary background and invites three visiting authors a year, letting the boys submit stories and poems to compete for a private audience. This year’s attendees are Robert Frost, Ayn Rand, and Ernest Hemingway, and Wolff does fun, elegant, fair impressions of each of them while also following his young protagonist through his own artistic and moral development. A sympathetic and sometimes-wrenching look at artistic influence and at identity more generally, with a sound structure and a keen eye for moral choices both tiny and not.
Murder at the Black Cat Café by Seishi Yokomizo – a Christmas present. It’s a detective story and it’s cat-related, so I’m going to call it a GOOD Christmas present. I haven’t encountered the famous Japanese detective Kosuke Kindaichi before but I’m immediately a fan, even if he only turns up about two-thirds of the way through the story here. It’s a ridiculously convoluted case and the various confused identities make it a bit of a puzzle to follow but it’s a lot of fun with a satisfying conclusion, keen to check out more.
The Odyssey – I bought the Emily Wilson translation. Its thing is having the same number of lines as the original text and is in iambic pentameter. I read the first book with it feeling lean and abridged.* Fitzgerald felt too flowery, but I’m willing to go back to it. I just want a firm grasp of the story and plot right now. I went with Fagels, which reads like prose despite being in verse. I’m on Book IV. The stories from the two kings fill in some details of what happened after the Iliad. Helen is an aging beauty, bitter and faithless with no compunction telling stories of her time in Troy with Menelaus in the room. Even back in BC times you couldn’t understand what goes on inside other people’s marriage and why they stay together. Agamemnon’s death feels like the Red Wedding in A Song Of Ice and Fire – Agamemnon lured in by a hospitable host for a celebration in his honor only for he and his men to be ambushed and slaughtered. That ancient trope, lol. Bad thing is I keep seeing in my head, Spider-Man as Telemachus and Mary Jane as Athena.
To be more…
Sirius by Olaf Stapledon – A scientist works to enhance the intelligence and lifespan of sheepdogs. A viable pup from the litter lives with the scientist becoming a member of the family and something like a brother to the scientist’s daughter, Plaxy. Sirius increases in intelligence and develops speech, albeit crudely. People find out and humanity sucks. Stapledon is more philosopher than literary writer. He uses the book for philosophical musings on the conflict between man’s animal nature and his higher reasoning, nature versus nurture, the development of language and questions of religion. But he can instill in Sirius a pathos from the feelings and perspectives of a dog transforming into a ‘human’, the growth of human identity and emotions, the search for life’s purpose, and the tragedy stemming from societal misunderstanding. Maybe a bit of Frankenstein in this. Less than 200 pages, but it goes deep.
*I read it’s a translation better listened to, like in Homer’s time. So I spent a credit to hear Claire Danes read it.
“Hospitality betrayal” seems like the kind of thing pretty much all civilizations, or at least their poets, decided to agree on as SUPER BAD in depiction, and that is pretty much a survival technique, right? Condition everyone to not do this, otherwise you’ll never eat a peaceful meal again.
Zoo Nebraska – Heart-and-head-breaking account of the combination of ambition, love, and incompetence that went into making a zoo in Royal, Nebraska (pop. 75). Saved from disaster by a donation from Johnny Carson, the ramshackle brainchild of a young would-be primatologist became a regionally-famous attraction and lived to become another kind of disaster. Fraught from the beginning by the same issues of funding and maintenance as any animal endeavor, Zoo Nebraska also had to face the peculiarities of small town politics and recruiting qualified help to one of the more remote counties in the state (the odds of finding someone for twenty straight years who can successfully keep the more dangerous animals from running loose… they are not good). The book wisely doesn’t try to provoke broader generalities on the state of the Midwest so much as evoke a JK Simmons-style “Well, what did we learn here?” The tale does squeeze the heart a bit when it circles back to the progenitor of it all, what his life has become, and his connection to the region, even sans chimps.
The Last Unicorn, Peter S Beagle
Continuing my trawling through the fantasy genre, and I’ve found all of them can be divided between LotR and Chronicles of Narnia, with this falling heavily into the Narnia – that is to say, a fairy tale working on fairy tale logic as opposed to being a coherent real world (by far its best quality is its light, breezy tone). I’m also amused at how much postmodernism is a fundamental part of the genre; this, like many of the early fantasy stories (with the exception of Dragonrider of Pern) has the characters comment on fairy tale tropes and their own role in them while living out a normal fairy tale.
8 Bit Theater, Strips 0480-510, Brian Clevinger
The plot here involves the beginning of the next quest, with the Light Warriors sent out to retrieve the Water Orb; through this, they’re now travelling across the ocean with the Dark Warriors (who now have Vilbert) secretly crewing the ship. This is another case where the plot itself is inherently funny; Black Mage is the only one to recognise they’re the DW, so he’s fighting their plans to kill everybody, which leads to an absolutely brilliant gag where BM overhears them talking about blowing up the LW, and there’s an explosion that is caused by stuffing even more gunpowder into the guns, causing an explosion that cancels itself out (which is impossible, on several levels). You have a) the character gag of revealing BM was trying to make their deaths even more likely and b) the wonky universe gag where an absolutely impossible thing happens just to piss off BM.
Great gag where BM explains his Hadoken is actually powered by love, in that it literally sucks love out of the universe (“I’m not sure how much, but I’m given to understand the divorce rate goes up with each blast.”)
Single funniest moment in the comic: “With gravity slain, we can now fly!” And then Fighter floats directly upwards, causing Red Mage’s brain to short.
“You’re the only one I can talk to as something like an equal. Don’t take that from me.”
Beagle’s short fiction is excellent, if you want to try more of him. He has several contemporary fantasy stories–not second-world–that have a more openly Jewish sensibility, like “The Rabbi’s Hobby” and “Uncle Chaim and Aunt Rifke and the Angel,” and they’re some of my favorites of his: clever and sparkling and beautifully written.
I should look for those. I absolutely love A Fine and Private Place, which has a mid-century Jewish feel to it even though to a large degree the Jewishness of the characters is filed off.
I finished Heated Rivalry yesterday, so this is the perfect time for this particular FAR! That’s a good pairing of articles, too–appreciative of the effect the show can have on the (wide variety of!) people who care about it while appropriately cynical about the NHL’s pandering, insincere embrace of pop culture but not the populace it comes from and represents.
The “Die Hard in an X” article reminds me that I have never seen Air Force One and that I should correct this at some point.
I only caught up with Air Force One very recently and was delighted to find out that it’s one of the rare movies where the US President gets suplexed.
Air Force One is an ideal TNT movie, I still might rank Sudden Death over it though.
After the Pride tape debacle I was genuinely shocked to see the NHL do anything with Heated Rivalry but ignore it, that’s for sure.
Apparently I must once again inform everyone that Tamra Davis directed Billy Madison.