The Friday Article Roundup
No names, just the best pop culture writing of the week.
This week, you will uncover the mysteries of:
Send (anonymously or not) articles throughout the next week to magpiesmedia [at] gmail, post articles from the past week below for discussion and Have a Happy Friday!
Among other musings, Carl Wilson considers the opportunities of anonymity for musicians:
It’s the exact opposite model to the “easter egg”-hunting parasociality that’s permeated pop in the social-media age, in which artworks are reduced to clues about a celebrity’s personal life. It even undercuts the idea of art as self-expression altogether. Anonymity asserts that the art should be more interesting than the artist, who’s just another person. It severs the work’s tie to its creators and sets it loose into the world.
Clayton Davis interviews John Davidson about his Tourette’s outburst during the BAFTAs for Variety:
I am often triggered by what I see and/or what I hear, and this part of the condition is called echolalia. For example, when the chair of BAFTA started speaking on Sunday, I shouted, “Boring.” On Sunday, Alan Cumming joked about his own sexuality and, when referencing Paddington Bear, said, “Maybe you would like to come home with me, Paddington. It wouldn’t be the first time I have taken a hairy Peruvian bear home with me.” This resulted in homophobic tics from me and led to a shout of “pedophile” that was likely triggered because Paddington Bear is a children’s character. I would appreciate reports of the event explaining that I ticked perhaps 10 different offensive words on the night of the awards. The N-word was one of these, and I completely understand its significance in history and in the modern world, but most articles are giving the impression I shouted one single slur on Sunday.
For the Criterion Collection, Adam Piron surveys more than a century of Native Americans on film, and how Native filmmakers looked to regain control of their images:
The early ’90s marked a boom in Native American nonfiction, fueled by accessible technology, the rise of independent festivals, and improved funding and distribution through platforms like the American Indian Film Festival, Vision Maker Media, the National Museum of the American Indian’s Film and Video Center, and Sundance’s Native Forum. Native American documentaries of this era took a self-reflexive turn, exemplified by Terry Macy and Daniel Hart’s White Shamans and Plastic Medicine Men (1996), questioning what it means for Indigenous filmmakers to engage with the medium and its legacy. Macy and Hart’s film subverts historical expectations by humorously studying non-Indigenous people exploiting Native culture and spiritual traditions, marking a logical end point of salvage ethnography in American documentaries.
At GQ, Corey Atad talks to Tony Kushner about making Munich and Steven Spielberg’s perspective:
Mark [Harris, Kushner’s husband] and I decided to rewatch Jaws, and at the very end, after the shark blows up—and I remember when I was watching it when I was 18, when it came out, and hearing the audience cheer—but the next thing that happens is you go under the water, and there’s this huge cloud of dark red, and the fin is spiraling through the water to this very melancholy music. It’s an elegy. It just immediately cuts the legs out from under, but it also engages you empathically, and it implicates you. It makes you feel grief, even at the death of an enemy. And that’s Steven. That’s in pretty much everything he does.
And Tasbeeh Herwees breaks down the self-implosion of the LA Review of Books:
I’ve been hearing stories about the LA Review of Books’ managerial dysfunction for years now, but the truth is, the publication has never mattered enough for any drama to boil over publicly (despite the valiant efforts of some of the writers and editors who’ve passed through there). “The best thing the founders of the LA Review of Books did was name it,” one former editor tells me, “because the name gave it a sense of tradition and belonging in this milieu of publications it just does not belong in.”
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The Friday Article Roundup
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Double Features
Family heirlooms loom large in Father Mother Sister Brother and Vulcanizadora.
Double Features
Moving in time with One Battle After Another and Caught By The Tides.
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Babylon 5, Season Four, Episode Six, “Into the Fire”
So I didn’t expect an end to the Vorlon/Shadow war this early in this season – I’m willing to sit with the thought on top of following the show, but it’s vaguely embarrassing that the whole thing was a metaphor for parenting. Like, I’m trying to play along and at least be empathetic to the American liberalism of the series, but the big ownage Sheridan has is giving the two leaders of foreign powers a stern telling off, and they shamefully cross out of the Rim. I think it would bother me significantly less if it was a literal story of a man in his forties standing up to erratic parents; I realise that actual world leaders are also often driven by neurotic obsession (look at the Epstein files) but it’s not dramatically satisfying to have it play out like this.
Compare it with the absolute brutal ownage from Londo, who not only wipes out the Shadows and cuts off Morden’s head, putting it on a pike, he deliberately sacrifices his own people to do so; it’s obviously not on the level of what he’s done to Narn, but it’s the beginning of taking what he dished out (when Morden told him he’d pay, I half-expected him to admit he already had). Part of this show’s reputation is fans who legitimately loathe Londo for his, you know, genocide, and I actually think the show mostly plays fair with it so far; there’s always an edge to Londo, who is playing with people’s lives on a grand scale, and it feels more honest than Sheridan’s uncomplicated heroics.
The parenting thing is not my cup of tea either, and my reaction was that this is Strazcynski’s take on a certain strain of sci-fi I associate with the 60s and early 70s that’s tied to our actual, ahem, baby steps into space — we are a young race, we must mature and take our place in the galaxy. In Babylon 5 this winds up being a having cake and eating it too situation — there are vast, destructive forces in the galaxy, but they’re just playing games over us, the most gifted kids there are. I think this could have been developed in a more comprehensive and overarching way, the way the creator/created conflict of humans/Cylons drives everything else in Battlestar, but the good news is this paves the way for the more interesting conflict that has been simmering along in the background to come forward.
Inside No. 9, “Last Night of the Proms”
The most Twilight Zone-ish episode yet, not so much a Brexit story as a story that uses Brexit as an entry point into a larger examination of persistent English racism and xenophobia that the Remainers, too, are complicit in. (In fact, Shearsmith’s Remainer may be the worst and most vicious of the lot once things really get going; his political position turns out to be less about ethics and more about the need to feel superior to his immediate family.) It’s the last night of the Proms, when the patriotic music comes out, and one middle-class family’s tense, tumultuous evening of “celebration” is interrupted by the arrival of a Middle Eastern immigrant everyone projects their lusts, fears, and violence upon. In a big swing, it turns out this could be the actual Second Coming, but the potential Jesus winds up murdered and disposed of, his body wrapped in the flag and buried like so many of the country’s sins. And like a lot of racist acts, it lets the white people bond.
I can see why some people apparently find this messy, but I think it’s trying to do something interesting by virtue of making a forceful moral/political point without having the characters be purely vessels for that point: condemning attitudes but not neatly embodying them. For me, while that might make it say less, it makes it mean more.
Taskmaster, “Am I an Idiom?”
“It sounds like the guy who invented the telephone! The second bit goes, ‘Germany calling! Germany calling!’”
“Hedgehog, no!” (The single greatest bit of comedic perfection this series. Thank you, Sanjeev, for the perfect on-the-fly integration of Phil and Reece’s past surprising secrets + amazing delivery.)
“Passed down, ironically, from my auntie. RIP. She’s not dead, but it’s no life the way she is at the moment.”
“It doesn’t surprise me that you have got a Victorian device for electrocuting people, but you get a point more than him because it does surprise me you electrocuted a child.”
“What does connect all these things?”
“Yes, that’s the question. They’re all things—no, I couldn’t get that up my ass.”
“And I can tell you that none of that is relevant to the task at all.”
“There’s something that was in the room that is no longer in the room.”
“My enthusiasm.”
“Well, Sanjeev didn’t, at any point, notice the enormous duck, of course.”
“Couldn’t give a shit!”
“Do you feel safe?”
“Well, I did. Now I don’t, since you said that.”
“I see the orangutan and I feel good.”
“Pains. Cramp. Tired. Hurts. Cruel.”
“You fucking mean to tell me ….”
“Learn from Sanjeev: care less.”
Best facial expression: Tie between Maisie’s smug face and Reece’s flat reaction when the giant duck in the cape walks out of the bathroom (“It felt like something you would do to break somebody”).
Best mime: Not actually from the charades! It’s Phil’s “top part of a corkscrew” mime when talking about pig penises.
Best sound: Ania’s “small cat” noise when she’s running away from what she’s harnessed to.
Reverse task ownage: Greg really is terrible at charades. “Cold foot,” are you kidding me?
Should’ve won the entire series just for how funny he is this entire episode: Sanjeev. What a legend.
The Station Agent – Sad and sweet and makes exurban New Jersey look like somewhere you might actually want to live. The cast – Peter Dinklage, Bobby Cannavale, Patricia Clarkson, Michelle Williams – are all excellent. And the over meditations about loss, loneliness, and the dangers of making connections really hit home.
I should rewatch this — Dinklage is obviously superb but I remember Cannavale hitting a very good balance of pushy and friendly but not obnoxiously so.
This has been Cannavale week for me, since I also saw Blue Moon. Not an actor I’ve paid a lot of attention to, but maybe should.
Trancers — an odd little film. Cheap as hell but fun in its “Hey we’re at the punk club! Hey we’re at the tanning torture chamber!” 80s LA setting and Tim Thomerson is hilariously grouchy, especially in the early going. The Terminator-esque setup is good but Terminator has urgency, this is pretty meandering and feels weird whenever the plot kicks in. It also ends with an unrecognized horror that Source Code would bite 30 years later and that’s sour, but a decent lazy watch.
What’s Up Doc — making a live-action Bugs Bunny cartoon with Barbara Streisand is a great idea, but I cannot think of any Bugs Bunny cartoons that have an extended denouement in a courtroom so there is a rather large whiff in the ending (especially because this only exists to set up the reveal gag and that gag is obvious several miles away, the whole thing feels like padding to get to 90 minutes). And while Bogdonavich is good at the farcical stuff and any wordplay interactions he does not have the chops for larger slapstick — the big hotel room destruction is oddly flat and the car chase, while full of great actual cars doing actual shit, is similarly without the snap it needs. It brought to mind how John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein actually direct large comedy setpieces in Game Night and make them sing compared to a lot of comedic stuff now, but back then isn’t entirely a lost Eden. Still fun with some laugh-out-loud bits, Bogdanovich definitely attended the “kill wealthy dowager” class at clown college, and strong evidence in my Ryan O’Neal > Robert Redford argument, O’Neal can and will be a doofus in a way Redford never could.
Exhibit A, so to speak, in my personal “no movie is improved by a courtroom scene as its climax.” With the judge’s bench spontaneously falling apart as a wholly unnecessary wacky-ass Hail Mary at the end of the scene. Unnecessary because I laugh at something in almost every scene prior! Wish that most comedies hit the highs of this one, even if it loses a little juice at the end.
*seeing the courtroom* well this isn’t good but you can’t say it doesn’t follow from the previous carnage
*judge continues to talk about his medications* what in the fuck are we doing here, Pete
And the bench is so sweaty of a gag, “uhh uhh uhh blackout!” At least it ends the scene though, I was being driven out of my mind by O’Neal’s “Who’s on first” retelling of the plot, because it does not have that joke’s elegant structure and is relying on forced confusion that isn’t funny to begin with and is only there because, again, we have to prolong Streisand’s reveal. At a certain point in the movie I stopped trying to place which bag was where because fine, this is MacGuffin wackiness and the shenanigans are the point; the courtroom shenanigans are far too weak to justify the flimsy structure. It’s annoying because a bad ending really hurts a comedy and this has quite good stuff beforehand — Madeline Kahn is here! You have to be extremely funny to be this annoyingly unfunny as a character.
Love & Basketball – Took the Ploughgirl because she wanted to see a movie and I hadn’t seen this and it was in theaters for the day (she wanted to see Brad Pitt Goes Vroom solely because of a song on the soundtrack, I convinced her just to put the song on in the car). I appreciated the great performances from a great cast and the care it took to show the importance of basketball to characters without overstating it or making the game into something it isn’t (the claustrophobic women’s gyms I suspect aren’t true to life even in the 90s – I would think they would be playing in empty mens’ arenas – but the secondhand feeling is probably 100% accurate). Also fun to see the women’s sport grow through the course of the movie and to recognize the trajectory would go up from there. Alas, I am a romantically impaired old man and found myself restless in the fourth quarter. The Ploughgirl was not, reporting that she didn’t breathe all through the climactic one-on-one game. Victory!
Games – Starring Simone Signoret, James Caan and Katherine Ross in a not quite remake of Diabolique with Signoret playing a similar role. Socialites Caan and Ross get their kicks from playing parlor tricks and “games” on other wealthy people. Door-to-door cosmetics saleswoman Signoret just happens (or does she?) to come knocking on the door of the playful couple. Signoret also gets a kick out of duping people as a psychic, and the three decide to play one of their “games” on the Instacart guy. But who is really controlling the game? Things go from innocent fun to deadly with the film turning into a twist and turn thriller with some horror elements. It’s clever and fun but predictable and not Hitchcock, but somehow it gets better as it goes along. The reason to watch this is for Signoret projecting charm and menace. With it’s reality vs. illusion it reminded me a bit of The Magus, Sleuth and, well, The Game.
phoenician scheme. This one left me kinda cold, but it’s the first Wes Anderson I didn’t love immediately since The Life Aquatic, so I’ll have to give it a second chance.
Stylistically of course it’s great. The afterlife and near death experience scenes were beautiful, and somewhat of a departure from the staged dollhouse aesthetic. The dialogue is droll and witty. The hand grenade running gag was very dumb and it made me laugh every time. But it doesn’t cohere into a thesis statement like Grand Budapest Hotel, or French Dispatch, or Asteroid City. It felt like it wanted to be deeper and ended up shallower. I’ll see what I think later.
Muppets Treasure Island. Any movie where Kermit sword fights is great.
I am with you, both on Scheme and Aquatic; Mrs. Miller likes Aquatic a lot more and also liked Scheme much more than I did. So I think there’s a definite connection between the two, besides the similar father/estranged kid reconciliation journey plot. I also think that after the structural experimentation of Dispatch and City, Scheme’s structure suffers for being more straightforward and extremely episodic. On the plus side, Cera is fantastic, his accent reveal had me howling.
Agreed re cera.
Hmm. Might need to take up this “wes anderson working through father issues leaves me cold while I love everything he else he does (except for royal tenenbaums, but even if royal is technically the protagonist the kids’ perspective dominates the story more)” issue with some sort of cinephile therapist. Just park a big ol therapist couch in the criterion closet.
Muppet Treasure Island! Hell yeah! That sword fight is so funny.
My favourite Muppet movie, in no small part because of Tim Curry. I still get a tear in my eye when he and Jim have that final confrontation during his escape.
What did we read?
Nothing But Blackened Teeth, Cassandra Khaw
A melodrama. There’s a cool horror concept here as a vehicle for post-post-Whedon writing; characters are young modern Americans with neuroses, tangled relationships, and a willingness to escalate every conflict between them almost immediately. It’s coupled with writing that draws attention to itself.
8 Bit Theater, Strips 0720-0750, Brian Clevinger
“Y’know, I sort of assumed this whole hero of destiny thing would involve a lot less devastation in our wake.”
“So you were running out of the shattered remains of the community center for, what, your health?!”
“That is a basically correct statement.”
Excellent use of understatement and literally correct wording.
Black Mage taking a mere two and half hours to succumb to Lovecraftian madness when in the submarine is a killer gag. One of the funniest aspects of his character is his complete lack of emotional resilience, and combining that with his flowery language is so fucking funny.
“Not that I’m complaining, but where did the doom water go?”
“I have a story to tell!”
“Now I’m complaining. Where did the doom water go?!”
This is one of my all-time favourite gags in the comic. It’s a classic subversion of a cliche, and it perfectly suits Black Mage’s character and his low, completely reasonable expectations of Fighter.
“Well, that’s the worst thing I’ll ever see.”
GLSHURPLE!
“That’s what I get for daring the universe.”
Part of what makes this comic so funny is how the absurdity is also kind of relatable.
“I’m probably your newest ruling class larval head squid thing.”
“New leader?”
“But we have one.”
“You know what this means?”
“Glorious leader, we have a QUEEN for you!”
“I have made a grave miscalculation here.”
This is another of my all-time favourite gags (this entire run is on fire). BM’s response is very Blackadder in how understated it is.
“So they saw right through your disguise.”
“Maybe if you’d shut your air-hole occasionally, you might pick up some pointers from me in the twin arts of subterfuge and wantonity.”
“So they saw right through your disguise.”
“Like a window.”
Nearly done with Death of a Racehorse by Katie Bo Lillis. I have yet to get up to the part where she apparently talked about how to save thoroughbred racing, but nothing she’s said in her narrative makes me think we should save it. It’s cruel and always has been. It’s full of doping and always has been. But she loves it too much to agree with my assessment, which at once makes for a good book and removes any objectivity.
Started Southern League: A True Story of Baseball, Civil Rights, and the Deep South’s Most Compelling Pennant Race by Larry Colton. I doubt the last part of the subtitle will be true since we’re talking entirely about minor league ball, but the rest is accurate. In 1964, the minor league team in Birmingham, AL integrated, and this is both about how that team dealt with being trailblazers in the Jim Crow South, and how such a team was received in the city of Bull Connor and twenty years of white supremacist terror. So far, quite interesting both as sports history and as political history.
Katabasis, rf kuang. Much like Babel, the central
conceit here is that some sort of magic is real and that the way to access it is through being an academic at Oxbridge. In Babel, it’s with silver and language, here it’s with chalk and paradoxes. But the setting maintains a certain groundedness; no matter what fantastical stuff happens, the world is basically recognizable. The other conceit here is that through magic one can travel to hell and return; Dante, Eliot, and Virgil were writing travelogues.
It’s a fun book. It’s quick paced, lots of literary allusions. It’s smart without being ponderous. The narration uses a third party limited view that keeps us in the protagonists viewpoint but gradually peels back layers of self-deceit.