The Friday Article Roundup
I kid, I kid, it's just the best pop culture writing of the week.
This week, you will feel the burn of:
Send articles throughout the next week to magpiesmedia [at] gmail, post articles from the past week below for discussion and Have a Happy Friday!
Vikram Murthi surveys the state of the comedy roast for The Atlantic:
Though a veneer of good-natured joshing persisted, a coarser approach defined by “Roastmaster General” Jeff Ross, a frequent writer of and participant at those roasts, replaced the kinetic playfulness from the Dean Martin days. On a recent episode of Dana Carvey and David Spade’s podcast, Fly on the Wall, both veteran comics pointed to the 2002 Chevy Chase roast as the moment when the format jumped from fun to foul. “I could tell there was pain in his eyes,” Carvey said. “I thought, Is this like an execution or something?” (In that same episode, Carvey announced that he has agreed to be roasted at a future date.)
For Vulture, Rachel Handler breaks down the insidious takeover of Cannes by AI:
They turned our attention to a trailer playing on a TV at the front of the yacht. It began with a voice-over, playing across scenes that looked like if Final Fantasy were made for $14. “You ever think about what happens after?” asks a woman. “After what?” asks a man. “After we stop,” she replies. An AI man falls to his knees in a forest, blue flowers surrounding him. The trailer stopped abruptly due to technical issues. The boat was quiet. “We’re not gonna flog a dead horse if it doesn’t work,” said one of the executives. They started it again.
At the LA Times, Ashley Padilla talks to Tim Grierson about creating characters for Saturday Night Live:
“I really want to be able to stop and take that pause at the beginning [of a sketch], which are the quickest things to cut because you’re trying to save time: ‘Let’s get rid of when you enter,’” she says. “What roots me as an actor is a little breath. Before we get to the jokes, let the audience see me live in it for a second. I think I’ve proven that [those pauses are] not going to suck the air out of the room. It’s actually going to assist in the blowup that we’re waiting for.”
Adam Nayman reviews Boots Riley’s I Love Boosters at The Ringer:
The goal here seems to be leveraging the aesthetics of acceleration, in the form of even more outrageously stylized sets and special effects, against the principles of deconstruction, to send a distaff heist thriller premise à la Set It Off or Widows spiraling vertiginously over the top while breaking it down into its component parts. What’s at stake in the process is whether one of America’s most dialectically minded filmmakers can wrangle, if not fully reconcile, the tonal and stylistic contradictions of surrealism and social realism—and, for an even higher degree of difficulty, those of mainstream commercial filmmaking at large.
And Jeremy Hinks interviews the Butthole Surfers’ longtime drummer King Coffey for Instinct:
When I joined at 17, I told my mom, “Good news and bad news. I joined my favorite band. The bad news is they’re called the Butthole Surfers.” She said, “I don’t care what you do, just don’t ask me for money.” We both held up our end of the bargain for forty years.
Tags for this article
More articles by Dave Shutton
The Friday Article Roundup
There's still time to experience the best pop culture writing of the week.
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 Nineteen, “Between The Darkness and the Light”
Some plot movement here, which makes it interesting. I’ve locked down that Straczinsky’s worst quality as a writer is writing too many damn words – by which I mean, he expends so many individual words on a single concept that he ends up flattening the emotional affect. There’s a good scene that articulates this – a quick comedy scene where Garibaldi, Franklin, and Lyta bicker over a water canister, where the basic concept is pretty funny but the scene goes about twice as long as it needs to. You see this across the board – Ivonova’s situation is sad, but Straczinsky flattens it by having about six different ‘great’ lines.
(I can actually think in comparison to another story with ‘too many words’, Order of the Stick, which ‘compensates’ for it by having a good ending to its monologues that summarises everything, as opposed to B5 often blathering long after the point has been made)
On the other hand, the opening scene is gangbusters, cutting constantly between Sheridan’s imagined understanding of what’s happening to him, the actual situation, and then an increased merging of the two. I love it because I could totally see the show just skipping over Sheridan’s heroic rescue.
Hacks, “Hacks”
This felt like a nice send-off, and while the emphasis was more on emotion and closure than jokes, I never mind that for a finale.
The show’s strength, as always, is knowing exactly why and when its characters would make the choices they do, and Deborah holding firm to her decision until she runs smack into the realization that there’s work she still wants to do that she can only do because of this particular set of circumstances is beautifully realized and ultimately feels a lot more life-affirming than her changing her mind purely out of love for Ava or even love for a vaguer concept of life in general. And it takes what could be typical “the finale has come full circle” back-patting, likable or not, and injects it with some real juice.
My wife repeatedly said before the finale that all she really needed was for Jimmy to be okay, and we we were both happy with how he ended up: I like that since the culture at Latitude was so dogshit he was never going to win everyone over (and wouldn’t want to work with some of these guys in most circumstances anyway), the walkouts felt realistic, and moving ahead with a smaller, more committed company makes sense and gives him and Kayla a happy ending that isn’t too sugary or unbelievable. (I do wish they had connected offices at the end rather than having her back at the assistant’s desk, even if she’s obviously not an assistant anymore. Could also have done without the reappearance of Bob Lipka, even if he’s established enough that working with him would probably be a necessary evil.) And I’m quite impressed by how the leverage here was set up. A very good bit of plotting for a season that sometimes felt like it had to blow through material too quickly.
So many great send-offs throughout here, from Marty settling for driving fast at home to Mayor Jo cutting an artery (again) at the Diva’s opening. It’s even a heartfelt love letter to Vegas (all the more notable given that so much of it takes place in Paris).
Taskmaster, “I Don’t Got Any”
“I think you’re a twat.”
[fifteen seconds of stunned Joel reaction]
“…I’ve been so nice to you.”
“You have, actually.”
“It can’t be–I mean, it can’t be ‘finger yourself silly,’ that would be outrageous.”
“He genuinely doesn’t like saying bad things about people, though. You know the worst thing I’ve ever heard him say? ‘Well, they are difficult to like.’”
“Did you find me in the end? I think I just wandered off into a park.”
“I think I became mesmerized by his thighs.”
“It happens.”
“Look, it’s no secret. I’m losing this whole show. I find reading the task the hard bit. It’s not looking great for me. The only saving grace is I’ve got a fucking egg in my pocket.”
“My fear was the people in Hollywood would be watching and they would see you jump with fear over a jack in the box that you’d set yourself.”
“I’ve always wanted to use the other side of a hammer!”
Task ownage: Amy’s censored onion story. Kumail and Joanna tormenting Alex by making him run around all the time during the bell task + Kumail winning because he’d worked out an actual strategy as well.
Reverse task ownage: Armando losing his fucking mind with the censorship task. I have no idea what happened there, and neither does, and neither does anyone else.
Tin Men- Richard Dreyfus and Danny Devito (surpringly good in the dramatic moments) play rival aluminum siding salesmen in 1960’s Baltimore who get in a prank war after a fender bender. This is a lot of fun in the mode of Levinson’s Diner (not as good, but what is?) for the first half. Whereupon Dreyfus delivers “the ultimate fuck you” to Devito’s character and it becomes somewhat more conventional. (A pleasingly frumped up Barbara Hershey becomes involved.) It’s still an enjoyable picture as Dreyfus discovers that — to his own surprise — that there is something more to him than just a fast talker swindling working people out of their hard-earned dough. But the movie is an incredible collection of “that guy” actors as the rival sales teams — John Mahoney, Seymour Casel, Bruno Kirby, J.T. Walsh, and extremely funny Stanley Brock, and plenty of others.
The other very funny notion of the film, of course, is that it’s a period piece about the distant and unrecognizable past of 20 years before. Now, 20 years hardly even seems like the past.
Husbands and Wives — Who’dathunkit, that Woody Allen of all people would make a midlife crisis movie about a college professor who *doesn’t* sleep with his student.
I think we have to recognize this as the absolute pinnacle of the Woodman’s career. Even with Annie and Hannah in the rear view and great films to come like Deconstructing Harry and Match Point. This is certainly his most committed performance as an actor (he’s funny, but funny in dialogue, not through mumbled comic asides or slapstick.) And while he still layers multiple stories within the film as he has in other pieces. they’re all more connected to each other. They serve as an amplification of the plot rather than a contrasting approach as in Crimes & Misdemeanors or the upcoming Melinda & Melinda.
Allen and Farrow (in her last appearance in this retrospective, and I’m sorry to see this amazing actress go) play Gabe and Judy Roth, who are shocked when their longtime friends Sally and Jack (Judy Davis and Sydney Pollack) announce they are splitting up after decades of marriage. Farrow is great here, completely falling apart in the face of Davis and Pollack’s calm assurances that everything is fine.
The movie then follows Pollack and Davis as they try single life, while Allen develops a close relationship with a promising writing student (Juliette Lewis). Davis makes this picture — her character is just absolutely insufferable in her criticism and horrible opinions, but at the same time drawing empathy for her anxiety and fear of being alone. (There is one just split-second shot of her in the opening scene where Pollack is explaining how everything is fine, and the cinema verité camera catches her in a tenth of a second of terror when nobody else is looking at her.) Meanwhile Pollack has what seems a great fling going with a young aerobics instructor (Lysette Anthony), but he becomes brutal in a searing scene where he’s embarrassed by her airheaded opinions. You don’t expect anything so raw and stark from this director.
Which isn’t to say it isn’t funny, because it’s incredibly funny, mostly centered on Davis in her distress (and how she inflicts that distress on others, such as a hapless Liam Neeson.) An amazing movie, as I say above, probably the best of Allen’s long and storied career. .
Sydney Pollack? Brutal on screen? Never! A director whose movies I don’t love and an incredible screen presence.
Tales From The Crypt, “The Thing From The Grave” – While Miguel Ferrer is, not shockingly, a real prick in this episode, I can totally understand committing murder for Teri Hatcher in the 90s. Despite Fred Dekker’s writing-directing credit, this is a meh episode with a thin story. (Ferrer’s fingers getting cut off by a shovel was awesome though.)
Boxcar Bertha – Apparently it’s Barbara Hershey Day here! Like many of these early for-hire Corman projects helmed by future auteurs, mostly interesting for the way it speaks to movies yet to come. But there’s a handful of moments that stand out on their own here, including a grandly orchestrated climax and an unforgettable final shot. Your drive-in goers got the guns ‘n breasts they paid for, plus just a bit more.
Old – There comes a time when children must know about magical beaches that make you old, and I don’t want them learning it from the streets. They were duly grossed out and a little frightened and hopefully they think twice about taking vacations offered on the back of pharmacy receipts.
For my part, I was more appreciative of the thematic heft in the movie – the scramble for lost years, the fight to get just a bit more time in a bad situation when maybe the solution was to contemplate the sea – and to be pleasantly intrigued by the odd visual strategies in the movie. Shyamalan as less-particular director has found interesting moments that enhance the unsettling feeling. Shyamalan as loose writer continues to range from first-draft nonsense to your-mileage-may-vary (Midsize Sedan as a rapper name played straightforward makes me chuckle in a good way, whereas even Night’s awareness of his characters’ ridiculous obsession with shouting out their occupations every ten minutes doesn’t keep it from being annoying). Kreips and Bernal end up in just the perfect spot and even the surrounding goofiness can’t take away from that.
John Cassavetes, after watching Boxcar Bertha: ““Marty, you just spent a year of your life making a piece of shit.”
Was talking to a friend about how Shyamalan is a sloppy screenwriter (or outright bad at his worst) and still an often superb and interesting visual director.
Elementary, “The Diabolical Kind” – A seven year old is kidnapped by Moriarty’s right hand man. At first, it seems she is part of the scheme, so Holmes and Watson and the NYPD are forced to work with her, but it turns out the girl is her daughter and the right hand man is scheming against his old boss. Clearly, this one is about Moriarty and Holmes, who have very quietly been corresponding since her arrest, and it’s about these two uniquely brilliant people who might actually care for each other trying to understand the world and how they might relate to it. Natalie Dormer is more comfortable in the part this time around. Faran Tahir is very good as Moriarty’s somewhat mysterious government-assigned minder. (And at the end, Moriarty has not escaped, and like other versions of the character, is sure that she will not face any sort of justice in a world she can easily manipulate.)_
What did we read?
The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler
It took me two pages to realise I’ve never actually read this book – I’ve seen the movie, I’ve read one of the sequels, but I never actually read this one and simply thought I had for some reason. It ends up being as much a Form that later works I love as the James Bond movies – The Big Lebowski, Max Payne, Sin City, Cowboy Bebop, LA Confidential, even Fight Club, and to a lesser extent Law & Order and Mad Men. And much like the Bond movies, I come to it and feel that a Form is all it is.
Reading this, it actually makes sense that neo-noir descended into pure style, because I think that’s what this does – taking this at the most good faith, this exists largely to have jokes, as Marlowe describes things; I think the descriptions of his route to places is what got me, a very Tolkien problem in the least expected place. The plot is famously convoluted, but that’s because the plot is basically extraneous, or at least a structure for Marlowe being witty and kind of an asshole.
The thematics are that people are either horny or scared, something James Ellroy managed to run away with and make something sincere and painful out of; Hammett played with a similar idea but asked ‘how do you respond to this?’. Chandler doesn’t really do as much; it’s just kind of there to make fun of. It puts his later book, where Marlowe seems to have been slowly driven insane by his world, into perspective.
8 Bit Theater, Strips 1070-1110, Brian Clevinger
“I fail to see how that’s my problem. Or fault in any way.”
“How?”
“Oh, by choice.”
“Will you stop looking in the ancient insanity box already?!”
“I’m not sure any of that is likely, and I know parts of it are impossible.”
“Um.”
“Yes, that is the correct response.”
“Only people who aren’t is have disappeared, Rogue. Should this pattern continue, we ought to be fine.”
“Temples be the ships o’ the land, everybody knows that.”
“As they say, ‘always trust an elf’.”
“They do be saying that… on opposite day.”
“Hey, we weren’t summoned from the depths of hell to argue semantics with an elf. Uh, I hope.”
“Think of them as a warm up.”
“Did someone say ‘warm up’?!”
[FWOOSH!]
“Okay. New rule. No one day anything remotely related to fire.”
“Did someone say something remotely related to fire?!”
“Okay. I deserved this.”
“Just because he’s useless now doesn’t mean he’s less useful than he used to be.”
“I’m listening.”
This pays off a few things on our way to the endgame – it finishes off Thief’s deal with the trickery god, for one thing, an explanation that’s not that satisfying but satisfying enough, and it pays off Black Mage’s deal with an explanation that’s hilariously unsatisfying. The fact that BM fulfilled his role and then fucked it up offhand, right in front of our eyes, is really good.
This also sets in motion the penultimate boss fight, where the Light Warriors refight all the boss characters – which as Nath would point out, is in the original game. It’s kind of shocking to me that I actually only have four weeks left at the pace I’m going.
Your opinions are bad and you should feel bad!
Actually, I agree that The Bog Sleep isn’t very strong as a novel and seems disjointed because it’s not really a novel, it’s a fix-up. Chandler had been a short-story writer who was told he could make more money with a novel, so he stitched together the best scenes from his previously published shorts and changed all the character names to Sternwood.
The thing I really like about it is the character of the Sternwood sisters, where it seems clearly designed from a literary standpoint that Carmen is the crazy one that leads to our hero having a romance with the much steadier Vivian. Except, no, Vivian is also a piece of work and hes smart enough to keep away from her too. This kind of playing the potential love interests off each other but the protagonist making the smart decision to stay away completely is something that few other works of any genre (including even the film adaptation of this very book) would accomplish.
But I do think many of the later Marlowe books are better, because they are actually designed as novels. They still take the same character — seemingly louche, actually deeply empathetic and suffering for it — and the same idea of him wandering into people’s distress and arriving at a conclusion mostly by accident but actually construct a book around it.
The Dark Half, by Stephen King
I felt like I should give Parker at least a week or two off to stand in for the 20+ years Stark himself took off after Butcher’s Moon, so this seemed like a good time to finally read one of the two unfinished (near-)classic era King books I’d been saving. I first read the start of this over twenty years ago, and I think, as a friend of mine also said, it’s how I first heard of Richard Stark to begin with. (Though now I disagree a little with how Thad characterizes Parker, but eh.)
This is not absolute masterpiece King, but it’s very damn good King, with a gangbusters opening–the eye in Thad Beaumont’s brain has stayed with me all this time; Malignant, eat your heart out–and some tremendously effective, eerie, and gory sequences. To use King’s iconic terrify-horrify-gross-out scale, the gathering sparrows terrify, Stark’s relentless rampage (including what we only see as aftermath, like Homer bludgeoned to death with his own prosthetic arm) horrifies, and Stark’s decaying and almost irradiated body grosses out: good fucking food here. King never quite fully embraced crime writing, generally always adding at least a tinge of the supernatural, and while this obviously has even more than that, it’s also the most hardboiled thing he’s ever written and goes pretty hard in all the Stark murder sequences, which are both clever and ruthless.
The best aspect here, though, is how destabilizing and bleak the ending is: this is not triumphant at all, and if Thad gets rid of his dark half, he pays and pays and pays for it. (And an offhanded remark in Bag of Bones, as brutal a line as King’s ever written, reveals that he paid more later, too.) There’s a lot of hard material here at the end, from Liz’s realization that the twins love and feel safe with George Stark (and that her husband doesn’t hate him nearly as much as he “should”) to that sparrow peck on Thad’s face to the loss of the budding Thad-Alan friendship to that final line/image.
Blanche on the Lam, by Barbara Neely
Mystery novel from 1992. I’d somehow thought this was earlier, but that’s probably part of the point: it’s about a Black maid in the South (at least in this book), and so Blanche has to live in a world that’s never even fully acknowledged that the Civil War ended. She’s contending with a lot of white people who are still, willfully and (very occasionally) otherwise, sticking with the expectations, manners, and customs of an earlier age.
The actual mystery here is no great shakes–part of it is easy to guess, and the rest of it gets revealed via a slightly clunky villain monologue–but Blanche’s POV is terrific and (sadly) still unusual. She’s frank, unapologetic, sharp, analytical, and poignant; there’s a lot here that doesn’t often get explored, from the way her hard-won love for the niece and nephew she takes care of doesn’t mean she’s not secretly relieved to have a clear excuse to be away from them for a while to the complex and often one-sided (though in various meanings of the word) emotional entanglements between Black servants and their white employers. (And all the masking the Black characters have to do around the white people they work for: there’s a fantastic, funny, bitter line about Blanche speculating that the old view that slaves were happy must have come from someone observing them right after an overseer died.)
Blanche also winds up with an interesting semi-friendship with Mumsfield, a white man in the family she’s working for who has Mosaic Down Syndrome and so also isn’t counted as quite real by most of the people around him; she doesn’t like that she cares about him, and she’s constantly pushing back against it, and the ultimately touching end of their emotional arc involves a permanent boundary that Blanche has to place and that he accepts and understands. Good, rare stuff. Looking forward to reading more in this series.
”Ankle Snatcher,” by Grady Hendrix
Finally, a short story brave enough to ask the important question: “What if Stephen King’s ‘The Boogeyman,’ but shit?”
Started When We Cease to Understand The World, already really enjoy the way Labut’s mind is making connections between Franz Haber, Dippel, Hitler, and cyanide, maybe because this is similar to how my mind functions. All the pieces matter.
Four plays by Henrik Ibsen, staggering stuff and if Zoe has not read or seen these, she should. Hedda Gabler and A Doll’s House especially are masterpieces, with Hedda a fantastic dramatic character in her diabolical machinations and how those often fail because she can’t predict every behavior. On some level we want her to win, even if this has a terrible cost to the people in her orbit, because of the sheer ownage in her “need to control another person’s destiny.”
I’ve read The Doll’s House (and loved it), but not anything else! Sounds like it’s past time to correct that.
Because Internet – A pop linguistic analysis of the way the web has changed our writing with a durable enough thesis and observation to hold up even being written pre-pandemic (maybe internet writing reached a plateau after social media became available on phones). The main takeaway is McCullough’s observation about the massive corpus of informal writing now available for the first time in history, meaning there are now two distinct and evolving systems of written communication (formal and informal) which for centuries was true only for speech.
Clint: The Man and the Movies by Shawn Levy (the film critic and not the director) – The new book about the iconic actor and director was recommended by both a friend and by David Sims, and so far it’s quite good. (I am just up to Bird.) Levy is working to be between the lovefest by Richard Schickel and the dismissiveness of Patrick McGilligan and so far he’s doing this. Levy is willing to praise and equally willing to toss brickbats (he hates the films with the orangutan!), but works to judge the movies on their own merits. And he is not afraid to criticize Eastwood the man but doesn’t go out of his way to do so. In short, this feels honest. The most interesting discovery thus far: if Clint Eastwood is in a movie, he was almost always the producer and had a say in who directed. I am looking forward to seeing how he ended up doing In the Line of Fire.