The Friday Article Roundup
The best and cheekiest pop culture writing of the week.
This week, you will butt into:
Send your own submissions throughout the next week to magpiesfar [at] gmail, post articles from the past week in the comments for discussion, and have a Happy Friday!
At The AV Club, Kyle Turner interviews the people in charge of cinematic images to determine why movies look so bad now:
Cinematographer and director Jake Moore says that, to increase efficiency, more cameras are being added to shoots: “When you have two, three cameras, that changes the lighting plot, because Camera A can’t catch Camera B’s light, etc.” This results in lighting setups designed to be primarily unobtrusive: top lights that hang from the ceiling or are placed high up and emit little more than a soft and even glow, or single light sources that are faster to strike….This desire for efficiency collides with an assumption that all could be fixed in the post production process. “It’s awesome that you have all of these knobs and buttons that can do everything you like,” [cinematographer Steven] Yedlin says, “but not if you need to use all of them in order to just get to a baseline before you can even finesse it.”
Damien Davis writes for Hyperallergic about what it means for an artist to lose their archive:
Years ago, I couldn’t afford the payment on a storage unit in the neighborhood of Greenpoint in north Brooklyn, where I had been keeping a large portion of my work. Sculptural components, unfinished pieces, modular elements, things that only made sense in relation to one another. The unit was auctioned off….One of the works that was broken apart and sold off from my storage unit had been part of my exhibition For Demetrius at the Sugar Hill Children’s Museum in 2019. The show was named for my late brother, who died from sickle cell disease in 2009, and it marked the tenth anniversary of his passing. That work was never meant to circulate casually. It was an act of remembrance, a way of holding grief in form. Knowing that it had been dismantled and redistributed without context was emotionally devastating in a way that is difficult to explain. It felt like a second loss, quieter than the first, but no less final.
Zach Vasquez looks at a new documentary series tracking the Mob’s influence in Hollywood for The Guardian:
[Agent Lew] Wasserman and [lawyer Sidney] Korshack are two of the central figures in this middle chapter, as they were at the heart of a cadre made up of Jewish gangsters and businessmen known as the Supermob, or, alternatively, “the Kosher Nostra”. The Supermob ran every aspect of Hollywood, from casting to funding to unionizing – as well as off-the-books wheeling and dealing, such as negotiating the release of Frank Sinatra’s kidnapped son – but, as summed up by series narrator Jeff Rechner, “where the mob once used violence to exercise control, these new figures wield the boardroom as their weapon.”
At Mubi, Will Sloan follows the giant footprints of Godzilla across the years:
The “Godzilla” series reached the height of its popularity in the early to mid-’60s. By the late ’60s and early ’70s, it suffered the usual audience erosion that afflicts aging franchises—further abetted by the rise of television in Japan, which had a devastating impact on the local film industry. It was during this period, when the series was becoming strictly children’s matinee stuff, that Jun Fukuda became its primary director. A modest journeyman capable in many genres, Fukuda professed no particular affinity for his giant-monster assignments: “I don’t think that any sequels to the first Godzilla should have been made,” he told Cult Movies magazine in 1994. Asked in the same interview which of his “Godzilla” films was his favorite, Fukuda replied, “None of them.” Asked if there were any films with which he was especially unhappy, he replied, “Many.”
And former Allmusic editor Stephen Thomas Erlewine remembers rock critic Dave Marsh, and his influence on one of the great creations of the internet:
The length of The Heart of Rock and Soul allows Marsh to indulge in such contradictions but, more importantly, it gives him space to offer context and create unexpected connections between genres and eras….I read The Heart of Rock & Soul as much as The New Rolling Stone Record Guide, maybe more, but it wasn’t until adulthood that it influenced my critical approach more than The Blue Book. The essential lesson I learned from The Heart is that great records can be found anywhere. They can be buried in the past or cut within the last year. They could be inescapable upon their release or only find an audience years later. This omnivorous ideal powered me and my colleagues at All Music Guide as we built the repository of album reviews and artist biographies that became known as the Allmusic database.
Tags for this article
More articles by Dave Shutton
Picking the best of the unpicked discs.
The Friday Article Roundup
Wall to wall coverage of the best pop culture writing of the week.
The Friday Article Roundup
Not to be confused with the best pop culture writing of the week.
The Friday Article Roundup
Taking a break with the best pop culture writing of the week.
Department of
Conversation
Come on, man.
To be clear, this is not just any ass, it is the ass from the movie Ass, as seen in Idiocracy. A movie literally looking like ass!
What did we watch?
Babylon 5, Season Five, Episode Nine, “In The Kingdom of the Blind”
Here we go – Byron and the telepaths have finally become interesting by, ya know, actually doing something. The scheme is pretty good in that it’s not perfect – a stance is being taken, and events are set in motion, and there’s no way the Allied races would just lie down and take it. It’s even got a pretty clear and good goal; a world to settle on. I even thought about it, because they could have taken just about any world, but I suppose it’s harder to find a good world than that, and a specific world would make it so much easier. Also, Byron is revealing he has the fortitude but maybe not the patience to do what he’s trying to do. He could have started this shit like six episodes ago and it would have ruled, but whatever.
Bob’s Burgers up through the movie and a bit further
The movie was interesting in how it was An Episode Of The Show But Bigger – TV writers are notoriously bad at translating to film mostly because they’re not used to the pacing that comes with it. I think BB makes it work by having two major plots and several smaller ones, and it’s amusing to see a much greater level of detail – not just literal background detail or even shadows, but how much fun the animators have in creating different kinds of movement, like Bob and Linda’s dance early on.
Curious to see where the show goes from here; I have the impression it gets much more sentimental post-movie, though I haven’t noticed a difference yet.
11:14
A very simple little post-Tarantino movie – five stories, all of which have a major event happen at the same time, crossing over in various ways. The difference between this and Pulp Fiction is that the story is much more tightly interconnected; the cheapest examples being when characters simply drive past the results of each other’s actions, totally baffled, but there are a lot of subtler connections, and things are basically hooked together very dramatically.
Seinfeld, S9 “The Junk Mail” – not a particularly memorable one, although George’s attempts to horrify his parents by dating his own cousin are pretty entertaining. Needless to say, he ends up more traumatised than they do. Enjoying the more regular presence of Puddy / Patrick Warburton in this season, he’s an excellent scene-stealer. Also, unexpected Wilford Brimley!
“They said it’d be a mailman I know AND YOU’RE A MAILMAN I KNOW!” is top-tier Kramer delivery.
City On Fire — finally catching up with this and man, Tarantino really did gank a lot, didn’t he? But he also excised the girlfriend shit, which is not exactly bad but it is not doing a lot either — the dude relationships are so much more interesting here. Woo would improve on this in pretty much every way (including our two absolute kings in Danny Lee and Chow Yun Fat) in The Killer but not being The Killer is hardly a crime, this rips too and Lam’s violence has a raw charge of its own.
Exit 8 — a dude gets lost in a repeating subway corridor and can only get out if he notices shifting differences on each passthrough, Shylock Fox fans experienced at Spotting The Difference would presumably be fine here. This is a spatial loop movie as opposed to a time loop movie and director Genki Kawamura does good work moving in this repetitive setting (although the opening first-person segment is rough sledding, get your video game ass shit out of my movie man) and putting the viewer in the same place as the characters — more than one person is in here. The broader thematic stuff about fatherhood anxiety is much weaker but oh well. Not a bad flick if not as good as its potential, on Shudder.
I am enjoying your outrage at video game shit being included in a movie adapted from a video game
Ahahahahaha I did not realize that about the source! Makes things a bit clearer.
Ruthless People – “Spandex Miniskirt King” Danny DeVito is scum. He stole the basis for his company from Helen Slater and Judge Reinhold. He married Bette Midler for her father’s money and loathes her and is planning to kill her and run off with Anita Morris. And when Slater and Reinhold kidnap Midler and threaten to kill her, things couldn’t be better. Of course, things fall apart for Danny and get better for Bette and Helen and Judge, though along the way there is a lot of physical comedy and cringe comedy and a scheme by Anita and her other boyfriend, himbo Bill Pullman, to blackmail Danny. Some of it works, some of doesn’t, but for the most part the cast is game and the ZAZ directing team does well enough with a plot that matters as much as the gags. DeVito is in his element here, naturally. Bette less so as she isn’t great being over the top. And boy is this an 80s movie, with a house full of Memphis style furniture and fashions to match. Some plot holes, and one element that bothers me: Bette, while being held hostage, loses 20 pounds in a week. Never mind how unhealthy that is. She has slimmed down to 120. Meaning that “fat” Bette was a mere 140. As ever, women cannot be too thin, but it’s fine for Danny DeVito to be, you know, Danny DeVito.
Elementary, “You’ve Got Me? Who’s Got You?” – The reference to the Chris Reeve Superman movie ties into a story about the murder of a “real life superhero” (people in gaudy costumes who take inspiration from the comics and engage in neighborhood watch activities, sort of like the Guardian Angels but sillier). The story at once looks askance at such people and respects that they want to make a difference, even as Sherlock takes a similar attitude about the comic books that inspired this specific cosplayer. (He is especially tickled by the death of the Masked Ranger “going over a waterfall in the embrace of his worst enemy.) This was the first American script by Paul Cornell, the man who parlayed his success writing Dr Who novels and radio scripts into work on the actual show, and from there into a career that includes writing for DC Comics. So while Sherlock was created by Who alums, Cornell is the only person to write Holmes, the Doctor, and Lex Luthor.
Barney Miller, “Doomsday” – William Windom shows up at the squad room wearing a bomb and demanding the arrests of the mayor, city council and governor, since everything is going to hell and something has got to change. At once darkly humorous and just dark, with worries about the “sea of sludge” that was discovered in the Atlantic in the 70s and was thought to be coming to NYC. Meanwhile, future cast member Steve Landesberg is a “priest” peddling stolen bibles, but it’s never clear whether he’s a con man or a crooked cleric.
Real life superheroes were a thing for a bit in the 2010s so this tracks (I remember one RS article about them.)
I remembered this. My wife had never heard of it, and a quick search shows the fad ended. (It’s always a bit depressing and chastening to me that the superhero fiction I love is total and absolute rank nonsense in the real world. Batman is awesome as a fictional icon. He is just stupid in reality.)
What did we read?
Lenin: A Biography, Chapter Five, Robert Service
This covers the final years of Lenin’s schooling and his transition into adulthood; like Stalin after him, he never really has a ‘real’ job and sees the Revolution as his real job. Service goes into detail about the hardening of Lenin’s morality; notably, there’s a famine that Lenin is completely indifferent to as it strikes him as a natural extension of his beliefs of the development of capitalism into socialism. This is an extension of his general preference of books and theory over actual people and his general contempt for peasants.
The Power That Preserves, Stephen Donaldson
The third and final entry in the first Thomas Covenant trilogy, and it does a pretty good job at wrapping up the story. I think the Quest arc is my least favourite kind of arc because the narrative is basically predictable; yeah, the hero is gonna get out of this one, and the story will end when they finish the quest, and we’re all just waiting it out. This climaxes with Covenant finally finding peace with the whole ‘being alive’ thing; this is a narrative about despair, which is basically what it said it was gonna be. That said, I did have a lot of affection for his relationship with Foamfollower, and I was moved by how he ended up destroying everything of value to him but choosing to go on anyway.
Ultimately, the first Thomas Covenant trilogy fits roughly into the pre-Tolkien planetary romance genre (think John Carter*) and neatly into the Narnia side of high fantasy. It has the same premise as Narnia, of course, but more importantly the action and world are part of a metaphor for a real-world issue; to a fault, I think, in that the Land feels very generic (right down to the name), and only rarely did I end up caring about characters as characters. Comparing it to Lewis’s work ends up serving it favourably; it has a neat, clean writing style that never got in my way. My main fault is that it hasn’t got enough ideas; I’m not specifically asking for Santa Claus but ironically, it would be served by having the density of Lewis.
Next fantasy series: <>em>The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks.
*This speaks to the flaws of my approach to this project. I started with Lord of the Rings as the origin of high fantasy, but much of it is also influenced by Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E Howard.
It is really fascinating – and also depressing – how little room in the Soviet revolutions there was for the vast majority of the Russian population. Peasants don’t count as workers and I have no idea why.
Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe – further adventures through the Guardian’s top 100 novels. I hadn’t heard of this one before (which I’m sure is on me, it seems to have been a bit of a breakthrough for African literature) but really enjoyed it, a quick, punchy read. It’s about a man in pre-colonial Nigeria who has rebelled against his lazy, arty father by becoming tough and motivated, and rises through the ranks of his village until tragedy strikes and he gets exiled. During his exile, Christian missionaries arrive and everything begins to change. It’s interestingly even-handed, I guess I expected the arrival of everyone’s least favourite guys (white guys) to be more of a creeping evil but the storytelling here isn’t as… erm… black and white as that. Sorry. It’s a fascinating time capsule and the author wrote two more books that follow this one, I’m curious to explore more but not until I’ve made some more progress on The List.
It was actually inspired by the author reading Heart of Darkness and thinking it was the most racist things he’d ever read. I agree that given this, it’s great how even-handed it is – but it makes sense, when the goal is to write Africans with humanity.
Heart of Darkness is another blind spot that I’ll be filling for this list, so I’ll bear that in mind!
Working my way through In Search of Godzilla: Myth, Stagecraft and Politics in Ishiro Honda’s Masterpiece, a long essay (or maybe short book) by Rick Wallach. Wallach was a noted Cormac McCarthy scholar. I was also loosely acquainted with him through Craig Calcaterra’s baseball newsletter, where he would post as Old Gator, a crusty fan of “the Feesh” – the Marlins – who I imagined sounded like Charles Napier. The book addresses Godzilla from multiple facets, and goes beyond the usual “Godzilla is a metaphor for the Bomb” to address how WWII and other elements of Japanese culture are present in the movie, and he talks a lot about the connections between Honda and Kurosawa. It’s a bit a slog at times since you can feel Wallach’s academic roots showing, but I think it’s worthwhile.
A McCarthy scholar strangely sounds apt for this material; the tone I didn’t expect and got from Godzilla was a real sense of awe and karmic justice. These violent delights have violent ends.
Nightmare Alley – Much discourse in retrospectives about this incredible, bleak book about it’s femme fatales and per the Post, “Dostoyevskian” nihilism – accurate! (Less so with the femme fatales, more on this in a minute.) Nightmare Alley portrays how easy it is for Stanton Carlisle to bilk the “rubes” with his spiritualist and mentalist acts – he’s of a piece with A Face In The Crowd’s Lonesome Rhodes and Mad Men’s Don Draper as hucksters who have had to destroy their identities to get ahead in a society built on scamming. This ultimately destroys Stanton’s soul, his fury, exploitation of every single person, and sheer lies chipping away at him until he’s a husk of a human being.
However, Gresham’s novel does have a real core of morality to it that doesn’t seem to be discussed much, perhaps understandably, given the whallop of the ending. This is hinted at in how it is structured according to the Major Arcana of the Tarot. The chapter titles and subtitles suggest the character’s fates and how the Great Stanton is wrong about how we as individuals are merely flung into a filthy, evil, pitiless world. There IS a greater order here and assuming there is nothing else – or only Stanton’s hokum – is folly. The Post mentions femme fatales but only Lillian truly counts as a pure, evil Machiavellian. (Molly is a Freudian creation and an innocent, and it tracks that she gets a truly happy ending according to the book’s ethics and noirish, latent sexist ethos.) Zenia, Stan’s mentor and former lover, is his real foil because she isn’t a bad person. Gresham portrays her fortune telling as fakery. Zenia, however, seems to use it to give sage advice, to “follow human nature” but not for Stan’s corruption and cruelty. She’s not perfect and yet she has a code of beliefs, using the Tarot to see the future, and acts according to solidarity with other carnies and freaks. (Nothing in the book suggests the Tarot cards are wrong either.)
Hilariously, Stanton even meets a Black labor agitator near the end who calmly refutes his cruel, selfish bullshit line by line, musing that if you see sex as filthy, you’ve chosen to perceive it that way, and that we are not thrown in the world. The non-spiritual order sucks shit, but we don’t have to suck. We grow into what we are and choose our actions. It’s one of many chances Stanton gets to see the world differently, and to be better, but he will not take it. His descent into soused, poetic madness is what helps make Nightmare Alley so memorable, a haunting, powerful novel of the American ethos taken to it’s ultimate, insane end.
The Light In The Piazza by Elizabeth Spencer – Coming to this in part from the musical score; this is quite different as the book musical is more expansive, incorporating different characters’ points of view and emphasizing Clara’s romance (and struggle for agency). Nelson’s novella is a tight, insightful, often dryly funny character study of a middle-aged American WASP housewife on vacation in Florence, and the machinations she takes first to keep her disabled daughter away from the handsome young Italian she falls for, and then to get them married. It’s my favorite kind of character study because it allows the reader to make their own judgements regarding Margaret’s quick thinking and often incredibly insightful manipulations of her husband and her daughter’s potential father-in-law. It’s also a depiction of a very Anglo-Saxon, controlled woman becoming swept up in the seeming irrationality of love and the Italian mindset then using logic to make her daughter happy. There’s real insight here; despite the moral ambiguity of the ending, perhaps the best approach to life is to use emotional decision-making and logical problem-solving to create your best outcomes.
Lonesome Dove – A bit more than halfway through. Every other sentence is superb and the rest are really, really good. Less How The West Was Won and more Why The Hell Did We Win The West? Augustus embodies this in his little rants about how he and Call as Texas Rangers merely made the country safer for bankers and lawyers and it’s in the depictions of weird-ass settlers living entirely in isolation, and plains so empty that they’re actively depressing to the outfit. An obvious influence on Deadwood’s focus on peculiarities and the glory of the English language (biggest difference being that the characters leave the town).
Year of the Month update!
This September, you can write about any of these movies, albums, books, etc. from 1937.
Sept. 4th: Gillian Nelson: Moose Hunters
Sept. 6th: Tristan J. Nankervis: Lenin in October
Sept. 18th: Gillian Nelson: Pluto’s Quin-pup-lets
Sept. 20th: Tristan J. Nankervis: The Hobbit
Sept. 22nd: Lauren James: Stage Door
Sept. 25th: Gillian Nelson: Donald’s Ostrich
And there’s still time to write up any of these movies, albums, books, etc. from 2001 for this month!
TBD: James Williams: Millennium Actress
Aug. 21st: Gillian Nelson: Disney’s California Adventure
Aug. 27th: Cori Domschot: The Mummy Returns
Aug. 28th: Gillian Nelson: Walt Disney Treasures