The Friday Article Roundup
Get your bearings with this week's pop culture writing from around the internet.
Which way will you turn to, lost Magpies reader?
Thanks to C.D. Ploughman for putting away childish things and sending in contributions! “Send articles throughout the next week to magpiesfar[at]gmail.com, post articles from the past week in the comments for discussion, and Have a Happy Friday!”ย
Forย The Pudding, Melanie Walsh heads a data study of how animals in chlidren’s books are gendered:
First up: childrenโs books. After filtering the data to focus on animals who were explicitly gendered (she/her or he/him) and appeared in at least 10 different books, only a few animals were more consistently gendered female: birds, ducks, and cats. The restโfrog, wolf, fox, elephant, dog, monkey, bear, rabbit, mouse, and pigโskew male. Because so much of our worldview is shaped by our environment when we are young, automatically reaching for he after โlook at the frog!โ starts to make some sense. After all, thatโs what the books say.
Atย Episodes, Emily St. James and Libby Hill attempt to parse the mythology of their child’s favorite cartoon show,ย Firebudsย and discover madness:
What’s different, however, is that it’s clear there’s some sort of deeper world-building at play in Firebuds, but creator Craig Gerber and his team only sprinkle little bits of it over the top of various episodes. For instance, the closest thing the series has to a protagonist is young Bo, a rescue-happy boy whose vroom-mate is a firetruck named Flash. In one episode, Bo and Flash celebrate their shared birthday, and you might be, like, “Oh, that makes sense! Vroom-mates are born the same day and pair-bond for life!” But no. The show goes out of its way to have Bo and Flash sing a song about how unusual it is that they share a birthday. Why does it do this? Who can say! Evidently, there’s something about this that we’re supposed to glean as important, but it’s never entirely clear.
Ethan Warren interviews John Darnielle about work ethics, ideal listeners and the right way to read the Narnia books at Broad Sound:
EW: Do you have a feeling about whether you read The Magicianโs Nephew first, or The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe?
JD: I donโt like any retconning stuff. They were issued in the order they were issued in. This is a Catholic stance. You gave me this, and so thatโs what Iโm reading. Iโm not here to reorder it some other kind of way… I mean, the other thing is, for any scene in the entire story to be first besides the scene with Mr. Tumnus just feels really short-sighted. Entering snowy Narnia ought to be your first view of the whole thing, right? Itโs not about plots or anything else. Who cares? Doesnโt really matter what order the stories are told in. What matters is your first view, your first look. And the first look you want is the wardrobe.
Crooked Marquee‘s Sara Batkie looks on Agnes Varda’sย The Gleaners and Iย on its 25th anniversary:
As with just about everything Varda makes, to attempt to describe what the film is about is to extract much of its joy. Perhaps itโs best to start where she does with a definition of what a โgleanerโ is: someone who gathers from a field after the harvest. Like a flaneur, itโs presented as a distinctly Francophone pursuit; other countries might practice it but it was perfected in Vardaโs. It was historically considered womenโs work. By the time Varda decided to make her documentary, modern machinery had made it essentially obsolete. And yet it persists, which is partly why Varda is interested in it as a subject. In an age when our culture has weaponized the concept of worth, gleaning is the art of salvaging what others have deemed disposable.
And the big comic book movie of the moment is given the antagonist it deserves — The New Yorker’s Richard Brody:
Gunnโs skill set in developing a batch of antic characters and episodes proves similarly wide and thin; itโs altogether different from the art of exploring the full potential of an idea or delving into the character of a lonely hero. The superheroic team and Lexโs cabal fight one another amid catastrophes in which fungible people are served up as collateral damage without ever getting individual voices. The top-down superspectacle follows the track of its plot with mechanical obstinacy, reserving its hearty empathy for humanity in general without imagining any particular people in it outside the protagonistโs immediate circle of friends and enemies. All of Metropolis and the world at largeโin which Superman claims free scope of actionโare simply backdrops. Despite touches of menace, โSupermanโ feels crafted for children.
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Department of
Conversation
What Did We Watch?
Live Music – my first gig in a few months, I decided to ditch the “old favourite” live staples and mostly play new stuff and it was really nice to feel like I had a full set representative of where I’m at Right Now. The headline act was local folky powerpoppers Connexion Man who are great songwriters and harmony singers, and the other supports were a new project from a guy who was in a local band that Broke Out years ago but hasn’t done much since – he was really good – and one of my best friends opening up with an acoustic set. Much of the extra-musical stuff probably deserves to be in the other thread but yeah, great times!
Wooo, your own and others’ live music!
Woot, live music and power pop!
Wooooooo live gig!!
The X-Files, “Roland”
It’s unfortunate that this comes right after “Born Again,” which is sort of similar in plot. It’s not as fun or strange, either, though I do give it points for both ลฝeljko Ivanek and a Donovan’s Brain setup.
The episode makes an effort treat Ivanek’s intellectually disabled Roland as a person rather than a prop or a set of quirks–he’s part of Deadwood‘s “wide range of normal”–and I think it does a reasonably good job of that, though it’s not my area of expertise. (I think it’s safe to say Mulder and Scully’s scenes with him are generally good, at least: they’re as friendly, respectful, and compassionate as they would be to anyone else in trouble.) I liked his quiet romance with Tracy, a woman at his care home; that emotional connection makes it even more affecting when Roland’s brain-in-a-jar brother’s puppeteering of him keeps jeopardizing Roland’s own life. Ghostly revenge stories not infrequently have the subtext that the ghosts are ruining the living they enlist to their causes–I mean, look what happens to Hamlet; he cared more about avenging his father than his father cared about protecting his happiness–and this falls squarely into that category. Roland’s twin brother uses him (almost like he’s remote-controlled, as Mulder illustrates), and at the end of the episode, Roland’s position in life is uncertain. He’s lost his job, he’s (at least temporarily) forced to leave his home, he may lose his freedom. That’s a big price to pay–not even by choice!–to protect his dead brother’s ownership of his research.
Sin City
SO MUCH EDGE. But also a total commitment to its own grim, sleazy, ridiculous pulp aesthetic and to its stylized visuals, and that’s winning in its own way. It’s funny to me how much showy blood-spilling there is here for so little effect–there’s violence but rarely pain, rarely reaction, and these rubber-and-steel people shrug off so many serious wounds that it becomes hilarious. Everything is so over-the-top that it’s completely lost sight of the circus, but again, this does have a kind of grandiose, operatic effect, especially as it accumulates strangeness and its characters start to feel unabashedly mythic. I laughed a lot watching this last night with a friend, but if I’d seen it as a teenager, I probably would’ve been obsessed with it.
โ so over-the-top that itโs completely lost sight of the circusโ is a wonderful descriptor (especially of this movie) that I intend to steal and use in my daily life.
I do enjoy that the ridiculousness of the plots and style combines with the wide scope of stories to create this bizarre effect where it’s obviously not real but also obviously feels like a lived-in place – this really is its own universe that operates on its own rules.
People don’t often talk about worldbuilding except in the context of science fiction and fantasy, but this has some very solid, effective pulp crime worldbuilding.
In terms of over-the-topness, what comes to mind most about Sin City is not the macho pulp and dangerous dames but Elijah Wood’s quiet psycho, a guy who says nothing and is creepier than anyone. And it’s a brilliant use of Wood, the most heroically frail guy in town after the LOTR movies.
I love the whiting-out of Wood’s glasses: such a great, unsettling comic book touch.
Might have to watch this again, the technology had not aged well for me but Sin City was meant to be seen on a good TV/theater screen, not the ludicrously fuzzy one in my former apartment.
It Came from Outer Space – Well, technically THEY came from outer space. A spaceship crashes in the Arizona desert and the only man who can stand between the powerful if indifferent aliens and an angry mob is an amateur astronomer. Good production values (including very good on location filming) and a solid cast and an interesting plot never quite add up to a great movie. Though I suspect this felt a lot more fresh when it came out at the start of the 50s sci fi boom. Story and some of the better dialogue by Ray Bradbury.
The Practice , “The Blessing” – The main story involves a doctor on trial for aiding in assisted suicide, with Bobby firmly in favor and Helen deeply opposed because both had personal experiences with letting someone die. On the one hand, a honest attempt to grapple with a hot button issue, on the other hand sort of pat. Though this time out, the client is found guilty. The second story involves a penny ante bnokie arrested to pressure him to snitch on his boss. Funny that over 25 years later, gambling is essentially legal in most of the US, and assisted suicide is not. Today’s guest judge is Ed Asner in his usual charmingly grumpy mode, and having a great time of it.
Frasier, “Beware of Greeks” – We discover that some years ago, Frasier gave advice to his heretofore unknown cousin that angered his Greek sister in law so much she broke all ties with not just Frasier but Martin and Niles. Now the cousin is getting married and Frasier tries to make amends, only he finds himself once more giving advice that angers his sister in law. This one is not very good. For starters, the advice is sound both times. Meaning that in order for this to work, the sister in law needs to be a harridan. Making her Greek only makes things worse. Not that Patti Lupone (or anyone else in the cast) is even a little Greek. Lupone won an Emmy for this, but for the life I mean I can’t see why unless it was for adhering to stereotypes.
I managed to see It Came From Outer Space in 3D a few years ago and it looked so cool, there’s something extra strange about the combination of 3D and B&W. It’s definitely a good looking but otherwise slightly lacking film but yeah, such cool desert locations.
Much prefer LuPone in Italian Mom stereotype mode in 30 Rock.
I Could Never Be Your Woman – For about twenty minutes, Paul Rudd heroically hoists this movie onto his shoulders and carries it farther than we thought possible in the initial going. Itโs not quite enough to make it a fully successful film, but itโs enough to keep it out of disaster territory until its quirky instincts find some footing. Whether its more irritating aspects – a bad acting Lovitz or an inane industry insider plot – outweigh its charms will depend largely on your mood, so consider this a 50/50 proposition in the underserved low-stakes comedy category.
Babylon 5, Season Two, Episode Seventeen, “Knives”
This is a good articulation of what frustrates me about this season and the show in general – it keeps suggesting fucked up shit is just around the corner and I know itโs excited to show me, and itโs deliberately spinning its wheels to artificially build excitement. If it were me making this, thereโd be much more distracting surface details to be able to swerve into the cool twists. Londoโs plot is an old friend who tries using him to protect his family, discovers Londoโs crimes, and in his outrage decides to use them to sacrifice himself to save said family. Londoโs conclusion, in which he realises heโs trapped in his own choices and decides to keep playing them to the end, is moving; Iโm with Vyr (who is gradually becoming a Cassandra figure, insightful truths that are never believed), but Londoโs resignation makes emotional sense, as if he believes he deserves whatever comes for him.
On the other hand, events of the past keep coming up time and time again; Sheridan (who is in the middle of a very Star Trek: TNG kind of plot) has the events of Babylon 4 explained to him, for example, and itโs always great and makes the viewer feel the history of the show.
There is a lot of Londo inching down a bad road this season but I think it largely works — here it brings in some fun Centuri cultural stuff and a larger emphasis on family that is very important, and because it means we spend time with arguably the show’s best character as he becomes the show’s worst person. It’d be one thing if Londo were Vic Mackey, the clear protagonist, but he’s a major character who is often not around for the human leads’ business, his relatively slow burn works for me (Mrs. Miller was getting impatient though).
Mad Men
Season 6; Episode 8. “The Crash”. Partial rewatch, I saw the latter two thirds of this years ago, though I don’t remember when, how or under what circumstances, which is fitting given how much of this episode is about not knowing where you are whether its on in time, in space, in a relationship, in the Chevie account or in your heart which might be broken or misdiagnosed due to faulty equipment but hurts all the same just like a car crash with people you hate but need to keep happy or fainting head-first into the floor when the drugs wear off or getting stung in the arm by a dart thrown by the most awkward dope in the world, or coughing your lungs out from cigarrettes or from living in the 1930’s or from getting bashed in the head for the unpardonable sin of popping your cherry with a hooker who’s actually a rather nice person just like Sylvia who’s right not to put up with telltale cigarrette butts or the silent treatment in the elevator and not at all like Ida who only feigns niceness and becomes an unsettling figure who just might be a ghost of Don’s old life and no one could know it certainly not Sally and what I realize now is that underneath all the lunacy and world-level tap dancing there’s the basis of a regular old Mad Men episode with the firms woes and Don’s personal bullshit firmly in place before the doctor’s happy shots derail the place and reveal how close everyone is to collapse and SCDPCGC is not going to stop you when you fall they’re just going to see the I-ching coins drop like bets on the side and watch even Peggy with the nice ass and underlooked personal professional wisdom and by the way Jay Cutler seems like a real wild card so far he doesn’t seem to care or even enjoy turning the office upside down for a weekend R.I.P. Jack Gleason he might be the lucky one Wendy’s probably gonna be alright.
You know, all Mad Men reviews ought to read like paragraphs out of THE SOUND AND THE FURY.
What Did We Read?
I’ve started Maximum Bob by Elmore Leonard, which feels like it’s probably going to be another mid-level effort by his standards but very enjoyable so far with a couple of classic morally-questionable characters at its centre already.
Grifter’s Game, Lawrence Block
Strong stuff, clever and horrifying. Block’s grifter is a low-level gigolo who makes his way from city to city, cultivating women and skipping out on hotel bills; low on luggage, he lifts some expensive cases from another traveler … only to find a box full of high-quality heroin along with the nice shirts and ties. He then gets involved in a heady, passionate affair with a woman who turns out to be married to Mr. Heroin, and the grifter gradually hatches a plan to have the woman and (at least some of) the money. You will know from all noir ever that this does not exactly work out, but how it doesn’t work out is more low-key and morally complex than usual … and then Block provides one of the bleakest final developments in the genre. Good, punchy, doomy prose too.
A Plague of Life, Robert Reed
People whose taste in SFF reasonably matches mine keep praising Robert Reed, and I keep reading him and not exactly gelling with any of the stories. This is a novelette with a cool premise–an alternate world where humans and animals all have extremely long natural lives, if disease and destruction don’t get in the way; the protagonist is from a family where everyone lives thousands of years, and she’s entangled in complicated drama with the patriarch of it–but aside from a cool, brutal description of a revenge, it feels like it simply peters out without much point to it. Reed’s afterword explains how one of the scenes of the story is a bit of family history, but I didn’t see much point to it in this story and I didn’t see why it would be worth passing down as family lore either, let alone why he thought it was interesting enough to include without further development.
Innocence, Penelope Fitzgerald
Thoughtful and gracefully written, pessimistic in a half-bracing, half-defeated way: Fitzgerald never seems too happy about life’s prospects, but she’s always interested in them. Set in Italy (mostly in and around Florence) in the ’50s and very specific to that time and place.
This has an ancestral anecdote at the beginning where Fitzgerald’s clear, precise prose gives you a kind of capsule Dogtooth, but one where everyone meant well, and it’s an incredibly effective horror story that kind of can’t help overshadowing, as well as informing, everyone else’s pettier struggles with relationships and growing old. I’ve read several Fitzgerald novels now, and in case, the books are quietly brilliant and I’m glad I read them, but I can’t love them and probably won’t go back to them. This was another one of those.
Two favorite bits of prose:
Describing the Ridolfi family, whose lineage has changed over the years, but:
Still a tendency towards rash decisions, perhaps, always intended to ensure other people’s happiness, once and for all. It seems an odd characteristic to survive for so many years. Perhaps it won’t do so for much longer.
And a final exchange of dialogue:
Salvatore threw up his hands.
‘What’s to become of us? We can’t go on like this.’
‘Yes, we can go on like this,’ said Cesare. ‘We can go on exactly like this for the rest of our lives.’
This is a good reminder to dig into Block, one of the big guys I have very little familiarity with. And this one sounds excellent, apparently it was his first novel?
I think it was the first under his name, at least: he did a lot in the porn market before that, IIRC. This is a great place to start (I also remember having a particular soft spot for The Girl with the Long Green Heart, but the details have faded, so I need to revisit it).
He and Westlake were close friends and sometimes collaborators, which I love–his memoir has a great bit in it about how they would try to write their softcore novels in each other’s styles from time to time to confound people who were trying to figure out whose books were whose.
I love The Blue Flower. Fitzgerald’s books all have that icy British sense of control that is horrific for an empire, great in prose form.
Oh I love this description — perfect for Ruth Rendell as well.
Love that kind of prose, and that’s a perfect way to describe it.
I’m trying to finish making my way through the Fitzgeralds I picked up after reading her biography, and I still have The Beginning of Spring and The Blue Flower left, and I’m saving the latter for last because I’ve heard so many good things.
It’s her last, her most unusual compared to her other books, the first one I read, and still her best, I believe.
Finished The Demon of Unrest by Eric Larson. Does a decent job with what happened between Lincoln’s election and Fort Sumter but doesn’t even try to get into why. And the author is just too enamored of the secessionists in South Carolina despite clearly opposing slavery and maybe supporting the decision to not let the union unravel.
Also finished John J. Miller’s bio of baseball manager Earl Weaver. As admiring bios go, this one is pretty balanced if maybe too forgiving of Weaver’s drinking problem. But only for hardcore baseball fans.
Started a new reassessment of Douglas MacArthur as a general – the author is not a fan – and a book about how long distance walking was a popular spectator sport before baseball and horse racing.
How Music Works by David Byrne, weird listening to this on audiobook with a different narrator because Byrne’s voice is so familiar to me, even in spoken form. Still, it’s naturally a pretty enthralling work, maybe 25 percent memoir largely focused on Byrne’s experiments with recording/playing music solo and with the Talking Heads, 75 percent discussing musical trends and recording techniques. The stuff about how recording in the early 20th century changed musical forms is especially new to me, like how these jazz bands were actually reducing their sound for a three minute phonograph. Plus, in 2012, he’s predicting how music is becoming more of an anesthetic and atmospheric without ever becoming Old Man Yells At Cloud. It speaks to one of Byrne’s best qualities as an artist, that he’s always interested in what’s new and what’s exciting without dismissing the trends or feeling hermetically sealed.
Zero Saints – Horror barrio noir by Gabriel Iglesias, second book I’ve read by him. Not a bad writer but his observations always feel kinda preachy and this one especially feels like a short story expanded into a novella. Think I’d rather check out some other barrio noir collections/novels for now.
I should go back to How Music Works, I got stuck on a chapter that got a bit too deep into music-business / marketing stuff that I didn’t find compelling but everything leading up to that was fascinating.
2012 feels forever ago! I bought How Music Works for my husband for our first Christmas after we started dating.
I actually haven’t finished a book this week! For the last couple of months, I’ve been reading a Lovecraft story every Saturday to put here with the intention of switching over to reading a full novel when I ran out, but I spent last weekend staying with my mother and visiting family, interrupting that plan (and not having time to read a novel in full since). That said, I’ve been reading with the tenacity and pace that I did when I was a kid; reading nonfiction has mostly replaced my mindless doomscrolling with the clear effect of clearing out my head and settling my mind, so it’s become my comfort activity. But nonfiction books also tend to be long, so I haven’t finished my current one.
The Instrumentality of Mankind by Cordwainer Smith โ This is a collection of fourteen tales by one of the masters of SF. All represent Smithโs vision of mankindโs future evolution. Undoubtably science fiction the stories are also full of magic realism, surrealism and fantasy. Itโs vivid and colorful writing, dynamic and full of energy, looking at humanism and spirituality hitting up against new and strange technology. Itโs hard to highlight a favorite story as I think each one is a masterpiece and a favorite will be different for everyone as they evolve in life navigating advances in technology and changes in society. Smith had an interesting if short life, working in military intelligence, the CIA and as an advisor to JFK. He may or may not be the mysterious โKirk Allenโ, a case study which is its own kind of X-File.
More of Stupid TV, Be More Funny, which is full of very funny anecdotes and stories behind the scenes, as well as more details about some of the aspects of the show we already knew about, particularly the cultural impact. (The Bushes… uh… barked up the wrong bush? There it is, Homer.)
Not really much else– I’ve been mostly juggling working and cleaning around the apartment and decorating– unless perusing movie scripts counts.
Hey Friends, What’s Up?
So in addition to last night being my first gig in a while, it was also kinda the “public unveiling” of my new romantic relationship, the first time we’ve been around a load of mutual friends since properly getting together. And it was really lovely! Quite a few people already had some kind of knowledge that there was Something Going On but it was so nice having it solidified into a proper thing that other people know about, and lots of them being visibly excited for us. And I finally got to play her a song that she inspired me to write, and she loved it, and we are disgustingly cute and I am loving every second of this.
Also I got offered another last-minute gig on Saturday afternoon and since I was on a high I agreed to it and now I’ll be singing a slightly different bunch of songs at a family-friendly local festival I guess? That will be… interesting. And extremely hot, if the weather forecast is to be trusted.
Work remains annoying and I’m struggling to remain engaged with it due to the vastly more positive stuff going on in my free time. I guess I need to really think about looking for something new, but it’s hard when it keeps on paying the bills so nicely…
Aww! There is nothing like the delight of being disgustingly cute with someone. And it’s great that your mutual friends were so excited about it.
Good luck with the festival, but boo about the weather. I’ve had about enough of this summer on that front.
I’m generally pro-hot-summer and especially pro-long-evenings but working from home is definitely impacting on my ability to enjoy the heat.
Last night’s venue had just installed a new fan and the breeze was *delightful*
Wooo live performance! Wooo live relationship! Booo family-friendly CENSORSHIP, do you even have any songs that don’t include “wanker?”
Only one! I’ll have to play it ten times.
This song is really starting to chafe ….
I have stuff to do at work but not a lot, and it all relies as ever on other people getting back to me. I never know how much to poke and prod people. But nothing I am waiting on can’t wait till Monday.
Rescission vote is next week. If by some unfortunate luck you have a Republican senator, please express your support for continued funding of public media. I remain pessimistic, but the only thing worse than trying to make our voice heard is not trying.
Met a friend’s new boyfriend, who we have a lot in common with – he’s not only fannish but on the standing concomm for Worldcon – but i just did not find engaging. Obviously didn’t tell the friend, but held my tongue with my wife and my mom. I feel funny saying out loud “he’s sort of a lump.”
Said wife celebrated her 50th birthday yesterday. We aren’t doing much this weekend, but our trip to Worldcon in Seattle – which is very expensive – is basically her birthday gift. We are also getting a new igniter for the oven, which is not a gift but did force my wife to go to Mom’s to bake her cake. (Some people like to be treated for their birthdays. My wife, being part hobbit, likes to do the treating.)
I would really love to go to a Worldcon someday. I hope you do a con report for us after Seattle.
I will endeavor to. Honestly, I have no idea what to expect. It could be amazing, It could be overwhelming. I already have discovered that the whole thing ends Sunday afternoon and that we could fly home a day earlier.
More job stress for the Ploughwoman and thus the house, getting quite tired of every day bringing some new catastrophe. No wonder voters keep themselves ignorant.
On the good news front, kids visited their grandparents for the past few days and we got some empty house time. Had a lovely dinner out with some friends on a scorcher of a day that was actually very pleasant in the shade. Now theyโre back and brought my sisterโs family with them for the weekend, so weโll get to see them between activities. Feels good when I have something to focus on, and between guests and school work, I have plenty to focus on.
Was picketing and helping out with the strike here but now it’s over! Boo, our mayor sucks. Onto the next crisis but I am honestly unsure how to stop the concentration camps which are rising other than getting a passport and fucking fleeing once the shit hits the fan. Even my mom said people are talking about simply not paying their taxes. (Kinda pissed at the centrists that they didn’t see how they were normalizing a bunch of this crap, is this how Weimar Republic Communists felt?) In more personal bad news, a family friend died and my mom’s in shock, though it was a long time coming. Cancer sucks.
Iโm sorry about your family friend.
Fuck cancer, I’m sorry.
I’m really struggling with the helpless feeling too.
The good: While I’ve been trying to drink less, the word I’ve been thinking of lately (and that has come up a lot in therapy) is intentionality. It turns out I have a lot of fun doing it when I’m intending to do it for some reason, whether with friends or trying a new place or it’s a day I really want to get out of the house, but not so much when I’m doing it too often or by default because I can’t think of anything better to do. Saturday night went to a new place not far from us for the second time, had some great food, great drinks, great time hanging out with the owners and making friends with them. Had a good time at happy hour, as far as I remember. And won a poker tournament after happy hour was finished, which proves either tequila is magic or poker is very silly, probably both.
The bad: Mother-in-law has been trapped in place since the Texas floods, since the creek with the only bridge out of her community flooded. But she’s safe and doing fine herself. Still thinking about trying to convince her to sell that place and move either closer to us or somewhere we can all get the hell out of this country.
The… well, I don’t have anything ugly. I’ve just been trying to get the house cleaned up and decorated, and focused on spending more time on my creative efforts. Which is probably still not enough so far, but I’m doing better than I was.
Intentionality is one of my (aspirational) mantras these days. Especially when it comes to trying to avoid the grey times when I find myself doing neither what I should nor what I would like.
That’s a huge problem I struggle with, particularly with my crippling internet addiction and my struggle to convince myself that the amount of time and effort it would take to fulfill my creative ideas will be worth it in the end.
I always wonder…was Richard Brody ever a kid? Though saying superhero movies are for kids – or worse as I remember one wag saying Batman ’89 was infantile – is a long standing critical tradition. And feels like it misses the point. Comics aren’t just for kids anymore, but they should still be for kids. (What I really wonder is why The New Yorker doesn’t assign someone else to cover this sort of movie.)
At this point, being any critic assigned to a superhero movie has to be something of a losing task. Either youโre interested in seeing another Superman movie, which is fine, or youโre like me and you know at best itโll only be a certain type of good and youโve maxed out your investment in that type of good movie. Either way, you donโt really care if this one is a good Superman movie or not.
One of the things I loved about Ebert was that he took each film as it came. He never judged a superhero film against Citizen Kane, nor a musical against a serious drams. But he was such a lover of all movies that he was able to put aside anything that would have prevented him from accepting the movie as it was and not as it should be.
Yeah, the last sentence in the excerpt is kinda laughable, YES, THIS IS FOR CHILDREN, STOP ANALYZING IT LIKE AN ADULT. You can do that with Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns, they are INTERROGATING the idea of a superhero, this is the superhero in the flesh! Do you see me doing this shit with Superman: The Animated Series? Not really! It’s for CHILDREN. (See also my angrily retorting to an entire Instagram comments thread of leftists debating whether Bruce Wayne did enough for charity, “He is a fictional character who fights frozen ice men, stop talking about him like he’s real.” No wonder the 2024 election happened.)
I add (like the nerd I am) that of course it’s been canon for ages that Bruce Wayne is charitable. Surely what they should be (not) debating is his complicity in late stage capitalism.
The FAR is learning an important lesson about editing! I left that sentence in solely because it was the one that identified the movie in question (although it is obviously not hard to figure out) — what comes before it is much more important: “The superheroic team and Lexโs cabal fight one another amid catastrophes in which fungible people are served up as collateral damage without ever getting individual voices. The top-down superspectacle follows the track of its plot with mechanical obstinacy, reserving its hearty empathy for humanity in general without imagining any particular people in it outside the protagonistโs immediate circle of friends and enemies.” This is a huge part of Gunn’s bullshit in his Suicide Squad and the third Guardians, and if anything children’s entertainment is more honest in its indifference to others — Looney Tunes is not teeming with background characters we are supposed to give a shit about. It does speak to a playing-with-dolls level of childlike morality though, and in a movie that apparently also considers Superman as international liberal interventionalist it is worth highlighting the way it falls down in a more “mature” outlook. Anyway, the review is fair and acknowledges good points in the movie and Brody is not opposed to childish entertainment — indeed, Brody has always been for the children, per his infamous (wonderful) pan of Inside Out: “I was jolted from the start by its deformation of children and of mental life.” https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/the-curse-of-the-pixar-universe
Its a fair point, but if you write a phrase anywhere near “Why is this Superman movie so childish”, I dunno, maybe you’re being a pedantic fool about a subject that is for children.
“Why is this SUPERMAN movie so childish” — dumb question about the character, Superman was created for children
“Why is THIS Superman movie so childish” — honest question about the movie, which was very much created for “everyone” in the four-quadrant sense. This is the question Brody is asking.
I’ll give you that but the New Yorker critics will sometimes throw contempt at even some very good blockbusters (Spider-Man, Dark Knight, The Incredibles) that feels less like taking the movie on it’s own terms and more scolding them, and I stopped reading those reviews because they felt so predictable and joyless. Oh, Anthony Lane hates a Raimi movie, news at 11.
How dare — how DARE — you imply I have anything but contempt for Anthony Lane. Cannot believe it took them that long to dump his worthless tut-tutting above-it-all ass. Denby ate shit too. Chang is a huge breath of fresh air but Brody has always been an honest guy, he can be cranky as hell and happily walk outside the norm (although he was also a huge verging on psycho Barbie stan!) but he has never once given me the impression of being above what he’s reviewing the way Lane did. Although I suppose in the specific case of The Incredibles, Lane was an enormous fan of at least one aspect…
I have my issues with Brody but yeah, a straight shooter. And from my long ago days promoting a film festival every January, I fondly remember that he always took an interest in the festival and selected three or four movies he wanted to screen, and usually did at least two capsule reviews. Getting any MSM outlet with limited bandwidth to cover any festival but NYFF and maybe New Directors New Films was a massive headache, and Brody always came through when almost no one else save Jordan Hoffman did.
Don’t entirely agree about Denby, but right there with you with Lane.
Brodyโs the only critic who has ever written glowingly (let alone at all) about something I worked on, so he gets a pass from me.
It’s still a Superman movie, though. It is, in fact, a four-quadrant movie, with children as one of the four quadrants. I know that we are currently dominated by cape movies (though actually we seem to be shifting to ‘dominated by sequels’) but they don’t, in fact, have to be anything other than goofy cape movies. It’s literally fine if a Superman movie isn’t that deep.
Maybe I’m missing something because I haven’t seen the movie yet, but this seems like a lot of wanting these movies to be something other than they are, when the problem is that these movies are all we’re talking about and making.
Honestly? What little I have seen of Gunn’s work has never impressed me even a little and this certainly fits with my vision of the first GotG film. There were hordes of Nova Corps members whose lives were on the line, and all of them were little more than NPCs for Groot, So maybe I need to cut Brody some slack till I see the movie (which will not be for a while since my wife and I still aren’t going to movie theaters and probably won’t for a long time to come).
There is a good monograph waiting to be written on how certain “children’s” genres spawn more adult variations that subsume the original formula, and the cultural circumstances that allow that to happen. We definitely see it start in the late 30s when the more juvenile cowboy B Westerns mature into reflections of populist American identity. Likewise, 1986 seems to be a watershed year when comic books, if not the movies, fully embraced a trend of interrogating the themes and viabilities of superhero lore. Structural economic changes, and increasing global concern of American interests requiring sacrifice spurred the Westerns maturation, and the waning of that order in the mid to late 60s kicked off a second wave of revisionism that was more brutal and knowledgeable about the injustices perpetuated in the name of American values. I suspect that the reification of patriotic, paternalistic imagery in the Reagan era provoked a certain shift in comic books as well, often as a form of resistence. Why particular genres associated with children’s cultural consumption go through this process is grounds for speculation. Are the respective culture industries trying to reflect the changes in their original consumers?
As far as the American comic book film goes, every Superman reboot seems to fully reject a full re-examination of the values and tropes associated with the character. A moss of nostalgia seems attached to the Man of Steel at the start of each reboot that pines for a postive view of American ideals forged in the Apollonian perfection of the American male image. Batman’s origin story seems more malleable across generations, in contrast, perhaps because Bruce Wayne’s flaws are too weighed in human imperfection to be fully idealized. Superman is who we desire to be, whereas Batman is who we truly are. The former may be more useful in modeling children’s behavior, but the latter serves as a gateway towards a more modern struggle to forge moral principles to social control and action.
I feel like there are Superman stories that hold up a mirror to the character and his origins and interrogate them, but none come to mind. For all that I love the character – and do draw some degree of inspiration from someone whose ethos is Do Good for All – I will readily admit he doesn’t actually inspire many writers to do something new. While as noted, Batman is constantly morphing to suit the times and that opens the door for so much.
Though I would add that very early Superman was kind of a working class hero with a limited power set and we almost never see anyone go back to that. Maybe that would be worth trying but would anyone but me be interested?
“I feel like there are Superman stories that hold up a mirror to the character and his origins and interrogate them”
Red Son comes to mind. Weird story but it does go to interesting places, and has the temerity to break the status quo, fictional and historical.
Almost the only thing by Millar – this and his run on Superman Adventures before he was famous – that i would say nice things about.
Red Son was also what came to mind for me. I thought that was a fascinating kind of nature vs nurture story.
There has definitely been some Superman revisionism but it never seems to come across when Hollywood reboots it.
I did find it odd Brody pulled this one and not Chang, but as noted above he does a fair job — it’s not a pan by any means. I think he criticizes it on its own terms and the problem is its own terms are muddled bullshit.
I finally caught up with SINNERS the other night, and I kind of agree that the use of certain genres to illustrate broader social points, tends to expose how limited those genres, on their own terms, are in articulating the issues it wants to address.
I think this is much more a Gunn issue than a genre issue — Coogler grapples with a lot and is messy, Gunn displays things that are different and in fact counter to what he is actually doing. “hearty empathy for humanity in general without imagining any particular people in it outside the protagonistโs immediate circle of friends and enemiesโ nails it — Gunn has the indifferent callousness people have long (falsely) accused the Coens of possessing.
Eek, thatโs a banger of a quote and gives me a new lens to think about my beloved Peacemaker.