The Friday Article Roundup
Good grief, it's the best pop culture writing of the week.
This week, you will get advice about:
Send articles throughout the next week to magpiesmedia [at] gmail, post articles from the past week below for discussion and Have a Happy Friday!
For Architectural Digest, Nicole Gates Anderson looks at how a Peanuts art exhibit showcases home interiors:
The bubble Schulz created for his characters echoed the neighborhood of the artist’s upbringing in St. Paul, Minnesota, and later on, his postwar tract home in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The houses stayed consistently ranch-style with gabled roofs, allowing for only slight variation over the decades. In many ways, Peanuts could have been set in any neighborhood in any suburb across America, and that, say Peanuts scholars, was the point. To the average American in the 1950s and ’60s, this typology was not only familiar, it matched their own reality, and, as [Charles M. Schulz Museum curator Benjamin] Clark notes, “projected normalcy.” These backdrops provided a neutral canvas for Schulz’s characters as they got in and out of trouble, squabbled, and dispensed advice, however dubious, from Lucy’s psychiatry booth.
Due to an unwanted family member’s presence, Christopher Connor fails to review Tom Lin’s latest novel for The Oakland Review of Books:
Tom’s novel sits on my coffee table, which sits in front of couch, but a worse couch, not the Alabaster-colored Pottery Barn couch that we had to finance when we first moved down here, that my sister-in-law is sleeping on. I love this couch. It’s where I sit, lonely in my house, and read the books for review. I have not sat on it since mid-March. “Why don’t we go get some beers?” I say to my sister-in-law. She loves getting some beers. I look once more at Tom’s novel as I close the door. I think about Tom’s novel as we walk to the restaurant.
Scott Feinberg takes down the opinions of an anonymous Emmy voter for The Hollywood Reporter:
Best Movie: This category is not “television movie” anymore, just “movie,” which is as close as we’re going to get to them acknowledging that it’s no longer about MOWs [Movies of the Week] and, for the most part, is now just filled with movies that weren’t good enough to get a theatrical release — what a fucking joke. I never heard anything about Miss You, Love You or People We Meet on Vacation, so I didn’t watch them. I refused to watch Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan — first of all, enough of Jack Ryan, and second, I hate Amazon, I don’t buy Amazon products and Jeff Bezos should stay the fuck out of our business.
Franklin Schneider examines one of the most profitable and popular movies right now at Slate:
The animation, which was created over the course of five years by a mother-and-son team, Xin Yumeng and Sun Lifang, using secondhand architectural modeling software, has the stiff polygonic look of a PlayStation cutscene from the ’90s, and the movie unfolds at the pace of an Éric Rohmer film….Fang Jun, a 52-year-old graduate student in photography in Taipei, caught a showing of Niu Lai during a trip to see family in Guangzhou. “I originally thought it would be a film so bad that it becomes interesting,” he told me via DM. But he changed his mind after seeing the movie. “It is an art film, a magical realism one,” he wrote. “It even has some expressionist undertones.” He pointed to its symbolism, such as several long shots of a sinister cross-shaped tree, intended apparently to foreshadow the mother cow’s incipient martyrdom at the teeth of a pack of wolves. (If there’s a theme running through this disjointed film, it’s Mother Knows Best, Always Listen to Mother, Mother Will Gladly Die for Her Son. I imagine there was a good bit of eye-rolling as the son painstakingly animated yet another scene that ends with Wise Mother 100 Percent Totally Vindicated.)
And Lindsay Zoladz considers the contradictions of Olivia Rodrigo’s Daisy Chain Fields at the New York Times:
The festival persistently megaphoned messages of equality, but it still offered the best views of the stage to those who had paid $1,250 for special “pit access” tickets….Can a mainstream music festival ever be a truly utopian space? Probably not, and these are some of the same complaints plenty of people might have about Coachella or Governors Ball. But I air these grievances in keeping with the beliefs that Rodrigo encouraged throughout Daisy Chain — that improvement is always possible, that learning is a vital part of change, and that, even in a space as rife with noxious misogyny as the music industry, the status quo can indeed be radically reimagined, preferably with a sprinkle of Stevie Nicks’s gold dust.
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Department of
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What did we watch?
Babylon 5, Season Five, Episode Eleven, “Phoenix Rising”
This episode almost works – all the way up to the crappy ending. I actually found myself liking Byron; partially because his backstory is actually pretty cool, giving him a relationship with Bester and locking in his character a bit, but mostly because he’s actually doing things now; sacrificing personal relationships for his ideals. It all falls apart in the end, naturally; the main problem is this should have been happening about nine or ten episodes sooner, and Byron shouldn’t have pointlessly killed himself, and things would escalate from there.
Also: this has a lot of Bester owning. At one point, he reflects that everyone likes talking to him, which feels pure Bester; partially because he’s getting sidetracked in a monologue, but also because it’s him genuinely being amused by that fact and knowing that being a bad guy doesn’t make him uncharming.
Raging Bull – More like “Raging Bore.” A ton of filmmaking acumen that successfully captures both the past and the violent spectacle of boxing, attached to a rather uninteresting story about a reprehensible man. There is both little to like about LaMotta and little effort to let us get inside his head, and two crying jags do not fill that void. And it’s just impossible for me to like a man who abandons his wife for a 15 year old. But beyond that, it feels like we just move from event to event in a rather bland way. The performances are generally good, but not much more than that.
Elementary, “Henny Penny the Sky Is Falling” – A quantitative analyst is murdered because…honestly, I am not sure why he was murdered, but it has something to do with a research paper he submitted to undermine research into killer asteroids to benefit companies planning asteroid mining? The ideas are interesting, the execution all over the place. The most interesting thing is that Sherlock went to boarding school with someone intended to be British white Neal DeGrasse Tyson (presumably without the sexual harassment accusations). Richard Thomas guest stars as the victim’s boss and for once the biggest guest in the cast is not the killer. Meanwhile, Sherlock is reluctant to let himself be included in a citation being given to Gregson’s team, maybe because Gregson makes a speech to that team is the biggest dose of copaganda the show’s done so far.
First chunk of the Lonesome Dove show, watched with my mom. This is a shockingly good adaptation of what must be a difficult book to get right given how it’s third-person omniscient, taking on every single perspective. I expected Duvall to play Call and instead he’s having such a good time as Augustus.
There is a bit of janky special effects but otherwise this is fantastic, perfectly cast across the board. Duvall could play Call but he’s a joy as Gus and Jones is perfect for Call’s stolidity.
Jones when he silently reacts to Jake and Gus talking about Maggie and Newt’s paternity alone speaks to why he was cast as THE Western Stoic. (I’m pretty sure he’s playing older here as I don’t think he had white hair, or appeared with white hair, until the late 90’s.) I got a kick out of seeing semi-baby Chris Cooper, talk about an actor who is permanently middle-aged in my brain.
After Hours – I’ve really been looking forward to revisiting this, it’s one of those films I solidly enjoyed on first viewing (probably 15 years ago) but the way it has stuck in my head made me think that a second viewing would catapult it up to favourite status, and indeed that was the case! I generally love “one crazy night” movies and this might be the best of them, it’s such an unusual take on dark comedy and continues to be delightful scene to scene even as it gets darker and darker. All of the eccentrics that Griffin Dunne encounters on his bleak jaunt through the city are wonderful, and the scene where he recounts the entire plot of the film late on is hilarious. Definitely top-tier Scorsese.
To piggy-back on Simon’s comment, AFTER HOURS works better for me than most of Scorsese’s 70 films in that the protagonist’s motivation, and thus the film’s POV, is clearly articulated and is at the center of each action. The reaction of the SOHO community is also comprehensible due to the context in which Paul, as an outsider, intrudes on their world (this really flips the urban eschatology of 80s Hollywood on its head, come to think of it). While Scorsese was a technically imaginative filmmaker prior to this, his confidence as a storyteller didn’t really develop until this.
From Russia With Love — I had heard of but was not really prepared for the level of spying in this movie, which is not Le Carre in tone or meticulousness but is still much closer to him than where the series goes. And what’s really weird is how much of a chump Bond is in this, at multiple points he only survives because the person with a gun on him does something incredibly stupid and it feels like the movie suddenly realizing “oh shit, this guy needs to be kept alive.” Robert Vaughn rules and the fight in the train is nicely brutal, if anything Vaughn is presaging Day Of The Jackal in his meticulous planning and execution for a lot of the movie. Insanely bad theme song!
Failure To Launch — a little while back we watched Dorothy Azner’s 1931 movie Working Girls, which follows two young women who live in a boarding house with strict rules about comings and goings and where men are certainly not allowed, and their various courtships and machinations on the way to marriage, which despite their actual work is still pretty much the main option for a woman. It’s nearly a century old and depicting social restrictions mores that have disappeared, and yet it feels easier to grasp than the plot mechanics here — not that Sarah Jessica Parker runs a fake girlfriend service (this actually feels like it could’ve been done in the screwball era) but that Matthew McConaghuey is somehow driving away would-be partners with the reveal that he lives with his parents — is this remotely a stigma in this economy? Anyway, he also has a pretty solid emotional reason for doing so that the movie reveals in the last act, it makes his parents’ plot the act of psychopaths. The whole movie is dopey to the point of self-parody, as Caroline Seide pointed out, but this really knocks it over the cliff. Mrs. Miller pointed out how SJP’s character would make a lot more sense in New York City rather than whatever weird gormless version of Baltimore this is, the movie’s sense of place is terrible and the soundtrack even worse. Fortunately a lot of wine was consumed.
One other think I like a bout FROM RUSSIE WITH LOVE is that the spycraft carries with it a theatrical flair for metaphor, distraction, and spectacle, offering a hint of Powell and Pressburger Britishness into the proceedings. Bond’s fallibility, and a sense of imminent danger in the film’s back half, is nicely handled as well.
Something that Connery and Craig share is real vulnerability; when there’s a spider in Bond’s room in Dr. No, he’s genuinely scared and sweaty, relieved once it’s dead.
Fitting that Vaughn became a great older tough guy of the 70s, he belongs to a harder era than the one that produced this movie (though I like it).
Season 1 of Adults – Holy crap, we might have finally found a worthy successor to Happy Endings in the friend-group sitcom. With the age of the characters, the New York setting, and in particular Amita Rao’s large personality and sexual appetite having very strong Ilana vibes, this feels like it has some Broad City in its DNA, too. Ugh, Lucy Freyer is adorable. Anyway, do you know how funny a sitcom has to be for us to actually be interested in blasting through it like that? Now on Hulu.
What did we read?
Lenin: A Biography, Chapter Seven, Robert Service
This chapter covers the years Lenin spent in exile, which essentially covers his political maturation, his marriage to Nadya, and the beginnings of his writing career. His entitlement – both literal and in terms of social class – has given him complete confidence and material comfort. His relationships are based heavily on theory and ideas of modernity; unsentimental, material.
Where he distinguishes himself as a Marxist is his belief in educating the working class to his intellectual level; projection of his own qualities, obviously, but sincere ones. He also has a particularly strong belief in the economic possibilities of agricultural Russia and their ability to industrialise, and to support the Russian economy.
Finished the first Witcher book – technically not a novel but a series of connected short stories – and am moving to the next one. These are not high art but they are a lot of fun and have some interesting characters and worldbuilding.
Started a bio of Dashiell Hammett leaning heavily into how his time as a Pinkerton agent influenced his writing. The most interesting thing so far is that being an operative for a firm infamous as strikebreakers utterly appalled him and no doubt helped radicalize him some.
If you haven’t already, you should hunt down Charles Siringo’s COWBOY DETECTIVE, which is the autobiography of a Pinkerton union busting operative who, like Hammett, also became sympathetic to the plight of the workers and became increasingly disillusioned with the owners whose interest he served.
Am deep into the new Gary Stewart biography by Jimmy McDonough, which is something of a redneck No One Gets Out of Here Alive; Stewart is a complex, unpredictable character, capable of incredible generosity and piss-poor behavior. I definitely relate to the “to live outside the law, you must be honest” outlaw mentality of the Stewart family while seeing the limitations of it. It’s easy to have no self-control in this situation and no limits unless they are self-imposed. I didn’t know Gary Stewart’s music was wildly popular on Indian reservations so he toured them all the time.
Started Opium and Other Stories by Geza Csath. Quietly weird early 20th century Hungarian writer creating character studies of odd and damaged people. So far “The Surgeon” is the best one yet.
Getting close to the end of My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante. As with a lot of these “100 greatest novels” list books (not to mention the 1001 albums), I find myself wondering exactly what it was that generated such acclaim even as I’m enjoying it very much – this one actually topped a poll for “greatest novel of the 21st century so far” which is not to be sniffed at! I suspect in this case the full revelation comes from reading the full series (there are three more books that follow this) as the worldbuilding is patient and quite special and I can only assume the effect is cumulative. But taken as a standalone, I’m finding a lot to love. The writing is very straightforward and to-the-point, which I’m assuming is at least partly because of the young age of the narrator (she’s 14 for much of the story) but the character dynamics and emotions on display feel rich and compelling. I’m definitely intrigued to explore the series further once I’ve reached a suitable point in this enjoyable quest.
I went to the Schultz Museum as a kid as a die-hard Peanuts fan (which says something about how I was a high-functioning depressive even then).
Year of the Month updates:
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 here’s all the movies, albums, books from 1998 you can sign up for this October!
Oct. 3rd: Gillian Nelson: Movie Surfers
Oct. 4th: Tristan J. Nankervis: Pi
Oct. 9th: Gillian Nelson: Mighty Joe Young
Oct. 18th: Tristan J. Nankervis: Who Moved My Cheese?
Oct. 30th: Gillian Nelson: Halloweentown