The Friday Article Roundup
Burn away the hours with the week's best pop culture writing.
This week you can while away the hours reading about:
Thanks to Casper and Dave for their time this week. Send articles throughout the next week to ploughmanplods [at] gmail, post articles from the past week below for discussion, and Have a Happy Friday!
Mubi runs an excerpt from a new book by Elena Gorfinkel and John David Rhodes about the significance of props:
Chaplin’s hands pervert the functionality of objects and redirect from their intended use. Transformed through gags, a clothes wringer becomes a dish dryer, a donut becomes a dumbbell, a ladder becomes a cage and a weapon…. Chaplin’s propped performances initiate and sustain processes of chaotically rigorous transformation that underscore the alchemical nature of the performer’s power to translate the prop’s properties into strange new idiom. In Chaplin’s cinema the control of expressive feeling through the use of the prop that Naremore describes is directed toward an undoing of control itself, a sort of laborious unmaking that points to the arbitrary status of the prop’s normative utility or use value in narrative fiction.
Keith Phipps eulogizes the great Gene Hackman via his take on the weary detective role in Night Moves:
Harry has strewn relics from his past throughout his cluttered office, but they belong to another time, maybe even another America. He’s a good enough detective to stay in business and to have to turn down job offers from a larger firm, but nothing about the way he lives suggests he’s thriving professionally. He gets by, but Harry carries himself like a man doing a job that gives him no pleasure working in a grimier, more dispiriting country than the one in which he’d expected to live. The events of those five years between slain Kennedys never really gets filled in, but the movie never really needs to explain them. They’re the years when everything went wrong. It’s a Boomer cliché that history went off the rails with John F. Kennedy’s death, but Night Moves gives that cliché substance, depicting Harry as a fallen man in a fallen world a little more than a decade out from Dallas. His particular curse is to feel the weight of sin more heavily than those around him.
At Collider, Maggie Lovitt interviews Tony Gilry ahead of the second season of Andor, including about the non-release of the scripts from the first season:
GILROY: I wanted to do it. We put it together. It’s really cool. I’ve seen it, I loved it. AI is the reason we’re not. In the end, it would be 1,500 pages that came directly off this desk. I mean, terribly sadly, it’s just too much of an X-ray and too easily absorbed. Why help the fucking robots anymore than you can? So, it was an ego thing. It was vanity that makes you want to do it, and the downside is real. So, vanity loses.
Nick Pinkerton reviews Who By Fire for 4Columns and finds both pluses and minuses:
[Writer-director] Philippe Lesage is interested not only in conflicts based on sex, age, and status, but also the friction between the interior art of the written word and the exterior art of cinema. His depiction of the neurotic, symbiotic relationship between director and screenwriter—the latter a chimerical creature, poised somewhere between literature and film—is fantastically acute. There is, however, a sense of desperation in the attempts to “open up” the pensive, decidedly literary Aliocha in the homestretch, which play like a series of unsuccessful auditions for an ending. (All the more unfortunate is the fact that Arandi-Longpré’s superbly modulated, close-to-the-vest performance doesn’t need such concessions.) Blake, too, will come in for his humanizing moment before the credits roll. I do not consider it a revelation that a man who in many regards seems a bit of a prick can love and be loved by his dog, as we learn is the case for Blake; this is what dogs are for.
For Screen Slate, R. Emmet Sweeney interviews Paul W.S. Anderson about his new George RR Martin adaptation:
“On this movie, I’m pretty proud that we didn’t spend the hundreds of millions of dollars that a lot of other big visual effects films do, and to stretch the money, the dollar, we didn’t do any overtime. The animators weren’t working these punishing 18 hour days, seven days a week that you read a lot about. They had a life, and that’s beneficial for them, but it’s also beneficial for me as a filmmaker, because just like with shooting crews, you can work people massive overtime and long hours. But after a 10-hour work day, people start slowing down and you’re not getting the best out of them. It doesn’t matter whether they’re standing on set holding a light, or whether they’re working in a post-production company animating something. After being chained to their computer for a while, people start slowing down, and you don’t get the best, most creative work out of them. So, we took a little longer in post-production on this movie and allowed people, I felt, to deliver their best work, by actually giving them a weekend off and allowing them to go home and see their kids.”
The New Yorker‘s Namwali Serpell expresses concern over the “new literalism” that plagues the biggest movies today, even all the Oscar nominees (except one!):
A warrior is in a prison cell. His guard approaches and shows him the wooden sword that he will receive once he has earned his freedom. The warrior grabs it, uses his unlocked cell door to knock the guard down, and places the sword’s tip on the guard’s throat. He drives it in as one might hammer a post, a coarse and grisly death. Then, for some reason, swaying back and forth, the warrior yells down at the corpse, “Wood or steel, a point is still a point!” […] When I say literalism, I don’t mean realistic or plainly literal. I mean literalist, as when we say something is on the nose or heavy-handed, that it hammers away at us or beats a dead horse. As these phrases imply, to re-state the screamingly obvious does a kind of violence to art. “A point is still a point!”
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C. D. Ploughman
The weary Ploughman is a writer and filmmaker, focusing these days on documentary and educational projects. He obsesses over movies with his very patient wife and children.
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What did we watch?
Babylon 5, Season Two, Episode One, “Points Of Departure”
So, fun fact: J Michael Straczinsky had a five year plan worked out for this show, long before he even did the pilot. As part of this plan, he created escape hatches for each main character, should the need arise to let an actor leave. He had to do it here, with Michael O’Hare having to leave because – I have learned last week – he had paranoid schizophrenia, a fact JMS kept for the entirety of O’Hare’s life (understandable, given this was in 1993). So Sinclair is suddenly transferred off the ship, and we now have Brucer Boxleitner as John Sheridan.
It’s such an odd, almost disorienting moment. It’s like comparing Bonds or Doctors Who – clearly the exact same template for a character, but within the one continuity. It draws attention to Boxleitner’s greater emotional openness – as weakness as much as a strength, both as a character and as an actor, as Sheridan comes off more uncertain and confused but also kinder in his softer moments. Amusingly, the emotional consequence of the plot is that Sheridan wonders if his presence didn’t make things worse as compared to Sinclair.
We also get not only a massive reveal, but a whole chunk of the show’s main mysteries resolved right in front of us, and to my great shock I actually find this lore extremely cool! Minbari souls are reborn in each successive generation; they’ve found they’ve had lower birthrates, leaving some souls unreborn, to the Minbari confusion, only to realise that souls are being reborn… in humans, with Sinclair being the first discovery. They ended the war because they didn’t want to kill their own people, and they initially put him in charge specifically because he has a Minbari soul.
That is incredibly fucking metal, I love it. It has powerful implications for the plot, leaving me wondering how various characters are going to react to that information as well as the effect it will have on the world at large. I’m especially delighted by how Lennier, of all people, is the one to drop all this information (Delenn still being in her cocoon), elevating him to something like a prophet. This is all fully sick and I’m totally engaged.
I like Boxleitner in the role, and as you note his emotional openness is probably a better choice for the lead of an ensemble. But I do miss something about Sinclair /O’Hare’s meat and potatoes charisma. Boxleitner is more obviously actorly.
So far I actually prefer O’Hare’s very internal grit. I like that he’s keeping secrets from us in favour of following a procedure.
Kojak, “Out of the Frying Pan…” – As I have noted, 70s TV and the use of guest stars is so weird to modern eyes. In season two Eugene Roche played a sad sack accountant sucked into thing beyond his capacity to process. A year later Roche is back as an alcoholic detective who loses his gun trying to stop a robbery while off duty and who sees his best friend killed. Naturally, he sets out to make things right and makes things worse. Roche is as well suited to the new role as the old, but I wonder if anyone watching ever said “wait, wasn’t that guy an accountant?” The story is a bit of a mess, but I think the story matters less than the vibes of Roche spiraling to his doom.
The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, “The Problem at Thor Bridge” – An American ex-pat – a former senator and “Gold King” – hired Holmes to prove that his children’s governess did not murder his wife. Half the episode is Holmes working to get the Gold King to admit the truth of relationships, the rest solving the mystery. As ever, we watch for Jeremy Brett and Edward Hardwicke as much as for the solution. But this one was also a meeting of old friends. The Gold King is played by Daniel Massey. Who was for a time Jeremy Brett’s brother in law. And Massey and Hardwicke grew up together, since their fathers are in fact Cedric Hardwicke and Raymond Massey. How did I not know that about Edward Hardwicke till now?
Frasier, “The Innkeepers” – Frasier and Niles open and close a restaurant. We’re in farce mode here, with about half the jokes landing, and with Martin in full “you should have listened to me” mode. The big problem here is that going in, we know the restaurant is going to fail. That sort of status quo change wasn’t ever going to happen. (That such a thing happened on All in the Family is, in retrospect, really amazing.)
Not quite the same thing as a reused guest star, but my biggest ’70s TV double-take ever was when Starsky & Hutch straight-up reused the cold opening for two separate episodes. Not in the “these two cold openings have essentially the same premise and hit the same beats” sense, but in the “exact same footage of the exact same scene in two separate episodes, without any kind of clip show excuse” sense. I wonder how many people originally switched the episode off thinking they’d seen it already.
Babylon 5 — hmm, this show might be going somewhere. There is an odd and at times off-putting mix of sincerity and naivety here — well-meaning but endless denunciations of fanaticism, criticism of corporate influence over science that also thinks there is a kind of archeology that is not at its base grave-robbing — but for the first time there is also a willingness to let things play out in less expected ways. A confrontation with a monster turns those denunciations into recognition (and perhaps another show would have let that recognition extend into the future, there was a moment for Pratchettian forward-thinking here) instead of blunt action, and the actions taken by our hero are also recognized as the *gulp* trauma that they are at base. Hoping for more of this, but also the show has given us one of those inexplicable and personal line readings (just the doctor saying “Nelson?”) that is now living rent free in our heads as an inside joke, so that helps too.
Heretic
This is at its best in the first 45 minutes or so, when the horror is more grounded. When you eventually get to Hugh Grant’s John Dickson Carr-esque architecture, choreography, and planning, the sense of contrivance starts to overcome the horror. I’d say that no movie ever wants to remind me of Prisoners, which is true, but it’s also true that I was passionately engaged with this even when it started reminding me of Prisoners: the performances are just that good, and I can’t resist some tense, high-stakes battles of will, especially with theology involved. One of my most beloathed horror tropes is the villain who can smugly predict your every move, but while this gets close enough to that to irritate me, it also undermines it interesting ways, building in how Grant’s character cheats (he can claim he saw an outcome in advance, but it’s also obvious that he built in alternative outcomes he could just as easily say he saw coming) and letting him encounter some genuine surprises. If the Saw movies let characters push back against Jigsaw’s bullshit even half this much, maybe I wouldn’t hate that franchise the way I do.
Fantastic Hugh Grant, and fantastic early tension. (Though we really never need to cut away from the house once we’re there: I didn’t need to see that Topher Grace looked at a sign-out/sign-in chart to figure out the girls had been gone too long! You don’t have to establish that!) Eventually pushes into territory that’s too over-the-top and Hannibal-esque, which hurts it, but I found it engrossing despite its flaws.
Poor Topher Grace! Was he basically edited out of this movie as well? Or does he just take bit parts for fun? I got thrown too far afield from this one to get back to being too positive on it, but agreed that the performances are all great and especially Hugh Grant finding the right kind of compelling insufferable when I think a lot of actors would just be insufferable in the role.
Weirdly, the initial framing of the corridor down Hugh Grant’s house gave me flashbacks to being a little kid and frightened of the dark end of my grandparent’s house at night.
Some of the bits in the trailer made me think of that. I think there’s something cozy about the setting that evokes that feeling too.
1941 – Interesting to consider this failure in light of Airplane! which would come out the next year. They share an anarchic approach (and a deadpan Robert Stack) and clearly are drinking from the same waters downstream of Kentucky Fried Movie. Spielberg also cast SNL and SCTV stars and, as many later movies would also erroneously think, reasoned that their mere presence would be enough to get laughs. But few, if any, movies are this cacophonous, this unrelenting, shout this many jokes without punchlines for this long. Spielberg is under the misapprehension that anything WACKY is automatically funny. Bogdanovich had a similar view with What’s Up Doc?, but he was wise enough to go into production with a funny script.
This movie’s purpose is to clarify what a writer brings to a project. There’s a number of exquisitely executed sequences – the brawl at the dance club, a downtown Los Angeles aerial dogfight, a Ferris wheel vs. submarine sequence – but without anything to hold this together scene to scene, or a single memorable character among the massive cast, it just pelts off you like the endless showers of shrapnel on screen. What a misfire.
“Spielberg is under the misapprehension that anything WACKY is automatically funny” — this feels important. Spielberg has directed many gags and funny sequences but I think he does not understand comedy the way he fundamentally understands action and sentiment and horror. Those are the modes that let him work in comedy (see the snake business in Raiders) but without them he is flailing.
100%. This comes hand-in-glove with the sentiment that comedy isn’t as hard to do as it really is – a brilliant filmmaker should be able to make a brilliant comedy, right? Scorsese, I would argue, is also not a naturally funny filmmaker, but I think he put more work into learning to be. I think Spielberg learned how to recognize the funny moments and outsource them as needed, but he was never going to be the right guy to helm a straight-up comedy.
I like this comparison to Scorsese a lot — agree he is also not a funny filmmaker naturally (although he seems to have a pretty good sense of humor), but I think he understands the possibilities of comedic tone better. Specifically, he learned that cruelty and stupidity is funny, it is funny because it is cruel and stupid and that is something to work within. I have long argued that Spielberg is the most sadistic filmmaker we have, at least in terms of technique, but his sentimental instincts hold him back from developing that either in pure horror or toward the comedic ends of something like Wolf Of Wall Street — his version of WOWS is Catch Me If You Can, a very good movie in a lot of ways but he’s pulling his punches in terms of what a con man story can be.
Poltergeist is another interesting data point on that description of Spielberg. He may have had a strong hand on that film, but it was Tobe Hooper that allowed it to go farther into goopy horror than I think Spielberg alone would have dared. Maybe if he had co-directed 1941 with Harold Ramis it could have worked (I was going to say the more logical-for-the-time John Landis, but considering the amount of aircraft and stunts I don’t think the studio could have stomached the body count).
The Color Purple – more Spielberg blind-spot filling. Hard to really know what to say about this one, Spielberg does an interesting job making a Spielberg movie out of pretty un-Spielberg source material and there are some excellent performances – I was particularly impressed by Margaret Avery. The sentimental stuff is done with a thick brush but the ending definitely still packs an emotional punch. Would have been great to see a director with more connection to the material make this one, but an interesting chapter in Spielberg’s career all the same.
High Potential, “The RAMs” – hey, Avon Barksdale turned up in the episodes of Justified I watched this week and now here’s Herc in High Potential! What is this, a reunion? That only exists in my timeline? Anyway, decent episode.
Oh, and of course last night’s Happy Hour. What was the first movie you remember hating? Is the writer of the comic strip Daddy Daze insane? Does your area have a colloquial expression for rain during sunshine? And what is wrong with the Germans in regard to that last question? Just some of the many questions pondered.
The Righteous Gemstones – premiere. Jroberts and Ruck said it all best, but Cooper’s having such a good time as a cutthroat straight out of Nightmare Alley surprised when imitating a chaplain actually brings him salvation. (Also Bradley Cooper’s from Philadelphia and playing a Confederate, pretty funny.)
A YouTube rip of the Sweeney Todd 2005/6 revival, featuring the actors playing their own instruments and a really stripped down score. This proved to be really influential on future Broadway shows as it got harder and harder to make money on them. I think there’s something inherently weird about the blocking – the actors can’t always interact because they’re playing music – but as the show builds, something happens where the lack of movement makes the actual moves (Sweeney with his arms around the Beggar Woman, the Judge fondling Johanna) way more powerful. By the second act, it is breathlessly fucking intense, like the routines of the cast and the disconnection have created the horror musical Sondheim wanted. As he said, you inherently lose something without an orchestral score, but the tragedy and intensity resonate more than ever. Michael Cerveris especially is riveting as Sweeney, satisfying a dark and hungry god with his empty, glowering stare.*
*Want to write something about the occultism or cosmic horror peaking around the show’s Brechtian edges – Sweeney Todd “served a dark and a vengeful god,” the show also gleefully juxtaposes Lovett’s kneejerk Christianity with her meat pies.
What did we read?
The Other Europe, Jacques Rupnik
I’ve decided to start giving up on books on the basis that explaining why is also a fun post. This is a history book about Eastern Europe, exploring how the Soviet Union affected countries like Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, etc. While there is a clear display of expertise, Rupnik has absolutely no sense of narrative, jumping from data point to data point and assuming far more knowledge of the topic than I actually possess. It’s frustrating because he’ll essentially bring up an interesting topic and then move on almost immediately without actually exploring it.
Ken Holt in the Secret of Skeleton Island, Bruce Campbell
This is a typical kid’s adventure novel from 1957 – the same kind of stuff as the Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew, and in fact published by the same people who did The Bobbsey Twins. It’s fascinating in that it’s comfortably crafted in a very pulp way – moving from one disaster to another – and has absolutely no ideas whatsoever. The emotional hook is that Ken’s mother died years ago, his father is loving but distant, and he craves a family, and the vast majority of the book is not about that – it’s a typical smugglers affair.
This makes it much easier to lock down how this kind of thing works. The narrative is third person but locked into Ken’s perspective, and it lays out his thought processes as he works his way out of each situation he’s in. It’s undermined a bit by adults in authority who are extremely helpful and villainous adults who are also extremely helpful – there’s one bit early on where Ken tells his kidnappers he’s hungry, so they take him to a drive in, and he throws pepper in their faces to get away. But you could see how an enterprising writer would use the structure to actually tell stories; almost every scene in the book has the same energy as the Strike Team getting together to discuss their problem o’ the week, for example.
Seeing as I have a gap in my knowledge, I started “What Ho, Jeeves!” Not a page turner but the sort of book you can just start and stop as the moment strikes.
We Got Ourselves a Crime Spree, by Tristan J. Nankervis
A screenplay by a guy who writes for some website or something. This is propulsive as hell, kicking off hard in the very first scene (a gang of queer punks, led by the very focused and pragmatic Callie, knock over the Mob) and letting the action escalate and reverberate from there. There’s an innate emotional and structural logic to the progression–an eventual second meeting that has to come for the audience’s satisfaction–but still plenty of room for events to play out in unexpected ways; the interplay of thrillingly rewarded expectations and surprises is great. (One of my favorite bits is where a minor character, set up as a kind of temporary distraction/scapegoat, winds up becoming more of a worsening complication than a sacrificial lamb.)
We talk a lot, and deservedly so, about how slowing stories to a crawl makes them ponderous and artificial, but–while we rarely get to see it these days–speed can be a problem too, and burning through too much action too fast can make a story feel strangely weightless, like none of it matters. That doesn’t happen here, and in fact we get some great moments where the characters themselves respond to the pace–where Tony, a gay mobster’s son, registers for the first time that he’s still in the middle of raw grief for his dead boyfriend as well as in the middle of a potentially lucrative revenge scheme. The speed ramps up the desperation, which ramps up the revelation of character. Which is another thing the screenplay is especially good at: the best pauses here are all for the characters realizing who they are. (Except Callie. She knows already.)
Screenplays are always interesting to me, because it’s fascinating to see what the writer tries to nail down vs. what they leave for the actors and director. This has a lot of humor built into the script itself–not just the dialogue, but things like the stage directions–and that makes it a pleasure to read … and makes it noticeable, and pointed, when the authorial voice takes a step back and refuses to over-define the character or the moment, especially in the recognition beats. There’s a real openness to collaboration here, with both the eventual filmmaking team and with the audience/reader.
Very cool, very memorable, very much up my alley. I look forward to someday writing this up again for Streaming Shuffle.
Watch Your Back!, by Donald E. Westlake
Another late-era Dortmunder where the charm outweighs the inventiveness or the sheer pleasures of plot. But it’s still Westlake, so I’m still engaged and having a good time. It’s also interesting to see how Westlake manages the story to keep himself engaged–in this case, he lets the ostensible subplot about the imperiled O.J. Bar and Grill take over most of the novel, pushing the lucrative heist into the background. It’s a very fun late-series shake-up to suddenly have one of the routine settings in jeopardy–it feels so wrong for Dortmunder to have to actually go into a men’s room not labeled POINTERS–and it results in one of my favorite one-off jokes, which is the Barbara Pym-reading woman on the plane getting invested in the bar’s plight.
The OJ stuff in Watch Your Back! is definitely the best part and I think it’s a key text in Westlake’s writing. For one it’s something Dortmunder’s counterpart Parker had to deal with, the Outfit fucking up his life, and while the vein is appropriately comedic the threat is different than previous Dortmunder antagonists of the Law and Rich People, both of whom appear here but are not as dangerous*. The Outfit is parasitical, it has the restrictions of straight society but without doing the work and without the relative merit that comes with work, and I think Westlake saw that the bust-out would become the defining business practice of this century. Better to be a crook.
*and the Rich Person is a huge asshole but is weirdly resilient and almost a second protagonist, the guy sucks as a person but doesn’t stop fucking people over even when he’s down and out
<3
Fantomas, by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre — the first novel of the long-running series about the genius of crime. Fantomas is a specter of destruction that only his opposite number, the brilliant detective Juve, really believes exists, and to unearth this master of disguise who can go anywhere Juve spends half the novel disguising himself so he can go anywhere. But mostly 1900s Paris and its outskirts, where several unrelated crimes turn out to be connected to Fantomas, what is extremely weird is that the connection is true but there is zero motive for some of them, including the brutal murder that opens the book. Fantomas just does this shit! At one point he needs to dispose of one of his identities and books passage on a ship, a less ambitious person would fake falling overboard but he blows up the entire boat with hundreds of people on it. And the way he gets out of a tight spot at the end is a connivance plot-wise but its cruelty and remorselessness make it work like gangbusters. The writing here is not particularly good but it zips along with some fun side characters and a general sense of pulp entertainment before pulps were a thing. The introduction has a criticism of Fantomas the guy as “a petit bourgeouis who prefers crime to bowling” and if that is not inaccurate I don’t think that is a bad thing. Not sure if I will follow the series but I’m glad I read this one.
Modern assessments of Fantomas tend to call him a terrorist, and it’s true in the sense that his goal is, from the first page, to spread terror. There’s no “or else”. Money gets made but it’s not the point, I don’t think there ever is a point. Fantomas was celebrated by the Surrealist movement and some of his escapes feel like reality rearranging itself to accommodate the evil at the center of the books. Alan Moore gave him one moment in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and it’s just enough–like Holmes and Dracula, he’d overwhelm the story if you give him any more. Fu Manchu debuted a few months after Fantomas, and the Genius of Crime and the Lord of Strange Deaths between them gave us supervillains.
Yeah, he spreads terror but that is sort of beside the point too? Terrorism as we define it now has “to” and “from” vectors — the terror is to publicly destabilize or to create conditions the terrorist wants, and it is clearly from the terrorist, who takes credit. Fantomas never says he did any of this stuff, and I got this weird sense that it wouldn’t bother him if the crimes did not create a stir. His biggest crime (the boat explosion) isn’t even recognized as such! He is a crime purist, to the point of building crimes on crimes — he has no place to really retreat to, and an infinite amount of cover identities is the same as no base identity — again, there is an odd dynamic where Juve is creating him as much as investigating him, shades of Batman here. (The intro makes the point that this also inverts Javert/Valjean.) And then there is the hilarious, almost slapstick moment of “ow FUCK I cut the wrong wire” during the (surprisingly sexy!) bathtub robbery, even Fantomas can screw up.
The Bright Side: How Optimists Change the World, and How You Can Be One – Think I’m going to take this one back to the library unfinished, this book can kiss my ass this week.
Less that I’m not finding it useful and more that I’m not really giving it a fair shake. I’ve got the gist – optimism doesn’t mean grinning like an idiot and can be useful from a practical standpoint – and I don’t disagree. At the same time I read sections on things like the Voluntary Extinction Movement guy and think “now here’s a fellow that’s making sense,” so I may not be in the right headspace for this. It had a quiz developed by sociologists to determine if you’re a pessimist or an optimist (its methodology is duly questioned by the book). A score of “less than 13” indicates low optimism, says the following paragraph, 14 and above indicate levels of higher optimism. I got exactly 13, which created at least two more groups I don’t quite fit in with, though maybe by looking at it this way I can safely lower myself to 12.
But I’m pretty sure for all my Eeyoring about, there’s a stubborn kernel in me that refuses to be anything other than optimistic. Don’t know that’s it’s going to be drawn out by this book, though. Perhaps it’s time for some P.G. Wodehouse or something.
Wodehouse improves everything by his very tight focus on people rather than The Horrors.
I read sections on things like the Voluntary Extinction Movement guy and think “now here’s a fellow that’s making sense
I feel this in my bones.
Every Nation Has Its Dish: Black Bodies and Black Food in Twentieth-Century America by Jennifer Jensen Wallach. This is the kind of university press book that is a fine read but not at all engrossing. I am finishing it but it’s much slower going than it would be if it were written just a bit more engagingly.
Opened up the New Yorker article and the second example (after the bit quoted in the FAR) is a scene from Megalopolis and complaining about Megalopolis as literal as opposed to allegorical, or as part of a trend instead of something largely from one dude’s long-burning brain, is ridiculous. Come the fuck on. Also, the first line is the same damn thing as “Are you not entertained?” from the first Gladiator, a point on a point that is THE FUCKING POINT of the outsized story! Christ, it is too early and I am too hungover to be this irritated.
I opened that article and hit the paywall. But what else is new?
(you might say the pure of heart can open it) WITH AN INCOGNITO WINDOW. Oops, I said the loud part quiet and the quiet part loud.
No dice.
I went to sleep last night turning over whether the point I agree with the most – that aping film stock from another era is a silly and overdone way to indicate a time period – actually fits in with his broader argument about literalism. I think it technically does (it’s one way of taking the idea “make it look like the 60s” literally), but I also find it way more annoying than any of the other examples he complains about.
It’s also really funny that he ends the article praising Conclave in light of this critical video silverwheel pointed out recently: https://youtu.be/cseW9B-Ug3k
I think this has come up elsewhere, but the “literalism” problem is more of a narrowness problem. The metaphors and techniques are aligned to one interpretation, aesthetically distinct perhaps but still a Stanley Kramer message movie in nuance. The opposite of this is yesterday’s Lunch Link or David Lynch, but I think the scale contains plenty of movies where there are multiple interpretations (The Shining, say) or movies where the techniques serve the drama before the interpretation. Maybe Altman and Tarantino are examples here — guys with fairly distinct styles and philosophies but whose movies are so much richer than a central metaphor.
I liked Conclave a lot but ‘the movie that literally has a beam of light coming from the Heavens telling people how to vote isn’t handholding you’ is a bold fucking claim.
(That video is pissing me off too, because this is the week I am fucking done with people using ‘stupid’ as some kind of marker for anything for various reasons, so that’s the thing I’m not giving a fair shake lol)
I had problems with the video, too, which I feel like is swerving to kick one of the few decent options for a general audience. I don’t disagree with the criticisms but it overlooks any of its visual or performance offerings, and you could find dozens of screenplay nominees that are far worse, so I don’t think the invective is warranted.
That said, an article that can’t abide a hammy but writerly turn of phrase in flippin’ Gladiator II then holds up Conclave as the sophisticated writing We Need Now is pretty wild.
I hit the paywall and decided that I wasn’t going to bother because I think complaining about The Substance being not subtle enough is, let me choose this word carefully, dumb. (tbf, I still haven’t seen it). Like, I think there might be the kernel of a point there but some movies are, in fact, best when they’re hitting you hard over the head.
Hey Friends, What’s Up?
I have of course mentioned I work in public media. Which means that anything we do will be at least a little newsworthy, if only within the industry. And there is in fact an industry magazine. So that magazine reported on the latest wave of layoffs. And also reported that we are running a big deficit. Which is: a) a matter of public record – we are required as are all nonprofits to make our form 990s public; and b) something I don’t think anyone has ever told the staff. Instead, we keep being told about running on a break even basis, or even having a surplus. So I have no idea how this deficit ties into the budget. My guess is that it sits off to one side and we make interest payments and the business plan is some other thing designed in part to not increase the deficit. Think of it, I guess, like the national debt run up over decades and not the annual budget (which has on a few occasions not run up more debt). So I don’t think we are in trouble – and our endowment in a worst case scenario could easily pay the deficit in a crisis. But I am really nonplussed that this has been essentially hidden from the staff. Our morale is already bad, with the decline of public media in the age of YouTube, with Musk and Project 2025 coming after us like we’re Greenlanders, and with some other stuff that is not for the public. Learning the truth second hand cannot help things.
I’m sorry. (A good nonprofit will have deficit plans in place, but…someone should be telling you that.)
It’s been a discouraging week. Short version: facing difficulties resulting from poor decision making in college course selection a quarter of a century ago. Trying not to waste energy being angry at my academic advisor, who has been dead for at least ten years, or at my past self who was apparently brain dead on arrival. Luckily ditches can be dug in a straight line and there’s not going to be a shortage of rainwater for the foreseeable future, so… possibilities abound.
Really nice weather this week. My father’s coming for a visit and we plan to sit and watch baseball. These are the good things.
Hell yeah baseball with your dad.
Signed a lease for a 2 bedroom! Landlord doesn’t seem perfect but his L&I violations are minimal and he’s private and thus not a corporation, easier to negotiate with, etc. It’s cheaper, I’ll get an office and more space. Have to get back to work but things have largely been good.
Just sold my old car – it has gotten me through two house moves, three jobs and endless trips since 2012 and I wasn’t sure if I’d feel emotional about saying goodbye. I didn’t really though, haha. After a ton of hunting for a replacement I heard that my cousin was selling one that met my requirements perfectly so I’m heading off to pick that up tomorrow.
Less than a week until I play my first gig since last summer. Decided to include FIVE songs that I hadn’t played before, because I enjoy stress and punishing myself I guess.
Wooo! The prospect of future live music!
I’m exhausted and angry, honestly. This morning I opened up Facebook and was reminded that we’re about to have a new Trump Travel Ban and all the other shit going on had been relentless enough I had forgotten about the whole travel ban shit.
This is also the week of my Dad’s birthday and I miss him. I’m kind of glad he doesn’t have to worry about losing his VA medical support, and how fucking bleak is that.
Year of the Month update!
March is Silent Era Month, where you can join these writers in examining your favorite silent movies and anything else from the 1910s and ’20s!
Mar. 20th: Cori Domschot: Steamboat Bill, Jr.
Mar. 24th: Tristan J. Nankervis – Birth of a Nation
Mar. 26th: Sam Scott: Peter and Wendy
Mar. 27th: Lauren James: The Well of Loneliness
Mar. 31st: John Anderson: The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog
And in April, we’ll be movin’ on up to 1999, so you can write about any of these movies, albums, books, et al!
Apr. 7th: J. “Rodders” Rodriguez: The Scooby Doo Project
Apr. 8th: Bridgett Taylor: …One More Time
Apr. 16th: Sam Scott: Spongebob Season 1, Wakko’s Wish, Elmo in Grouchland, and/or Bartok the Magnificent
Apr. 28th: Tristan J. Nankervis: The Sixth Sense