The Friday Article Roundup
The best and most righteous pop culture writing of the week.
This week, you will speak out 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!
Maureen Ryan considers how to cover the upcoming Harry Potter show:
The new Harry Potter show is the Sun City of TV….The fact is, writing about the new wizard show as if it’s a normal program is a political act. Penning a regular review or feature and just inserting a line or two about how J.K. Rowling has “caused controversy,” or about how her views have been “polarizing” — those are deflecting euphemisms. Those kinds of actions do not meet the moment. To quote South African cleric Bishop Desmond Tutu: “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”
Tom Breihan reads the tea leaves of the 2027 Coachella poster at Stereogum:
The Coachella poster is not an organic document. Artists tend to invest a lot of feelings in where they might sit on a Coachella poster, and their teams care even more deeply. I’m sure artists turn down Coachella bookings because they can’t stand to be listed in the fourth line when they think they should be in the third. We rarely get to see any of those negotiations. Though we did get some leaks this year, the final document comes to us like tablets carried down from the mountaintop. This is who’s on top, who matters. It’s up to us to parse what that means.
At Reactor, Matthew Jackson examines the legacy of horror writer Peter Straub:
This remarkable, decades-long exploration of the Gothic as a form and the idea of haunting as not just something we can be, but something we are, is the cornerstone of Straub’s legacy as a horror writer. He didn’t always write pure horror, and sometimes chafed at the label, but even his stories which lean harder into crime or fantasy or pure suspense carry his haunted landscapes, his worlds full of human ghosts. Some of that is just the way his imagination works, but on a craft level, his poetic sensibility reinforced it. He had, as fellow horror titan Laird Barron once put it, a knack for creating worlds suffused with dread, even if that dread didn’t immediately lead to all-out terror.
For Fangoria, Brandon Streussnig interviews Larry Fessenden about his new movie, which really is about trauma:
I directly named it Trauma to say, “Yes, yes, it’s about trauma.” But let’s think about it differently, rather than saying, “Look, I’m going to show you that somebody’s mother was mean to them.” I’m going to say, “There’s a lot of regular town folk in my story that suffered from this werewolf thing, and a lot of them won’t admit it was a werewolf.” I’m trying to depict the vibe of how we suppress things, how we won’t admit things, how we always have to be correct, and just the real interaction of people together and scapegoating and all the things that have led to the great horrors of the world, and the little horrors, the little microaggressions. It’s all in a fluid nightmare.
And at his substack, Ty Burr remembers the mercurial greatness of Richard Lloyd:
In person, Lloyd was intense, often congenial, secretly spiritual, sometimes weird….He had eyes that never seemed to blink and an itchy edge to him – Michael Shannon would definitely play him in the movie. I saw the man live a handful of times, two or three with Television after it had recombined in the 1990s and twice on his own. The first time, at Boston’s Paradise in 2009, Lloyd had a temper tantrum when people at the bar wouldn’t stop talking during his set, cursed out the audience, and walked off stage. He had a point, but it was a bit Travis Bickle-y. After a half hour had passed, he came back onstage and proceeded to blow the windows out and roof off via guitar. Mission accomplished.
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The Friday Article Roundup
Cooped up with the best pop culture writing of the week.
The Friday Article Roundup
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The Friday Article Roundup
From the hub of the universe, the best pop culture writing of the week
The Friday Article Roundup
Get the willies, heebie-jeebies and jim jams from the best pop culture writing of the week.
What can art do when the world is ending?
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Always Sunny, S17: “The Gang Goes to a Dog Track” – hmm, this gets nicely dark but as far as episodes about Frank exploiting / tricking the rest of the gang I didn’t think it was anywhere near as clever or funny as “Frank is in a Coma” from earlier this season. The “raw dog” jokes felt a bit basic and tired, although I did like the mysterious guest-star guy at the dog track.
Babylon 5, Season Five, Episode Twenty-one, “Objects At Rest”
An hour or trying to make something out of literally nothing. It’s really quite incredible how hard this trying to fill an hour of television; it would be more forgivable if it wasn’t also making a punk out of Lennier in a really uncharacteristic way. There’s a few moments of sentimentality that work, like Sheridan looking back at the station, but otherwise this is some bullshit.
I got halfway through The Sea Hawk when I was interrupted – my mother was not happy about the Outlook shutdown – and when I got back to the screen, I wasn’t sure how much I wanted to continue. Given how good Curtiz usually is, given how good Captain Blood is, I was surprised what a slog this one is. It’s predictable and a bit nonsensical, even if some of the scenes look good. The romance is a bore. And then add in the propaganda element. As I noted last week, I struggle with propaganda even if I agree with it. Making the Spanish Empire into an analogue for Nazi Germany? A bit of a stretch. Making poor little Elizabethean England an analogue for the UK in WWII? That really doesn’t work for me. (Apparently the movie ends with a rousing speech by Queen Elizabeth about the need to fight for the freedom of all. Did she do this before or after sending her men to round up some more priests?) But really the problem here is just that this never quite comes together.
Elementary, “The Geek Interpreter” – The title is of course a play on the OG story “The Greek Interpreter.” Sherlock’s somewhat poorly socialized friend the Columbia math professor is worried when a grad student goes missing. Turns out she was kidnapped to help rewrite flood zone maps as part of a real estate scheme. (Superman ’78’s Lex Luthor would be proud.) Oh, and the professor is into the grad student and it’s clear he chose her since she is unattainable (as he is a decent man and won’t date a student). Pretty good, mainly for Sherlock being made to confront that he too is stuck on the unattainable woman (Moriarty) and is lonelier than he realizes.
Barney Miller, “Goodbye, Mr. Fish,” part one – Clever title. The fourth season starts with yet another reworking of the show’s iconic theme – it’s been changed every season – and with Steve Landesberg, Ron Carey, and James Gergory being added to the regulars. It’s Fish’s last day before retirement (and the second and last season of his own show), but Fish is nowhere to be seen. But that is not the core of the episode at all. A local merchant has been putting up posters offering a reward to any civilian who killed a criminal during the commission of a felony. Which is of course vigilantism of the worst stripe, but no one is sure if the poster itself is illegal. And then a thief is shot after robbing a jewelry store by either the jeweler or a liquor store owner. And the bickering between the two merchants in front of the one who put up the posters turns heartbreaking when they learn the perp died. Comedy turns to the horrible realization that one of them killed a man. Been a while since the show took a turn like that, and it’s very well done.
I like The Sea Hawk much, much more than you do–including the turn towards open WWII propaganda, as little sense as it makes with the actual historical conflict it’s using for it–but even I will agree that the romance is a snooze. Flynn and Marshall have okay chemistry in the featherlight-but-fun Footsteps in the Dark, but here he has way more sparks with Flora Robson’s Queen Elizabeth I.(Not exactly romantic, of course, but a lot livelier.)
Yeah, Team Sea Hawk all the way for me too. And I really like the propaganda aspect, it’s so blatant and weird historically, as Lauren notes, but the good historical aspect is that Britain kicking the shit out of the Armada is such a known quantity of uncomplicated righteousness that it makes sense to repurpose it here.
Blood on the Moon
Robert Mitchum looking weary and jaded while conveying an essential sense of honor. Robert Mitchum beating the shit out of men with his bare hands. Inside me, there are two wolves, and they are both well fed by this movie.
Excellent noir-Western hybrid, featuring–in addition to the sublime Mitchum–a complex cutthroat scheme (the reveal of exactly why Riling brought in Garry is top-notch), nuanced and unstereotypical female characters (another film would have made Phyllis Thaxter’s character either villainous or treated her with scorn; not so here), some nice supporting work from Walter Brennan, and a restrained and moving romance.
Across 1110th Street
Bleak, gritty, cool, and well-acted. Yaphet Kotto is, to hopefully no one’s surprise, incredible in this, burning even hotter than that car that goes up in flames at the end. But everyone is fantastic: Marlene Warfield, for example, briefly steals the movie even when sharing the scene with Kotto, as she plays a woman taking in the news of her husband’s death. The physicality of her response, with her face (and slow folding down into her chair) showing all the stunned shock and grief she’s not going to let herself express to the cops, is really incredible.
Fuuuuuuuuuuuuck yes Across 110th Street. Richard Ward’s gravelly laugh is incredible in this, like sandpaper on your soul. And I think this is brutal even for the genre, not just the violence (which is intense) but the overall despair. I first heard of it through Greil Marcus’ extended analysis of it in Mystery Train (part of a chapter looking at Sly Stone through the lens of the Stagger Lee myth) and it’s some of the best writing Marcus ever did, it made me need to see the film immediately.
…I have to read Mystery Train. I knew this before, but I know it even more now.
Yeah, Mystery Train demonstrates that Marcus is an attentive listener, skilled at micro- and macro-levels of analysis, and understands the value of cultural context. I’m not sure Marcus wrote anything better, or, at least, hits the bulls eye so convincingly.
I’d love to track down a copy of the novel, which I hear is even better.
Due to a recent restoration, BLOOD ON THE MOON has been getting a lot of attention lately, and it’s well deserved. It’s basically a gangster noir in an Old West setting, and a good vehicle for a Mitchum crossover, just at the point when RKO realized how well the actor fit in with that vibe. PURSUED, which came out around the same time, is an even better fusion of Western Noir.
Pursued is on my list as well!
The Lowdown — this season feels a bit more diffuse than the previous one, that had an unsolved killing with many complications but it still spiraled out from a known crime and this one (purposefully) has a hole at the center. Dale Washburn had more to him than there seemed to be, Mekko is a cipher. Which is not to say it isn’t good, just unfocused at times; but the mystery stuff takes a back seat to two dudes hanging out here (similar to the first-season highlight with Peter Dinklage) and it’s great stuff that leads to one of the best needle-drops I’ve heard, a punch to the gut that is unexpected and perfect.
Snake Eyes — a fascinating mix of three flavors that aren’t quite in sync, Nic Cage and Brian De Palma and David Koepp. Koepp’s screenplay is twisty and smart (the shift halfway from whodunnit to thisguydunnitcantheherofigureitoutintime is a great call) and I don’t know how much is in there visually but De Palma wilds out, especially at the beginning and its famous single-take (which I believe has a cheat but is still great). And so does Cage, in manic shark mode early on and more heroic if still noirish territory later, and this doesn’t quite feel right. I started dozing off during the end and was surprised at myself but it really is sort of a snooze and no wonder, the original ending that involved a hurricane crashing through the casino/arena setting and turning the set into a tunnel of water was filmed with apparently janky CG (water is of course very tough and the mid-90s effects were likely not there for any extended sequence) and had to be scrapped and entirely re-shot, I think the results were the same story-wise but the execution is clearly inferior to the verve that had come before. And story-wise, Koepp is never going to be as cynical as De Palma, so the noirish stuff resolves fairly lightly and conventionally, all things considered — this isn’t the brutal failure of Blow Out or the meta-fuckery of Body Double. But it’s still a good time and absolutely crawling with Guys — Luis Guzman! Mike Starr! Kevin Dunn! David Anthony Higgins! — and any time in their presence is surely not wasted.
Alias Nick Beal – Faustian noir with a staunch D.A. (Thomas Mitchell) willing to sell his soul to convict a crime boss. Old Nick Beal-zebub (Ray Milland) mysteriously walks out of the shadows on a foggy wharf to lend a helping hand, giving Mitchell the evidence for a conviction, which propels Mitchell to the governorship with an alliance of special interests and sleazy politicians. Milland enlists Audrey Totter to tempt, blackmail and keep Mitchell in check. Events culminate in murder and the inevitable showdown between good, represented by minister George Macready and evil. It’s a “You shall not pass!” moment with Macready sending Milland back to the shadows and fog from whence he came. The ubiquitous Macready usually plays gentleman villains and the cold and heartless French General in Paths of Glory, so it was interesting seeing him play against type as the minister who takes on the Devil. Mitchell is resolute and weak. His presence makes this an inverse It’s A Wonderful Life in some ways. Milland makes an amiable Mephistopheles, Totter is great as the sex-worker with a heart of gold who regrets her choices and temptation for a life in high society. Director John Farrow creates a thick and oppressive noir atmosphere, especially when Milland is on screen. I thought this was going to be silly but Farrow keeps it from getting too fantastical. He keeps it serious and straightforward getting to the dark fate at the core of Film Noir – the consequence of a man selling out his values for power, sex and easy financial gain, so the Faust myth is a natural fit for noir treatment.
I remember enjoying this as noir atmosphere — Milland and Totter are great — but being annoyed with Mitchell’s character and his ultimate redemption. No! Go team Satan!
I think you could give this to a new noir watcher and say this is what noir atmosphere is. But, yeah, the ending is a little pat, like Snake Eyes.
A classic “this sounds great, I will add it to my wishlist… Oh it is already there and I simply never check it” scenario, right here. Maybe this time!
Farrow is a rather overlooked director, in my opinion. Like Preminger, he was adapt at blending camera movement and dramatic blocking that allowed for the minimalization of the 90 degree rule of cutting to close-ups. I’d love to see an update of THE NIGHT HAS A THOUSAND EYES, although it would lack some of the seamy atmosphere of the original.
Chicago (2002) – One of the meanest movies to ever win Best Picture but also one of the most purely entertaining – which does neuter a bit of the original’s “fuck you” energy, Bob Fosse could have been a punk and Rob Marshall could not, hell he only ever made one good film, and it’s this one.* But it’s still Chicago and it largely rips, a movie made out of editing sinew (this is in fact an incredibly well-edited film, sneered at for the MTV edits when you can still see every movement and pelvic thrust from Marshall who also choreagraphed) and the sheer muscle of Kander and Ebbs’ songs, plus the sheer commitment to the story and performances. Zeta-Jones is famously great, Zellweger and Reilly commit to the stupidity of their characters, and Gere steals half his scenes, tap dancing and visibly enjoying his own swagger. Would happily watch it again right away and who can say that about most movies?
*I don’t hate Into The Woods as much as other theater nerds and nevertheless, On Stranger Tides is one of the worst blockbusters ever made.
Happy to say that this movie was a big bisexual awakening for me once upon a time. That certain horny quality goes along with the energy and visible enjoyment of the performers, probably.
Into the Woods is on the VERY short list of movies I just gave up on because I was getting nothing. But I should definitely see Chicago at some point, it feels like a pretty hefty blind spot.
I mean GREAT score alone!
It hits a sweet spot for being highly, if superficially enjoyable while not sentimentalizing it’s inherent cynicism. “Cell Block Tango” is a huge boost of adrenaline if you need it.
What’s bizarre is that this is arguably a very auteurist movie, with Marshall coming up with the framing conceit, choregraphing the dancing, and directing, and then after he largely disappears into bad musicals and blockbusters.
CHICAGO was probably the movie Marshall felt a particular affinity towards, and thus was able to move between two diegetic spaces (the more naturalistic story and the imaginary “musical”)with maximum comprehensibility. I wonder, has if anyone has programmed this alongside PENNIES FROM HEAVEN?
What did we read?
Lenin: A Biography,, Chapter Seventeen, Robert Service
The buildup to socialist revolution happens in this chapter, and it’s interesting to compare to current day America. Lenin solidifies his theory about the stages between capitalism and socialism; he doesn’t just commit to the idea that violence is the first necessary stage, he unthinkingly takes it as axiomatic. He’s the main voice pushing for violent uprising and it takes a lot of pushing to get his way. It’s interesting because it superficially mirrors the increasing agitation in America over, ya know, state violence and the fascism things, with the obvious difference that America has decided on the whole “elections” approach.
As for Lenin as a person, this has the infamous moment of Stalin shaving him, which is part of the whole amateur infiltration. Service notes the farcical incompetence of the whole thing, though they do succeed in the end, which feels like it summarises the Soviet Communists to me (like the five year plan).
The Pact, Jodie Picolt
I picked this up because I remembered hating Picolt’s novels as a teenager and wondering if that emotion still held up. The specific ideas that bothered me were her particular approach to plotting and her particular bougie woman’s sense of provoking moral outrage; if I recall correctly, I nearly threw My Sister’s Keeper across the room. I respect the former a lot more now and am more muted on the latter. For the plotting: I deeply enjoy her non-linear approach to storytelling, slowly revealing the big picture and connecting dots over time. She also has a good sense of jumping around in perspective even outside that; the premise is that a boy was found in a car with his lifelong girlfriend dead from a shot in the head while he was holding a pistol, and he claims they were going to go through a suicide pact. Late in the book, the boy’s lawyer ends up getting the lion’s share of perspective, and it works.
As for that moral outrage that I reacted badly to, I still feel some disdain here, but it’s not as bad as I remember – which, admittedly, might actually be down to the book just being better on this level than the ones I read as a teen – the one bad thing about the plot is that the solution to the central mystery is the single more boring and obvious answer, but it’s also not a false rape accusation. I remember what especially annoyed me about MSK was the vivid entitled bougie asshole at the centre. Like I knew then that the point was that she was like this, but I reacted so viscerally badly. This book has some of that, but it’s more downplayed and there’s a very wide cast of characters.
Ultimately the novel is a “Wasn’t that fucked up? I’m Rod Serling,” kind of story – it ends exactly when the real consequences for everything would kick off, perhaps the surest sign that a story is about shock value. Still, it basically gets across the attitude of the writer and her view of the world in a compelling way. There are these detailed tiny slices of people’s lives and attitudes; the most interesting was the father of the killer who tried to will the situation of out of existence before admitting that was kind of dumb, and the mother vividly and emotionally acting out was more compelling in smaller doses.
I also think it’s a pretty good layout of the dead girl herself, who we follow in flashbacks; she has terrible PTSD due to being sexually assaulted as a child, but she’s the only one who knows and she has no way to deal with that, and it affects her relationship with her boyfriend. It’s an agonising direction for the plot to go, because how would she know what to do in this situation?
Serling by Alan Sepinwall – Well, most of it since I am up to Night Gallery, and he doesn’t live much longer. This is part bio of the famous screenwriter and part somewhat overwrought appreciation. As i noted yesterday, Sepinwall has amazing contacts in the industry, so he’s got interviews with pretty much every big name who publicly professes to consider Serling a god. Which means that it gets to be an echo chamber after a while. But this is not meant to be scholarly or critical. I suspect if I want that, I can find it. Not entirely looking forward to how Sepinwall tells us every great TV show is inspired by The Twilight Zone but that goes with this sort of book. (Bios that end with the death of the protagonist might be preferable for that reason.)
Finished at last The Lost Detective by Nathan Ward, a pretty okay focused bio of Dashiell Hammett tracing how his work as a Pinkerton man led to his crime novels. This one ends with The Thin Man, so if i want to know about how he was sent to prison for being a pinko, I need another book.
Started Unforgivable Blackness, Geoffrey Ward’s bio of boxer Jack Johnson. Good so far.
And still making my way through the book about NASA and the Mir space station. The author continues to find bad things to say about pretty much everyone at NASA and in the Russian space program. Though when he starts a section about a woman astronaut that no one cared for by saying he isn’t sure why no one cared for her, and then talks about how much she had to fight to get ahead in a man’s world, he seems quite clueless about, you know, sexism!
Clown Town, by Mick Herron — the latest (year-old by now I think) Slow Horses book, Herron had been getting a bit soft in regards to his characters in the previous ones but goes for the jugular here. Literally at one point! This is an odd book in some ways, the plot revolves around bad and bloody work from MI6’s past coming to light in the present and that’s not new but the sympathy for some of the actors is, this is in contrast to the higher-ups using them but it still feels a bit off. And the higher-ups are engaged in power struggles, which again is not new, but these are dominating the book without other plotting as counterbalance. This leads to one of Herron’s extended action setpieces and he’s as good as ever here even as the people involved are fucking up hard and despite the title, the fuckups are not as funny as before. And then someone who really knows what they’re doing steps in. This is a board-clearing in some ways, interesting to see where things go next.
This is one of my favorites of the series, I think. Love how apocalyptic it feels towards the end.
Herron has a device where he talks around exactly which person has had a bad thing happen to him, he uses it fairly frequently and he’s good at it but it does get a bit old at the end of this one. On the other hand, the dread of everyone converging on this one place is excellent, the previous book had that fantastic action blowout at the rehab facility, violent but comically so, here all of the blunders are clearly leading into something not funny at all. And that last bit afterwards is ruthless as hell, the action is taken in that way because it removes one person directly and the other indirectly, the second person might be more “worthy” of direct action but this is smarter. So far, at least — Herron does a very nifty trick of mentioning a character as a distraction and keeping them off-page for most of the book, so when they do appear and are clearly ready to play the game, it sets things up very well.
Yeah, the deliberate semi-obscuring is a little tired here, but I’ll allow it at least a little because there are enough hints to make it clear by the end of the book.
And going off your last line–the same also sort of applies to the final mention of Waterproof, which has come up several times before but is a real stinger here at the end.
I like the unpredictability that comes from the housecleaning he does in some of these books. As for the slimming down of subplots, It’s been forcing revisions in the series.