The Friday Article Roundup
Come find the week's best pop culture writing.
This week, you will get lost in:
The FAR would be lost without the contributions of Bridgett Taylor! Send articles throughout the next week to magpiesfar [at] gmail, post articles from the past week in the comments for discussion, and have a Happy Friday!
In Empire, Christina Newland writes about the personal loss in Robert Redford’s death:
In 2018, I had the cosmic good luck of meeting him for a brief interview at a Toronto junket for his brilliant crime caper The Old Man & The Gun. It was hard not to feel like my brain was being rewired. The enormity of it was almost too much. He responded to my fluttery nerves with such kindness, asked me about my background and greeted me in Greek, took a photo with me and held me close enough that I have – sorry, this is very gauche – spent years talking to my girlfriends about it. For the first and only time in a career of interviewing famous people, I got in the lift of the hotel afterward and cried.
Jason Diamond examines how Robert Redford captured a dark mood in Ordinary People:
It’s also a film that I believe has been overlooked purely because how last days of the Carter administration it feels. I’m still not sure why there hasn’t been some big, celebrated edition of it on Criterion or its addition to the National Film Registry, not just because of Redford or all the Oscars it won, but because it is about as “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant” a movie as I can think of in the way it portrayed the very American way of trying to wish the bad away, of hiding behind our money, and inside our nice homes, hoping the facade will protect us from the cruelties of the world outside.
For the Guardian, Stevie Chick interviews Ken Casey of the Dropkick Murphys about speaking out and speaking up:
“Regarding our safety … whatever,” he snarls, disdainfully. “I’ll never have a security guard or anything like that. But you gotta keep your head on a swivel a little bit. Back in the day, we always had a Nazi element gunning for us, but you could see them coming. Now you don’t know who’s who. I’m not sure what’s keeping other people quiet, though, especially in punk-rock. Where’d everyone go? They had the balls to speak out against Bush back in the day. But Bush didn’t have an army of trolls that come after you. Speaking out against Bush wasn’t going to cost you half your fanbase, potentially.”
Bryn Greenwood surveys the overwhelming number of kidnapped women as opposed to men in fiction for Crimereads:
I sometimes suspect that this constant focus on women being abducted stems from male readers who have more faith in their ability to escape a kidnapper, and so are less willing to suspend their disbelief for a male kidnapping victim. After all, according to a YouGov survey, 7% of American men think they could best a grizzly bear in unarmed combat.
At his substack, R. Emmet Sweeney talks with trombonist Jacob Garchik about the freedom to make his new jazz-prog-metal sci-fi concept album:
It was like me fusing all the things that I was interested in into one project, even if it was an awkward combination of things. I’m just going to make it work. The joy of being independent and making records now, financing them yourself, is you just get to do what you want. And so there’s no practicality. You can put together a weird band with a weird concept and there’s nothing stopping you.
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More articles by Dave Shutton
Double Features
Considering the comedy in The Phoenician Scheme and The Naked Gun.
The Friday Article Roundup
Going on the record with the best pop culture writing of the week.
The Friday Article Roundup
A cowardly and superstitious lot? No, the best pop culture writing of the week.
The Friday Article Roundup
No kings, of pop or otherwise, just the best pop culture writing of the week
The Friday Article Roundup
Out of the mists of history, the best pop culture writing of the week.
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Franz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask – Dreamy 1995 docudrama about Franz Fanon starring Colin Salmon(!) and featuring interviews with loved ones and fellow intellectuals. Some powerful visuals here like Fanon half-staring at the camera as Algerian rebels and French soldiers alike talk about the awful things they’ve done and seen. Salmon of course is also perfect casting to play a Fanon of the cinema, strong, proud, intelligent, incisive, his eyes seeing right through the screen. Feels incomplete at only 71 minutes but then you feel the same with Fanon’s life, dead at only 36. The moment where his brother tries to read his final letter to his wife out loud but chokes up too much to get through the second sentence is a heartbreaker. On Criterion.
Andor S2E5 – Diego Luna in charming tourist designer mode is great as is how he rightly chides the Ghorman rebels for a lack of professionalism. Good syncopation with Luthen approaching activist burnout mode and Saw Guerrera still in ecstatic Bakunin meets Che mode. The last scene rules and Whitaker is swimming in the river of ham here, getting into John Huston territory in his deliveries.
The Fanon flick sounds very interesting, Salmon is a great presence — I mainly know him from Arrow, where he was not slumming but bringing some crucial gravitas to a show that really needed weight, especially in the beginning.
Yeah he’s perfect for a role that is largely silent except voiceover, all gravitas as you say. He has to embody Fanon and he obviously can do that.
All Is Lost – Does what it sets out to do and does it well. But one man against the elements with no script, no real sense of who he is, just gets to be a drag after a while. Probably damning with faint praise to say that this is the sort of role Redford excels in, all physicality and no dialogue and interacting with other, better actors. But even if we have no idea who this guy is, we can feel his frustration build. (But I gotta ask: aren’t life rafts made with radio beacons now?)
The Practice, “Body Count” – The case to defend Edward Herrmann builds, but Kelley could have just done this in two weeks if he skipped the other cases. But we are entering more regular serialization now, and get another case that will stick around. Wherein the guy who sued Ellenor over a bad date runs to her for help. With a head in his medical bag. Yup, we’re here, at the point when the cases start getting weird all the time. In retrospect, though, it will be interesting to watch for the signs that this guy was guilty all along and stringing Ellenor along. Also, Bobby and Rebecca tag team on defending a man clearly plotting to kill his wife. But was he serious about it, or just a sad sack whose only way of finding release was acting like Jack Lemmon on How to Murder Your Wife. Suddenly, Jimmy is almost competent, but newbie Rebecca is still better than him. Poor Jimmy.
Pavements – I love Pavement’s music but I’m not really sure I find them all that interesting outside of the albums. I found the previous documentary about them pretty weak / irritating and the parts of this film that go over their history also left me a little cold – it’s mostly just “and then they did something else that prevented mainstream success!” over and over. Luckily there’s plenty of other stuff going on in this particular film, the parody biopic stuff is very funny (excellent work from Joe Keery) and the stage musical stuff is kinda fun even if it never really amounts to much. I’m a fan of Alex Ross Perry as a filmmaker and he definitely makes some fun swings here but only parts of it really worked for me.
Babylon 5 — what appears to be an episode of downtime in the Goofy Zone escalates to a Big Reveal! A worrisome scene with a Heartwarming Child is a feint before Brutal Character Recognition! Good stuff heading into the finale.
Sully — Geoffrey Miclat is the casting director here and does phenomenal work to justify the movie’s big bullshit conceit of EVIL NTSB INVESTIGATORS, the bullet-headed Mike O’Malley and the aged Randall Flagg Jamey Sheridan lead the way but the real cop is the queen of talking down to a powerful man who we all know and love, Anna Gunn. This is a joke but also not, these actors understand their roles and play them straight, and that is the crux of the movie — professionalism and its fallout. They are countered by Ann Cusack, Autumn Reeser and Molly Hagan as the flight attendants, who are casually sketched as old pros and then snap into cold hard action when shit starts really going down, when Sully announces where things are going they immediately start chanting in unison to brace head down and it’s actually sort of frightening, these voices blaring out in a chorus of warning, but it is fucking effective and that is the point. The movie very effectively jumps in time from aftermath back to incident and Eastwood and Tom Stern do phenomenal work here, the effects and wide shots are in service to the people acting and being acted on, it’s really nail-biting stuff and professionals of all stripes bear down to save the day, Sully is the focus but the narrative clearly recognizes a collective action. So why does Todd Komarnicki’s script make the NTSB not just villainous but unprofessional? There is a solid conflict (goosed for the movie but still good) of Sully’s actions vs simulators saying they were not necessary and this is great to dig into*, what also would have been great to dig into is how these investigators are also professionals and their work is running counter to Sully’s. In structure of multiple sides around a crucial pivot point and what exactly happened there, this looks forward to Juror #2 and that movie does much better by all sides; in cheap denigration of people who could be engaged with (and criticized!) on their merits this points to Richard Jewell. And the latter is still stronger because of the conflict at its core, who Jewell thinks he is and what others see in him; Hanks is excellent here but his internal conflict isn’t at the same level. Still a good watch though, Clint knows how to make an entertaining movie (give small roles to Holt McCallany and Chris Bauer).
*albeit increasingly hilarious, there are multiple simulated reenactments of real pilots in a computer scenario and every time they have to begin the simulation by announcing “birds,” which they do in a dull monotone, this became a laugh line in our house. But it also is a nice thematic pull, twice we see Sully’s reaction to the initial avian intrusion and he says “birds” as well but while he is not panicking at all his quiet tone is still acknowledging and engaging with this and that becomes a crucial point in the investigation
Live music — the FAR gets results! While pulling the last item I learned guitarist Mary Halvorson was on tour and she hit Boston last night with her sextet plus a couple extra saxes. So a very full sound that moves in waves that rarely swing straight but have their own rhythm. Although the highlight of the evening was the last song with the saxes setting in, something very free and dark, a city street turning into a car crash turning tectonic, and thrilling in its lack of easy hook and the sense that it was being built and nearly flying off the rails entirely in the moment, even more than how the other songs start from a head before improvising. But those songs were great too! A gorgeous stretch of one sax player just letting loose over a great rhythmic bed was bookended by a bass solo and a drum solo, each struggling against a heavy and ominous vibraphone pattern (Patricia Brennan also went ham a few times, watching a vibes player go off rules) — this was intentional I think, making that struggle part of the song. Halvorson’s tone was at its most beautifully watery on one song and she spent time in the shred zone in the last one, and on one song that was more lonely than bluesy she followed up Garchik’s trombone solo with a solo of her own, one that pretended not to be as sad as it was. One little bit was the sound of a laugh just a bit too brittle, breaking and revealing the emptiness under the assurance of a good time. Great stuff.
Hell yeah live Ominous Vibes.
Woo, live music! She have an album out there? And this would make good companion viewing with The Rehearsal Season 2, one episode goes to insane and very funny lengths to recreate Sully’s incident (among, uh, other Sully-related stuff) but also quotes the crash transcript and noting how the man’s communication with the co-pilot may have helped save the day.
Halvorson does have a new album! I of course bought an older one by mistake but I am sure it will still be rewarding. And she’s in Philly tomorrow — strong recommend if you can go! https://www.songkick.com/concerts/42534126-mary-halvorson-at-solar-myth?utm_source=1471&utm_medium=partner
Woooooo live music!!
Babylon 5, Season Three, Episode Five, “Voices of Authority”
Really good, although alternating between the current news and a show about an American-coded government relying on increasingly fascistic measures of suppression is, uh, interesting. As a plot thread aiming to be entertaining, it absolutely works, because it feeds into the sense of a large and complex universe; Earth is falling to fascism at the same time the Centauri are enjoying harsh, authoritarian measures over the Narn, giving us a real “the damn things overlap” sensibility. Everything is falling apart around the hero’s ears. There is a bit of an issue in that Straczinsky’s writing can tend to “ten words when three would do”, or more accurately, three sentences when one would do – the Political Officer is intentionally abrasive and unpleasant, but he’ll hammer the point really well in one line and then keep hammering, making the character needy as well as evil.
Meanwhile, the guy controlling the planet-computer comes back again, and I’m delighted every time with how he becomes more banal to me. One of the advantages of twenty-odd episodes a season is that this guy can feel like a regular even though he’s been in, what, three episodes? So the universe feels really rich AND like it’s filled with regular characters despite not having to recycle the guy and his makeup or effects too often. Ivanova’s story really is one where she keeps being thrown in over her head and making the best of it.
Not that I’m not entertained, but Garibaldi is emerging as the second-worst character in the show and specifically for ACAB reasons, and it’s really hard to tell how purposeful it is – Zack Allan has quietly been going through the show has a nervous, unsure Just A Guy kind of guy, and his arc lately has been quietly falling into a useful idiot for Earth’s fascist forces. Garibaldi’s paranoia and abrasiveness ends up directly and specifically driving him into the fascists – Allan has been doing things he strongly suspects are wrong, and when he and Garibaldi confront each other, they end up blowing up at each other. In this context, Allan’s actions were terrible but understandable; Garibaldi was the one operating with way more information and he chose to burn down the relationship out of paranoia.
That said, his arc with G’Kar was really funny and interesting; G’Kar observes that they’ve never been friends, but they have a strange positive relationship that you can only get through working near each other for so long; most TV shows end up having a “everybody is friends in a weird way” thing going on, and this is more interesting.
“Really good, although alternating between the current news and a show about an American-coded government relying on increasingly fascistic measures of suppression is, uh, interesting” — spoilers, this just gets increasingly, uh, interesting. Not great, J. Michael! (although good in the show)
And our household is confirmed Zack-haters, although he gets better over time he is similarly needy as a performer, overselling the Just A Guy stuff. I don’t think ACAB stuff applies to a cop-on-cop situation, I do think Garibaldi is making some bad mistakes here but that is also intentional (on the writers’ part). His relationship with G’Kar is instructive here — Garibaldi has quite a bit of G’Kar’s rectitude in him, but G’Kar has been able to set that aside for longer-term goals and Garibaldi’s general mode of control (useful for a security chief who needs to know what’s going on) means he fucks up this situation outside of his control, he can’t handle laying back.
With Zack, it’s easier to tolerate because the character is supposed to be weedy and spineless, but there is a general sense (which I was warned of) that a lot of the actors on the side were chosen less for their abilities and more because they were cheap enough for the production.
The Long Walk — This is a good one, anchored by great performances from Cooper Hoffman and David Jonsson. Based on a Stephen King novel I read when I was a teenager (and which he wrote when he was a teenager), this is a story of a brutal endurance contest run by the Major (Mark Hamill), the totalitarian dictator of an alternative America that sunk into fascism after a debilitating war (a better excuse than the real America has). But the focus is on the boys and their relationships and cameraderie under extreme duress, contrasted with the horror of how their society chews them up and spits them out and then sprinkles meaningless platitudes over them. The film does not shy away from the goriness of death, which I wasn’t sure about at first. But in hindsight it’s the correct choice to force the audience to confront it.
The film is quite faithful to the novel, although some of the characters are combined and the ending is slightly extended to be more cinematic. I think all the changes work just fine, especially the somewhat increased presence of the Major, who is more of an austere presence in the book (as far as I remember). Here, he’s just an absolute worm and Hamill does a good job of making him hateful and pathetic even as you buy how his charisma has charmed the rubes. This will probably work fine at home, too, but it’s an excellent theatrical experience as you feel the dread emanating from your fellow patrons.
Will hopefully be seeing this today! And yes, the Major is very much a blank in the book, what I’ve seen of Hamill is not that at all. But it also seems like a change that the screen sort of demands, as long as it’s only in presence and he’s not more actively participating in the story.
Hundreds of Beavers – Wednesday night watch. For fans of silent films, video games, and Looney Tunes. I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect, beyond some idea of a deliberately cartoony live-action film, but it’s a very fun time. I never got tired of the details of beaver society– the beaver construction site complete with beaver foreman and beaver surveyor; beaver Holmes and Watson; the beaver space program; and of course, the simple beaver lawyer. I’m still impressed with how they pulled this off on such a low budget, just to the point of wondering how they constructed some of these gags. And it’s a fun time.
I recommend checking out the film’s Twitter account for a bunch of fake posters, as well.
What did we read?
Up to the rise and fall of Ambrose Burnside in Lincoln’s Lieutenants, which means we are just past Antietam, the height and depth of McClennan’s career. Interesting stuff but also not for anyone but hardcore Civil War buffs.
And started Midnight in Chernobyl by Adam Higginbotham, which I got as a free e-book from the publisher just for visiting their site, but I need yet another app to read it. Good writing style so far, and clearly the author does not buy even a little in any myths of Soviet greatness. Though his explanation of what radiation is is a bit too simplified.
Eight Million Ways To Die, by Lawrence Block — THE SCUDDER-PILLING WILL CONTINUE UNTIL MORALE IMPROVES *whispers in ear* I AM TOLD MORALE WILL NOT BE IMPROVING. Good lord did the movie fuck this up, keeping the barest bones of the plot while adding a bunch of bullshit, including the LA setting, this is a damn NYC book. And the background noise of the see title, the grim body count in the daily paper, winds up being part of how the mystery is resolved, it is nicely done. But this is most famous as the book that places Scudder as not a boozy private eye but an alcoholic and that part is extremely well done, cutting a bit close to the bone for the hungover reader. Block has never confirmed he is an AA meeting attendee like Scudder is, this is both his right as a person and respectful of the anonymous culture of AA, but he sure seems to know what he is talking about and he absolutely knows what he is talking about when it comes to drunk thinking: “Hell, if I could limit myself to two drinks a day, that was fairly strong evidence that I didn’t NEED to limit myself to two drinks a day.” I should pace myself reading these but damn they are good.
Moved onto a second Harry Crews book from later in his career, The Knockout Artist. Excellent stuff with an ex-boxer who was never a great fighter but is good at knocking himself out as a gimmick for parties and bacchanals in New Orleans. Zigs instead of zagging in the plot, the writer sticks to his point of view so you’re experiencing this sad, weird world right alongside him.
CHAOS by Tom O’Neill, if even half of this is true, no wonder he went a little insane writing it, tracing figures who are in certain places at certain times in Ellroyian fashion – maybe Manson met Jolly West, maybe he didn’t, and this far down the line, can you ever find out? Only gets more tedious when it’s about how O’Neill writes the book but that might be necessary for the author going down so many rabbit holes. Certainly suggests Helter Skelter is bullshit and that certain witnesses in the trials were outright lying.
Manhunt – The Twelve Day Chase For Lincoln’s Killers by James L. Swanson – Rich in historical detail and forensics while also reading like a fast-paced political thriller without veering into historical fiction with assumption or inference for entertainment. I always wonder with historical accounts like this, “How do you know he said that, felt that way, thought that?” That wasn’t too bad here. It stayed very much in the non-fiction lane. I started reading this before recent events. What has jumped out is, all the conspirators who were closest to the kidnapping plot or the political violence committed on Lincoln, Seward and Andrew Johnson (planned) were all in their twenties – Booth, 25, Lewis Powell, 21, David Herold, 23, and George Atzerodt, 29. Mary Surratt, the only woman among the conspirators to be hanged, was in her forties. Also, people who had sympathies for Booth or were seen to be celebrating the assassanation were either made to wear signs denouncing them, beaten or killed. Has anyone watched the show based on this?
Conan The Rogue by John Maddox Roberts – I’ve been rereading the TOR Conan pastiches and Roberts was always my favorite of the TORnan authors. He captures Conan’s voice well, and his action is vivid, and more complex plots. Conan pastiches can be an exercise in adding, removing and moving around deckchairs of plot and tropes. But Roberts always had something more than other TORnan writers. Here Roberts does a mashup of Red Harvest and The Maltese Falcon. Conan plays three or four sides against each other while searching for a cursed idol. Roberts’s plotting is very tight as Conan’s plan comes together. There is some fun overlaying of characters with the films of the books – a Greenstreet character, Lorre, Astor – but not to the point of rolling your eyes at the similarities.
Nope, but there’s also the Robert Redford-directed (?) about Surratt, The Conspirator. Robin Wright plays her.
Haven’t read the TORnan authors but this reminds me to buy the second Howard Conan volume.
8 Bit Theater, 0061-0090, Brian Clevinger
Interestingly, this just about covers an entire plot thread, as the group is officially labelled the Light Warriors and they go through the preparations for going on their adventure. It’s a very Order Of The Stick kind of structural thing, actually, with the difference being that 8BT’s thumb is much harder on the comedy whereas OotS is a serious story with some jokes. 8BT feints at serious storytelling with a series of dreams the characters have hinting at mystical fates, but even at the time it’s obvious this was going to pay off with jokes.
The style is also becoming strongly elaborated on. Clevinger is breaking up the visuals in interesting ways; one panel in which the characters are muttering to each other is expressed via an entirely black panel, the mini-sprites of the characters, and no speech bubbles; even better, he’s started throwing in little asides of characters in the corner of panels, commenting on what happens. Both of these things speed up the pace of the comic and, amusingly enough, express the emotion of the scene.
There’s also still iconic running gags still being introduced; Fighter has his first meeting with Dr Swordopolis, the avatar of sword, and we meet the Real Light Warriors who showed up too late because they wanted to level up first. There’s even the first return of Onion Kid, who runs into BM after he’s butchered a pair of guards hunting him down for beating up the old man.
It’s interesting to me how much this comic has a professional ethos, just like Curb Your Enthusiasm; each character is locked down to their actions at this point – Thief manages to make Fighter fuck off by telling him Red Mage is going to go look at swords; RM complains later that being around Fighter for too long has sucked out all his knowledge, leading to a killer gag where Thief makes a casual reference to tabletop mechanics, RM expresses shock he didn’t think of that, then is reminded he’s been around Fighter all day.
This is combined with a careful series of running gags deployed to keep the story moving. It’s a fascinating combo that keeps the comic readable but also keeps cycling in new ideas as they go to different locations. It reminds me a bit of 30 Rock in how individual characters are very predictable but also going to increasingly unhinged places; although 30 Rock is working within the structure of a series of episodes with the same basic structure, whereas 8 Bit Theater is using the much larger structure of Final Fantasy, and thus looks looser.
In terms of specific humour, this section has a gag where BM initially mistakes King Steve’s order to fight Chaos (a specific villain) for chaos (the abstract concept), and launches into a rant about both the pointless of fighting an abstraction and that chaos itself is not inherently bad. This is another thing that always drew me to this comic; both the abstract philosophy it occasionally dived into and the comedy coming from it being in a dumb comic made out of video game assets.
A shopkeep offers RM wooden weapons and shields, including wooden helmets (“Extra splinters, of course.”). “There aren’t any monks or martial artists within five genres of here!” is, of course, hilarious for its precision. There’s an interlude with Fighter making his own comics; he, of course, overexplains everything. “Black Mage. I only beat the Bajeezus out of you before because I was so overwhelmed by your raw sex appeal that I couldn’t think straight.” / “That’s a perfectly natural reaction to my presence.” BM’s line is basically my automatic reaction to any positive commentary on my appearance.
Thief specifically requests the smallest, most insignificant, hard to find item so he can steal a guy’s stuff. The repetition of the gags means, again, a 30 Rock-like attempt to push it to as ludicrous an expression as possible.
Inversions, Iain M Banks
This is marketed as a science fiction novel but is effectively a medieval fantasy story where the fantasy is partially the invented (though cod-European) culture and a few space heroes wandering around in disguise. As a result, I found myself mostly uninterested; the best part is Doctor Vosill, a modern female doctor in a misogynistic culture, deeply internal in her emotions and goals until they come spilling out, and her relationship with the narrator of that section of the story.