The Friday Article Roundup
Taking a break with the best pop culture writing of the week.
This week, you will be tentatively amused during downtime by:
Your regular FAR will be on vacation next week, tune in to find out who will step up! In the meantime, post articles from the past week in the comments for discussion, and have a Happy Friday!
At his blog, Chris Richards reviews the World Cup halftime show:
Let’s keep the energy up. More than 1.5 billion people are expected to watch this first-ever World Cup halftime show on television, and that’s roughly one in five people alive — so up next, you’re gonna need Gustavo Dudamel conducting exactly three-sixths of Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem. Honestly, I think Janice, Floyd and Animal are more than enough. (Sorry if you’re just finding out about this, but Dr. Teeth and Zoot both died a few years ago. Fuck cancer.) Anyway, “Seven Nation Army” rocks, but tell Dudamel not to go too hard with the headbanging because the Electric Mayhem won’t actually be playing their instruments. They’re Muppets.
Luke Plunkett muses on Grand Theft Auto VI and the death of the video game industry as we know it at Aftermath:
Note that I am not mourning this; if cowardice has been the defining trait of AAA gaming’s executive class for the past decade, then obscenity has come a close second. The fact Grand Theft Auto VI’s total spend will be over one billion dollars while everything else collapses around it is an embarrassment to Rockstar, publishers Take-Two and the entire medium of video games. It’s Sodom and Gomorrah type shit, and some would be forgiven for thinking maybe God is right to smite this sector of gaming in its wake.
In a long interview at The Guardian, Steve Rose talks with John Carpenter, who is keeping his priorities straight:
When I tell him there is almost a paragraph of his Wikipedia entry listing film-makers who have cited him as an influence – Guillermo del Toro, Quentin Tarantino, Edgar Wright, James Cameron (who worked for Carpenter once) – he seems genuinely oblivious, pained even. “What does that mean to me? I can’t do anything about that. It’s wonderful, I think it’s fantastic, I don’t know why. If you were gonna emulate a director, you’d emulate somebody whose movies aren’t panned.” It sounds as if he is not online much then? “No! I rebelled against mobile phones. I rebelled against computers. I can’t do that, I don’t want to do that.”
At Filmmaker Magazine, Adam Nayman pays tribute to Sam Neill:
The scenes between Neill and a young Nicole Kidman [in Dead Calm] draw a bead on one of his greatest gifts. Where some alpha-male types tend to do their best work either in isolation from or at odds with female costars, Neill was always an alchemist with actresses. Not only did he hold his own with the likes of Davis, Adjani, Meryl Streep (A Cry in the Dark, 1988), and Holly Hunter (The Piano, 1993), but he seemed to draw the best out of them as well. The funniest scenes in Jurassic Park are the ones where we’re obliged to see Neill—lustfully, but also with bemused and begrudging affection—through the wide eyes of Laura Dern.
And Noel Murray makes the case for the latest Big Bang Theory spin-off at The AV Club:
[Stuart Fails To Save The Universe] is a show with a lot of the strengths of its predecessors, including a deeply wonky sense of humor and an emotional core that reveals itself gradually. It’s also sure to irritate anyone who can’t stand The Big Bang Theory. With Stuart, creators Chuck Lorre and Bill Prady lean harder than ever into the kind of nerd culture humor that makes one wonder whether they’re laughing at or with their cast of geeks and geniuses. The answer is, as always: Maybe both?
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The Friday Article Roundup
Not to be confused with the best pop culture writing of the week.
Trying and failing to remain open-minded about mind-openers.
The Friday Article Roundup
A grim future to fight in the best pop culture writing of the week.
The Friday Article Roundup
Painting the town red with the best pop culture writing of the week.
Department of
Conversation
Big Bang is laughing at. No doubt in my mind.
No Dr. Teeth erasure!!
What did we watch?
Person to Person (2014) – Inspired by Miller to check this out before it expires, it is not surprising that we were both attracted to a short film about a New York record store clerk in a strange social situation, in this case with a girl who simply will not leave his house after a party. A lot to chew on here, especially the party photography early on, and Benie’s ease and familiarity with his neighbors and customers contrasted with the befuddlement/increasing irritation with this weird, obviously disturbed woman. It’s also apparent that she might need help, at one point maybe contemplating suicide, and there’s only so far Benie will go. If this took a bigger turn, it’d be a Safdie Brothers film, especially its very “normal” looking cross section of urban humanity. Instead, Person to Person is low key and cool much like the R&B on the soundtrack.
“Benie’s ease and familiarity with his neighbors and customers contrasted with the befuddlement/increasing irritation with this weird, obviously disturbed woman” — bingo, none of his bonhomie seems forced and the film ends with him clearly delighted to run into another acquaintance on the street. He likes people, or at least people he’s familiar with — taking a leap is beyond him.
There’s a feature length version with more of an ensemble cast, did you watch it?
No — I looked it up and it didn’t grab me with its expanded take, but I should give it a shot at some point. Defa is clearly a good filmmaker.
Elementary, ‘Absconded” – A Dept of Agriculture bee expert is murdered. Who killed him is pretty simple: a beekeeper found the guy was causing colony collapse with a mite infestation. The question then becomes why, and it connects to a weird but successful plot to lure an emir who also keeps bees to New York and kidnap him. The culprits are caught and arrested for a related attempted murder, but they do get the ransom. Which is more interesting than the rest of the plot. Sutton Foster is the special guest killer, but I suspect viewers not into Broadway didn’t know who she was, so not quite “the most famous person is the killer.” But the second plot is quite intriguing: Gregson is offered a big promotion and turns it down, happy where he is, and learns that someone wanted him promoted for Reasons. As this is about the point I stopped watching, I can’t wait to find out more.
Andor, episodes 8-10 — as expected, the show improves greatly by sticking Andor in prison. Prison escape flicks rule and this one has some great moments, it is also a prison escape flick turned into a TV show and if the non-prison stuff is also frequently good* it breaks up the momentum and procedure of the escape and planning. Andor the guy functions best with his back against the wall and that comes out here except for him once again failing to kill people it’d be smart to kill, this may be a characteristic but it is a characteristic of him being a dope. Get it together dumbass! The good part about the TV intercutting is the broader thematic stuff of the Empire being top down and the Rebellion being made up as it goes along, people repeat words they hear from others as a way of reaffirming their own belief. As always, Syril is great stuff, trading blind loyalty to the Empire for blind loyalty to Dedra and this will obviously end terribly. In part because Dedra doesn’t shut it down! Girl, get your shit together.
*Mon Mothma getting owned is delicious but it’s also pretty funny that the gritty sci fi show is dipping into the Game Of Thrones feudal marriage well for drama
Babylon 5, Season Five, Episode Five, “Learning Curve”
I’ve been toying with the thought that this show is the rare serialised television programme that sits at a comfortable three outta five – exactly the same level as Bob’s Burgers or Law & Order, but in the exact opposite way. Those shows are deeply episodic – you’ll start with a good opening five seconds and follow it all the way to the end, and they’re limited more by low ambition than anything else – no higher goal than being comfortably entertaining for a half hour or hour. Babylon 5 is ludicrous in its serialised ambitions, and it’s just the moment-to-moment writing is often weak and combined with sloppy episode plots.
The upshot of this being that, while this season has been a visible step down, the actual construction of episodes is about the same as ever, so most individual episodes are fine if they’re not completely conceptually offensive; they just lack the forward-driving oomph that made the show watchable up until now. None of this feels like it’s going anywhere, so the sloppier aspects are more irritating, the good stuff lands more softly, and the mediocrity is now bad. This has some cool heroic stuff with the Minbari who goes to save that woman from the telepath, but I find myself caring even less about the worldbuilding than I did before. There’s not really anything on the level of travelling back in time to start a Minbari religion.
What did we read?
The Girl on The Velvet Swing – Inspired by the musical Ragtime to find a book on the real Evelyn Nesbitt and Harry Thaw/Stanford White murder case, where in Nesbitt’s husband Thaw shot White point blank at a show in Madison Square Garden, the very structure White had built. More than ever I think the musical does a disservice to the real Nesbitt by interpreting her as a publicity hungry bimbo. (Not sure about the novel yet as I haven’t read it.) It is apparent Nesbitt was a traumatized and sometimes gullible very young woman who was taken advantage of by two horrible men who happened to hate each other. A good fount of info for the case; like many books with legal cases, the trials take up too much of the book and slacken the pace.
Started the updated American Way of Death, slow going. This might be a book that’s best in hard copy, not audio book.
The novel is kinder to Nesbitt than that, though it’s been a while. (It’s damn good.)
The NYT review of the original stage production mentions this, and IRL her testimony appears to have been a harrowing experience for the poor woman. It speaks to the plays’s problems as a whole, despite some terrific songs (ironically, “Crime of the Century” is a really fun number) where it is very hard to create a cohesive book musical with a sprawling, episodic novel. Parade takes place in roughly the same pre-WWI 20th Century era and is much stronger because it has a tighter narrative focus and a far darker political undercurrent. (Another 90s musical comparison, and another co-starring Emma Goldman, is Assassins; Ragtime WANTS, badly, to believe in the American Dream while questioning it, and Assassins asks if this Dream is, taken at face value, completely fucking insane.)
Started Shawn Levy’s 2009 bio of Paul Newman. It’s a bit less of a deep down than his current Eastwood bio, maybe because Newman wasn’t a one man moviemaking machine and thus there’s less to say about Paul’s movies. I am just up to the start of Paul’s incredible run through the 60s so I have yet to get to his other careers in auto racing, spaghetti sauce, politics, and philanthropy. Overall, Levy does feel like he is good with popular, laudatory, and somewhat critical bios. (He pulls no punches when he thinks a Newman performance isn’t good.) I might read his others after this.
Also started What They Didn’t Burn: Uncovering My Father’s Holocaust Secrets by Mel Laytner. Does what the title says: Laytner, a former reporter, applies his investigative skills to find the things his father never talked about, uncovering a path to survival that was both something of a miracle and full of chicanery of the sort that Holocaust narratives rarely get into. This is part of subclass of Holocaust history that is both about the survivors and about their kids coming to grips with the unwanted legacy left to them. And as usual, I find the parts about the history gripping if of course a hard read, and the parts about about the son a bit unengaging (the same way I never cared for Art Spiegelman talking about himself in Maus). This is a worthwhile book as any and all stories of individual experiences in the Holocaust are worthwhile, but I would have preferred less of the author’s own life.
Would like to read the Eastwood book!
The Judgment Of Deke Hunter, by George V. Higgins — this is mid-70s Higgins, after his initial run of Eddie Coyle and company and subsequent sojourn in Washington DC. The titular character is a state trooper working with the DA’s office and the focus is crime-adjacent — cops and lawyers dealing with an upcoming trial — without the criminal perspective and with more women in relationships with the characters. So while the monologue-heavy chapter structure remains, this is moving into literary fiction as genre. Higgins would get better at this but right now there is a lot of middle class griping that doesn’t ring false but is in service of an ennui/lack of direction that doesn’t feel as urgent or vital as the crooks who have to worry about the walls caving in just as much as the grocery bill. Not a bad read but Higgins has done better — I’m currently re-reading his Kennedy For The Defense, which came out a few years later and is about a sleazy defense attorney who also has middle class woes but this is more overtly comic and interestingly told in the first person, which lets Higgins get more wry and observational. It’s a lot of fun and as I have said for years, Ben Affleck could get an Oscar in an adaptation of this, the character is perfect for his cocksure and slightly untrustworthy vibe.
Shibumi, by Trevanian – A Westerner raised in Japan becomes an international assassin. Retired for several years he protects a young woman from being hunted by the Mother Company, a Bilderberg-like group. Good spy-thriller with an interesting main character. It’s a satire of Western culture and masculinity, and a subversion of the modern spy genre and even the superhero myth. Hel has acquired his abilities through the hardships and survival in his life, philosophical discipline, a bit of mysticism, and the strategies of Go rather than brute strength and training, gadgets or the support of governments. He is a master of the “naked kill”, the use of everyday items – tea cups, paperclips, drinking straws – as killing weapons, something that is now a part of the spy genre and films the novel satirizes. He, of course, practices shibumi, a shift from excessive wisdom to simplicity, more about understanding than knowledge, and humility that does not feel the need to prove itself. The caving sections are, like Go, a metaphor for Hel’s life but boring. Still a solid adventure novel with all the stuff these types of books have – Superheroes, conspiracy theories, murders, terrorist acts, sex, anti-Western sentiment and mysticism.
“conspiracy theories, murders, terrorist acts, sex, anti-Western sentiment and mysticism” — but enough about Andor!
I read this last year! I found it in a secondhand shop and couldn’t resist the pulpy blurb.
Lenin: A Biography, Chapter One, Robert Service
Decided on a new project: go back over the biographies of the Soviet Union leaders I own, chapter by chapter, starting with Lenin. It’s good to reread books every now and again, and it’ll be fun to go deeper into them than I did before. This opens with Lenin’s great-grandfather and works through to his birth, and the journey here is of gradual assimilation and aspiration; the men in Lenin’s family were largely concerned with achieving middle class comfort for themselves and their families, and each generation was a little more successful than the last.
Service spends a lot of time contemplating Lenin’s Jewish heritage; Lenin’s grandfather and great-grandfather both converted away from Judaism to escape persecution (and also out of indifference to it), and it ended up becoming more of a curio to them than anything else. Lenin’s family wanted, more than anything else, to be normal and comfortable Russians. They value discipline and education, and they pursue basic civic responsibility.
This is environment priming for Lenin; indeed, Service considers how such normal people generated one of the most successful revolutionaries. His father’s medical career was functional but not spectacular; his family technically noble but not notable. The main thing uniting Lenin to his forebears is a stubborn focus and his premature baldness.
The Delta Factor, Mickey Spillane
Not one of Spillane’s famous Mike Hammer stories, but very reminiscent of his reputation. I admire the hardboiled prose – almost certainly an influence on our James Ellroy – and to an extent I admire the brutality; there’s a shocking running gag about the narrator threatening to rape the female agent he’s legally married to for their cover, where it’s like… if the joke works, it works in drawing attention to the fact that he’s right, there was no legal recourse for a woman at the time to escape that. Most of all, I think Spillane has a knack for fast, effective characterisation of people when he’s in the mood; this has a flighty young woman who immediately becomes sympathetic and likeable and successfully sets up her being brutally murdered and us feeling bad about that.
But overall, this is a dumb pulp novel living down to the reputation of dumb pulp novels. It exists solely to make the narrator look cool, and in a forced and stupid way that makes me not like or care about him. The plot is stupidly simple and ludicrously convoluted, and not in a fun Metal Gear Solid kind of way, and most of the characters exist to be killed off by the narrator. Frankly, I find the twist ending downright insulting.
I have not read Service and only know he did make up numbers for victims of purges using bullshit math, which is hilarious.
Year of the Month update!
And for August, send us your pieces on any of these movies, albums, books, etc. from 2001!
TBD: James Williams: Millennium Actress
Aug. 2nd: Tristan J. Nankervis: Ocean’s Eleven
Aug. 7th: Gillian Nelson: Recess: School’s Out!
Aug. 14th: Gillian Nelson: The Princess Diaries
Aug. 16th: Tristan J. Nankervis: Mulholland Drive
Aug. 21st: Gillian Nelson: Disney’s California Adventure
Aug. 27th: Cori Domschot: The Mummy Returns
Aug. 28th: Gillian Nelson: Walt Disney Treasures
And there’s still time to write about any of these movies, albums, books, etc. from 1979.
Jul. 24th: Gillian Nelson: Don Bluth
Jul. 28th: John Bruni: All That Jazz
Jul. 29th: Lauren James: Ghost Story
Jul. 31st: Gillian Nelson: Big Thunder Mountain
On Jay-Z and the divide between how he wants to see himself as a Black liberator and how in reality he is an ultra-capitalist:
https://www.theringer.com/2026/07/23/music/jay-z-yankee-stadium-concert-target-deal-colin-kaepernick
Ha, I did read Noel’s review of Stuart Fails to Save the Universe a few days ago. Because with that cast and the concept, if anything could convince me they could get something good out of a BBT spin-off, it was that. But then the review starts with “The Big Bang Theory is better than you think…” and praises all the other spinoffs, and I started to doubt the reliability of the review here.
As one of the comments says, “My beef with the show is not the depiction of ‘nerd’ but the judgment: accomplished professionals with rich social lives depicted as ‘losers’ because they represent a boomer high school idea of ‘weird’.”