The Friday Article Roundup
Give a hand to the best pop culture writing of the week.
Show’s over, nothing to see here — except:
The FAR would like to shake the hand of C.D. Ploughman for his contributions this week! 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!
At Little White Lies, Charles Bramesco rejoices in the return of comedy via The Naked Gun:
The platonic ideal of a comedy as a machine that extracts laughter — and that the best comedy would necessarily be the one that operates at maximum capacity along these lines on a minute-to-minute basis — is not pursued nearly as doggedly as it should be.
Luckily, for Earth and its people and everyone who will live in the future, Detective Frank Drebin Jr. stops for nothing when he’s in hot pursuit. Not pedestrians. Not unfortunately placed beehives or clutches of helium balloons. Nothing.
Mark Asch surveys the landscape of new micro-theaters like The Low Cinema in New York for Film Comment:
These days, studios such as Warner Brothers are increasingly reluctant to ship out their own library titles, preferring to take a cut from a venue that sources the film off a Blu-ray. This is perfect for a place like the Low, which can run discs, old VHS tapes, and digital files into a prosumer projector from a player, a computer, or an indie filmmaker’s external hard drive, as well as 16mm…. The casual, drop-in nature of much of the programming (“like [the] TBS Superstation,” jokes [Low co-owner Davis] Fowlkes) makes the implicit argument that moviegoing is an everyday pleasure.
In an interview at Filmmaker Magazine, writer/director Kelsey Taylor talks about making use of her limitations while shooting her new movie To Kill A Wolf:
Taylor: We had about 10 people on our crew. It was very, very small. One of the biggest things, I think, from a technical standpoint, is that we did not have a way of moving the camera in any traditional fashion — no dolly, no slider, nothing. I’m proud of how much the camera does not feel still in the film, and so much of that was because of blocking, making sure the actors are moving so the camera could pan with them, and being clever about where we put foreground elements and stuff. Watch the film and you’ll notice there’s not a single traditional camera move.
Men Read Books Too revels in the feeling of cracking a paperback’s spine:
People have always written inside their books, whether for self-reflection or to give as a gift, it’s a token of appreciation to the story. Our words are now forever bounded in the pages of this authors book. In a way, we are recontextualizing the meaning of the book to us or to someone else as a gift. You can have several copies of the same book and yet, they can each have a different personality. A nice hardcover or leather-bound copy gives an air of sophistication. Newer, contemporary covers are more enticing in how they look. Used, beaten paperbacks oddly give an air of cared admiration for it.
And while it is not an article, Magpies delighted to see Keith Phipps’ column The Laser Age resurrected in podcast form! To kick things off he finally discusses the classic sci-fi movie we’ve all been waiting to hear more about… Visit to a Small Planet with Jerry Lewis:
There were few bigger movie stars than Jerry Lewis in 1960, the year he released three films: Cinderfella, his directorial debut The Bellboy, and this adaptation of a popular Gore Vidal play. Lewis plays Kreton, a traveler from the other end of the universe who drops down to Earth, talks to dogs and cats, jams with beatniks, and generally stirs up trouble. Longtime film and pop culture critic Noel Murray joins us to discuss a semi-forgotten entry in Lewis’ filmography with a longer-lasting influence than you might expect.
Tags for this article
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?
Alfred Hitchcock Presents, “Into Thin Air” – already left some thoughts over on yesterday’s article, but this one fell a little short for me. For the most part it’s an interestingly different take on the “Lady Vanishes” plot but the twist / explanation didn’t really justify the elaborate setup for me. As usual, Lauren’s write-up did a good job making me think about it more deeply, though!
I always love getting your and Simon’s thoughts on the episodes! The next one is a bit of an odd duck, so I’ll be curious what everyone makes of it.
The Firm
No, not that one. This is a made-for-BBC movie from 1989, where Gary Oldman plays a real estate agent whose actual vocation is football hooliganism. I got this (and the other film in today’s write-up) off a Letterboxd list of best made-for-TV movies after I was rightfully contending that it’s wrong for the Emmys to count made-for-streaming movies as made-for-TV movies because those are two categorically different things, and talking about that made me want to sample some of the medium’s highlights. And indeed, this is great stuff: Oldman is electric, giving his character enough charisma, nerve, and intelligence to paper over how fundamentally pathetic it is to be a grown man devoting his life to brawls and vandalism. I can see what he gets out of it–“the buzz,” as he says, but also the intoxication of power and sway–and then certainly the film shows where it gets him. I’ll probably write this up for Streaming Shuffle, as well as …
Citizen X
Low-key, smart HBO movie that plays like a cross between Zodiac and Chernobyl, and if it’s not actually as good as either of those, it’s still pretty good and satisfying in a meat-and-potatoes kind of way. Stephen Rea, Donald Sutherland, Max von Sydow, and Jeffrey DeMunn–all good-to-excellent here, and this film makes strong use of Rea’s natural ability to look like he hasn’t had a good night’s sleep in decades. It oversells itself a little, underlining and stressing some of the relationships and character traits rather than always conveying them naturally, but that feels like a sign that it’s suffering from a too-short runtime: it has the skills and the sincerity that all of this would be fully there if it had more time. And the actors get it most of the way there in terms of selling it anyway.
Alan Clarke is a complete blind spot for me despite his films (TV and otherwise) being highly regarded as top-tier British filmmaking. I guess a lot of them feel a little “worthy” / homework-esque but I keep meaning to check out Penda’s Fen, his contribution to the folk-horror genre.
I didn’t even realize he was also behind Penda’s Fen! That’s been on my to-watch list since it was mentioned in Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched.
Panda’s Fen is on YouTube stateside but the visual quality of the copy looks pretty meh.
Those made for TV movies were on such a different scale than the typical Netflix film. And half of them, I think, started Anthony Hopkins.
I remember enjoying Citizen X when it was new. I thought a little about it last week when I watched Gorky Park, after which it is very consciously modeled.
I watched this with a friend, and he looked up the timeline of the original novel’s release vs. when the news story about this case fully got out, and we both got to be impressed by how much Martin Cruz Smith got right about how police investigation worked in the USSR.
Babylone 5, Season Two, Episode Twenty, “The Long, Twilight Struggle”
Holy shit. This episode is built around Londo committing a brutal and monstrous act of ownage, worthy of The Shield, that demands an immediate response from the people around him. It’s set up with Refa as Londo’s shadow, showing none of his hesitation, but Londo goes further than anyone expected – all pretense is dropped from Peter Jurasik and Andreas Katsulas (magnificent moment from him when he’s shown kneeling at the meeting towards the end) as the former hardens and the latter has all his strength sapped; brilliant touch for him to be at his most useful away from the battlefield and the glory that comes within (speaking of The Shield, he’s in a very Dutch-like situation where to show strength he has to do superficially weak things).
This is also where the show’s appeal is starting to shine, with the return of Draal, who took over a world-sized computer and now returns and offers it as a tool. This has taken what would be a typical episode of Star Trek and breathed new life into it by making it consequential, where the magical future promised is now here.
The Centauri and Narn of Babylon 5 riot with the speed and clarity of vision of Sprinfieldianites.
Between your write-ups and Dave’s, I’m definitely going to end up watching this at some point. And now I’m committing this particular episode title to memory to look forward to it in particular.
I will be slightly measured and observe that my reaction was partly “Why wasn’t the show operating at this level the entire second season when I know it could have handled it”, but I look forward to what you think of it.
This has persisted through the third season to a degree and I really do think the effects/makeup is a factor — episodes with the aliens are uniformly superior to the human-focused ones but I think those episodes take more work/time, so there are always some human-centric (or human-only! gah!) episodes in the mix for the 22-episode seasons.
Also I realise now how much it must be the phrase “worthy of The Shield” that must have pushed you over, which is definitely distinct from my general comparisons of media with The Shield.
Great Dutch/G’Kar observation here, and it’s making me realize there is not a small bit of Vic in Londo — both charismatic and quite successful mid-level guys who get into real shit when they try to take on more than they are able to handle. Refa always was this way, Londo makes himself this way and it’s very clear he would rather not be doing this (Vic gets to similar points of “how the hell did I get to this point”) but he is doing it. The action trumps the emotion. G’Kar understands this in his action, as painful as it is.
Londo has a lot more self-awareness than Vic, I think, but as you say, what he thinks about what he’s doing is ultimately secondary. I think when Vic ends up in similar thoughts, it’s mainly when someone throws it in his face, and mainly unintentionally (the best example I can think of is when Rebecca throws him into that monologue that climaxes with “I’m not gonna use my kids as an excuse, that’s bullshit.”). Londo has time to recognise he’s about to do some heinous shit.
Yeah, Vic the shark doesn’t stop moving and part of that is when he slows down he can look around and realize where he is. Londo definitely realizes things more frequently and has to actively push them away.
Babylon 5 — actively holding my head in despair whenever Jason Brian Cole’s Marcus is on the screen at this point. A pre-credits fight scene where he goes Ninja Turtle on a bunch of mopes is ridiculous and feels like it was forced into the episode by an executive demanding more action; the broader issue of how Marcus has been jammed into the station (aka the show itself) overall is lampshaded later in a character openly saying this, and Marcus responding with a wacky flow chart he made, it looks like a fourth grader’s family tree project and he apparently is walking around the station with this, this fucking schmuck, a secret agent who really is constantly present and talking about secret agent shit for some reason and expects no one to notice, I hate him so goddamn much. There is a lovely scene with Garibaldi visiting G’Kar in the brig and noting how happy the latter seems, G’Kar says he has been able to focus in insolation but his cheerfulness is clearly due to not having to deal with Marcus.
The Naked Gun — per the FAR above, comedy is BACK. Hits the perfect balance of ZAZ wordplay and deadpan (and uses some sturdy structural stuff from the original and its sequel) while also bringing in its own goofiness and absurdity, there is one scene I don’t dare spoil that nearly killed my buddy, he was laughing so hard. There are maybe two or three parts where a joke is not coming every 30 seconds or less, and aside from one cameo the cast is mostly very game low-key folks (along with people like Paul Walter Hauser and CCH Pounder and Danny Huston in larger roles, cast to their strengths) and this is such an important factor, everything here is in service to the jokes and their effect on/delivery from Neeson, who is perfect — he gets a line at the end that no one could’ve delivered better. And Anderson is a hoot too! Huge fun all the way through the credits, this is a perfect comedy to watch again and again. The Bat-signal is up, check it out folks.
I’ve been amused by your Marcus hate, because the guy who sparked my interest in the show in the first place also fucking hated Marcus’s guts. What’s really funny is that he also apparently gets a monologue that I find profound – I’ll get to that when I get to it, of course.
I owe your buddy a beer, Marcus Hat8rs 4ever. The Ninja Turtle comparison above is not made lightly, what Marcus reminds me of is the character who is cool when you are younger (Michaelangelo) and becomes more and more obnoxious as you get older due to the neediness underlying the cool, the demand for attention that is in fact the opposite of cool. This is combined with a very 90s sense of cool overall that is divorced from contemporary 90s signifiers, so maybe it’s not immediately apparent, but it is a sensibility that would have Marcus on a skateboard if Babylon 5 took place on Earth in 1995. I think this evolved into Whedony ironic cool and that certainly has its own issues, but this version is the worst of all worlds. Also, motherfucker looks like Pantene Pro-V Manos.
I kind of liked Marcus because at least some of the time the character embraced absurdity in a way that actively pushed against the rad dude template.
This is a fair observation and I can see the value of this point of view. But I think it is tonally off in execution anyway — you are not Errol Flynn, motherfucker — while also being too jarring for the show itself, which relies on intrigue as much as action. Absurdity and intrigue do not mix for any extended period of time, and especially when the absurd guy is supposed to be a key player in the Resistance and is spending more time being absurd than Resisting. Maybe if Marcus had been there from the start and grown into this position it would work for me, dropping him in now is too much.
Ooh, man, I had not had any expectations for the Naked Gun, but I’ve heard a lot of good things.
“Doc” – Stacy Keach as Doc Holliday is nobody’s huckleberry. This early 70s revisionist Western directed by Frank Perry (The Swimmer) and written by two fisted hard drinking newspaperman and occasional novelist Peter Hamill ignores most of the facts. And creates a Wyatt Earp (Harris Yulin) who’s more interested in power and wealth than in justice; and a Doc who is caught between his status as a legendary gunslinger, his desire to leave that behind and settle down with Kate Elder (Faye Dunaway), and his painful slow motion death from TB. The climactic gunfight is almost an ambush and an execution in this version, Wyatt and Doc hard and mean men beyond redemption, Doc hating himself for it. The film moves along a bit slowly and the pieces never really come together, but the leads are all very good – this is peak Dunaway even if the role as sex worker turned common life wife is a bit thankless – and Perry’s vision of the old west is grimy and dusty and not even a little glamorous., And unlike in Tombstone the movie, there are a lot of Latinos around (though given that this was filmed oin Spain, maybe more out of necessity than because there would have been a lot of Latinos around).
Frasier, “First Do No Harm” – Frasier dates the daughter of Martin’s best friend, but it doomed once he realized she might be subconsciously dating him for free psychotherapy and he might be dating her to flex his therapist muscles while out of work. It’s an interesting enough notion, and Ethical Frasier is always more interesting than Pompous Frasier. But that it ends with her yelling at him instead of them having an amicable breakup is too predictable. And did I mention the girlfriend is played by Teri Hatcher? (Frasier Crane and Lois Lane! Though by now I suspect she’s more remembered for “they’re real and they’re spectacular.”) Once again, the notion that Frasier has a fling with such an attractive woman makes it harder to sympathize about it ending too soon.
The Naked Gun – Yep, it’s good and well worth the theatrical visit. I don’t like using the phrase “understood the assignment,” but… hard to think of a better one here, as Akiva Schaffer, Liam Neeson, and co. have made something that understands the spirit of the original and keeps up a similar pace and density of gags, while still feeling like its own thing rather than a slavish recreation or hacky imitation of the original.
Any further commentary would probably just be listing off some of my favorite jokes from the film, and there are a lot. Oh, I will say: Pamela Anderson? Very good!
What Did We Read?
The Lion and the Unicorn, George Orwell
This is a piece of journalism Orwell wrote during World War II, and it’s fascinating to read as a piece of history. Orwell inadvertently reveals that the Left has always been like this, partially by attacking other leftists as much as he can get away with, partly by combining extremely potent insights into conservatives, capitalism, and fascism whilst making wildly overly optimistic estimations of how fast each of these things will fall. Like, not wrong, just wrong about the speed.
It’s also funny how paternalistic his view of India still is, even when he’s mostly accurate about trying to ensure autonomy for them. I dearly love his take on England as a sleepy, conservative country; he notes that capitalism is just good enough at making every-day life for most people comfortable enough to make it hard to bring down for something more equitable; bread and circuses shit. One thing I’ve been thinking, between this and the stuff I read for Andor, is that the main strength of capitalism is its resilience and the main strength of fascism is that it makes the individual feel like part of something bigger, and the two combine for something terrifying and horrible because the strength of each is the weakness of the other.
The Beginning of Spring, by Penelope Fitzgerald
Possibly my favorite Fitzgerald novel so far, displacing Human Voices. (All I have left now of the set that I bought is The Blue Flower, which I was saving for last; my reading has left out The Golden Child by virtue of it not having been reprinted in the cool set that I got.) Slim, off-beat historical novel set in Moscow in 1913, but–as is typical with Fitzgerald–not feeling at all like what you would think just from that description, because it’s stranger and more intimate and personal and seen from an odd angle. It’s about Frank, an Englishman whose Englishness somehow persists despite the fact that he was born and raised in Russia and whose wife abruptly leaves him at the start of the novel; she initially takes the children but then leaves them at a railway station for him to retrieve them. Frank doesn’t know what to make of his wife’s sudden departure, but he goes on as best he can, caring for his children and running a small printing press where he deals with his eccentric employees, including a fellow Englishman who is a fanatical Tolstoy adherent and who arranges for Frank to hire a temporary nanny/governess for the children.
This is a fascinating look into a very specific time and place through the lens of a very specific man. I adored Frank, who is so drawn so well: like a lot of Fitzgerald characters, he’s funny in a way that’s slightly acerbic and slightly diffident at the same time. He does genuinely care about doing the right thing (for people: he’s very practical when it comes to how principles play out in his corner of the world, so he never gets on a high horse about not wanting to dole out bribes when they’re expected), but he’ll still commit the occasional foul to protect his personal happiness (the bit with him and a downtrodden would-be governess is solid gold).
Yeah, I started this off with saying it was “possibly” my favorite Fitzgerald, and now it definitely is. We’ll see if The Blue Flower displaces it, though.
I found a mystery novel by AA Milne but haven’t really started it yet. Might end up vacation reading. But apparently he wrote it before he went to Pooh Corner.
Moving along steadily through Dan Jones’s Plantagenets book. King John was almost as bad as everyone thinks. He was, however, more interested in seeing that the poor as well as the rich had their day in court, which was a first for the Normans. Otherwise, though, not a good king. Next up: Henry III.
“Oh bother, I’ve gotten blood on my honey pot.”
Prince John is of course in The Lion in Winter and gets one of the best lines during the musical kingship chairs: “I’m king again! Fantastic!”
Hello Summer, Goodbye by Michael Coney – I read the U.S. release, Rax (DAW #170). This takes place on a unique planet with Coney stressing the planet is not colonized by humans in the far future but inhabited by humanoids. The world is vivid with its own politics, a civil war, and unique flora and fauna. The planet is part of a dual system with the planet Rax. It has a unique elliptical orbit causing long unbearable winters and extremely hot summers. Winter is feared causing behavioral changes in the people, animals, it affects politics and changes in war strategy. It even influences the inhabitant’s vocabulary. Their F-word is freeze, as in “Freeze you!” or “You freezer!”
Told in the first-person through the eyes of a young boy it feels like Summer of ’42 on an alien planet but with more age-appropriate protagonists. The young boy Alika-Drove from the town of Drove goes to Pallahaxi with his father a mid-level government official. Pallahaxi feels like a Cornish fishing village in 1875 with some variations in technology being something like steampunk. There Drove falls in love with Pallahaxi-Browneyes. The two experience a beautiful summer together preparing for the harsh winter which brings the “grume” along with it. They are very near the front line of the ongoing civil war which causes some political situations in the town. It’s a coming-of-age story, a love story, a war story and an SF story. There is the mystery of a missing child and a possible murder of another individual. Coney writes in a Romantic, elegiac style. The book is filled with sentiment, nostalgia and longing. It’s more about growing-up, the Romantic feel of enjoying your youth and looking back and learning from it rather than the plot, but there are some explosive sharp edges at times. It’s all done in two-hundred pages. Fantastic stuff.
Every so often, I search to see if this is in print again yet, even as an ebook, and every time, I’m disappointed. I’ve heard good things about it for years, but the only copies I can ever find are used ones that are a tad too expensive. A bunch of Coney has made its way back into print in ebook form, though, so I keep hoping.
The DAW book might be your best bet. They can be all over the place in pricing. But there are affordable copies to be found. It’s a beautiful book well worth tracking down.
I finished Atlas Alone, the fourth and looks to be final novel of Emma Newman’s Planetfall series. Each book for the most part stands on its own, but they set up some conflicts we would expect to see settled in future volumes. However, it seems Newman is not able to find a publisher to continue the series. And that’s sort of too bad but, also, I’m not gagging to read the rest of these. They’re all pretty good, but none of them were spectacular and they all end quite abruptly.
Hey Friends, What’s Up?
First week back at work following a mostly-pleasant family holiday (highlights: good weather, proximity to beach, nice food, decent accommodation; lowlights: my mum’s health issues, which somewhat spoiled her enjoyment and made her very prickly towards others – my very pregnant sister got the bulk of it) and it has been a bit of a nightmare: immediately plunged into a week-long planning session that has only just finished, the cats are acting up after a week of being looked after by the neighbours and I feel like crap. Not sure whether to blame my complete feeling of fatigue on post-holiday blues, the relentless online meetings or illness / a Coeliac flare-up but it has been a STRUGGLE.
On the plus side things are still going extremely well in my exciting new relationship and I have some nice plans this weekend, assuming I don’t feel too damn tired to actually do them – country walk with friends tomorrow and a day at a music festival on Sunday, then Monday off work.
Summer doldrums at work, which I hope last until after my vacation. Though of course I have more to do today than I did the rest of the week. People do love to wait till Fridays to get stuff done, Otherwise, the staff holds its collective breath. There are starting to be layoffs all over the industry, though there are also reports that some places did so well with fundraising, they matched what they would have lose for the year. So who really knows? And then my brother offers the opinion of “you should just move everything to streaming anyway.” But I can’t convince him anyone still watches public TV.
No health updates yet from my wife – whose test is in a week – or her father – who was supposed to see the doctor yesterday. My mom started physical therapy for a bad back, and was told to put most of her exercise on hold till they can give her a new regimen. She’s pushing 83 and still goes to the gym despite a bad back and bad knees. I think she exercises more than I do.
And I had to make two tech support visits for her this week. She’s decent with computers and phones, but between a slowing mind and just the issues of adapting to new tech, it gets harder and harder.
Update on my father in law: apparently his gall bladder can wait till the fall to come out. As long as he’s not in pain or otherwise sick, it’s not an immediate issue. Never heard of that before, but I am not a gallologist.
This week marked the new teachers training at my school district, so it’s been a back-and-forth between renewed courage from understanding (I got a teacher’s copy of the textbook at last! And it comes with premade lesson plans that I can jump off from!) and return to terror and despair (my assigned “Buddy” in the building isn’t all that encouraging about what to expect from students!) This will be a challenging building, with the majority of students in the “economically disadvantaged” category and a lot of non-English speakers. Somebody asked about ICE raids (there was a raid nearby in the city where 11 restaurant operators and workers were taken from two locations simultaneously, the agents left the doors unlocked and all the effects and food laid out after the raids in case somebody actually thinks this is about law and order). The principal had a ready answer. He’s a longtime educator in the area who hasn’t quite lost his rural Kansas drawl. “Nobody’s getting past the office,” he said. “And I’m ready to go to jail over it.” I think I’m in the right place.
Spent yesterday morning at the aquarium – my first visit in nearly 20 years! We were drawn in by an Animal Crossing promotional event (collect stamps, find characters, etc), but the real animals were the stars of the show. It was so much fun staring through the glass at all the wonderful creatures. Highlights were the seahorses with their cute little monkey tails, being underneath the sharks and seeing their weird whiskery mouths, trying to spot the frogs in their enclosures, and watching two penguins have a little screaming match (also the way the penguins all stand around with their flippers out like a bouncer hulking with his traps all puffed up).
More inner child activities desired after this.
Thanks for the heads up about The Laser Age returning. But also I have discovered that The Reveal left Substack! That is now three former Substack newsletters I can report moved elsewhere in part due to Substack allowing Nazis. Not nearly enough,. but it’s a start.
Year of the Month update!
This August, we’ll be covering 1959. Check out all these movies, albums, books, et al
Aug. 8th: Gillian Nelson: Noah’s Ark
Aug. 15th: Gillian Nelson: I Captured the King of the Leprechauns
Aug. 18th: Sam Scott: Imitation of Life
Aug. 2oth: John Bruni: Shadows
Aug. 22nd: Gillian Nelson: Khrushchev Goes to Disneyland
Aug. 29th: Gillian Nelson: The Monorail
Aug. 31st: Tristan J. Nankervis: North by Northwest
And in September, we’re covering these movies, albums, books, from 1938!
TBD: Cori Domschot: Bringing Up Baby
TBD: Bridgett Taylor: Rebecca
Sept. 22nd: Sam Scott: Holiday