The Friday Article Roundup
Welcome to best pop culture writing of the week country.
This week, you will stand for:
Stand up for something! Send articles to be featured throughout the next week to magpiesmedia [at] gmail, post articles from the past week below for discussion and Have a Happy Friday!
At The AV Club, Noel Murray scrutinizes the curdled certainty of Landman creator Taylor Sheridan’s characters:
This is also what makes his shows ultimately unsatisfying as stories. Because his protagonists are incapable of truly changing—since changing would negate the Know-It-All principals for which they stand. The central characters of Yellowstone and Mayor Of Kingstown just repeat themselves, season after season. Conflicts are resolved and reset, without any lessons learned. I’m not saying Sheridan should tell us what to think about controversial social issues, or that his shows should offer a set of attainable action items. I understand that he’s making pop art, not staging a rally. But drama does usually involve some catharsis, which Sheridan’s protagonists rarely experience. They don’t evolve.
While Elizabeth Nelson examines other crucial Landman aspects for The Ringer:
Man can’t live on land alone, and that’s where the landwomen come in. And boy howdy, are they something else. If you’re going to start, and we obviously are, you’d have to start with Angela Norris, Tommy’s ex-wife played by Ali Larter as a kind of equivalent force of nature to the wind and dirt and oil and gas that otherwise drives Tommy. Angela is immensely entertaining and, by and large, very likeable—so take that into account when I tell you she is bonkers. She is forever FaceTiming—always FaceTiming, never a regular phone call—Tommy while he is landmanning, which takes hours and hours a day by pickup, and trying to seduce him in some way. She is very sexy and he is vulnerable to this, though he is always saying “Honey, I’m driving 85 miles an hour, and I don’t want to crash. Why are you taking your top off?” or something.
Peter Yung looks at the grim grind of The System, Peter Yung’s Mann- and To-anticipating 1979 film, in Screen Slate:
Most morally grey cop films coming out of the Hollywood studio system focus on the individual compromises of anti-hero lawmen. Whether these are meant to be critiques of policing practices or a fascistic fantasy of judicial control, their often shallow analyses are hamstrung by their larger-than-life protagonists. The System realizes a narrative that subjugates both its lead cop and criminal informant, in the end sacrificing them to ensure the survival of an oppressive social order. Instead of taking an ambivalent approach, vaguely resigning to the reality that criminal organizations and police departments are co-dependent entities, Yung characterizes both groups in the same light: as conforming mechanisms of authoritarian control.
At I Have That On Vinyl, Adam Steiner makes the case for the greatest hits compilation:
Consider Alan Partridge, the everyman of Middle-England mainstream malaise, who once notoriously cites “The Best of The Beatles“ as his favourite record by the band. Unwitting as ever, Alan opens himself up to ridicule by choosing the most generic musical format–but he has a point. Perversely, The Beatles were defined by their single releases, including several non-album wonders, such as the Double-A side of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and ‘Penny Lane’, while at the same time, helping to kill-off The Sixties reliance on the single, by affirming the unified album as the dominant format of the late 20th century. This soaring achievement is encapsulated by the 1 album, collecting together their 27 number one singles.
Richard Whittaker of the Austin Chronicle finds Mercy, in a delightful headline, guilty of being stupid:
This all transpires in a somewhat future-ish L.A. inspired by the San Francisco tech bros’ vision of the City of Angels as a hellscape filled with (gasps, clutches pearls) homeless people. They are, of course, all junkies and criminals. Exactly when this is supposed to happen seems unclear, since cops have personal helicopters in the back of their cars but a hard copy of The Anarchist Cookbook is also a pivotal plot point.
And Defector writer Dan McQuade passed away at the age of 43 this week, the site is showcasing his best work, including a 2022 look at McGruff’s “Smart Kids” album:
McGruff was voiced by Jack Keil himself. And instead of getting a singer to do the actual singing—Garfield’s singing voice at the time was Lou Rawls—it appears Keil did all the singing here himself. @bloodberry_tart says this track sounds like New Order, and I agree, but I also think the intro sounds like Eddie Murphy’s “Party All The Time.” This album’s 1984 release date predates Murphy’s hit song, so perhaps Eddie Murphy and producer Rick James copied McGruff. We can’t rule it out.
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The Friday Article Roundup
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Double Features
Family heirlooms loom large in Father Mother Sister Brother and Vulcanizadora.
Double Features
Moving in time with One Battle After Another and Caught By The Tides.
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Inside No. 9, “The Riddle of the Sphinx”
A superb episode that starts off with amiable geekery over cryptic crosswords and then escalates and escalates and escalates until it turns into a Greek tragedy written like a cryptic crossword, all full of jumbles, reversals, and clever clues. Pemberton plays a Classics professor with a sideline in crafting cryptics (published under the name “the Sphinx”), and Alexandra Roach plays Nina, who breaks into his rooms in the middle of the night to get a peek at tomorrow’s puzzle. A wild, dark, fiendish ride. Maybe not the best starter episode for the series, but an A+ episode for anyone who’s come to love its no-holds-barred approach. Great behind-the-scenes details for this one, too: Pemberton, a real-life crossword devotee, designed the cryptic and threw in a terrific Easter egg.
Punch-Drunk Love
One of my two unseen PTAs (now all I have to do is check off Inherent Vice). Lovely, melancholy, funny, sweet, and light on its feet; the colors here are incredible, especially the gorgeous deep blue pop of Adam Sandler’s suit against all the white backgrounds. Gotta say, I find Barry incredibly relatable. (Though I’ve never destroyed a bathroom.) The scene where he tells his brother-in-law that he doesn’t like himself very much but doesn’t know if this is normal or not, he doesn’t know how other people are, is a beautifully crafted swerve back and forth between the most delicately heartbreak and superb comic puncturing: “Barry, I’m a dentist.”
Now I wish I had some pudding.
I don’t really know if there’s a consensus on where to split PTA’s career into different phases but I definitely think of Punk-Drunk Love as my favourite of that era (from Inherent Vice onwards he’s been working more consistently in My Vibe so I guess that’s where I’d draw a line).
Shampoo – New Hollywood’s most famous Lothario Warren Beatty is a hairdresser who sleeps around about as much the actor playing him. This is billed as a comedy and even a social satire, but I view it more as a character study of a man who has almost no character, who cannot stop chasing women, who became a hairdresser just to be around women. And who ironically is actually really good at (and a little passionate about) being a hairdresser. It’s hard to like the protagonist, but I am not sure we are supposed to. Doesn’t help, though, that Beatty continues to not impress me. The rest of cast is stronger, especially Goldie Hawn as Warren’s current girlfriend, who is both far too decent for him and far too perceptive; and Jack Warden as a rich old dude whose wife is having a fling with Warren AND whose mistress used to be with Warren. Warden’s character is about as rotten as Warren, but Warden somehow imbues him with a bit more depth and a bit more self-awareness. Lee Grant is Warden’s wife and got an Oscar for some reason (Warden was nominated), and Julie Christie is just there as the mistress. Hal Ashby’s direction – purportedly guided heavily by producer/writer/star Beatty) is quite effective. And look for Carrie Fisher in her first movie part.
The Practice, “Pro Se” – The comment above about how Taylor Sheridan protagonists never change reminded me of my note that everyone on this show is stuck. Well. there does seem to be an effort to change Bobby as he came out of being nearly killed deeply unsettled and angry and asserting that he can’t keep being a criminal lawyer. In some ways the show has been building to this, but it always backed off from actual change. So I doubt we see it this time. But the core of this one is the great Giancarlo Esposito, already somewhat known to audiences from Homicide: Life on the Streets, as a convict who killed his cellmate. He refuses to plea, demands a trial, demands to be his own lawyer, and cooks up a convincing story to explain he had no choice, and Esposito plays the part with a perfect mix of menace and charm. But it’s only at the end that we learn all of this was part of a plan to escape since he was as good as dead if he stayed in prison, and it’s chilling. Rene Auberjonois returns as a judge, this time played entirely seriously. This is the end of Ron Livingston’s run on the show for reasons unknown. And John Tinker, longtime TV writer and producer (St. Elsewhere) comes on as co-executive producer for the next year.
I think the reason why Lee Grant got an Oscar is that, not since Anne Bancroft’s portrayal of Mrs. Robinson (The Graduate), have we seen such an angry woman on the older side of the generation gap (Shampoo is set on the eve of the 1968 election that set the stage for Nixon’s rise to power). Grant spends a lot of energy just trying to keep herself together; she balances self-hatred with desperation to break out of her limited world, which is fascinating to watch.
She’s also a foil to Warren Beatty’s hairdresser who spends a lot of energy chasing his contradictory dreams, and, in a joke that you’ll only get if you’ve spent time in LA, all the women he’s sleeping with live in different parts of the city, which means he’s always tired, and looks constantly distracted, which is what all that driving will do to a person.
Mortal Kombat – “work sucks, let’s watch Paul WS Anderson movies” continues to pay off this week, this is one of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen and a hell of a lot of fun. My only real complaint is that the Johnny Cage / Scorpion fight is so great and it comes halfway through, nothing afterwards QUITE matches it even if it remains a lot of fun throughout. Also loved Christopher Lambert playing the god of lightning, the excellent FX for four-armed champion Goro, and the amped-up techno soundtrack. Might keep this going and watch Alien vs Predator tonight…
A word of warning – while AvP has some of Anderson’s understanding of movement through space, it has a disappointingly low amount of the title creatures and a lot of dumb humans, so be prepared. I will wholeheartedly recommend Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, which is not as competent as the original in terms of action and is extremely cheesy but is also a ton of fun if you are on its goofy wavelength.
Noted – the general verdict on the Screen Drafts episode that prompted these PWSA blindspot watches was that AvP has aged pretty well largely because it’s a goofy monster-mash movie that is more charming when viewed from the future perspective of people who’ve been disappointed by further Alien / Predator movies released since. I think I’m pretty well prepared to accept it on its own terms but we shall see… I’m also tempted just to revisit Event Horizon since I haven’t seen it in a very long time.
This is the first even remotely positive thing I’ve heard about Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, interesting.
Those were five hundred dollar sunglasses, asshole!
Mortal Kombat is my favorite bad movie ever.
M*A*S*H, Season Three, Episode Twelve, “A Full Rich Day”
“Wanna take that knife off him, sir?”
“Uh, I’m not interested in mock heroics.”
“I’ll settle for the real thing, sir.”
“Klinger! I want to see you out of that dress, tonight!”
“Never on a first date, sir!”
This is another ‘letter home’ episode, with the twist that Hawkeye is using a tape recorder to tell his story – although honestly, you can never really go wrong with a basic letter-home concept, because you can fit a surprising amount of characterisation into it. You definitely get a very rich understanding of Hawkeye’s relationship with his dad just from how he talks. This has a lieutenant who threatens everyone with a gun to get his sergeant treated. It’s an incredible performance, no attention on anything other than his goal; you get the sense Lt. Smith isn’t very smart, but he doesn’t need to be to get what he needs done (though the recklessness that could get another guy killed grates on me).
This is also where we learn Hawkeye is named after the character in Last of the Mohicans. It’s the only book his father ever read, and presumably it put him off the whole reading thing.
“Frank, can you do me a favour?”
“Sure!”
“Next time we work together, let’s do it apart.”
Babylon 5, Season Four, Episode Two, “Whatever Happened To Mr Garibaldi?
Sheridan is going through a typical Zen plot; it’s well done, I suppose (and there’s a typical bitchin’ twist, with the reveal that Kosh left his consciousness in him), but I’m much more interested in G’Kar and Londo. Their story has been obvious and we’re to take pleasure in the specific details; Peter Jurasik is typically magnificent as he apologises to G’Kar without really apologising.
G’Kar gets the best part of the whole episode though, in his search for Garibaldi. In a show dedicated to the cosmic, he had priced himself dedicated to the personal, to the point of incapable of being anything but. Garibaldi is his friend, and he will tear the galaxy apart to find him. Even on the cosmic, he’s personal; every one of his people who is hurt is a wound to him.
G’Kar going after Garibaldi rules — of course he would, that is who he is, and it’s a nice way to bring various pieces back together.
What did we read?
Finished Johanna Wittenberg’s The Norse Queen. Meh. About two thirds of the way through, instead of merely suggesting that supernatural elements might exist or might just be what people believed in those times, we get actual supernatural stuff that doesn’t really add anything. Then we get a side quest with a character who ultimately doesn’t really figure in the conclusion of things. And finally an orgy of violence that I found really unpleasant. Lastly, the author’s note tells us that while there was a Queen Asa, nothing is known of her, meaning this is only just barely about a real person. All in all, not a lot to recommend here unless you really like Vikings.
After a strong start to the reading year I’ve kinda ground to a halt on Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi. The cover has a cat on it, it’s about time travel and coffee, all of these things should appeal. But the writing (in translation obviously) is very focused on details that just don’t seem important at all, early on there have been TWO characters who refer to other characters as “sis” or “bro” which it then clarifies in both cases is a term of endearment for a character who is only related by marriage and… ugh I think my brain is still too withered to read something this intent on constantly torpedoing its own momentum. Might give it a few more pages this weekend and give up if it still isn’t grabbing me.
Out, by Natsuo Kirino
Dark, gripping Japanese noir thriller. A woman impulsively kills her abusive, unfaithful husband. She asks her coworker from a box lunch factory to help her cover it up, which involves enlisting two more women from work, and everything follows naturally from that (if you remember that nature is occasionally perverse and driven by self-destructive passions). Fantastic and ruthless stuff, with at least one gasp-inducing visual and a sometimes nauseating parade of sensory details. Kirino has excellent noir instincts for how choice leads on to choice leads on to lack of choice and how complications can spiral off throwing a murder into a life that already includes a hungry loan shark.
The Complete Jack the Ripper, Donald Rumbelow
Exactly what it says on the cover – a description of everything we know about Jack the Ripper and every major theory of who did it. There’s one endearing moment where Rumbelow remarks that, when all the Ripperologists go to Heaven and are presented with the actual identity of the killer, they’re likely to look upon them and ask: who? The funny thing is that the section covering the actual murders covers maybe two chapters; one thinks of that line from Zodiac where Paul Avery remarks that more people die in the East Bay commute every three months than the title character ever killed.
The Ripper is interesting less for his success rate and more for both the initial brutality and the reaction he inspired; the final chapters, in fact, cover serial killers inspired by him, and they far exceed his body count despite often being more obscure (I was particularly struck by Peter Kürten, the Dusseldorf killer, who was impossibly monstrous).
Interestingly, the book actually opens properly with a layout of East End of London shortly before the kills, and Rumbelow sketches out how much of Jack’s success came from the situation he was in – not just the technology not yet invented that would have meant the case could have been solved in 24 hours, but the misery and poverty that gave him cover. Rumbelow lays out what we know of the lives of the women involved – most of them driven to poverty by circumstance – and the social situation, with people living these incredible and brutal hour-to-hour lives in which money disappears as soon as it’s gained and violence is a natural way of life.
(The most interesting part is a short section of well-meaning philanthropists who use exactly the same pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps rhetoric we hear today, as charity cases are judged on individual merit and try to teach people thrift. Rumbelow lays out how ineffectual these practices are; people can’t afford more than the absolute bare minimum to be starving every second of every day, and it’s impossible to read of this without feeling the physical toll it would take on the body, let alone the soul)
Who’s Afraid Of Gender?, Judith Butler
A friend of mine attends university, and I noticed this book sitting on their stuff and borrowed it off them, having not read any Butler. This turned out to be about 250 pages of stuff I already think, expressed in a more complicated way; Butler followed much of the same news as me and came to the same conclusions, which I put down less to any quality regarding me or Butler and more us swimming through similar circles. The interesting thing about Butler’s style is how they veer wildly all over the place, and yet every word in this is dedicated to the title question, characterising those who oppose ‘gender’ (sometimes referred to as ‘woke’) as an ideology, as well as what they mean by ‘gender’ and what Butler means by ‘gender’.
The most interesting aspect was their observation that the conservative Christian response to ‘gender’ is based on the belief that only God can create, and that anyone who says otherwise is the devil. This fascinates me for horrifying me; creating things that don’t already exist is the cornerstone of my worldview, and the notion that these people bounce around a tiny world terrified at seeing something outside their experience would explain a lot.
8 Bit Theater, Strips 600-630, Brian Clevinger
Fantastic gag where Thief is outwitted using ‘dibs’ (“Accursed dibs!”). In a lot of ways, this strip’s comedy comes from Clevinger forcing the plot to go the direction he wants in defiance of all logic.
Great bit of scifi-fantasy horror comedy when Fighter taps a column for no reason, causing the others to be teleported rapidly (and quite painfully). Part of the comedy comes from the absurd, specific, and needless cruelty; part of it comes down to Fighter being bored and childlike enough to keep playing with it for, again, no reason, having both curiosity and zero imagination.
An insanely funny moment where Red Mage manages to out-logic a dinosaur out of existence.
The characters face personifications of their own flaws. Black Mage gets the funniest (which is wisely saved for last) when he meets the personification of his evil – which is to say, himself, presented with increasingly absurd detail – although I also enjoy Red Mage arguing with the personification of hubris (“Clearly, I lack arrogance, as that would be a flaw.”).
This collection also contains a bit where Clevinger responds to a fan-theory of how to bring Black Belt back to life, violently cutting it down. As someone delighted by making fun of people missing the obvious point of a story (especially one like this that wears its intentions on its sleeve) I enjoy this very much.
Babylon 5 – uh oh, the Season 5 haters are getting extremely vindicated here. Very stupid plotting on the rise in the micro – an episode revolves around a gang leader trying to “run” the station like a crime lord and this is just unfathomably moronic – and macro, as a soapy element is retroactively and crudely jacked in. It involves a replacement for a good character, who sucks; far more appalling is how the show’s worst character is replaced by someone even more obnoxious and creepy. This is tied to the telepath stuff that has always had the X-Men problem of “these people really are dangerous and should be monitored” and is only getting worse. Significantly less Londo too!
The Plot Against Harry – a Jewish Friends of Eddie Coyle in some ways, a low level crook tries to get out from under as time passes him by, but more wry than bleak. Made in the late 60s in NYC and a great time capsule of places and faces, there are no familiar actors here but everyone is lived in. And in some ways this anticipates A Serious Man in terms of spiritual adriftness, but it builds to something smaller and more durable. On Criterion for one more night.
A.S. Hamrah – introducing a double feature and also plugging his latest collections of criticism, so I got to see a real life critic telling me to buy his book. One of the films was Linklater’s Breathless and Hamrah noted how much of its dialogue comes from Godard’s writing in Cahiers du Cinema, he made the case for more movies drawing from criticism and I guess I was the only one who found that pretty funny.
Breathless itself is odd, a very good Reverse Shot review puts it in the context of Linklater’s hangout flicks and that is accurate, but the timeframe is longer than his usual hours/day/weekend zone and that makes things baggier. What is more familiar is the tone of conversation – everyone has advice for Godard – and exploration, there is more conflict than usual from Godard’s producer and especially Seberg as they clash with his looser methods. What Linklater evokes at his best here is the larger atmosphere of excitement and possibility where this can all come together, if it occasionally hits a few cheesy beats it’s ultimately a charmer.
Vulcanizadora followed as purposeful counterprogramming from Hamrah, and it is possibility’s foreclosure. Darkly funny at times but also bleak and sad, it is technically a sequel to Joel Potrykus’ breakthrough Buzzard – Potrykus and star Joshua Burge play the same characters – and you don’t need to know that but it makes things sting harder. The pair spend the first half of the movie on a shitty camping trip that is clearly building to a sinister purpose, and what happens winds up being even worse. Burge has one of the great faces in movies and he looks shockingly old at the start of this, but later looks younger and closer to his dirtbag days and that is somehow terrible, a line in a review referred to the characters having development that is not just arrested but on death row and that is what Potrykus is examining without pity (although with understanding and maybe mercy). There are lots of 90s signifiers that are not ostentatious but real – I had a dark laugh when I realized immediately what was in an unopened parcel, been there dude, and a darker sigh at a barely seen object at the end, a knife in the heart of certain 90s kids and their dreams. Which were meant to be grown out of and without growth there’s nowhere to go. Not for everyone, but also not like anything else out there.
As a wrote back about a year or so ago, I really enjoy THE PLOT AGAINST HARRY–Very wry humor, and a slice of New York that probably doesn’t exist anymore.
It’s the rare comedy without laughs where that is a feature and not a bug — reading up on how much work and research Michael Roemer put into making it made a lot of sense, he’s observing a world and letting those observations be as funny as you want to find them.
Year of the Month update!
Coming in February, we’ll be looking at 1957, including all these movies, albums, books, TV, yadda yadda.
Feb. 2nd: Tristan J. Nankervis: Throne of Blood
Feb. 6th: Gillianren: The Story of Anyburg, USA
Feb. 13th: Gillianren: The Truth About Mother Goose
Feb. 16th: Tristan J. Nankervis: The Incredible Shrinking Man
Feb. 20th: Gillianren: Our Friend the Atom
Feb. 27th: Gillianren: Sleeping Beauty’s Castle
This March, you can write about any of these movies, albums, books, TV, etc. from 1980.
Lol damn
Out loud laugh at this because I didn’t clock the quote from the FAR’s own damn article and thought this was trashing Captain Sheridan of Babylon 5, per Tristan’s comment. He may make mistakes but he is no Bill Maher, sir!