The Friday Article Roundup
The best pop culture writing of the week, wasted on the worst pop culture.
This week, you will pan:
Send articles throughout the next week to magpiesmedia [at] gmail, post articles from the past week below for discussion and Have a Happy Friday!
Outlaw Vern is disappointed in the carnage of Onslaught:
Strangely, the problem I have with ONSLAUGHT is that there’s not enough onslaught. Maybe I’m wrong to assume it’s supposed to be horror mixed with action, because if there was a scene that would count as a “good kill” in a FRIDAY THE 13TH movie then I’ve already forgotten it, and if there was a memorable action sequence, I must have amnesia. There is some siege. Some shooting. A little bit of a giant chainsaw, that was fun (mainly when Celeste gets ahold of it). There’s not alot of build. It turns out the way to kill them is (spoiler) shoot one in the head and chop one up with a chainsaw, which I believe is also how you kill regular people who are not super soldiers.
Michael Gutierrez is skeptical of Lily Allen’s latest tour at the Cambridge Somerville Independent:
Maybe it was an off night. Maybe the exhaustion of being on the same tour since 2025 has settled in. Maybe participation in such a public simulacrum of her dissolved marriage is starting to feel more like an obstacle to, rather than a cathartic release in support of, healing in the face of traumatic separation. At the close of the night’s final song, Allen made the dramatic gesture of wiping a tear from her eyes, as if the emotion of the confessional had finally caught up with her. Was it a real tear? Or staged for effect? And why should it matter to us?
At Movies We Texted About, Sarah Manvel says the use of AI makes Ink a shit sandwich:
And what is that use of AI for? A brief image of the Kray twins, as a the punchline for a story Jules tells about Larry at a party, and a brief image of Margaret Thatcher, in a dream Larry has. That’s it. That’s for what Danny Boyle turned his wonderful movie into a piece of sht. He didn’t need to do this! He especially didn’t need to do this in a movie about how important it is for hypocrites to be held to account! And because the movie is otherwise so good there will probably be a lot of people telling you to overlook the 1% sht and enjoy the rest of the sandwich. But the simple fact is that you should not. So I cannot suggest you go see Ink, and I would also in fact pay close attention to the people who think you should. The very least we can do these days as more and more of this sh*t comes out is hold the hypocrites to account.
Anne Carson can’t find a way into the lure of Rosalía at the London Review of Books:
Rosalía’s face is projected six feet high behind her all the time. As the spectators in front of me remain standing, I mostly watch her on video. Her face, her theatre, her palimpsest of bad love. Emotional opulences flood across it, mythic in a technological way. I confess, saturating myself in the video like this feels a little uncommitted. Is there something too easy about video? As a form of attention? I don’t have to work for it. And I wanted to work for it, I wanted to work for her, to match her heroism.
And at The Reveal, Scott Tobias reviews a tepid Mayday and makes time for an extremely FAR-approved message of contempt:
Ryan Reynolds has been a glib, unfunny screen presence for nearly three decades, a durability that suggests that many people do not find him glib and unfunny, accepting him much as they might accept, say, the default motion smoothing setting on their TV sets. It might be tempting to say that he’s “evolved” since National Lampoon’s Van Wilder defied critical consensus and made him a star in 2002, but it’s the projects themselves that have legitimized him more than any significant tweaks on his part. There’s a fundamental disengagement to his approach to comedy that tends to suck the air out of his films, one defined by an arch, wink-wink/nudge-nudge running commentary that signals to the audience never to take what they’re seeing too seriously. All of what they’re experiencing is just grist for the mill.
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The Friday Article Roundup
Good grief, it's the best pop culture writing of the week.
The Friday Article Roundup
Ripping the cord on the best pop culture writing of the week.
The Friday Article Roundup
The best and cheekiest pop culture writing of the week.
Picking the best of the unpicked discs.
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Babylon 5, Season Five, Episode Twelve, “The Ragged Edge”
This was an alright episode – I suspect lowered expectations tend to make me enjoy parts of it more. For example, G’Kar becoming a religious leader is a lot of fun, and a logical extension of his general morality and spirituality. And the Garibaldi investigation is alright.
Elementary, “Bang Bang Shoot Chute” – Someone doing a base jump from an office tower is killed by a sniper. But his chute was tampered with, so he was basically murdered twice. The latter murder was by his wife, angry over an affair, and this would be pretty meh except the affair was with an Afghan refugee, and her brother was offended by this. My timing of watching this is an interesting coincidence, as much of what we see here touches on the legacies of 9/11 – soldiers who came home from war with adrenaline action, soldiers who stole money since they resented Haliburton and Blackwater getting rich, Afghan refugees who helped the US and are fleeing the Taliban. These might not be things that should be discussed during memorial events, but they are things that should be discussed. Meanwhile, Joan’s attempt to help her ex-con friend come to nothing. For now, as this is clearly leading somewhere.
Barney Miller, “Happy New Year” – The squad is on duty on New Year’s Eve. A pickpocket spends the evening trying to talk his victim out of pressing charges. Wojo and Barney’s wife help a Latina arrested for shoplifting deliver her baby (she was stealing stuff like diapers since she clearly has nothing). And Fish is sent to talk a man threatening suicide if there isn’t peace in the Middle East. The baby enters the world safely. The leaper leaves the world distraught. There is an attempt to balance the bitter and the sweet but things tip too much to the sweet and Fish’s distress is basically ignored. But it’s interesting to learn that Wojo played midwife in Vietnam. His service there is usually just background noise – he;s a vet, he’s a proud ex-Marine – and it’s rare so far we learn anything about his experiences. But this is before The Deer Hunter and the like changed things.
A reference to John Watson’s service in Afghanistan, I assume?
Or a reference to Martin Freeman’s Watson being an adrenaline junkie after his service.
Always Sunny, “The Gang Goes To The Ren Faire” – Del Toro as Pappy MacPoyle is never a bad time, you can tell he’s having so much fun as this lunatic. Crazy that this show’s been on the air for 20+ years and it still makes me gasp in shock. Charlie’s reaction to Dennis having sex was extremely funny. “I don’t know if we can, like, be friends anymore.” (As is Dennis’ resigned agreement.) I have never been to a Ren faire and I should probably go to one.
Ask Gillian for advice, but based on “My Dark Places” there is definitely a noir side to them.
Violent Saturday — this movie is called Violent Saturday and has a young Lee Marvin and in Lee Marvin’s first scene he is sniffing bennies and in his second scene he slaps a child around, Violent Saturday knows what the people came to see. And the movie’s actual opening is sort of unconnected to the movie but is there to set the scene of a copper mining town (it was filmed in Bisbee Arizona) and to use Cinemascope to get as wide and deep as possible, it’s awesome and that’s before the miners blow up a big fucking rock. So lots of good shit here that shows some cracks — Richard Fleischer is casually elegant and brutal in his direction but Sydney Boehm’s adapted screenplay has some issues juggling the “everyone in town collides during a bank robbery” story, there are odd slack bits like Marvin having a monologue that is so clearly a monologue, a thing an actor says, and maybe Marvin was too green to pull it off but it’s not very good. Fortunately he also shoots people and even more fortunately the “everyone in town” bit is handled by a great cast, including Stephen McNally and J. Carrol Naish as Marvin’s cold-blooded bank partners and Richard Egan and Margaret Hayes as a self-loathing couple and Ernest Borgnine as an Amish farmer, he gets more play in a back half that anticipates Witness and has one fantastic wordless moment in particular. There is also Victor Mature, a guy who just doesn’t do it for me and does even less for me with the worst tan this side of Cary Grant in To Catch A Thief, but he pulls it together by the end. And here is the movie’s problem, most noirs have a stupid happy law-abiding ending tacked on and that’s to be expected, but this movie finds a solid ending and then goes for another five minutes and makes an extremely infuriating choice, I’m still mad about it. Boehm also wrote The Big Heat, a great noir that pretends to have a restorative ending but clearly does not, if he was trying for something here he failed or the material failed him. Anyway, this is still very much worth a watch before it expires on Criterion and I’m throwing up the Lauren-signal, this would be a great flick for Streaming Shuffle to dig into.
I’ve been recommending this movie to individuals in various film groups that I am in for quite a while now. I really love its ASPHALT JUNGLE meets PEYTON PLACE vibe, and while the story doesn’t set up the co-mingling of storylines with great commitment, the manner in which Fleischer uses the rare combination of Cinemascope horizontal composition with deep focus is paradoxically bold and subtle.
To pretty much everyone here, try to catch a lot of these “murderous melodramas” before they expire. I think they constitute the basis for a revisionist take on American film genre in terms of hybridity, intermixing domestic sturm and drang with criminality in a garish aesthetic underscoring the Freudian repression of bourgeois hegemony. I’m not surprised that their reputation has increased while those movies that earned awards and critical recognition in the mainstream press are routinely ignored.
“the manner in which Fleischer uses the rare combination of Cinemascope horizontal composition with deep focus is paradoxically bold and subtle” is very well said, all of the stuff in the diner — not a place one would think for Cinemascope — is fantastic, and it’s only occurring to me now that Tarantino probably took some notes here in regards to The Hateful Eight.
I got a sense that the Peyton Place aspect is much more prominent in the novel, as well it might be, but it feels like parts get truncated here. Sylvia Sidney gets real short shrift despite having a great little parallel story and the more sordid aspects of Egan and Hayes feel wrapped up too nicely in order to set up the ironic follow-through. This is what makes the last few minutes and how they let a certain character off the hook really suck for me — fuck that dude!
What did we read?
Lenin: A Biography, Chapter Eight, Robert Service
This is where Lenin writes his famous What Is To Be Done? pamphlet. Obviously, delving into the nature, influence, and philosophy of his writing interests me; I absolutely love that a) little to nothing in it is original, b) its style is rigid and uninteresting, and c) despite the title, Lenin spends no time explaining the process of shifting to communism. Service makes it clear that this is important less because of being a manifesto and more as a concentration of real feeling at the time.
Point a) is interesting because it reflects so many highly popular works of art I know, from Citizen Kane to The Sopranos to Tarantino films – the parts are all unoriginal, and it’s the combination that makes them interesting. Locking down the exact qualities and their combination is the real trick, if you’re looking to be popular; obviously Lenin was much more individualistic than that.
Triton, Samuel R Delaney
Speaking of unoriginal, this is Delaney’s riff on The Dispossessed; a man lives in a communist utopia in the far sci-fi future. The difference is that Bron is neurotic and almost constitutionally unhappy; it gives the utopia an interesting edge as he wants for nothing but inner peace. The book shifts from interesting – very much like a soap opera as he navigates relationships – to genius when Bron impulsively changes sex and gender (not quite delineated in those words but still shockingly modern in spirit) to female hoping it’ll resolve that neurosis, only to find she’s simply neurotic over different things; not in a “women are from Venus” way, but simply because she’s like that. The final words are like a door slammed in her face.
The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks
Speaking of unoriginal, this is the first high fantasy book in my trawling through the genre to be exactly what I always assumed most high fantasy books are like. This feels the most so far like someone who grew up reading Lord of the Rings and said ‘this is what I want to do with my life’; the one that feels the most like a bureaucrat living on the land a pioneer settled. Well, it’s not quite there yet – the world isn’t quite specific enough, not quite vivid enough. Brooks’s world – I can’t even remember the name of the world offhand – is actually about as vague as contemporary Stephen R Donaldson*. Brooks has the specific detail his world is actually set in the far future, after Man has destroyed himself with his technology and magic rose afterwards; Dwarves and, I think, Elves are actually just variants of Men that rose up, with the former coming about after Men moved underground and got short and stocky and able to see better in the dark. The villain also does have a really cool thing going on where he believes so strongly he’ll never die that he becomes a shade wearing a cloak.
*Both the first Thomas Covenant book and this were released the same year, 1977 – the same year Triton was released, and indeed Delaney and Brooks are the same age, which makes Brooks’s lapses in imagination look kinda bad. I really did try to put that out of mind and take the book on its own terms.
The actual plot itself is fairly rote and tedious, and the characters incredibly simplistic to the point of acting hysterically at times. So much of the plot here is just “characters go somewhere, characters get exposition, rinse and repeat”. It picks up around the halfway point but even then the action sequences ain’t exactly Heat. I will admit that I got to the end and vaguely cared about what would happen to the characters next, if only because it felt like Brooks got this book out of his system.
Swatstika Night, Katharine Burdekin writing as Murray Constantine
Visionary. Brilliant. This is a “what if the Nazis won World War II?” novel, but one of those rare ones written before World War II kicked off. It specifically criticises the hypermasculinity of Nazi ideology; truly fucked up things happen to women in this (Burdekin correctly guessing the outline of the Holocaust, especially in many of the details). What’s especially interesting is that the perspective is very much in the men; much of the novel is taken up between a conversation between an Englishman and an old Nazi who knows more of the truth than most (Burdekin anticipates Orwell and 1984 with much of this).
Burdekin ties Nazi ideology into overall ideas of masculinity; one little note of horror is the otherwise sympathetic Englishman revealing how little he thinks about women early on, after we’ve seen the factory-farm like way they’re treated, putting him on the same spectrum as the Nazis he talks to. The Nazi society is basically sterile and dying at this point, creating no new music or culture and being based entirely on domination (and hypocritically projecting that onto others). At one point, the old Nazi reflects that they’re simply incapable of creating anything new at this point and are perpetually recreating the past, over and over; I won’t say this is almost as bleak as the factory-farm shit, but it’s still pretty awful that this is the best Nazis can offer.
Room, Emma Donoghue
Intense stuff. I admit, sometimes the voice of a five year old boy whose whole life was one room and one-and-a-half people got a bit old for me; I’ve seen people criticise it as unrealistic, but I’ve known enough kids to know they can be randomly insightful or sesquipedalian. I do enjoy the puzzle of trying to work out what’s really happening through Jack’s limited perspective, and I enjoy how the plot forces things so that a single ‘point’ or diagnosis simply cannot be locked down; Ma, in particular, is a glorious creation – not an easy victim but not an unsympathetic one, not a perfect mother but clearly driven by love. This edition opened with an introduction that I mostly skipped over, but what I did see sold the book as a paean to motherhood, which vastly oversimplifies things.
Ma loves Jack more than anything else, but she also hates her situation, but she doesn’t project that resentment onto Jack, but motherhood isn’t easy, but it does give her reason to live, but that doesn’t ‘save’ her, though it does motivate her escape. The same thing actually goes for Jack; as Ma points out late in the book, from his perspective he has had a perfectly happy childhood (though the physical effects of his confinement come up immediately); it occurred to me when she said that that, unlike myself, Jack was never hit*. Of course, he’s only five and we only get the first consequences of his childhood on his mind and body. He’s dependent on his mother, and that’s good and bad; he wants his mother to be happy but also wants his mother to look after him; he’s had more education than some kids get. None of this justifies the monstrosity of his father’s actions, but that monstrosity doesn’t undermine either Ma or Jack’s humanity.
*My mother had me when she was nineteen, so while the situation is more extreme, I saw a lot of parallels between the book and my life.
This complexity is something Room the movie did well; Ma’s mother has to point out that, all things considered, Jack is fine, and it’s Ma who is understandably traumatized by being kidnapped and repeatedly raped. It’s not that kids can’t be traumatized, it’s that Jack took his reality for granted and was protected.
Triton sounds up my alley.
Room is a very good movie I don’t need to see again, but my favorite part of it is how a couple of us went to see it as part of a buddy’s “let’s watch all the Best Picture nominees” plan and afterwards we just went to the bar and stared at our beers for a while. Fun stuff!
“At one point, the old Nazi reflects that they’re simply incapable of creating anything new at this point and are perpetually recreating the past, over and over”
Practical Magic 2, in theaters now!
Yeah that bit felt hideously relevant.
The Martians by David Baron – Around the turn of the 20th century, an amateur astronomer (and well connected Bostonian) named Percival Lowell was sure he could see canals on Mars. Not channels, the words used in Italian by the first person to say he saw such things. Giovanni Schiaparelli, but a full on system of canals and lush grasslands on either side of the canals. Lowell was not just convinced of what he saw, but that there must a thriving, advanced, and most likely noble race of Martians. Despite any real proof, and despite the opposition of many astronomers (who were sure telescopes weren’t good enough to make out such detail and who saw Lowell as egotistical and bullying), Lowell slowly managed to convince more and more people, and more and more newspapers, he was right. Baron tells the full story of the rise and fall of Lowell, and for a long while doesn’t seem to have much sympathy for the well meaning but self deluding pseudo-scientist. And then we get to the epilogue and it’s all “well, he was wrong, but he inspired so many people to love Mars!” Which I really cannot abide since this ends up being a defense of bad science at a moment when bad science is driving out good science more and more. But apparently such things didn’t bother Arthur C. Clarke and Carl Sagan.
The Default World – A sort of trans Talented Mr. Ripley, where a sociopathic, dysphoric trans woman worms her way into a circle of utopian techies in San Francisco so she can get the “trans benefits” a lot of tech companies do offer, so the gags and satire hit hard for me. Unfortunately, I think the ending really pulled its punches and a darker ending would have felt more coherent.
The Egyptian Book of the Dead which is powerful even in an English translation that is probably Christianizing a few religious bits here. (Did the ancient Egyptians really have a concept of sin?) Some context that helped is that the Egyptians saw the difference between spoken language and spells as nebulous so everything here is a proclamation to help cross over into the afterlife.
A Star Called Henry, by Roddy Doyle — this opens with a turn-of-the-century Irish mother telling her small child his dead brother is now a star in the sky, this leads into that child, our narrator, saying he hates his fucking brother. Sappy miserabilism averted! Which is not to say Doyle goes easy on 1900-20 Dublin, which seems like a pretty brutal place in a lot of ways, but his lead (also named Henry) is too full of vitality to be on a slog. And Henry has a lot to do, as he gets caught up in first the Easter Rising and then the War for Independence and all the real people that are involved in these things — this is not quite Irish Tabloid but there is at times a similar vibe of ordinary men in extraordinary times with huge stakes. And because the stakes are so high the game must be played accordingly, this would be a good read for any fans of Andor. Henry becomes a hit man for the rebels, putting down traitors, and where this goes is perhaps not surprising to anyone but Henry but he and Doyle don’t ask for sympathy. Apparently American and British critics loved this and Irish critics were much more, uh, critical, but so what — Doyle earns the right to play around in and cast a skeptical eye on his history through his prose, much like Ellroy does. And this is part of a trilogy too, which I need to get on.
When The Sacred Gin Mill Closes, by Lawrence Block — Block had his private eye hero Matthew Scudder admit that he was an alcoholic at the end of 8 Million Ways To Die and figured he was done with the character, but he owed a publisher one more short story. So he wrote it and then expanded it into this novel (and wrote another dozen novels, which are great), which has the setup of Scudder in the present (mid-80s, sober) looking back on a case from the past (mid-70s, very drunk) and this leads to a unique tone — the sober Scudders are pretty grim reads but are about people living in the present, this is about people that are clearly not going to be around in the future but Scudder is also partying harder and man can Block write drinking well. Not to mention plot well, Scudder winds up looking into several crimes and some dovetail while another does not, but they all lead to a bleak ending of betrayals and questionably rough justice. This is dark even for Scudder but it’s also a step forward for Block, he couldn’t not write about his guy after this. Excellent stuff.
Don’t Bite The Sun, by Tanith Lee. Set in the world of 4 BEE – a utopia that could be a post-atomic Earth, or a martian colony, or another civilization entirely light-years away, I couldn’t determine which. The protagonist, so talkative and self-centered that we don’t even know they’re name, tells us about the life and problems of the Jang, the caste of young people. In this society young people are expected to have fun and enjoy themselves in every way until old age (thirty, maybe) suddenly hits. Not only are mild transgressions like stealing or destroying museums tolerated, but one can change sex to try living in the opposite direction and/or because one has killed oneself practicing an extreme sport. The new body can be carefully and stylistically designed beforehand, with skin of any color and appendages such as antennae or wings (more aesthetic than functional). It’s a world where young people can marry for a day or a half-hour to see if they even love someone. Our protagonist, behind their brazen hedonism of getting drunk and chomping ecstasy, hides a worry: finding something meaningful to do in life. Lee writes in a New Wave dazzling, expressive, colorful, and dry ironic style. The world is described quite colorfully and lyrically – It feels like living in a psychedelic shoujo manga of “Yellow Submarine” with a vein of “A Clockwork Orange” – and also progressive in its ideas of fluid sex and identity. Published in 1976, Lee describes both virtual reality and other ideas that began to be described in more detail a little later in the cyberpunk genre.
Year of the Month updates:
This September, you can write about any of these movies, albums, books, etc. from 1937.
Sept. 18th: Gillian Nelson: Pluto’s Quin-pup-lets
Sept. 20th: Tristan J. Nankervis: The Hobbit
Sept. 22nd: Lauren James: Stage Door
Sept. 25th: Gillian Nelson: Donald’s Ostrich
And here’s all the movies, albums, books from 1998 you can sign up for this October!
Oct. 3rd: Gillian Nelson: Movie Surfers
Oct. 4th: Tristan J. Nankervis: Pi
Oct. 9th: Gillian Nelson: Mighty Joe Young
Oct. 13th: John Bruni: High Art
Oct. 18th: Tristan J. Nankervis: Who Moved My Cheese?
Oct. 30th: Gillian Nelson: Halloweentown
I’ll do High Art for Oct. 13th