MTV used to show music videos. Bravo was home to opera and jazz programming. The Learning Channel focused on educational programming. The History Channel aired shows about history. Discovery: nature shows. A&E: fine arts and educational content. Now they all air a lot of reality TV programming like Vanderpump Rules, MILF Manor (I had to look this one up to make sure it’s an actual show), and Duck Dynasty. This video from Captain Midnight explains how and why “channel drift” happened (hint: follow the money).
The Fictional Brands Archive is a collection of fictional brands found in movies, TV shows, and video games — think Acme in Looney Tunes, Pixar’s Monsters, Inc., and Nakatomi Corporation from Die Hard. Very cool. But gotta say though, the dimming mouseover effect makes this more difficult to use than it needs to be… (via sidebar)
I loved this analysis of a scene from the final episode of season three of Mad Men.
The scene shifts. The partners go from standing in disarray around the room to orderly sitting, two by two across from one another. They go from tense standing disagreements to calm, relaxed collusion.
This video is also a reminder of what a great show Mad Men was (it’s in my all-time top 5) and how they just don’t make TV like this anymore.
It’s not as though Sylvie and I discussed the problem of free will as we dodged RPG rounds. For the most part, our interactions weren’t nearly so high-minded. We stole each other’s kills and squabbled over loot. She badgered me for V-Bucks so she could buy her character new baubles in the Item Shop. But sometimes, after playing, we’d go for a walk and analyze how we were able to notch a dub — Fortnite-speak for a win — or how we might have done better. We’d assess the quality of newly introduced weapons. (The best were OP, for “overpowering,” but often the makers of Fortnite would later “nerf” them for being too OP.) She’d chide me for trying to improve by battling more, rather than by practicing in Creative mode — which suddenly made her open to hearing about the late Swedish psychologist K. Anders Ericsson’s theories of “deliberate practice.” (Like many kids, she had a built-in filter against my teachable moments.) We actually were, per Adam Driver’s character, bonding.
And in our Fortnite games I saw her cultivate prowess. I’m not talking merely about the widely discussed perceptual and cognitive benefits of video games, which include an improved ability to track objects in space and tune out cognitive “distractors.” I’m talking about that suite of abilities sometimes referred to as “21st-century skills”: imaginatively solving open-ended problems, working collaboratively in teams, synthesizing complex information streams. “Unfortunately, in most formal education settings, we’re not emphasizing those very much,” argues Eric Klopfer, who directs the Education Arcade at MIT. “Just playing Fortnite doesn’t necessarily give you those skills — but playing Fortnite in the right way, with the right people, is certainly a good step in that direction.”
This is the plain and perhaps embarrassing truth: During my sabbatical, I didn’t pursue any activity (with the possible exception of mountain biking) as diligently as I did playing Fortnite. My kids have been playing it for awhile, both together and separately, and it was fun to watch them working together to complete quests and sometimes even win. I tried playing with them a few times the previous year, but the last shooter game I played was Quake III in the late 90s and so I was comically bad, running around firing my weapon into the sky or the ground and generally just embarrassing my kids, who left my reboot card where it landed after I’d died more often than not.
Early last year, even before I left on my sabbatical, I decided I wanted to learn how to play properly, so that I could do something with my kids on their turf. I played mostly by myself at first — and poorly. Slowly I figured out the rules of the game and how to move and shoot. I played online with my friend David, who was forgiving of my deficiencies, and we caught up while he explained how the game worked and we explored the island together. I finally got a kill and a win, in the same match — I’d found a good hiding place in a bush and then emerged when it was down to me and some other hapless fool (who was probably 8 years old or a bot) and I somehow got them. A friend who had arrived for dinner mid-game was very surprised when I started yelling my head off and running around the house.
Over the summer after I started the sabbatical, I played most days for at least 30 minutes. I got better and was having more fun. I won some matches and bought the Battle Pass so I could get some different skins and emotes. Even though I got a late start in the season, I grinded on quests to get the Darth Vader skin, which is amusing to wear while you’re trying out different emotes. (You haven’t lived until you’ve watched Vader do the death drop or dance to My Money Don’t Jiggle Jiggle, It Folds.1) When the kids got back from camp, I was good enough to at least not slow them down too much and get a couple of kills in the meantime. I learned the lingo and how to work as a team, with my kids leading the way.1 I’m still not great, but it’s become one of our favorite things to do together and I’m enjoying it while it lasts.
I am surprised but delighted that a huge media conglomerate like Disney allows their character/intellectual property (e.g. Vader) to perform the signature move of another character (Trinity’s slow-motion spin kick from The Matrix) owned by a competing media conglomerate (Warner Bros. Discovery), and vice versa.↩
I know some parents have a hard time with this, but after having been surpassed by my kids several years ago in skiing prowess and now basically being a lowly private in their Fortnite squad, I am a firm believer that every parent should experience, as early as they can, the sensation of your kids doing something much better, like an order of magnitude better, than you can and then letting them lead the way with it. It will change your relationship with them for the better, remind you that you are not “in charge” (and never really were), and reveal that kids are often much more capable than we give them credit for.↩
For his new video series, David Friedman of Ironic Sans finds out the secret behind an unusual object that Joe Biden has placed in the Oval Office: an empty picture frame. The object turns out to be….well, I won’t spoil it, but a few other presidents have had this thing in their Oval Offices as well.
Joe Biden put an empty picture frame in the Oval Office and it’s got a lot of people asking questions. Has a photo been removed? Is something being censored and hidden from the public? I have the answer! And it takes us down a bit of a rabbit hole.
*sigh* I get it. I get why people are so enthused about this Jon Stewart video. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a clip from Stewart’s show on Apple+ where he’s debating a Second Amendment purist gun nut who also happens to be a state senator from one of the states that’s trying to take away health care, reproductive rights, and persecute/prosecute LGBTQ+ people for daring to exist in public — basically a real “rights for me but not for thee” dickbag.
Anyway, I guess it’s fun to see Stewart dismantle this guy but arguing with a dimwitted ideologue in this manner is like that old saying: “What’s the sense of wrestling with a pig? You both get all over muddy…and the pig likes it.” Conservatives in America want what they want and don’t care about the arguments against it or facts or consensus or bipartisan anything. They only care about their radical ideology and their constituents who agree with them (and their constituents who don’t can go fuck themselves, I guess). In fact, they welcome arguments because it wastes the time and energy of people who would argue with them and they can’t lose because they don’t care about facts and they increasingly have no shame. See also Can You Really ‘Back The Blue’ If You’re Weak on Guns? from the same show.
Anyway, anyway, anyway…it’s gonna be a fun Monday here I guess.
The official trailer for the now-confirmed final season of Succession (until they do one more, like 12 years from now). Premieres on HBO Max March 26. As I said when the teaser trailer dropped in January, Succession is my current pick for The Best Show on TV Right Now and I’m excited (and sad) for this final season!
You’ve probably never heard of Raymond Scott’s Powerhouse, even though it’s one of the most well-known songs of the 20th century. Powerhouse is the slapstick “the chase is on!” and relentless “assembly line” music that you’ve heard in many Looney Tunes shorts and other cartoons, including The Simpsons and Spongebob. Here it is in the 1946 ‘toon, Baby Bottleneck:
I’m sure Raymond Scott never would’ve guessed that he was sealing his legacy when he sold his publishing rights to Warner Bros. Music in 1943. This little transaction gave genius composer Carl Stalling free reign to plug Raymond Scott’s melodies into his scores for the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons. The propulsive energy of Scott’s quirky instrumental jazz compositions made perfect fodder for the likes of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, and Stalling found immediate use for his new library; Stalling’s first quotation of “Powerhouse” appears in the Frank Tashlin classic Porky Pig’s Feat (1943).
The peculiar strains of Raymond Scott’s music and the screwball slapstick of the Warner Bros. cartoons were a match made in heaven…
That CB post has a bunch of embedded videos of different uses of the song, along with this gem of Scott and his “Quintette” playing Powerhouse on TV in 1955:
If you’ve ever wondered what HBO and the producers of The Last of Us might do with some slightly different source material, Pedro Pascal and the cast of Saturday Night Live took a crack at a gritty adaptation of Mario Kart. I mean, I would 100% watch this.
In film and television, a table read is an early part of the rehearsal process where, as the name suggests, all the performers read their scripts together around a table, out of costume.
But what do you do when the performers are also operating puppets? The rehearsal process becomes more iterative; the table read is a kind of sketchboard, and the performance moves quickly from spoken dialogue to early filming in full costume. These two videos (less than six minutes long in total) follow the rehearsals of The Muppet Show (1976-1981) from a table read to filming.
One thing that might surprise you (I admit it surprised me) is how much the puppeteers use floor monitors to guide their performances. As Jim Henson says in the second of these two videos, “when we’re working, our entire reality is on the screen. You are performing, and at the same time, you’re seeing your performance the same as the audience does.” On the one hand, this makes perfect sense: on the other, it’s just another point of focus, another degree of difficulty in making an entire performance come together.
With soooo much TV these days, everyone has their own pick for The Best Show on TV Right Now and my pick, aside from the excellent & underrated My Brilliant Friend, is Succession. Since the middle of the first season, I have eagerly looked forward to each episode and I’ve been jonesing for season four since about 2 seconds after the final episode of season three aired. Plus, the opening credits are unskippable. Succession starts up again on HBO Max on March 26.
It’s actually, specifically, about how movies these days look. That is, more flat, more fake, over-saturated, or else over-filtered, like an Instagram photo in 2012, but rendered in commercial-like high-def. This applies to prestige television, too. There are more green screens and sound stages, more CGI, more fixing-it-in-post. As these production tools have gotten slicker and cheaper and thus more widely abused, it’s not that everything looks obviously shitty or too good to feel true, it’s actually that most things look mid in the exact same way.
Yes, yes, 1000 times yes. This has been bugging me for years now — movies and TV shows are too blandly shiny these days (or is it shinily bland?) It’s easy to make everything look just so — and so filmmakers do, without the visual zip of a Wes Anderson or David Fincher. This comment from Reddit captures the vibe:
I actually think it looks too “perfect”. Everyone is lit perfectly and filmed digitally on raw and tweaked to perfection. It makes everything have a fake feeling to it. Commercials use the same cameras and color correction so everything looks the same. Every shot looks like it could be used in a stock photo and it looks completely soulless.
No film grain, no shadows on faces, and no wide shots. I have a theory that going from tungsten to led lightning added to this as well. Tungsten allows for more accurate color in camera but LEDs are cheaper, cooler, and more convenient. So the solution is to film on a nice digital camera and fix the color in post. However, this makes for less creativity on set and less use of shadows.
Green screens make it worse as they also require flatter lighting to work. Marvel films are very obviously mostly made in post and they all look very flat and not real. Even shitty low budget 90’s comedies look better and I think this can be attributed to the lighting.
The length of winter near the northern 45th parallel requires events to look forward to in order to feel like you’re not forever adrift in cold and dark. Big things like vacations and reunions with friends & family as well as small things like getting outside in the afternoon, having something delicious planned for dinner, or just, like, getting to the end of the day having consumed enough water.
One of the things I am looking forward to in the early spring is March 1st because a) the sun will set at an almost respectable 5:38pm instead of the current 4:40pm, and b) season three of The Mandalorian starts. This is the way.
The Art of the Title, Print magazine, Slashfilm, and Salon have each compiled their picks for the best film and TV opening title sequences for 2022. There’s quite a bit of overlap, with the opening titles for Severance (which I added to the Unskippable Intros Hall of Fame earlier this year), The White Lotus, Peacemaker, and Pachinko making multiple lists. I haven’t seen After Yang yet, but I love that title sequence. Always a fan of lots of creativity and expression packed into small times and spaces.
I know I’ve posted this before, but with the new Avatar movie out in theaters, it’s a good time to revisit the SNL sketch where Ryan Gosling is driven mad by the typeface choice for the movie’s logo.
I had forgotten about the title card at the end. Perfection.
There actually is one single person responsible for Avatar’s Papyrus-esque logo: Peter Stougaard. The former senior vice president of creative advertising for 20th Century Fox willingly takes credit for selecting and tweaking the movie’s much-maligned font, but he doesn’t mince words. “I didn’t aimlessly pick Papyrus,” he insists. “I chose it very strategically.”
I can’t believe they got it off of the cover of Cameron’s copy of the script. (thx, matt)
Jon Lefkovitz has created a video montage of moments from movies and TV where characters “do or say the same thing at the same time”. As you might imagine, it’s a little bit mesmerizing.
Hulu and the NY Times are teaming up to bring Nikole Hannah-Jones’ The 1619 Project to television.
In keeping with the original project, the series seeks to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of our national narrative. The episodes — “Democracy,” “Race,” “Music,” “Capitalism,” “Fear,” and “Justice” — are adapted from essays from The New York Times No. 1 bestselling “The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story” and examine how the legacy of slavery shapes different aspects of contemporary American life.
The six-episode limited series will premiere January 26 on Hulu.
As 2022 recedes into the rearview mirror, I took some time to go back over my media diet posts to pick out some books, movies, TV shows, and experiences from the past year that were especially wonderful. Enjoy.
Everything Everywhere All at Once. I’ve seen this a few times now and I still don’t know how the filmmakers pulled this off. A chaotic martial arts action comedy romance multiverse movie with heart? It is a miracle of a film. Definitely my favorite movie of the year and probably in the past 2-3 years.
Glass Onion. I don’t know, maybe this shouldn’t be here because I just watched it the other day, but whatever. This movie is fun. Janelle Monáe and Blanc’s bathing costume were the highlights for me.
Fortnite. The one thing I worked on more than almost anything else during my sabbatical was my Fortnite skills. My kids play and I wanted to join them, so that we could have an activity to do as a family, one that was on their turf and not mine. I’m still not great at it, but I’m more than competent now and it’s been a great addition to our routine.
A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. Seeing this painting in person is a whole other deal. I think I stood in front of it for a good 10 minutes and then circled back later for another look.
Station Eleven. You can see the ending of this coming a mile away and it still caught me by surprise when it happened. I didn’t think I wanted to watch a TV show about a flu pandemic causing the end of civilization, but it was actually perfect.
Severance. It’s comforting to know that TV shows on these massive streaming services can still be weird. I didn’t love this as much as many other people did, Severance did keep popping up in my thoughts in the months after I watched it.
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. If you’ve ever worked on a creative project with someone and that collaborative frisson felt like the highlight of your life, this book might be right up your alley.
Tár. Cate Blanchett is just ridiculously good in this.
My Brilliant Friend. The most underrated show on television? This was so much better than a lot of other shows I kept seeing praised but not a lot of people seem to be talking about it.
Kimi. Soderbergh does Rear Window + The Conversation. The direction is always tight and Zoë Kravitz is great in this.
Middlemarch by George Eliot. By far the best thing I read during my sabbatical and an instant addition to my all-time favorites list. For whatever reason, I thought this was going to be stuffy liht-tra-chure but it turns out it’s hilarious? Almost every page had me laughing out loud. The writing is exquisite and Eliot’s observations about human behavior are still, 150 years on, remarkably astute. And there’s a scene near the end of the book that is almost cinematic — she painted such a vivid picture that it took my breath away (like, literally I was holding my breath).
Her Place. This Philly spot is getting a ton of attention and end-of-the-year kudos; it’s well-deserved. The food is great but it’s the casual family-style dinner-party vibe that really makes this place special. People will try to copy this concept — it’ll be interesting to see if they can do it as well.
The Lost Daughter. Based on an Elena Ferrante book and directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, the acting and cinematography are the central strengths of this film. Olivia Colman & Jessie Buckley shine as an ambivalent mother at two different points in her life and the tight shots keep them smoldering the entire time.
Top Gun: Maverick. I was shocked at how much I liked this movie — a Top Gun sequel didn’t have any right to be this entertaining. Straight-up no-frills thrill ride that’s best on a big screen. Loved Val Kilmer’s scenes.
Matrix by Lauren Groff. I find it difficult to pinpoint exactly what I liked so much about this book, but it has something to do with its surprising entrepreneurial bent, its feminist startup vibe. Groff’s Marie de France is one of my favorite characters of the year.
Bar Kismet. The type of place where you instantly feel like a regular. And with the ever-changing food and cocktail menus, you’ll want to become one.
Schitt’s Creek. I was worried that I wouldn’t jibe with the show’s humor — nothing worse than a comedy that isn’t funny — but it delivered so many laugh-out-loud moments that I lost count. The show really hits its stride after the first season or two when it makes you start caring about what happens to these annoying weirdos. I would have watched 10 seasons of this.
The Bear. Again, I didn’t love this as much as some others did, but my thoughts kept returning to it often.
Saap. When someone says a restaurant in Vermont is “good”, you always have to ask: “Is it actually good or just Vermont good?” Saap is great, period.
Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang. I don’t know how to think about the kind of stories that Chiang writes — they are simple and complex and deep and fantastical and familiar all at the same time. It’s the perfect kind of sci-fi for me.
The US and the Holocaust. Essential six-hour documentary series about how the United States responded (and failed to respond) to Nazi Germany’s persecution and murder of European Jews in the years before, during and after WWII. Another banger from Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, and Sarah Botstein.
Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan. I can’t say that this book made me want to become obsessed with surfing, but maybe it made me want to become obsessed with something again. Beautifully written and personally resonant.
Mercado Little Spain. José Andrés’ Spanish version of Eataly. I’ve only been there a couple of times, but omg the food. The pan con tomate is the simplest imaginable dish — bread, tomato, olive oil, garlic, salt — but I could easily eat it every day.
As part of a British reality TV series in the late 2000s, two sets of 11-to-12-year-old children, one group of 10 boys and another group of 10 girls, were left by themselves in a house for 5 days. They had food, bedding, games, paint, toys, bikes, furniture, etc. They had each taken a cooking course beforehand. None of the children had met before. At any time, they could ring a bell to talk to the production team, a parent, or a child psychiatrist. They were free to leave at any time. To produce the videos above, camera crews were in the house to film, but they were not allowed to speak to the kids and could only intervene for safety reasons. (Content warning: both videos include a few instances of homophobic slurs.)
So what happened?
Initially, there’s a bit of chaos in each house but then things diverge — but not as much as you might expect. After a brief attempt at cleaning, the boys completely trash their house, eat mostly sugar, divide into factions, and somehow trash the house even more. A representative bit of narration about the boys:
The atmosphere is becoming hysterical and aggressive. Almost everything has been destroyed.
The girls also somewhat trash their house, have trouble eating regularly, and two of the girls leave early. But they also, IMO, are more successful than the boys at living together.
Two of the children have left and eight have stayed. Close friendships have grown and split apart and then re-formed. Though the girls have argued and fought, they’ve also been able to forgive each other, to comfort each other when upset, to help each other.
Some reflections and observations:
I wonder how much the presence of cameras and their operators influenced their behavior. Clearly there was some initial showing off and pushing of boundaries, but after a couple of days, the surveillance may have receded into the background.
Individual kids can be smart, clever, and kind but a group of them often is not. I believe this often applies to adults as well.
Both good and bad actions are contagious within groups like this, but bad actions are easier to do and their results more difficult to undo. Like, it’s much easier to squirt ketchup all over the carpet than it is to clean it up.
Some would watch these videos and say, “well, boys are like that and girls are like this, it’s just nature”. Others might say that girls and boys are socialized differently, resulting in more violent behavior in boys, and more relational behavior in girls, etc. I am not sure this experiment offers any clarity into what the balance is here.
Everyone in the houses was able to exercise a high degree of personal freedom during their stay, but doing so often greatly impacted the group as a whole in a negative way. Sure, you can trash the living room if that’s what you feel like, but it ruins it for everyone, not just you.
Watching this, I remember why I hated middle and high school so much.
Were these “experiments” ethical? For that matter, is sending kids to American middle school ethical?
There are plenty of problematic things about this year’s World Cup, starting with the human rights situation in the host country, but for US viewers, Fox Sports’ coverage is really stinking up the joint. Aaron Timms burns them down in The Guardian:
In these circumstances you might expect Fox’s coverage of the matches, untroubled by politics, to be razor-sharp. You would be mistaken. From its Orientalist redoubt on the Doha Corniche (Arabesque motifs, casino lighting, no actual Arabs unless they’re from the Qatari tourism agency), the Fox team has set about its task with vigor: to beam all the tournament matches into the living rooms of America while being maximally patronizing to the country’s soccer fans. In those rare moments when Fox is not jamming a brand down our throats (“Here’s the player to watch segment, presented by Coca-Cola”, “Your first-half moment, sponsored by Verizon”, “Our player spotlight is hosted by the Volkswagen ID.4”), the network’s hosts, analysts, and match commentators seem determined to mansplain the sport as if we, the soccer-watching public of the United States, have spent the past four decades with our heads in the desert sands surrounding Lusail Iconic Stadium.
Insults to our collective intelligence have come from all angles: the constant, tedious analogies to American sports (stepovers and feints described as “dekes” and “hesis”, corners constantly compared to “pick and rolls”); the neverending quest to “contextualize” the world game by comparing whole countries to American states (“Qatar is the size of Connecticut,” we were told repeatedly on the opening day); the network’s embrace and promotion of the interminable “it’s called soccer” cause (who cares?); the strange extended segment in the run-up to USA v England about how much Harry Kane likes American football (ditto); the employment of Piers Morgan as a special guest pundit (no thanks).
The “it’s called soccer, no it’s football” thing is beyond stupid — it’s the sort of debate that 4th graders have on the playground. I watched the Netherlands vs. USA match the other day with my friend David and it was so bad we switched the channel to Telemundo even though neither of us speaks Spanish — and you know what, it was better because you could just enjoy the game. (Also, my pet peeve about the coverage: when showing the starting lineups and formations, they do not list the possible subs. The bench players matter, especially on these deep international teams! They come on late in games and score winning goals! Tell us who these people are!)
As you’ll soon read in a comically long “what I did on my summer break” post I’m writing, almost everything I do on a day-to-day basis when I’m working on the site came to a complete halt when I went on sabbatical back in May - I stopped reading online, unsubscribed from all newsletters (save one or two), ignored Twitter, stopped paying attention to the news, didn’t really read my email. Pretty much the only concession I made was to keep track of what I was reading, watching, and listening to. So here you go, my media diet over the past seven months.
Russian Doll (season two). A worthy second act of Natasha Lyonne’s surprising hit. The NYC subway is the best time machine since the police box and the DeLorean. (A-)
Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman. Another Burkeman banger. If The Antidote was a self-help book for people who don’t like self-help books, this is time management for people who don’t want to organize their lives like a Toyota factory. (A-)
Middlemarch by George Eliot. By far the best thing I read during my sabbatical and one of my favorite books of all time. For whatever reason, I thought this was going to be stuffy liht-tra-chure but it turns out it’s hilarious? Almost every page had me laughing out loud. The writing is exquisite and Eliot’s observations about human behavior are still, 150 years on, remarkably astute. And there’s a scene near the end of the book that is almost cinematic — she painted such a vivid picture that it took my breath away (like, literally I was holding my breath). (A+)
All of This by Rebecca Woolf. You’re about to split up with your husband and then he gets cancer and dies. That is a complex emotional landscape; Woolf describes how she navigated her relief and grief as her life was torn apart and put back together again. A brutally honest read. (B+)
Conversations with Friends. Not quite up to Normal People’s high bar but still pretty entertaining and affecting. (A-)
Ten Steps to Nanette: A Memoir Situation by Hannah Gadsby. Unexpectedly resonant — one of a number of things I’ve read recently by people who have discovered they’re on the autism spectrum as adults. (B+)
Troubling Love by Elena Ferrante. Didn’t like this one quite as much as her excellent Neapolitan novels. (B+)
Old. Decent M. Night Shyamalan effort. The Sixth Sense remains the only film of his I’ve actually liked though. (B-)
The Mt. Qi Pork Hand-Ripped Noodles Meal Kit from Xi’an Famous Foods. I find most restaurant meal kits to be expensive and the resulting food unsatisfyingly unlike what you’d get at the restaurant. Not so with this one…I feel like it’s an incredible bargain (when paired with some bok choi or something it feeds 4-6 in my experience) and it tastes exactly like what you get at the restaurant. I’ve recommended this to several folks and everyone loves this kit. Note: neither the ingredients or the finished product freezes well — order this when you can make and consume the whole thing over the course of a few days. (A)
Apple Watch. I haven’t worn a watch since the early 90s, so it took me awhile to talk myself into this. But I wanted a good way to track my exercise and perhaps use my phone less. The Watch has succeeded on the first point but not really on the second, and I’m convinced that this thing has no idea how to accurately track calories on mountain bike rides. (B+)
Blade Runner 2049. Always up for a rewatch of this. I (sacrilegiously?) prefer it to the original. (A)
Gattaca. I always use the title of this movie when I need to remember the four nucleotide bases of DNA. Which, admittedly, is not super often. (A-)
Against the Rules (season three). Timely and fascinating exploration of the role of experts in our society by Michael Lewis. (B+)
Maus I & II by Art Spiegelman. Finally got around to reading this after finding it on a local bookstore’s table of banned books. A masterpiece. (A+)
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. I guess I am having a little trouble with caring about Marvel stuff after Endgame. Also, Sam Raimi’s horror thing doesn’t jibe with my dislike/indifference of/about horror movies. (B-)
Top Gun: Maverick. I was shocked at how much I liked this movie — a Top Gun sequel didn’t have any right to be this entertaining. Straight-up no-frills thrill ride that’s best on a big screen. Loved Val Kilmer’s scenes. (A)
Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain. I was a little wary of watching this; from what I’d read, it seemed like it was a bunch of Bourdain’s friends and loved ones blaming Asia Argento (who was not interviewed for the film) for his death. It’s a delicate balancing act, but the film doesn’t actually do that, IMO. And the stuff about his early-mid career is great and was personally resonant. (A-)
Slow Burn: The L.A. Riots. I was 18 years old and a busy freshman in college when the 1992 LA riots happened, so this was fascinating to listen to. Joel Anderson was the perfect host for this — authoritative, probing, and skeptical in all the right places. (A)
Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs by Sally Mann. Nearly unbelievable family stories combined with fascinating insights on what it’s like to be an uncompromising artist. (A-)
Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi. A friend recommended this after I read Maus. Another masterpiece about the effects of authoritarianism. (A)
The Card Counter. Good performances but ultimately not that memorable. (B+)
The Grand Budapest Hotel. A rewatch after many years. Anderson’s most commercially successful film but not my favorite. I love that there are hundreds of reviews of the hotel on Tripadvisor. (B+)
Thor: Love and Thunder. Natalie Portman is a great actress who sometimes seems like she’s a bad actress — see also Star Wars. Maybe superhero sci-fi is not her bag? Also, I think they went a little overboard on the stuff that made Ragnarok so much fun…it just didn’t work as well here. (B)
Persuasion. Oof. A poor adaptation of Austen through the lens of Fleabag. (C-)
The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton. Hinton was in high school when she wrote this so it’s a little uneven, but the voice is amazing. (A-)
For All Mankind (seasons two and three). Not as good as the first season IMO. It’s tough for alt-histories as they get farther and farther from where the timelines split. That said, I am a sucker for such an artfully placed Radiohead song. (B+)
Schitt’s Creek. Late to this but what a delightful show! Was very sad when it ended; I wanted to spend more time with these people. P.S. If you’re in the US and missed this on Netflix, it’s available on Hulu now. (A)
The Bear. I’ll admit I didn’t love this at first — I got my fill of the edgy/grungy aesthetic in the 90s — but it crescendoed nicely. (A-)
Saap. Nisachon Morgan, the chef of this unassuming Thai place in the tiny town of Randolph, VT, won the 2022 James Beard award for best chef in the northeast. A friend of mine has been a regular there for years, so we stopped in for a meal. Let’s just say the Beard Foundation got this one right. (A)
The Gray Man. Gotta be honest — I think I got this confused with Red Notice. (B-)
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. Still incredible that this was written in 1931 — it’s strikingly modern in many ways. (A-)
Deception Point by Dan Brown. Total beach read. Tom Clancy did this sort of book much better though. (B)
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. I don’t understand the poor reviews of this series and its (unfair) comparison to the sexier House of the Dragon. It was engaging throughout, though maybe a little slow in places (I didn’t care much for the Harfoots plotline.) And it’s a setup for an epic tale that lasts four more seasons…there’s bound to be a lot of table-setting. (B+)
The Great Canadian Baking Show. Not as good as the original but worth a watch if you’re in Canada (either physically or via VPN), if only to catch how judge Bruno Feldeisen pronounces “sponge” and “layers”. Seasons one and two feature the delightful Dan Levy as one of the hosts. (B+)
Junior Bake Off. I understand that they’re children, but Bake Off just isn’t as fun when the baking is, uh, not great. (B)
Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr. With five different stories spanning hundreds of years, this was challenging to listen to as an audiobook at first. But it paid off well in the end. (B+)
The US and the Holocaust. Essential documentary by Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, and Sarah Botstein about how the United States responded (and failed to respond) to Nazi Germany’s persecution and murder of European Jews in the years before, during and after WWII. (A+)
The Holocaust: A New History by Laurence Rees. I’ve watched and read a fair bit about the Holocaust over the years, but watching The US and the Holocaust and reading Maus spurred an interest in learning about how the Holocaust happened in detail. After some research, I settled on this book by Laurence Rees, which provides a good overview on how the Nazis harnessed European anti-Semitism to gain power and then used it to murder six millions Jews. It was unsettling to read but important to know this history so that we do not let it repeat. (A)
Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie. The perfect little murder mystery. Like a magician revealing her tricks, Christie lays bare how murder mysteries are structured — and it takes nothing away from the thrill of the story. (A-)
Renaissance. Not my favorite Beyoncé album — it’s a little all over the place and the disco/house vibe isn’t exactly my jam — but there are some definitely bangers on here. All Up in Your Mind is my favorite track…I just wish it were longer! (B+)
Star Fluxx. A friend recommended this after I asked him for card/board games that would be good to play with my now-teenaged kids. Part of the game play includes changing the rules of the game as you go…we’ve been enjoying it. (B+)
Unspoken Words. Ambient-ish electronica from Max Cooper. My favorite track from this one is Everything. (A-)
See How They Run. Fun murder mystery with a few laugh out loud moments and great performances by Saoirse Ronan and Sam Rockwell. (B+)
Cool It Down. First new album from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs for the first time in nearly a decade? Yes yes yes. Spitting Off the Edge of the World is sublime. (A-)
Downton Abbey: A New Era. Sometimes, nothing but a low-stakes British period drama will do. (B+)
Night and Fog. An illuminating but difficult-to-watch companion to my other explorations of the Holocaust. (A)
Munich — The Edge of War. Solid historical drama that takes place around the events of the Munich Agreement that gave the so-called Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany in exchange for postponing WWII for about a year. (B+)
The Worst Person in the World. Really interesting and affecting in parts and a great performance by Renate Reinsve. (A-)
Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan. I can’t say that this book made me want to become obsessed with surfing, but maybe it made me want to become obsessed with something again. Beautifully written and personally resonant. (A)
Enemy. Good acting and direction but this is the type of film that I don’t think I care for anymore. (B)
Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe. Compelling and well-researched. The Troubles happened during my lifetime and I saw bombings on the news as a kid, but I didn’t have any more than a vague sense of what it was all about until I read this. (A)
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. I thought Coogler and co. did a good job in paying tribute to Chadwick Boseman while moving the story forward. But the kids and I agreed that we missed some of the fun and lightheartedness of the first film. (B+)
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. We listened to the audiobook in the car over several months — the British Stephen Fry version not the (IMO) inferior Jim Dale versions. (B+)
Her Place. A unique dining experience that’s not unlike going over to someone’s house for a dinner party. There are two seatings a night, at 6:00 and 8:30; all parties are seated at the same time. It’s a set menu with no substitutions and everyone in the restaurant is served at the same time. Every course or two, the chef quiets the diners to explain what’s coming up, who cooked it, where the ingredients are from, and anything else she thinks is relevant. It’s operationally smart and creates a great dining environment. Esquire just named it one of the best new restaurants in America. (A)
Tim Carmody’s wedding. Tim has been my friend and a vital part of this website for more than a decade, so it was a real pleasure to be able to join him and Karen McGrane for their wedding. We got to walk through a 20-foot-tall model of a human heart at the Franklin Institute! What a metaphor! (A)
The Handmaid’s Tale (seasons four and five). The first two seasons of this show were great. And then…well, they turned June into an antihero and a superhero, neither of which was very compelling. I dunno, maybe I just can’t get past how Elisabeth Moss can play someone escaping a cult-driven society while belonging to a cult herself. (C)
You’re Wrong About. I’ve given it a chance over the past several months but the new iteration of You’re Wrong About isn’t as good as the Sarah and Michael version. The show is still interesting and guests are fine, but the podcast is missing that comfortable witty banter, pacing, and Michael’s sharp editing (the double intro and outro are awkward and should be discarded). One odd thing for a show that is literally about explaining things: since the format changed, they often don’t plainly describe the subject matter at hand — it’s just assumed that we all know what they’re talking about (the eugenics and Henry Lee Lucas episodes for example). (B)
Le Relais de l’Entrecôte. If I ever own a restaurant, it’s gonna serve one thing, really fucking well. (A)
Trains in Europe. Specifically in Switzerland & France and to a lesser extent in Portugal & Italy. *sigh* (A)
The Strasbourg astronomical clock. A mechanical wonder located in the Cathédrale Notre-Dame in Strasbourg, France. I stayed for quite awhile, examining all the details. (B+)
Venice. This city seems fake, like you’re on a movie set or something. Even though Venice is unbelievably crowded in the touristy areas and the food is often so-so, it’s so so so relaxing and quiet to walk around a city without cars. (A)
Switch Sports. Nice to have a sports game on the Switch, but I miss the golf and a couple of games from Wii Sports Resort. (B+)
Benfica vs. Newcastle United. My very first time watching a football match in a European stadium and wow, what a stadium and experience. Great crowd for a preseason friendly and an 89th minute winner by the home club didn’t hurt either. Almirón, who is making some waves in the Premier League this season, scored two goals for the away team. (A)
Bar Kismet. Reminded me of my dearly departed favorite place in NYC. Great food, great casual atmosphere, creative cocktails, friendly service. (A)
Snowden Deli. My new favorite place for smoked meat in Montreal. (A-)
The Wok: Recipes and Techniques by Kenji López-Alt. Have only scratched the surface of this one, but it’s upped my wok cooking game already. Also, does anyone else’s entire family groan when I weigh in on some food question with “well, Kenji says…” or is that just me? (A-)
Legacy of Speed. Great story about athletics, politics, and activism. (B+)
Ejaculate Responsibly: A Whole New Way to Think about Abortion by Gabrielle Blair. A clever & compelling common-sense reframing of the abortion debate that places much more of the responsibility for birth control on men (for a whole host of reasons enumerated by Blair). Fellows, this is worth your attention and consideration. (A-)
Enola Holmes 2. Fun and entertaining but could have been 20 minutes shorter. (B)
Tár. Incredible performance from Cate Blanchett. I’m not going to weigh in on what I thought the film was about, but do read Tavi Gevinson’s take in the New Yorker. (A)
Well hey there, it’s been a few months, so it’s time for another roundup of what I’ve been reading, watching, listening to, and experiencing recently. In addition to the stuff below, I have a few things in progress: the second season of Russian Doll, Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks, and I just started dipping into Rebecca Woolf’s forthcoming memoir, All of This. Oh, and I’m listening to Russell Shorto’s The Island at the Center of the World on audiobook and the third season of Michael Lewis’ Against the Rules podcast. All always, don’t sweat the letter grades too much.
Everything Everywhere All at Once. This movie is a little bit of a miracle: action, comedy, heartfelt, and a little bit of a mess, all together in a perfect balance. This is the best movie I’ve seen in ages. (A+)
Matrix by Lauren Groff. Was delighted and moved by this work of historical fiction about Marie de France. (A)
Station Eleven. I loved the slow burn and resolution of this show. I didn’t think I wanted to watch a TV show about a flu pandemic causing the end of civilization, but it was actually perfect. Both actresses who played Kirsten were fantastic. (A/A+)
The Last Duel. Every director is entitled to their Rashomon I guess? And I’m not sure Matt Damon was the right choice here… (B)
Pig. Had no idea what to expect from this one. Even so, Taken + Truffle Hunters + Fight Club + Ratatouille was a surprise. (B+)
Strafford ice cream. This Black-owned dairy farm makes the richest, creamiest ice cream I’ve ever had. So glad I randomly bought a pint of it a few months ago…I’m never going back to anything else. (A)
Severance. Fantastic opening credits sequence and while I wasn’t as enamored as many were after the first few episodes, the show definitely grew on me. (A-)
My Brilliant Friend (season three). I don’t know why there’s no more buzz about this show. The acting, world-building, story, and Max Richter’s soundtrack are all fantastic. And the fight against fascism! (A)
The Gilded Age. Exactly what I wanted out of a period drama from the maker of Downton Abbey and Gosford Park. (B+)
Exhalation. Second time through, this time on audiobook. I love these stories - Chiang is a genius. (A)
The Book of Boba Fett. This turned into season 2.5 of The Mandalorian and I am totally ok with that. (B+)
Other People’s Money podcast. As a snack-sized in-between season for his excellent Against the Rules podcast, Michael Lewis revisits his first book, Liar’s Poker, written about his experience working for Salomon Brothers in the 80s. (A-)
The King’s Man. Not as fun as the first movie but more fun than the second one? But they all could be better. (B)
Turning Red. I loved Domee Shi’s short film, Bao, and this film is similarly clever and heartfelt. (A-)
Drive My Car. Really appreciated the cinematography of this one; wish I could have seen it in the theater. (A-)
Jennifer Packer at The Whitney. I was unfamiliar with Packer’s work before seeing this exhibition, but I’m a fan now. (A-)
Licorice Pizza. I’m really flabbergasted at the two pointless racist scenes in this film. PT Anderson is a better filmmaker than this. It’s a shame because I enjoyed the rest of the film — the two leads are great. Can’t recommend it though. (D)
Death on the Nile. These movies are fun. Sometimes all you want to do is watch Kenneth Branagh chew scenery as Hercule Poirot. (B+)
Moonfall. Not as fun or coherent (I know, lol) as some of Emmerich’s other movies. The acting in this is…not great. (C+)
Hawkeye. Fun but I don’t know how many more Marvel things I want to keep up with. (B)
Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore. Better than the overcomplicated sequel and Mikkelsen was a better Grindelwald than Depp. The story wrapped up so nicely that who knows if there will be a fourth movie. (B)
The Batman. Oh I don’t know. I guess this was a pretty decent detective story, but I’m not sure why Batman needed to be involved. (B)
The Northman. This would have been much better had it ended 20 minutes sooner. Not sure we needed another movie that concludes with ultimately pointless violent masculine revenge. (B-)
Kimi. Soderbergh does Rear Window + The Conversation. The direction is always tight and Zoë Kravitz is great in this. (A-)
Armageddon. The pace of this movie is incredible — it just drops you right into the action and never stops for more than 2 hours. Also, the top question when searching this movie title on Google is “Is Armageddon movie a true story?” *sigh* (B-)
May the 4th be with you and here’s the trailer for the upcoming Disney+ series, Obi-Wan Kenobi.
The story begins 10 years after the dramatic events of “Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith” where Obi-Wan Kenobi faced his greatest defeat — the downfall and corruption of his best friend and Jedi apprentice, Anakin Skywalker, who turned to the dark side as evil Sith Lord Darth Vader.
Today I discovered that all I want to do is listen to Natasha Lyonne talk about her experiences in showbiz. But instead I got a little more than 7 minutes and that’s just fine:
I’m a few episodes into the second season of Russian Doll right now and it’s so good.
When you think about TV shows about the workplace, The Office is likely top of mind. So, cutting an intro to new workplace darling Severance to match the visual style of The Office intro with The Office theme song was going to happen eventually…and here it is. Nicely done.
After hearing a buzz from my social circle about Severance on Apple+, I’ve been catching up on it for the past couple of weeks. Here’s the series synopsis:
Mark leads a team of office workers whose memories have been surgically divided between their work and personal lives. When a mysterious colleague appears outside of work, it begins a journey to discover the truth about their jobs.
I’m going to reserve judgment on the show for my next media diet post, but let’s talk about the opening credits sequence by Oliver Latta. It’s fantastic, an instant addition to the Unskippable Intros Hall of Fame. Mashable talked to Latta about his process and you can see a few behind the scenes images at Behance. And check out Latta’s other animations…you can definitely see where some of the imagery in the title sequence came from.
Yet there’s one thing that annoys softly spoken Britell: the “Skip intro” facility on streaming services, which was brought in five years ago and lets viewers bypass a show’s opening credits. “I am very against it,” says Britell. “TV theme music is incredibly important. It’s almost a show’s DNA identifier. It serves as an overture to bring you in and sets the tone. I think that formal entrée is crucial.”
Robust words from the man whose Emmy-winning, earwormy Succession work, with its gothic strings, cascading piano and skittering beats, is helping to revive TV theme tunes.
If you, like me, grew up semi-obsessively watching game shows from the 70s and 80s, you will get a big kick out of this. Photographer Steven Rosenow makes incredibly accurate digital renderings of the sets of old game shows like Jeopardy!, The Price Is Right, Wheel of Fortune, Match Game, and Family Feud, which he shares with a Facebook group called Eyes of a Generation. David Friedman shared some of these recreations in his newsletter. Here’s Rosenow’s notes on the Price Is Right set:
This was a fairly difficult set to model in 3D even though I had blueprints of the set to work with, as well as blueprints of CBS Studio 33… Assistance in this project was provided by the current owner of Door No. 2, who bought it from CBS when it was auctioned off.
I might have a new aspiration in life: to be “the current owner of Door No. 2”. (via waxy)
In an excerpt of her new book, Ten Steps to Nanette: A Memoir Situation (out today), Hannah Gadsby talks about her later-in-life diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder. As often happens whenever I read about an autistic person’s experience, there’s stuff here that really resonates with me. Like:
My meltdowns had always been a mystery to me, so when I was finally diagnosed, I was able to reframe the way I thought about my strange little outbursts. For a start, I became far more compassionate toward myself, which probably halved the distress of the occasions. In the scheme of my life, I have not had very many meltdowns, however. I’m more of a shutdown kind of autistic. From the outside, a shutdown looks very similar to a sulky tantrum, but it is nothing of the sort. I don’t have control, for a start. And I am certainly not ruminating on any kind of emotional narrative, because I have gone into fight or flight, but in my body that translates into neither fight nor flight; I just shut down like a maxed-out power grid in the middle of a storm.
And:
The problem is that communication skills are developed atypically in autistic people and, most often, very slowly. I have always had difficulty articulating my needs, but as I have got older, my language and social skills have improved a great deal. My ability to regulate, however, has not, and nor have my sensory sensitivities. My eternal struggle with these distressing disabilities often gives the impression to others that I am moody, reactive and inconsistent. I say I want one thing, then moments later I will say that I need the opposite. This is not a reflection of my character, but rather a reflection of my neurobiological functioning. I am unable to intuitively understand what I am feeling, and I can often take a much longer time to process the effects of external circumstances than neurotypical thinkers. But it is they who get impatient with me, and under that pressure I feel forced to guess my needs before I have had time to process stuff in my own way, and so mistakes are made. I can be cold and not know it. I can be hungry and not know it. I can need to go to the bathroom and not know it. I can be sad and not know it. I can feel distressed and not know it. I can be unsafe and not know it. You know how sometimes you put your hand under running water and for a brief moment you don’t know if it is hot or cold? That is every minute of my life. Being perpetually potentially unsafe is a great recipe for anxiety. And — spoiler alert — anxiety is bad.
I do not feel these things as acutely as Gadsby describes, but I do feel them — moodiness, sensory sensitivity, emotional shutdowns, difficulty understanding what I’m feeling, and taking a long time to process things. This line: “…under that pressure I feel forced to guess my needs before I have had time to process stuff in my own way, and so mistakes are made” <— woooooo boy I feel that so so much. Maybe, just maybe, he thinks to himself, this is why I’ve worked by myself for the past 16+ years.
You might have noticed that the two families in Succession and Arrested Development share some similarities — business-focused, rich, dysfunctional, sibling rivalry. Luís Azevedo explored the likeness with this video of scenes from Succession with music & Ron Howard’s voiceover from Arrested Development. So good. Also worth a look: scenes from Arrested Development with the music from Succession.
This short sketch from Saturday Night Live highlights how Amazon Go’s “grab-and-go” shopping experience (where you walk out of the store with your items without having to check out first) doesn’t work that well for all shoppers.
White people who have never been “randomly” followed around at a Walgreens may have no problem walking into a store, grabbing an item and leaving — like this guy in the Amazon Go promo video.
But shoppers of color, who already see enough unwanted attention, may have their doubts. Especially in a store where the employees are mostly there for customer service, as Amazon’s promo video suggests. They roam the store, stock shelves and hang out near shoppers.
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