December 2020 Update
Back to our regular scheduled programming?
Dear reader,
If you didn’t receive a monthly update from this newsletter, it’s because I have been very busy. To quote from Morrissey, “I was looking for a job and I finally found one,” so things are looking like they’re getting back to normal, to use it loosely. If things didn’t happen like this, this newsletter would have looked rather different. It would have been more regular and the features that I have right now would have been out this November quite quickly.
There was no Literally Me and Film Club last month. But I’ll get something out from the latter, as soon as the year finished. For now, I’ll have a Reaction Shots and Long Takes every week. If you wish to support the newsletter, or like what I’m doing, please donate.
From yours truly:
One of my pieces from the lamentable Rebeller Media was republished at Splice Today back in October. This coincides on the anniversary of Joker’s controversial release and the inaugural column of Literally Me, which of course is about Joker.
My October and November posts will be archived, so if you wish to read any of them, become a subscriber. Otherwise, you’ll be missing something like these:
My Long Take on the tenth anniversary of The Social Network:
David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin likened The Social Network to a high school or college film. Fincher called it the Citizen Kane of John Hughes movies, whereas Sorkin prefers to view it in the vein of Revenge of the Nerds. Part of its setup certainly overlaps with the fratboy genre: the confident, but socially isolated geek up against the snobby jock with so much swagger, barracked by an overzealous administration. The women are vaguely presented as trophies, except for Rooney Mara’s Erica Albright, who by being the movie’s Rosebud, shatters that antiquated notion, telling Mark that these nerds will be more powerful and left empty. Albright is the surrogate audience, a signpost that points to the beginnings, maturity, and the end of Facebook.
My Long Take on the Moviebob:
While it’s easy to mock Bob and his DiAngeloisms, it is a symptom of how film critics recently approach the movies, not the cause. They simply can’t be spectators in their area. They have to be active in others as well, mainly in politics. They can’t spend most of their time in press screenings and typing on their laptops on how they feel about David Fincher’s new movie. They urge for something to be done so that gutless polemics that shamelessly ride progressive trends are rewarded with attention. Bob’s champagne socialism is no different from that of David Ehrlich, who once claimed that for mass shootings to stop, JJ Abrams needs to delay the Star Wars sequels. The Moviebob who gripes about Ricky Gervais’s monologue at the Golden Globes being reactionary is the same as the likes of Slate bemoaning it because conservatives enjoyed it.
Best of the web:
One of Australia’s well known commentators is Waleed Aly. He is a journalist, an academic, a host of a light primetime news show (and even a guitarist for a band I’ve never heard of). In The Monthly, Aly writes an incredible long essay about cancel culture, what it is and why it is harmful to progressives. I often find myself agreeing with left-wingers (and Aly is certainly one of that bent) more than right wingers on cancel culture, because they understand the structural setbacks, the canceled people have if they are at the social bottom. Even wealthier authors like JK Rowling aren’t excluded from the values that cancel culture is against.
In Tablet, Jacob Siegel writes about Joe Rogan, as an alternative media figure and how it plays to the current politics that’s straying away from the left-right paradigm. The essay depicts Rogan as an Aleph, which is Jewish mysticism, presents ‘one of many’. In Siegel’s words, he represents the many platitudes of modern America.
The Australian had a really good profile of Francis Ford Coppola, as he releases another cut of The Godfather Part III, which is much shorter in contrast to Apocalypse Now Redux. One of the things that maligned Part III was Coppola’s decision to cast his daughter Sofia as Mary Corleone. Given that it’s a crucial component, this cut, titled The Godfather Coda, is intended the right the wrongs of Sofia’s performance.
In the print edition of National Review, Peter Tonguette has a retrospective of James Bond, the cinematic and literary figure. I caught up and watched all of the 007 movies, and what he observes is a very astute one:
Despite so many features that might render the character objectionable to cancel-culture types, however, Bond’s winning ways with moviegoers remain one of the surest things in Hollywood: The most recent films in the series — Skyfall (2012) and Spectre (2015), both starring Daniel Craig as Bond — were gigantic commercial successes, and part of the reason that United Artists has continually kicked down the release date of the latest, pandemic-delayed installment, No Time to Die, also starring Craig, is surely that the studio is confident in its blockbuster status when audiences can actually march into theaters again in large numbers. Why waste a likely megahit on unenthusiastic, mask-wearing audiences who can only partly fill capacity-restricted theaters? (The film, once promised for the spring of 2020, is currently set to open on April 2, 2021.)