Film, Television, Radio, and Gaming
Desperado was the first disc I bought for my fancy new DVD player in ‘97. As a film, it makes no narrative sense, and the characters are all cartoons.
But that opening scene in the bar is one of the best action sequences ever put to film, and Salma Hayek is insanely hot in every single frame she occupies.
I watched Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith for the first time this week.
That was… not as bad as I’d been led to believe. Not good, mind you, but both are dramatically better than The Phantom Menace, which I dozed through in a theater back in ‘99, and couldn’t bear to rewatch via Disney+. (I’m kinda sad I’ve missed out on General Grievous for so long… I’ve gotta give Lucas’s team credit, that’s a brilliant visual design.)
Now I just need to get around to watching The Two Towers and Return of the King and I’ll have finally caught up with mid-2000s pop culture.
Mank is my new favorite David Fincher film, edging past Gone Girl and Zodiac. He hasn’t simply made a movie about the writing of cinema’s greatest work… he’s picked the bones of Kane’s myths and played with the flesh. The recreation of Gregg Toland’s visual style is impressive, but the meticulous care put into the sound is even moreso; Fincher has taken the wonky audio levels, intrusive score, and other artifacts of 1941’s technical limitations and aestheticized them. Meanwhile, in front of the camera, Gary Oldman isn’t doing anything new, either, but his execution is perfect.
Do yourself a favor, though: don’t watch it until you’ve watched Citizen Kane. Mank works as a story even when stripped of its context, but much of Fincher’s passion and effort will go unnoticed without it. And honestly, it wouldn’t hurt to spend a few minutes with Google, brushing up on your early 20th century media moguls, particularly Louis B. Mayer and William Randolph Hearst. (If nothing else, you might find it strangely heartening to see that American politics have always been corrupt and disturbing and manipulative in practice.)
For the record, if I’d been Alex, I would have picked And Peggy.
So they’re raising the G4 network —and thus Attack of the Show, X-Play, and so on— from the dead next year. And I want to be enthusiastic… I’m pretty much the core demographic for that shit, after all. (Also significant: now is probably the ideal time to capitalize on Munn’s rapidly receding visibility as one of The X-Men Most Likely To Be Re-Cast by putting her back in front of a camera every day, looking cute and talking about her inflamed asshole.) The whole thing makes a sort of sense.
I question the long-term viability, though. Who —besides me— is going to watch Attack of the Show in 2021? There are 17 year olds on Twitch with 50x the viewers that AOTS ever had, and none of those viewers will be even slightly interested in the video game and pop-culture opinions of the aging thirty- and fortysomethings at G4. Their push for diversity might help —watching the reunion show on YouTube, it’s kinda glaring how overwhelmingly white G4 was— but I suspect that will simply quiet any half-hearted criticism, rather than significantly grow an audience.
But there’s one unique service the reanimated G4 could potentially provide: the adultification of esports. People my age —even the old-school nerds— just don’t understand the appeal, and no one involved in building the fandom of the future is going to slow down long enough to explain it to us. If a zombie network for aging geeks can figure out how to frame and explain esports in a way that resonates, they might be able to justify their existence.
During their time on SNL, I kind of hated Will Forte, Bill Hader, and Jason Sudeikis. Every major iteration of the show’s cast seems to include at least a few interchangably bland white guys… every now and then one of them will emerge as an underrated performer —the tragic, brilliant Phil Hartman— but for the most part, they quickly fade into obscurity.
When Forte’s Last Man On Earth turned out to be both unpredictable and approximately 1,000x funnier than any MacGruber garbage Lorne Michaels made him crap out, I was shocked. When Hader’s Barry turned into a critical darling, I was modestly impressed.
But Ted Lasso? My mind is blown. Jason Sudeikis can be endearing and quietly funny and even moving when he feels like it? What the hell?
Naturally, I refuse to give Sudeikis full credit… he conceived the core characters and the situation, but showrunner Bill Lawrence’s fingerprints are everywhere on this thing. Lasso himself has been converted from the amiable, one-joke good-ol’-boy-out-of-water that Sudeikis created into what is, essentially, a male version of Molly Clock from Scrubs. Roy Kent is a 2020-ready, post-toxic-masculinity iteration of Perry Cox. Rebecca Welton and Rupert Mannion combined form a Voltron version of Bob Kelso.
(There are probably some Cougar Town references I’m missing, because, well… I did my duty to my generation by watching Friends repeatedly back in the day, but that’s as far as I go with Courtney Cox.)
The result actually feels a lot like Bill Lawrence looking at his most beloved creation —the aforementioned Percival Ulysses Cox— and deciding to dissect and dismantle every testosterone-fueled, anger-soaked, chest-thumping lesson that Dr. Cox ever taught his underlings. The men in Ted Lasso’s world are unmistakably men, but they’re allowed to have conversations about things other than fucking, winning, or going down with the ship… their world views encompass compromise and kind persuasion and open-mindedness and a fundamental optimism about the value of pursuing a common purpose.
Yeah, the writing gets sloppy in places; like any show set in England and written by over-confident American anglophiles, there are occasional bits of dialogue that sound off. And the show criminally wastes Anthony Head, who is simply an evil-minded bastard and nothing more. But everything else is a delight that leaves me feeling faintly hopeful about the concept of hope.
(Aside: between this and Mythic Quest: Raven’s Banquet, Apple TV+ has clearly figured out the comedy side of their business.)
I’ve often been asked if there’s such a thing as “too pathetic and needy.” I’ve always said “no.”
Dear God, I was wrong.
Eddie Van Halen, legendary guitarist of Van Halen, dies from cancer at 65
A huge part of my childhood just died.
He’d been sick for many years, so it’s not a shock like it was with Prince… but I’m going to be feeling this one. Goddammit.
Stuff like this was the soundtrack to my life in the ‘80s:
But if you only watch one clip of Eddie —if this is the only thing you ever see of him— it should be Eruption, from Live Without A Net. I watched the whole fucking concert video dozens of times, but this shit still gives me chills:
Still my favorite reaction video on YouTube:
HBO MAX is a mixed bag right now. Unfortunately, they’re choosing to self-censor the problematic television episodes in their catalog, including eps of South Park, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, and of all things, The Boondocks. (If Aaron McGruder can’t be provocative about race, then someone at corporate has lost the plot.) But I really like what they’re doing with their potentially offensive classic film collection. I think the shaming they received for Gone With The WInd may actually end up making these difficult films more satisfying.
I was browsing their library this weekend, and decided to rewatch Blazing Saddles for probably the twentieth time in my life. Despite being nominated for a few Academy Awards in 1974 and being on many lists of the best films of the 20th century, most of you haven’t seen or even heard of it at this point.
And if you watch it completely cold in 2020, man, it’ll be a comedic throat-punch to your sensibilities. The n-word is flying within the the first five minutes, along with similar epithets for Chinese people and gay folks. There are multiple, laughing references to rape. The movie’s even sacrilegious on occasion. And vulgar? BS features the definitive cinematic fart joke.
But HBO doesn’t force you to watch it cold; in fact, they force you to go the other direction. They’ve inserted a three minute explainer at the beginning of the film, where host Jacqueline Stewart walks you through the cultural context, and points out useful info, like how all of the (knowingly) offensive jokes are put in the mouths of either irredeemable villains or the moronic townspeople who must be saved from their own stupidity by the kind, clever heroes, played by Cleavon Little and Gene Wilder. Rather than a lame attempt at appeasing modern audiences, it’s informative and interesting and makes the movie better.
If this is an example of our woke, canceled future, then I’m okay with it.
With that said, it’s worth noting what the explainer doesn’t mention: Blazing Saddles’ racist jokes are far more carefully, thoughtfully written and distributed —thanks to co-writer Richard Pryor— than the sexist ones. And to be honest, the gay jokes are just… gay jokes, on the order of “look at the prancing chorus guys holding hands while synchronized swimming, har har har!” It ain’t perfect.
Oh, and just for @domestic–doll, I’ll leave this clip right here:
Mac Davis (1942-2020)
