Reading, Watching, Listening 12/22/2024
A few words about the cold
It is excuse my French fucking freezing outside. -13°C according to my weather app but I’m sure the moment I step foot out there the wind will make that temperature sound downright summery. Talking about the weather. So dull. But the thing about days this cold is they also tend to be sunny. Blue skies and all. It makes for some nice cheer ahead of the holidays which I hope you’ll all be enjoying with friends or family or even by yourself. It’s hard out there and yet we’re here living and as long as that’s true we may as well take the joy and the nice things whereever we can. That’s usually in other people but sometimes it’s just curling up on the couch with a throw a mug of tea and a movie. It’s a Wonderful Life is always a good option.
Merry Christmas everyone, and happy Hanukkah!
Last week, I published an interview with Michele Catalano, who has launched her excellent new site, I Have That On Vinyl. It was a wonderful conversation, and I’m loving all the work Michele’s been putting up.
I also wrote a story for the Toronto Star about A-list movies stars going to TV, the ecoonomics involved, and the cultural shifts that have led us here.
Reading, Watching, Listening
Hellogoodbye might ring a bell if you were a certain kind of music fan who grew up in a certain perio. Hello, 2000s! I don’t think about the group and their extremely teenage poper pop often, but this week I was reminded of them thanks to the inclusion of their song “Touchdown Turnaround (Don't Give Up On Me)” in the film Didi. I still haven’t seen that movie, but someone on one of my social media feeds reacted to the song being in it, and a sudden wave of nostalgia hit me, and I’ve been listening to that first EP and album of theres on practically a loop.
They got Big Jim! On The Big Picture this week, host Sean Fennessey interviewed the man himself, James Cameron, along with his former producing partner (and ex-wife, he’s got a few), Gale Anne Hurd, to celebrate the 40th anniversary of The Terminator. The film is, of course, iconic. It’s also one of the great low-budget action films, and Fennessey really digs into the process of getting it to the screen. There are stories about the late, great Roger Corman, an anecdote about getting a meeting with a financier by responding to an a for-sale ad he put up for an old desk, and plenty more. I also think it’s important to do more interviews like this, about how movies actually get made, as an industrial matter. Engaging with art is great, but it’s hard to do if the art can’t get made at all.
“Casual Viewing”, by Will Tavlin is one of the great reads of the week. It was a few years ago now that Tavlin wrote “Digital Rocks” for N+1, a lengthy essay about Hollywood’s transition from film to digital, and the ways in which the shift was a carefully managed scam by studios intent on accruing more monopolistic power over both the production and distribution of movies. It was an essay about art, but also about the logic of capitalism, and a critique of the forces destroying our world as we speak. Tavlin has now followed it up with this new essay about Netflix, and what the streamer has done to degrade both the art of film and television, and ourselves as humans.
For Netflix, a movie is an accounting trick — a tranche of pixels that allows the company to release increasingly fantastical statements about its viewership, such as the absurd notion that Leave the World Behind, a dubious Julia Roberts apocalypse movie produced by Barack and Michelle Obama, was “viewed” 121 million times. How could anyone believe that?
I’m already patiently looking forward to Tavlin’s next major essay.