EPISODE 433: ICH BIN SKINNY PETE
POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
So this week Disney announced a new streaming series based on the Tatooine years of Obi-Wan Kenobi and Disney announced a new streaming prequel to Rogue Oneand Disney announced a new Marvel streaming show about Ms. Marvel, pretty much the biggest (and greatest) new Marvel comic book character in the last twenty years.
Meanwhile, Disney announced a new live action version of Lady and the Tramp, because people want to see actual dogs eat spaghetti, while Disney announced a new streaming show about a gamma-irradiated lawyer called She-Hulk, even as Disney announced that Kit Harington is joining The Eternals, which could be retitled the Endless it has so many stars in it, including Harington’s Game of Thrones brother Richard Madden.
Also, Disney is turning High School Musical: The Musical: The High School Show into a series, while Disney is doing a 21 episode animated What If? series which imagines what would have happened if things had gone differently in each of the Marvel movies, which are owned by Disney, and the long-sought after seventh season of the animated Star Warsseries Clone Wars will be released in February on Disney’s streaming service.
So yeah, Disney announced pretty much everything this weekend. New movies, new shows, new mini-series, new super hero-themed theme park lands, new rides, new restaurants. Oh, and the first trailer for the Mandalorian, which gave IG-88 fans reasons to cheer, and who would have ever thought that of all the things Star Wars might sometime offer that would have been on the list, let alone happen, let alone be so fantastic. (Star Wars droids are so damn cool, you guys. Also, if Bossk gets a moment we dance in the streets.)
(Actually, if you really want to have your mind blown, pick up a recent Star Wars novelization. The depth of character given to both new droids like Solo’s L3-37 or Rogue One’s K-2S0 and old droids like R2-D2 or the computer system of the Millenium Falcon is really unexpected. If I were going to try and pitch Disney on a new concept for its Long Time Ago Far Far Away Universe it would absolutely be a droid-centric or all-droid film.)
Based on the footage, I’d say Manda is Disney’s to lose. Great concept – following the world of the bounty hunters – cinema quality footage, a cast including not only Pedro “The Mountain Popped My Head Wide Open But First I Stole Your Hearts” Pascal but Carl Weathers, Giancarlo Esposito and Werner Herzog. If the story is there, this looks like a home run.
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But really all of those news items were secondary to the big Disney story of the week, which is that Sony has pulled the plug on letting Disney co-produce-oh-let’s-be-serious-produce-produce Spider-Man 3: Something to Do with Home. It was a pretty baller move on Sony’s part – the very week they knew Disney was going to be having their alt-mouse-Comic-Con D23, they drop this bombshell then follow-up with a series of tweets pointing to the fact that Kevin Feige, the brains behind Disney’s Marvel operations, will not be overseeing the next Spidey films because it’s not solely owned by Disney.
It was like a suicide bombing, really. Most people are blaming Sony, and yet it did absolutely overwhelm the conversation about Disney this week. And I kind of think as the weeks go on, there’s going to be more criticism of Disney; they seem to own everything cool now, their percentage of Hollywood’s box office is ridiculous – they’ve made 8 BILLION DOLLARS at the box office this year, and it’s only August. And based on last weekend Disney+ is definitely coming for your TV streaming dollars. I am embarrassed at how desperate I find myself to give them my money.
It’s a paradox: Everyone loves pretty much all of Disney’s properties, and loves what they’ve done with them, and yet no one likes a monopoly either. In comparison with say, Amazon, the cost of what Disney’s success is doing to other businesses, the radical diminishment of competition that their strength and their mergers bring, the power they have to set the terms unilaterally with people like Sony, is not obvious. But give it a year or two and let’s see if we don’t start seeing those kinds of stories.
Having said all that, I’m not terribly worried about whether they’ll come back to Spidey. With Far From Home they’ve positioned as the center of the post-Steve-n-Tony Marvel Universe. They could shift gears…I guess?... but ultimately I don’t think they will. Maybe they will win some financial concessions from Sony – come on, this can’t just be about Feige – but it’s pretty hard to believe they’d be willing to forgo the huge investment they’ve put into that character. People might rage at Sony, but in the end Disney has a lot more to lose by walking away from Our Friendly Neighborhood.
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When I was putting this together I checked Sony’s main Twitter page. Check out the photo at the top of their page and tell me they don’t how to troll like a boss.
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Got notes on an outline for a script this week that I've been working on kind of a long time. To summarize the notes: Umm, no.
Strangely, it didn't phase me. (In fact I think I agreed.) I spent the week producing a whole new take and it's got me kind of excited. We'll see. Meanwhile, a bunch of totally different things to chase this week, interviews and article pitches. I"m having a hard time keeping up with it all, because #aging, but it is a lot of fun.
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A Thing That Made Me Happy This Week
The Farewell is Lulu Wang’s somewhat true story of her mainland Chinese grandmother being diagnosed with stage four terminal lung cancer, and her family deciding to keep it a secret from her, even as they’re all traveling to see her, saying it’s for a wedding. I think it’s this year’s Movie That No One Saw Coming and Will Be Around for a While. There’s just so much good stuff in it about family.
As I was looking back on the film I was realizing that while the film is really about the grandmother Nai Nai (who is wonderful and so much fun) and her granddaughter Billi (played by the brilliant Awkwafina), my attention was drawn mostly to Billi’s dad Haiyan. He’s not a prominent character really; just this kind of ordinary late 50something dad – not movie star handsome, no Hollywood Father Knows Best font of wisdom. Kind of hapless really, small and clumsy before the movements and demands of the world. And yet somehow that makes him so relatable.
So much of Hollywood is telling stories of heroes. Some succeed, some fail, but it’s all Dramatic. And the older I get the more exhausted most of those characters make me. I’m always right there opening weekend for the latest Radioactive Spider Bite but I want to know all my clumsiness and weakness is okay too.
It’s sort of like this: this week Loyola Marymount welcomed its new students and their parents for orientation before classes begin Monday. One morning as I was leaving campus I saw a husband and wife climbing a hill that really isn’t meant to be climbed, their faces kind of lost in thought. They just seemed to be drifting along, like the colorful tissue paper you find in gift bags, now thrown aside. There was something so unmoored about them, so What Now?
A movie wants to turn that into an Inciting Incident – What Crazy Thing do they do now to avoid/face their new reality. But there was such a beauty just to their vulnerability. I didn't need hijinks or a story beyond that.
Another analogy: there are some people who want All the Things to go perfect – their parties, business meetings, Mass. But I find the more perfect a thing is, the more dead inside it feels to me, like a lavishly bedazzled door that enters on a desert. My favorite events are usually the ones that go kind of wrong.
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Someone online told me I need to read Revenge of the Sith. Which, you know, No I don't. And also, Really?
But then it's Star Wars and they said it would basically redeem the Prequelogy, that you can throw out that entire trilogy and just read this book and you will be happy, and so of course I'm reading it in between histories of Westeros and memoirs of Oliver Sacks and L.A. murder mysteries. (These Bosch novels are kind of great!)
I just got through the scene where Anakin cuts off Count Dooku's head. Here is author Matthew Stover describing Count Dooku’s take on Anakin, moments before Dooku gets killed:
Even as the boy hurtled downward, Dooku felt a new twist in the currents of the Force between them, and he finally understood. He understood how Skywalker was getting stronger. Why he no longer spoke. How he had become a machine of battle. He understood why Sidious had been so interested in him for so long. Skywalker was a natural. There was a thermonuclear furnace where his heart should be, and it was burning through the firewalls of his Jedi training. He held the Force in the clench of a white-hot fist. He was half Sith already, and he didn’t even know it. This boy had the gift of fury. And even now, he was holding himself back; even now, as he landed at Dooku’s flank and rained blows upon the Sith Lord’s defenses, even as he drove Dooku backward step after step, Dooku could feel how Skywalker kept his fury banked behind walls of will: walls that were hardened by some uncontrollable dread. Dread, Dooku surmised, of himself. Of what might happen if he should ever allow that furnace he used for a heart to go supercritical.
"This boy had the gift of fury."
++ LINKS ++
The Connection between the Ubiquity of Sugar Today and Slavery; How the Resistance of some States to adopt Universal Health Care mirrors those same states’ stances toward health care for African Americans after the Civil War, and the mistreatment of workers in the U.S. is an outgrowth of the fact the American economy was originally built on the labor of slaves. (All articles from the New York Times’1619 project. Well worth checking out for more interesting articles, poems, stories and photos about the impact of slavery on the U.S. on the occasion of its 400th anniversary.)
The Where’s Waldo of Marvel Comic Book Super Hero Movies (aka There are no more Easter Eggs in the Avengers movies, please internet stop writing clickbait pieces so you can get views).
What a Shit Day Really Looks Like (aka Probably Not the Next Season of American Crime Story).
The Song I Can't Stop Listening To This Week has a line in it that I kept thinking was "Do Si Do", even though that makes no sense at all.
The real problem with Sony walking away:
And lastly, This Just In (and yes, I know, How Can This Be True, it’s not even on the right network? And yet it appears that it is. Also, how is Skinny Pete not dead yet?)
Related but not related (but maybe related?) to some of the above, a quote from comedian Simon Amstell’s new special Set Free:
We’re all basically the same thing. And yet everything is about status, on every chat show on TV it’s ‘Welcome to the show here’s another famous person who’s done another amazing thing’ and it’s unsettling for all of us. Really it should be, ‘Welcome to the show, as you know, life is suffering and the self is an illusion. Please welcome my next guest, whose face is a mask covering an unknowable void.’
Here's to those moments when the mask comes down and it's okay for us to just be fragile, fumbling and ordinary.
See you next week.