EPISODE 708: ARE WE DRINKING?
I was also in Citizen Kane.
POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
I realized this weekend I’ve had some pop culture articles I want to recommend piling up. So that’s going to be the heart of the newsletter today.
The first is a real gem, an interview with Bill Murray. Ostensibly it’s about his new movie, New Worlds: The Cradle of Civilization, a concert movie in which Murray reads from great works of American literature while cellist Jan Vogler and some others perform classical pieces of music. (Murray also sings songs from West Side Story, no, I can’t imagine it either, but yes I want to see it.)
But articles about Murray are really never about the project he’s in, but about this fun-loving uncle character that he’s become in the world zeitgeist. For me, reading about Murray always begs great questions about the way I’m leading my own life. What’s to stop me from randomly giving strangers gifts or dressing crazy or thinking of my choices as an opportunity to play?
I haven’t really figured out something specific to do for Lent (I’m slow in this as in everything else), and I’m thinking I might try living like Bill Murray. Which is to say, at moments of action, to ask myself, what’s the most playful choice I could make here? What’s the choice that most injects laughter into the universe and the lives of others? What’s the choice that adds delight?
I don’t understand this but I love it.
The Disney film Encanto is likely going to win a couple big awards next weekend. The song’s biggest break out hit “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” is not nominated, but that hasn’t stopped people from continuing to write about it. And this little piece from the Hollywood Reporter about its choreography really turned my head.
Honestly, there’s so much going on in the song I never considered just how much it is actually a dance number. Every part of the story of Bruno is told through choreographed sequences performed by the other characters which Mirabel is drawn into. That’s part of what fascinates me personally about the dance, the way that the other characters’ stories draw Mirabel in. It’s a subtle way of talking about the seduction of story, and maybe particularly of stories told within a family. Bruno is absolutely not what any of these people think he is, but their stories are hard to resist.
The creative team had a group of dancers perform the dance for the animators. And there’s a great video online where you get to see the live action and animated sequences together. It’s so fun.
The umbrellas moment…*chefs kiss*
This year is the 50th anniversary of The Godfather, a film that I have spent pretty much whole adult life being told is the best movie ever and so rewatching it, because Film FOMO is real, and then talking myself into agreeing with them when in fact I’m like, okay?
I was going to write an article about this. I’m sort of glad America passed on it, because as I’ve thought about it a little more, I think I’ve come to a different way of thinking about what people are saying when they say Godfather is the greatest movie ever. I think they’re saying that every single moment of that film is crafted. The writing, the acting, the set and production design, the lighting, the editing, the cinematography—every aspect and moment has been carefully constructed. It’s a work of art because it’s a work of such incredible love on the part of its creators.
I think that’s part of why it’s entirely tolerable that the film is three hours long. When you’re in the presence of real artistry, you give the work permission to be what it wants to be. Rather than wanting to get to it or get it over with, you just want to be a part of this experience that it is creating. You want to allow the film to give you the gift it has in store for you whenever and however that will be.
There are so few films that are able to achieve this!
As part of the anniversary the New York Times interviewed Al Pacino. I love hearing him talk about how much love and support the cast showed him and also how weird it’s been to have played that role.
A couple weeks ago my sister and her family sent me this video game that I kept hearing about, Elden Ring. She warned me that her son Jack had said the game had ruined his life. And now that I have played it for about ten days, I can confirm, this game is an absolute nightmare from which I can’t find a way out.
Basically it’s a dungeons and dragons-type game set on a huge world. And the challenge of the game, which I think is also its genius, is that where most games slowly teach you their mechanics, and increase the difficulty of the bad guys slowly, so that you have a sense of progress and confidence as you enter into the real game, Elden Ring just throws you in the deep end. Everywhere you go there are these incredibly difficult monsters that kill you immediately. It’s just shocking, honestly. Like, what the #!%! am I even doing here?
And that doesn’t really change as you go. The game has so many different kind of things in play, including being able to travel to other universes (and having characters from other universes suddenly show up and kill you in yours for no reason, thanks so much), it seems to me like it will take months to actually fully understand the mechanics and opportunities of the game.
The Guardian did a sort of explainer about Ring recently. I love their description of it as what if The Legend of Zelda hated you. That is absolutely correct. I don’t know how interesting it’ll be if you’re not a gamer, but I just find everything about the game really fascinating. It turns out, a game that is impossible can be just as compelling as one that goes in baby steps. The very challenge of it makes you come back for more.
If you’re a Gen X’er, you probably know this comic book. Written and drawn by Todd McFarlane, it was this GIANT thing that happened in 1990. A popular comic book today might sell 100,000 copies, and more likely 30-50,000. (It is crazy to me that comic book movies are a billion dollar industry but the comic books themselves are not. I don’t get it, not at all.) McFarlane’s Spider-Man #1 sold 2.5 million. And it opened the door to massive changes in the comic book industry, most especially the idea of trying to turn comic books into speculative investments by way of things like relaunches with new #1s and variant covers. (This book had 13 different covers for you to decide among/buy.)
It was also the beginning of one end for Marvel. After the speculative market collapsed—because if everyone is buying all the covers then there is no demand and therefore no money to be made, comic sales plummeted. Marvel would go bankrupt in 1996.
Now, if not for that event, the Marvel Cinematic Universe would probably not exist, as many of its storylines are derived from the groundbreaking work of the young scrappy creators that Marvel was forced to turn to for new ideas. But in the moment, man was it a messy time. One of the other downsides of the McFarlane revolution was an editorial tendency to embrace similarly busy art filled with dudes that were freakishly overmuscled, toted guns literally taller than them and were accompanied by women drawn like pin-up girls, and little in the way of coherent story.
A lot of this is the result of other creators that exploded on the scene at the same time, particularly Rob Liefeld and Jim Lee. But they were all part of the same moment of speculation and artistic revolution, and they pretty quickly all left Marvel to start Image Comics, where they could write their own books and take all the profit for themselves.
George Marston at Newsarama did this very tidy history of Spider-Man #1 and how it impacted comic books. I love a deep dive into a pop culture icon, and this is a really good one.
THREE TWEETS
This whole thread is filled with the greatest X-Men tweets of all time.
The Oscar nominees, in emoji form:
Existential Crisis, 2022 remix
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This week was the second anniversary of the lockdown. In the months beforehand I thought it would be a big deal for me, but honestly there’s been so much going on I barely had time to consider it. I wonder if the same is true for you.
Or maybe we’re all holding off on thinking too deeply about the significance of the moment we’re in because it’s still not clear what that moment is. Suddenly and for the first time here in New York a lot of things seem very much like pre-pandemic. And it feels completely normal for it to be that way, almost like we’ve all tacitly agreed to act like 2020 and 2021 didn’t happen.
As much as I appreciate that, I do think it would also be good to take a beat to consider where we’ve been, or at least it would be good for me. In the midst of so much fear and frustration there also were good things, gifts that we can still draw on.
Actually it reminds me of Elden Ring. (Honestly, everything right now reminds me of Elden Ring. I saw a huge metal sculpture of a ball in Midtown last week and had to hold back from racing across the street to destroy it with the sword I apparently now believe sits on my right hip, because it looks like a thing you’re supposed to destroy in Elden Ring.) As much as it is a D&D game, it’s also very much post-apocalyptic. You’re walking through a world that has been destroyed in some unknown way at some prior moment. The fact there are these massive monsters everywhere is one sign of that. So are the weird green skies.
Another part of that reality is that from time to time you come upon treasures left by unknown people. Often they’re hidden in glowing skulls that you come upon on the road. It strikes me as an apt metaphor for us. I want to believe that in the ruins of our last two years we’ve experienced treasures too. And in our relief to be out of that horrible moment we might have left some of them behind. But they’re still there, buried in our memories, waiting to release more goodness into our lives.
Whatever that goodness might look like, may it be yours this week!