Weekend Reads: "Donnie Darko," "Space Jam," Aliens and Pop Stars, The Future of Superhero Movies
Recommended weekend reading material for July 24, 2021.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko turns 20 years old this year, and Walter Chaw reflects on the movie’s almost-prophetic story and themes.
I think that’s the thing that lingers for me with Donnie Darko, twenty years old this year: that sense that the despair we feel as kids when we first see how broken things are, how complicit even adults we respect and admire are in that brokenness, is neither childish nor silly. That to a certain extent, despair is the appropriate reaction to the state of the world and burning a mattress-full of money as the protagonists of Greene’s “The Destroyers” do, is the only kind of protest (one that impacts financial markets) that has any possible kind of positive impact. But it also says that the sacrifices we make for the people whom we love are, while pyrrhic in holding back the tide of ignorance and decay, are in fact the things that make a life worth enduring.
I remember first reading about Donnie Darko on Reel.com(!) when it premiered at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival, and I immediately got the sense that there was something special about the movie. And I wasn’t wrong: Donnie Darko would become a huge hit amongst me and my friends — read my review — and it contains scenes and moments that I still think about, to this day.
Isao Takahata’s Only Yesterday was released 30 years ago this week, and Mathew Lyons considers what makes it so special amidst the rest of the Studio Ghibli canon.
There are three landscapes in the film: the urban landscape of the city where Taeko lives, the rural landscape she visits, and the hazy, vertiginous landscape of memory. The visceral beauties of the first two are rendered with all the characteristic artistry of Ghibli at its finest: trainyards, puddled streets, safflower fields — all their realities so exquisitely visualised that we find ourselves startled by the loveliness of the most mundane things. But the landscape of memory is treated differently: the colour palette is pared back to more muted, pastel tones; often parts of the screen are left blank, incomplete, the foreground dissolving into negative space, the backgrounds barely sketched, implicit and unrealised. It’s a highly evocative technique emphasising the emotional precision of memory, its aversion to sensory abundance and detail, even as it replicates it. And, paradoxically, by encouraging the viewer to look closer, to engage creatively with what we see, the deliberate unrealism of the imagery deepens the emotional realism we experience.
Only Yesterday might not be as well known as Spirited Away and My Neighbor Totoro, but it’s an extraordinary film in its own right — and it boasts one of the most poignant endings of any movie I’ve ever seen.
Geoffrey Reiter compares the usage of sacred and secular relics in the Indiana Jones movies and the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
[T]he objects of Indiana Jones and MCU films may be said to function as relics, at least in a peripheral (or “secondary”) sense. Yet the relics of Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade function differently from those of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and in those differences we can observe a more fundamental difference between sacred and secular approaches to the material world and the arc of its history and eschatology.
The new Space Jam movie isn’t just a movie; it’s the future of blockbuster movies (for better or worse).
In a dizzying display of corporate dominance, the new Space Jam is trying to sell everything Warner Bros. has ever made. Space Jam: A New Legacy isn’t really a movie — it’s a crash course in vertical integration and brand identity, a marketing slideshow with a two-hour running time. Its viewers are taken on a whirlwind tour through every Warner IP geared toward every demographic: Wonder Woman’s Themyscira for girls and women, The Matrix for older men, Harry Potter for Old Millennials who haven’t been reading the news much, and so forth. This is how Hollywood works now.
Via Morning Brew.
James Gunn, who knows a thing or two about superhero movies (he directed the Guardians of the Galaxy movies as well as the upcoming Suicide Squad), opines about the genre’s future.
“We know about the way cowboy films went, and the way war films went… I don’t know, I think you don’t have to be a genius to put two and two together and see that there’s a cycle to those sorts of films, you know and that the only hope for the future of the comic book and superhero films is to change them up. They’re really dumb. And they’re mostly boring for me right now.”
Via Screen Rant. The thing is, Gunn’s not wrong.
The Polygon staff have a compiled a list of the best “lost” movies from 2020 that are still available via streaming services.
To describe 2020 as one of the most tumultuous and unconventional years in recent memory feels like a gross understatement. The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted every sector of life, including the simple pleasure of watching. Theaters and multiplex chains across the world shuttered their doors and the result was a release schedule thrown into a tailspin and an industry scrambling to program streaming platforms.
I’m glad to see that Andrew Patterson’s The Vast of Night made their list. It’s an impressive directorial debut and a refreshing take on some tried and true “alien invasion” tropes (read my review).
A number of pop stars, including Doja Cat, Demi Lovato, Robbie Williams, and Shaun Ryder, are finding inspiration in outer space and aliens.
It is understandable that musicians believe in extraterrestrial beings: after a year socialising over Zoom or from behind a mask, every interaction IRL feels like you need to relearn social skills after arriving from another planet. But astronaut Chris Hadfield, the only person ever to record an album in space (2015’s Space Sessions: Songs From a Tin Can) and who went viral for his performance of Space Oddity on the International Space Station in 2013, has another theory for the sci-fi pop boom: we’re in the middle of another space race.
Via The Fast Times.
A recently released documentary about Anthony Bourdain features some AI-generated dialog based on one of Bourdain’s emails — which raises anew questions surrounding the ethics of using technology to impersonate dead people.
Creating a synthetic Bourdain voice-over seemed to me far less crass than, say, a C.G.I. Fred Astaire put to work selling vacuum cleaners in a Dirt Devil commercial, or a holographic Tupac Shakur performing alongside Snoop Dogg at Coachella, and far more trivial than the intentional blending of fiction and nonfiction in, for instance, Errol Morris’s “Thin Blue Line.” Neville used the A.I.-generated audio only to narrate text that Bourdain himself had written. Bourdain composed the words; he just — to the best of our knowledge — never uttered them aloud. Some of Neville’s critics contend that Bourdain should have the right to control the way his written words are delivered. But doesn’t a person relinquish that control anytime his writing goes out into the world?
Via Morning Brew.
Several researchers and experts attempt to determine the most damaging conspiracy theory of all time. A couple of them point to the “Satanic panic” of the ‘80s:
We don’t tend to think of it as a conspiracy theory because it was accepted and promoted by so many authoritative institutions — academia, the police, the government and churches. But in every other respect, it prefigures the big conspiracy narratives of the 21st century — a secret network of child-abusing Satanists out to undermine the (white, Protestant) American Way of Life… Without the Satanic Ritual Abuse scare, you don’t have PizzaGate, and you don’t have QAnon and the storming of the Capitol on January 6th, 2021. Extreme as they might be, they didn’t come from nowhere.
Danielle Henderson reflects on the freedom, and neglect, that ‘80s kids enjoyed.
The hardest thing to convey to the children in my life about my childhood is the concept of unadulterated freedom. As people who have been scheduled and monitored down to the second for most of their lives, they truly cannot conceive of life outside of the panopticon of their own experience. When I was a child, a successful day was one where I saw my mother for two hours total, split evenly before and after she went to work.
It is interesting to think about how much things have changed. When we were kids, my brother and I would spend countless hours outside, running wild throughout our neighborhood with ‘nary a thought of checking in with our parents. It’s harder to imagine my own kids doing that, however, and for a whole host of reasons that are probably just as valid as the reasons for my own parents’ hands off approach to summer entertainment.
Then again, if I’d had Netflix and YouTube when I was a kid, I probably would’ve spent way more time inside, too.
From the Blog
I reviewed one of my favorite Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes, “Relics,” which brings the redoubtable Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott into the 24th century alongside with the Enterprise-D crew.
So often, Star Trek is about big ideas and stuff going on “out there,” which is why we love it so. But “Relics” is proof that Star Trek can be at its best, and most poignant, when it gets personal and human.
Also, Ted Lasso returned for its second season this week. We loved the first season, which proved every bit as delightful as we’d heard.
For all of its vulgar language (“wanker” is just the tip of the iceberg) and crass sexual humor, Ted Lasso might be the purest TV show that I’ve watched in a long time. And by “pure,” I mean the undiluted goodhearted-ness that undergirds nearly every scene. It’s a shame that, for a TV series or movie to feel “grounded” or “meaningful” these days, it must be tempered by snark and cynicism. But Ted Lasso achieves grounded-ness and meaning precisely because of its decided and determined lack of cynicism.
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