Weekend Reads: James Bond, Godzilla, LuLaRoe, Pandora Papers, Facebook
Recommended weekend reading material for October 9, 2021.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material. Note: There will be no “Weekend Reads” edition for Saturday, October 16, 2021 so I’ve packed this week’s edition with some extra links.
The new James Bond film, No Time to Die, arrived in theaters this week after several pandemic-related delays. It therefore seems only fitting to share Drew McWeeny’s in-depth review of the very first James Bond movie, 1962’s Dr. No.
When he first became a cinema icon, it was an age where we were doing everything we could to avoid a hot war because we knew it meant things would probably not end well for anyone. Bond treats the security of the world as a great big macho game, and so do all of his opponents, and while the micro view is a couple of guys rowing out to a small island under the cover of night, the macro view is that Bond and Quarrell are going after Dr. No so that the entire world can sleep safely. In the face of stakes like that, Bond’s flippant sense of cool is more than just an affectation; it’s a survival mechanism. If he ever really spent time thinking about what it is he’s doing and allowing it to register emotionally, he’d probably be unable to leave his home without having a panic attack.
McWeeny’s review — which also compares Dr. No to the original Ian Fleming novel — is the first in a series of articles that’ll explore all of the James Bond movies, and I can’t wait to read future installments.
For all their flaws, I have a real fondness for James Bond movies. When I was in grade school, my family often got together with friends to make pizza and watch movies on LaserDisc(!), and 007’s adventures were a frequent selection. Ever since then, I’ve always been excited when a new Bond movie arrives in theaters even as other franchises (e.g., the Mission: Impossible and Bourne movies) have challenged Bond’s cinematic status.
Related: Here’s a quick roundup of what various critics are saying about No Time to Die, which also happens to be Daniel Craig’s final turn as James Bond.
Bilge Ebiri tries to make sense of the strange allure of Michael Mann’s Miami Vice.
Perhaps, most importantly, much in the way that the odd, genre-extraneous elements that initially made Heat uneven for some (including me at the time) eventually proved to be among that picture’s greatest strengths, Miami Vice has endured thanks to all those things that once felt like distractions: its tortured romanticism, its unbridled intimacy, its downright transcendentalist focus on element over incident, where darkening skies and undulating waves and distant glimpses of lightning seem to say more than any line of dialogue ever could. It might have felt out of place in 2006, but it feels like an even more consequential outlier today.
I caught Miami Vice during its original theatrical run back in 2006. Mann’s digital filmmaking took a little getting used to, but as I wrote back in 2009, I ultimately found it to be “an incredibly stylish, taut and atmospheric, machismo-laden movie that is gripping pretty much from start to finish.”
Everyone knows that Godzilla movies are good, escapist fun, but as Alex Adams points out, they’re deeply political, as well — especially those Godzilla movies featuring the Big G’s arch-nemesis, King Ghidorah.
It is widely acknowledged that Godzilla is, as Ian Buruma writes in the BFI DVD booklet for Ishiro Honda’s original Godzilla (1954), “a profoundly political monster.” But Godzilla’s many sequels are often written off as cheap and goofy cash-ins. Big mistake. Much as US sci-fi movies like The Blob (1958), The Thing From Another World (1951) or Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) used alien encounters to think through themes of cross-cultural contact, colonialism, and communism, the Shōwa Ghidorah movies are a rich engagement with world-historical themes of Cold War antagonism, first contact, and imperial manipulation.
A union representing TV and film production workers (e.g., animators, designers, makeup artists, set builders) has authorized a potential strike that could have a major impact on Hollywood.
The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) announced Monday that 90 percent of its roughly 60,000 members participated in the vote, with 98 percent of those casting their ballots in favor of a strike authorization. What that meant isn’t that a strike was necessarily imminent, but that members authorized IATSE international president Matthew Loeb to call a strike should negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) — which represents major studios — continue to be stalled.
Driving IATSE’s actions are demands for better working conditions and increased pay for streaming productions. Numerous Hollywood stars have voiced their support for IATSE, including Jane Fonda, Seth Rogen, and Ben Stiller.
Mamoru Hosoda is one of the most acclaimed anime filmmakers working today, thanks to films like The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Summer Wars, and most recently, Belle. But before making those movies, Hosoda cut his teeth on Digimon.
Digimon Adventure was not Hosoda’s first-ever work. Inspired by Hayao Miyazaki, he’d been an experienced member of Toei Animation studios, contributing key animation to various Dragon Ball features, Slam Dunk, and Sailor Moon. But it’s here that the artistic affinities that would make Hosoda one of the top names in anime film direction come to the forefront. By diving so effectively into the kaiju and coming-of-age genres, Hosoda not only assured that the Digimon anime would have a bright future but that he would, as well.
K. B. Hoyle reviews Amazon’s LuLaRich and the perils and false promises of multi-level-marketing companies like LuLaRoe.
The spiritual language of MLMs is part of the grift, which makes MLMs like LuLaRoe so much more than businesses — and it’s part of what also makes them so dangerous. They offer — often promise — insta-community, insta-success, insta-friendship, insta-financial freedom, insta-spiritual fulfillment, insta-you-name-it. You can sign up to be part of something bigger than yourself where there is instant acceptance and the tenants of the organization promise to align with your existing morals and belief system. It’s everything you need and more.
I watched a bit of LuLaRich with my wife, and found it alternately fascinating and horrifying, especially the extent to which LuLaRoe “spiritualized” their business model. It really does seem cult-like.
As Agatha Harkness, Kathryn Hahn was WandaVision’s breakout star. So it should come as no surprise that she’s getting her own Disney+ series.
The series will be a “dark comedy,” Variety reports, citing multiple sources — though whether it is a continuation of Agatha’s escapades or a prequel exploring her funky past (or something else entirely!) has not yet been revealed.
Related: WandaVision had a lot going for it, but its ending was deeply problematic.
Ride’s Andy Bell discusses thirteen of his favorite albums. (I’m a sucker for lists of my favorite bands’ favorite albums.)
In his Baker’s Dozen, Bell takes us through breadth of his career, from early days memorising Sonic Youth quotes with his Ride bandmates at university in Oxford, to the house records he tried to unpick as he began his journey making electronic music on his own. Though his list includes everything from Paisley underground bands to dub meets post-punk acts there is a central theme. “Looking at the list, a lot of them seems to do one thing,” Bell says. “It’s not like a greatest hits of my top ten bands. It’s more like, here’s some stuff that speaks to me.”
If you’re unfamiliar with Ride, then I highly recommend checking out their 1990 debut album, Nowhere, which is a true shoegaze classic. And they’re still going strong: “Catch You Dreaming” is one of my favorite songs from 2018.
John Gruber excoriates the new tab design in Apple’s Safari browser.
From a usability perspective, every single thing about Safari 15’s tabs is a regression. Everything. It’s a tab design that can only please users who do not use tabs heavily; whereas the old tab design scaled gracefully from “I only open a few tabs at a time” all the way to “I have hundreds of tabs open across multiple windows”. That’s a disgrace. The Safari team literally invented the standard for how tabs work on MacOS. The tabs that are now available in the Finder, Terminal, and optionally in all document-based Mac apps are derived from the design and implementation of Safari’s tabs. Now, Apple has thrown away Safari’s tab design — a tab design that was not just best-of-platform, but arguably best-in-the-whole-damn-world — and replaced it with a design that is both inferior in the abstract, and utterly inconsistent with the standard tabs across the rest of MacOS.
Gruber’s absolutely right. I recently upgraded my iMac to Safari 15 and everything about the new UI sucks. Not only does it look bad, but it adds unnecessary cognitive effort. As Gruber puts it: “I have to think, continuously, about something I have never had to think about since tabbed browsing became a thing almost 20 years ago.”
I’ve written about my own experiences with Safari 15’s new tabs. Hopefully, Apple releases an update soon that’ll revert Safari back to the way it should be.
Perhaps you’ve never heard of Ozy Media. (I hadn’t until last week.) But the media company was a massive success — until it was revealed to be a fraud.
In 2019, the company said it had 50 million unique monthly users. Yet Comscore, a leading media analytics firm, found that Ozy only reached about 2.5 million people at some points in 2018. Comparatively, it reached approximately 230,000 and 479,000 people in July and July of this year, respectively. Watson told the Times that the company doesn’t use standard measurements of online traffic — which again raises questions about how a media outlet with one-of-a-kind measurements could be considered successful and attract so much investment.
And yet somehow, Ozy was able to raise over $80 million in funding last year.
The recently leaked “Pandora Papers” reveal how the world’s richest individuals, including politicians, celebrities, and religious leaders, evade taxes by hiding their wealth in offshore accounts, real estate investments, and secret companies.
Oxfam International, a British consortium of charities, applauded the Pandora Papers for exposing brazen examples of greed that deprived countries of tax revenue that could be used to finance programs and projects for the greater good.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with being wealthy. However, I simply don’t understand the lengths that some will go to in order to defend the super-wealthy for not paying more taxes when it’s obvious that they’re playing by a different set of rules than the rest of us — rules that they themselves have written and only they can access. Via 1440.
Earlier this week, Facebook and its related services (e.g., Instagram, WhatsApp) effectively disappeared from the internet for several hours. In light of the controversy currently surrounding the social media giant, it was tempting to believe in conspiracy theories that Facebook had been hacked or was trying to cover something up. But what really happened?
According to infrastructure vice president Santosh Janardhan, a command issued during maintenance inadvertently caused a shutdown of the backbone that connects all of Facebook’s data centers, everywhere in the world.
Regardless of the cause, this downtime certainly did Facebook no favors this week (though it gave the rest of us a tantalizing glimpse of a Facebook-less world).
The company is facing considerable scrutiny after a whistleblower named Frances Haugen appeared on 60 Minutes with claims that Facebook prioritized profits over everything else, including user safety and confronting misinformation. She has since testified before the Senate, where she repeated some of those claims. (Casey Newton offers some solid analysis of Haugen’s allegations.)
For many people, Facebook’s outage just meant a few hours free from silly memes, influencer videos, and unwanted ads. But for others, the outage meant being cut off from family members in countries that are reliant on Facebook’s apps as the only viable means of communication.
Another popular service got a black eye this week when an anonymous 4chan user released 125 GB of data taken from the streaming service Twitch.
The hacker wrote that the purpose of the leak was to cause disruption and promote competition among video streaming platforms. The hacker further said that Twitch’s “community is a disgusting, toxic cesspool.”
Twitch has admitted to the breach but has not responded to Ars’ questions. It appears that even Twitch isn’t aware of the full extent of the breach, as the company is still working out the details.
Among other things, the data reveals Twitch’s source code and the earnings of its top creators and streamers.
Philip Yancey’s memoir, Where the Light Fell, was published earlier this month. Christianity Today has posted an excerpt in which Yancey reflects on his rebellion and cynicism during his Bible college days. I don’t think I’d go so far as to say that I wouldn’t be a Christian today if it weren’t for Yancey, but books like What’s So Amazing About Grace?, Reaching for the Invisible God, and Soul Survivor: How My Faith Survived the Church did help me get through periods of deep doubt and cynicism.
Finally, a Japanese company will take your favorite alcohol and submerge it in the ocean to help it age better.
The theory is that when alcohol is submerged on the seabed for a certain period of time, the fluctuation of the waves and the minerals surrounding it help the liquor to age quicker than if it were on land. Add to that the appearance of a bottle that is covered in barnacles and has been ‘roughed’ around a bit by the sea, and you end up with a vessel of alcohol with a somewhat romantic backstory.
Correctly submerging alcohol for aging is be a relatively difficult process that was once reserved for breweries and wineries, but now with the aid of Shizuoka-based Utsukushi Umi no Winery it is possible for individuals to mature their favourite alcohol down on the seafloor of Minamiizu.
The starting price for an ocean-aged bottle of wine or liquor? 6,600 yen, or approximately $60. (Of course, if you don’t live in Japan, then there will be some additional costs getting your favorite bottles over there in the first place.)
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