Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.

In a recent interview, writer/director Ryan Coogler explains how his script for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever changed — and didn’t change — after Chadwick Boseman’s death in 2020.

The predominant tone of grief felt in the final version of Wakanda Forever was present in Coogler’s original drafts. But in earlier versions of the movie, it was Boseman’s T’Challa mourning the loss of time.
Like many in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, T’Challa vanished at the end of 2018’s Avengers: Infinity War when Thanos used the Infinity Stones to wipe out half the universe. The Black Panther returned five in-universe years later at the climax of Avengers: Endgame. In its original form, Coogler saw his sequel as a story where T’Challa struggles to resume life after “The Blip.”
[…]
In its final form, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever explores grief more explicitly. Mirroring the loss of Boseman, the movie opens with the offscreen passing of T’Challa, which compels all of Wakanda, including the royal family — T’Challa’s mother Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett) and his scientific sister Shuri (Letitia Wright) — to continue protecting Wakanda from outside plunderers hoping to seize its precious vibranium.

Via SYFY Wire. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever arrives in theaters on November 11.

Mike McGranaghan argues that some movies would’ve been better had they been rated “R” instead of just a measly “PG-13.” For example, The Dark Knight:

The Dark Knight is arguably the best Batman movie ever, thanks in part to Heath Ledger’s intense, Oscar-winning performance as the Joker. Not only did he bring an original take to the familiar character, he completely disappeared into the role. Every time he comes onscreen, the movie is infused with a nervous energy. In Ledger’s hands, you genuinely don’t know what the Joker is going to do next.
As fearsome as he is, imagine if director Christopher Nolan had taken everything a step further. The Dark Knight already skirts the border of an R rating because of the Joker’s aggressive antics. With Ledger in the role and an ability to push the envelope in terms of aggression, we would have seen a Joker totally in line with many of the darker Batman comics, where he is often portrayed as a lunatic perpetually in search of a bloodbath. The late, great Heath Ledger was certainly up to the task.

Via Steven D. Greydanus, who contends that “the MCU Spider-Man movies would have been better if they were rated (or at least leaned) PG.”

After steadfastly refusing to run ads on their platform for years, decreasing revenue due to subscriber losses finally forced Netflix’s hand: the streamer has officially revealed their ad-supported tier for $6.99/month. (The ad-free “Basic” tier costs $9.99/month.)

On Basic with Ads, you’ll see an “average” of four to five ads every hour, COO Greg Peters wrote in a blog post about the tier in October. Ads will be 15 or 30 seconds long, and you’ll see them before and during the things you watch, though you can’t skip or fast-forward through them. (You can pause ads.) Netflix is partnering with Microsoft as its “global advertising technology and sales partner” for the new tier.

The article notes that Disney+ will also be revealing an ad-supported tier on December 8th, for $7.99/month.

Related: Netflix has also suffered lost revenue due to people sharing accounts. In preparation for their eventual crackdown on account sharing, Netflix recently announced a new feature that helps you transfer your personalized recommendations, viewing history, etc., to a new account.

Spin Magazine’s Arsenio Ortezo recently published a list of the top ten Christian rock albums of all time, which is the sort of article that’s absolute catnip for me. Ortezo’s list is interesting, to say the least — I’d never think to put DeGarmo & Key alongside Michael Knott and Daniel Amos, or pick those Michael Knott and Daniel Amos albums — but I really appreciated John Ringhofer’s (Half-handed Cloud) response to being included:

So I’m feeling conflicted about Half-handed Cloud being on this list of SPIN’s, although very many of the songs for Half-handed Cloud are about working out the things of God, or loving Jesus, or are a part of the rich tradition of scripture songs, or they’re wrestling with the Bible and its implications — but it’s a little crazy that there’s this made-up “Christian Music” genre, just based on song subjects, for the sake of marketing it.

Related: If you’re an Opus subscriber, be sure to check out my playlist and podcast highlighting a slew of artists who made music on the fringes of Christendom.

A recent series of reissues shines a light on George “The Fat Man” Sanger, who revolutionized video game soundtracks in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

[T]he eccentric composer’s work in the ‘80s and ‘90s played a pivotal role in pushing the scope of video game audio from amusing bleeps and bloops into a realm of infinite possibility. If you grew up with a binder full of semi-educational computer games, you’re likely intimately familiar with his music, particularly the quirky, jazz-tinged tunes that he and his crack quartet of songwriters — Team Fat — created for Humongous Entertainment between 1992 and 2003.
Taking full advantage of the extra memory and creative freedom that the relatively new CD-ROM technology afforded them, Team Fat’s soundtracks for cartoony series like Putt-Putt, Freddi Fish, and Pajama Sam incorporated live instrumentation, lush sound design, and even lyrics. These point-and-click titles may have only taken an hour or two to beat, but they were teeming with enough detail to keep their young audiences engaged for playthrough after playthrough.

Linguistics professor John McWhorter explains why English is such a weird language.

We think it’s a nuisance that so many European languages assign gender to nouns for no reason, with French having female moons and male boats and such. But actually, it’s us who are odd: almost all European languages belong to one family — Indo-European — and of all of them, English is the only one that doesn’t assign genders that way.
More weirdness? OK. There is exactly one language on Earth whose present tense requires a special ending only in the third‑person singular. I’m writing in it. I talk, you talk, he/she talk-s — why just that? The present‑tense verbs of a normal language have either no endings or a bunch of different ones (Spanish: hablo, hablas, habla). And try naming another language where you have to slip do into sentences to negate or question something. Do you find that difficult? Unless you happen to be from Wales, Ireland or the north of France, probably.

Why are we so fascinated by photos of abandoned shopping malls, waiting rooms, empty streets, and other liminal spaces?

These moody images parallel a growing sense of dissatisfaction and paralysis in the world: a feeling that although systems of labor and public health and politics are broken, ordinary people can do little to change society’s course. For many, this stasis reflects a collective inability to imagine a future that is alternately presented as utopian — self-driving cars, the promise of debt forgiveness — and dystopian.
Liminal spaces seem to acknowledge that the world is in a state of transition, dragging us along with it. The pace of modern life seems impossible to keep up with, yet our lived reality does not change. So as society waits for the breaking point to come, liminal spaces make the anticipation of those fears visible, and reaffirm that other people are looking at the world the same way. If limbo is all we know, perhaps we take some comfort in the banality of its ubiquity.

From the Blog

I spent the last few weeks making some behind-the-scenes updates to my reviews, specifically adding genres to them all, which will hopefully make them more usable but also raises some really nerdy issues.

You could apply “shoegaze” to Slowdive, Cloakroom, lovesliescrushing, and Ceremony and not be wrong — but you would also have to admit that, despite being “shoegaze” bands, they all have some pretty significant stylistic differences as well. Does that mean shoegaze goes the route of metal, with all of its well-recognized subgenres (e.g., thrash, speed metal, death metal, black metal, doom metal, power metal)? Or is that just silly, leading to instances where each band potentially exists within its own singular genre — a situation that feels pretentious, unnecessarily specific, and not at all useful?

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Weekend Reads (Nov 5): “Black Panther,” PG-13…