Weekend Reads (Dec 3): Chantal Akerman, Albert Pyun, Movie Trailers, Legos
Recommended weekend readings for December 3, 2022.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
Every ten years, the British Film Institute’s Sight & Sound magazine release a list of the greatest films of all time, as selected by hundreds of critics, archivists, and academics. Previous winners of the top spot have included such classics as Vertigo and Citizen Kane, but this year’s winner — Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, the first film made by a woman to ever crack the top ten — is a bit of a surprise. (Read Alissa Wilkinson’s review.)
Albert Pyun, best known for directing such low-budget gems as 1982’s The Sword and the Sorcerer, 1989’s Cyborg, and 1990’s Captain America, died this past week. He was 69 years old.
Largely working under low budgets for a direct-to-video market, Pyun developed an immersive form of dreamy lighting, post-apocalyptic dilapidation and surreal, balletic action that found an enthusiastic following among genre film audiences. Over a filmmaking career spanning four decades, Pyun teamed with a veritable who’s who of action icons, including Jean-Claude Van Damme, Christopher Lambert and Burt Reynolds, as well as other collaborators such as Snoop Dogg, Charlie Sheen, Ice-T, Lance Henriksen, Ronny Cox, Kris Kristofferson, James Coburn, Rutger Hauer and Dennis Hopper.
Interesting bit of trivia: Pyun was discovered by legendary actor Toshiro Mifune, who invited him to work as an intern on Akira Kurosawa’s Derzu Uzula. Pyun ended up working on Mifune’s own TV series.
The aforementioned Alissa Wilkinson makes a case for avoiding movie trailers.
At best they’ll just show you stuff you probably knew anyway, or don’t need to know — who’s in the movie, what’s on the soundtrack, the basic plot setup. Maybe the look or the tone or the vibe. But trailers aren’t designed to give you a glimpse of the movie; they’re mini-movies, designed to sell tickets (or maybe subscriptions to a streamer). And they’re starting to feel increasingly divorced from their actual movies.
Conversely, The Playlist has compiled a list of 2022’s best movie trailers.
As cinema continues to shapeshift in a very literal formatting sense, and the future remains unclear regarding the size of the screen on which we’ll get to appreciate it, trailers often give us the only taste of a cinematic experience. To feel the rumbling drums of The Northman on the big screen or to hear Jenny Slate’s weirdly therapeutic voice for Marcel The Shell With Shoes On becomes a physical experience.
But then, when something like a glimpse of Jordan Peele’s sci-fi thriller or the first look at Mark Jenkin’s indescribable horror resonates on the smallest of screens, on a phone in the subway, or through tinny laptop speakers, you know you’re onto a winner. It’s advertising, sure, but it’s also a wildly compelling art form. Celebrating a weird, hybrid year of teasing delights of all sorts, here are our favorite film trailers of 2022.
Between 1983 and 1994, all home video technology (e.g., VHS tapes and players) was banned in Iran. In response, the Iranian people started an underground videocassette network.
Although video dealers potentially made good money, they almost never described their work in that way. Instead, they spoke of a desire to be close to the movies, of an opportunity for social mobility, and of a chance to provide people with entertainment and escape during a very difficult period in the country. In short, this was self-actualizing work that meant a lot to the people who performed it. This feeling was often reciprocated, as ordinary consumers expressed their fondness and respect for their video dealers, who opened up a world of entertainment that otherwise wouldn’t have been available to them.
Via 1440.
Related: As recently as 2016, Cubans seeking foreign news and entertainment often relied on an informal network of data smugglers.
The Rolling Stone staff have compiled a list of the 100 greatest TV theme songs of all time, from Stranger Things’ synthwave and The Flintstones (Yabba-dabba do!) to M*A*S*H’s “Suicide Is Painless.” And, of course, The Greatest American Hero’s “Believe It or Not.”
Stephen Geyer’s self-deprecating lyrics and Mike Post’s slow-building power-ballad composition are a good match for the show’s lighthearted superheroics. But the full recording of Joey Scarbury’s performance of it quickly outgrew the show that gave birth to it. “Believe It or Not” was a radio staple in the early Eighties, making it all the way up to No. Two on the Billboard Hot 100, and spent more than four months in the Top 40. And years later, George Costanza recorded his own version for his outgoing answering-machine message.
Rakiesha Chase-Jackson explains the solace she gets from playing with Legos.
As I created structures that I knew would eventually be hidden under plates and flaps and other structures, I reflected on the importance of a strong foundation in all facets of life. I realized that sometimes I was the foundation, and that even though I felt hidden or overshadowed, that it was still important to fulfill my purpose. I came to the conclusion that life isn't always glamorous. Sometimes, you get to be the final chest plate added at the end of the build and adorned with a cool sticker, and sometimes, you’re a hinge that’s under a leg plate that allows the knee to be poseable.
Lots of people have been talking about quitting Twitter (or reducing their time on the platform) following Elon Musk’s takeover, but Luke T. Harrington quit Twitter before it was cool.
In the last week or two, an awful lot of people have made a big show of Quitting Twitter, which in practice means that they posted a bunch of tweets to Twitter about leaving Twitter, and then continued to hang around Twitter in order to count how many likes and retweets their tweets about leaving Twitter got, and then spent several days tweeting back at all the people who questioned their sincerity about leaving Twitter. Of course they were quitting Twitter! The Bad Electric Car Man had bought Twitter, so it was Extremely Important that they make it known, via Twitter, that they were quitting Twitter.
But I’m going to assume that some of y’all are acting in good faith, and are totally-for-real-this-time stepping out of Plato’s Bird Cave, blinking blindly into the sun. So, as someone who’s been off Twitter for literal months at this point, it’s my solemn duty to reacclimate you to the realities of living in meatspace. With that in mind, here is your official guide to not-Twittering.
Following Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, many users flocked to alternative platforms like Mastodon. One such alternative was Hive Social, which recently took its servers offline due to massive security issues.
“The issues we reported allow any attacker to access all data, including private posts, private messages, shared media and even deleted direct messages,” the advisory, published on Wednesday by Berlin-based security collective Zerforschung, claimed. “This also includes private email addresses and phone numbers entered during login.”
The post went on to say that after the researchers privately reported the vulnerabilities last Saturday, many of the flaws they reported remained unpatched. They headlined their post “Warning: do not use Hive Social.”
Ironically enough, when Hive announced that they were shutting down their servers, they did so via Twitter.
It’s tempting to dogpile on Hive, e.g., they should’ve known better, they should’ve done more security testing, they should’ve hired more developers and support staff, and so on. All of that’s true. At the same time, however, building software is hard, especially software used by millions of people.
But let this also be a lesson to not simply outsource your online presence to the next cool-looking platform. Rather, build your own platform.
Finally, one for my fellow RPG nerds: The term “race” will no longer be used in Dungeons & Dragons. Instead, it will be replaced by the word “species” as part of the One D&D roll-out.
“We understand ‘race’ is a problematic term that has had prejudiced links between real world people and the fantasy peoples of D&D worlds,” the studio wrote on D&D Beyond, the online portal and storefront for Dungeons & Dragons players. “The usage of the term across D&D and other popular IP has evolved over time. Now it’s time for the next evolution.”
This is a continuation of D&D’s efforts to address some of its more problematic aspects. For example, a previously released rule book gave players the option to not use “racial” bonuses, i.e., ability score improvements tied directly to their character’s race, er, species, as well as removing unnecessary stereotypes.
From the Blog
In order to do a better job tracking my reading, watching, etc., habits, I added a new section to Opus: I call it “My Cultural Diet.” Most recently, I finished watching the first season of Amazon’s The Peripheral, an intriguing-yet-confusing sci-fi series that presents some clever twists on the usual cyberpunk tropes.
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If you can find a copy of 'Chuck Norris versus Communism', it tells a similar story in Romania of underground/black market VHS copies of American movies. I had a friend from Romania who confirmed it all. He said that the voice of the woman, Irina, who did most of the translations were part of the movies. When they added another person in order to translate more movies, people did not like them because it was a new voice.