Weekend Reads (Jun 3): Dirty Harry, Racist Movie Reviews, Ambient Country, Fandoms Run Amok
Recommended weekend reading material for June 3, 2023.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
Writing for Christ and Pop Culture, Cole Burgett reflects on the “Dirty Harry” films starring Clint Eastwood.
Harry Callahan straddles the line between violence and compassion, law and justice, becoming an embodiment of a uniquely urban—and distinctively American—strain of conflicted, Byronic hero. As jewels are formed under immense pressure, so is Harry’s compassion shaped and honed by the challenges and tragedies he faces.
Disney’s recent live-action version of The Little Mermaid, which had the “temerity” to cast a Black woman as the titular mythical character, has been beset by racist vitriol. So much vitriol, in fact, that sites like the IMDb are reworking their review systems to take into account the negative review-bombing.
The Disney live action remake saw wide release on May 26, and since then it’s received over 32,000 ratings on IMDb where it currently sits at a 7 out of 10. Out of those, more than 13,000 gave the flick 1 star. A small notice at the top of the ratings page reads: “Our rating mechanism has detected unusual voting activity on this title. To preserve the reliability of our rating system, an alternate weighting calculation has been applied.”
According to IMDb’s FAQ, the site publishes “weighted vote averages,” and notifies that “When unusual voting activity is detected, an alternate weighting calculation may be applied in order to preserve the reliability of our system.” The site does not say what kind of mechanism it uses to rate movies.
Luke T. Harrington sings the praises of Mrs. Davis, a TV series about a nun tasked with finding the Holy Grail for the AI that controls the world.
My Christian readers are going to be wondering just how heretical Mrs. Davis gets, and the answer is that, well… it’s not-not heretical? It might be roughly accurate to say that Mrs. Davis is heretical in the same way that that Disney Hercules movie is heretical: It plays fast and loose with the mythology, but that’s all it treats the ideas as: mythology. To Mrs. Davis, the tenets of Christianity are just one more thing to draw from — another prop in the cultural toy box, no different from the works of Shakespeare or an old advertising jingle. And that’s fine, I guess — Mrs. Davis isn’t the first time I’ve found myself loving something made by people who I’d guess wouldn’t respect me all that much.
I always enjoy reading Bandcamp’s genre overviews, like this recent article on ambient country.
Perhaps more than anything else, ambient country reflects the loneliness of America’s sprawling hinterlands. With no fences or neighbors comes freedom, but also pangs of desolation. Lassoing the ardor of post-rock, the zeal of experimental music, and the lyrical introspection of Americana, it’s the sound of the human vacuum that exists between heaven and ground, the liminal spaces untouched by boot heels and mile markers. Lush landscapes of sustain, twangy guitar riffs, and static-washed field recordings coalesce into a pastoral panorama, capturing the simultaneous grandeur and loneliness of the great wide open.
The ongoing fan campaign to get Taylor Swift to break up with her boyfriend is just the latest example of how fan entitlement can run amok.
If you’re not well-versed in the intensity and politics of stan Twitter — “stan” is internet lingo for fan, by way of the Eminem song from 2000 — this will probably read as massive, incomprehensible overreach: an example of people acting in a bizarrely paternalistic and proprietorial way over a star whom they supposedly love. If you do follow stan Twitter with any regularity, you know that this behaviour now passes for business as usual. The star/fan dynamic has almost inverted in recent years: many musicians now take their cues from social media. To some degree, pandering to your core base is a necessity of the job — even the most omnipresent star can no longer assume that they have a captive audience whose attention won’t be directed elsewhere when they’re about to release something new.
This sort of entitlement can also be found in the infantile “you ruined my childhood” mindset that surrounded the 2016 Ghostbusters reboot and the Star Wars sequels as well as the drama that pops up in YA literature.
Den of Geek has posted a list of 2023’s best book adaptations, including Hugh Howey’s Silo (currently on Apple TV+), Frank Herbert’s Dune (arriving in theaters on November 3), Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys (coming to Amazon Prime Video), and Liu Cixin’s The Three Body Problem (arriving on Netflix later this year).
When it originally aired in the mid ’80s, V caused quite a stir with its tale of authoritarian alien invaders, and has since become a cult hit. But there was more going on beneath the surface.
Few fans are likely aware of V’s backstory, its origin as a pure anti-fascism parable devoid of extraterrestrials, or the horrific true-life crime that shocked its cast and crew when one of its stars, Dominique Dunne, was savagely killed and another became embroiled in the tragedy as a witness. And despite the show’s success, [writer, producer, and director Kenneth Johnson] was forced out, leading to the eventual collapse of the franchise. The making of V could be a prime-time soap opera of its own.
Today, Johnson hopes to reclaim the show — from the executives who bungled it, from the conspiracy obsessives who misunderstood it, and from the reliquary of nostalgia TV. He is actively trying to remake it as a series of movies, believing its themes are more relevant than ever. Now 80, Johnson is a lean and limber presence, battle-scarred by his years in the Hollywood trenches but still energized. With his ginger-gray beard and ring of hair, he bears a striking resemblance to Don Quixote. V is now, and has always been, his impossible quest.
Elizabeth Lopatto pushes back on the idea of using AI tools to “extend” artwork like the Mona Lisa and show us the “rest” of it.
The Mona Lisa doesn’t need more background because the purpose of the work is in the foreground. Shit, the painting’s named for her! And despite what Marvel movie aficionados might prefer, stories do not need to go on forever. There are lots of stories out there; you can simply enjoy another. I think it is possible to make interesting AI art, even interesting derivative AI art — but in order to do so, creators need to think about what to leave out and where to stop. Computers do not supply purpose. People do.
The artist made a stopping point for a reason. Maybe that reason was bad, or maybe that stopping point didn’t work — bad art is a side effect of trying to make art — but there is no “extended” Mona Lisa. The full version of the original is the original. But if you want to make a meaningful derivative work, there should be a reason it exists.
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