Weekend Reads (Sep 30): Netflix, Motley Crüe, Taylor Swift, Google Doodles
Recommended weekend reading September 30, 2023.
It’s the end of an era: Netflix shut down their DVD rental service this week. Sam Adams laments its loss and compares the current streaming environment to Netflix’s DVD service in its heyday.
Netflix won’t say how many movies are on the service at any given time, but estimates put it at fewer than 4,000, less than 5 percent of the vast universe it once provided.* Where Netflix’s disc-by-mail service promised you could watch anything you wanted, its streaming incarnation merely promises that you’ll always be able to watch something. In the DVD era, Netflix’s queue would not only show you what was available but what wasn’t—if a disc ended up lost or damaged, the title would be grayed out and it would sink to the bottom of the page. But if a title on your list leaves the site, as dozens do every month, it just disappears: off of Netflix, out of mind. I rarely look at my list at all these days, but when I do, I’m vaguely annoyed that it’s full of things I’ve already watched, as if one time through Army of the Dead wasn’t enough. It’s no longer an agenda, something to be meticulously arranged and checked off one item at a time… It’s just a pile of stuff.
Related: The evolution of Netflix’s iconic red envelope is a trip down memory lane.
Also related: Netflix shipped more than 5 billion DVDs to its subscribers over the years. Behind that impressive number was some pretty impressive tech.
After nearly five months, Hollywood’s writers are going back to work after the Writers Guild of America approved a new contract with studios.
Following the leadership’s vote to end the strike and recommend the membership ratify the contract, the WGA released details of the new agreement via a simplified memorandum of agreement (MOA). “We can say, with great pride, that this deal is exceptional — with meaningful gains and protections for writers in every sector of the membership,” they announced.
The exact language of the contract is yet to be released. But from the WGA summary, it appears the union was successful in its effort. The MOA includes increases to minimum wage and compensation, increased pension and health fund rates, improvements to terms for length of employment and size of writing teams (which had been shrinking drastically in recent years), and better residuals (which are like royalties), including foreign streaming residuals.
Hollywood actors, however, still remain on strike; they share some of the same demands as the writers did concerning residuals and artificial intelligence. And their strike could potentially expand to include video game companies alongside movie studios. The companies include Activision, Electronic Arts, Epic Games, and Insomniac Games.
Some conservative commentators have criticized Greta Gerwig’s Barbie for its various jabs at the patriarchy. However, an argument could be made that it’s actually very conservative, and perhaps surprisingly so.
We realized in the car on our way home from the theater that the Barbie movie is one giant middle finger to transhumanism. It’s about how it is so much better to have sexual desire and sexual function than the opposite, despite the costs. Barbie reveals that sex is not an idea, it’s a physical fact with far-reaching implications, and that it’s ultimately naive to treat the human body like an idea, like a doll. So no, Virginia, it’s not better to be a gorgeous, sexless, ageless doll with a smooth bottom line than it is to be a fleshy female in a finite world with a life cycle and a menstrual cycle, bound by the laws of gravity and the inevitable pressures, disappointments, and limits of being human.
[…]
Barbie’s incarnational message shows the goodness of being female and the beauty of growing old. It’s made by and for middle-aged women who need a laugh, and who need a reminder that life is good, that the trade-offs of motherhood are worth it, and that it’s okay to look old when in fact you are old. Gray is the new pink.
Related: My review of Barbie, and especially Ryan Gosling’s performance as Ken.
The music licensing company Songtradr recently announced that they’ve acquired Bandcamp from Epic Games. (Epic acquired Bandcamp back in March 2022.) I don’t know how you could possibly screw this up, but here’s hoping that Songtradr keeps letting Bandcamp do what they do best, i.e., making it easy for fans to financially support their favorite artists.
Related: I’ve posted some extended thoughts on the Songtradr/Bandcamp situation on Opus.
Mötley Crüe’s Shout at the Devil turned 40 years old this week. Stephen Thomas Erlewine reflects on the album’s legacy as one of the most iconic (and infamous) heavy metal albums of the ’80s.
Much of Shout at the Devil’s sonic force derives from the Sixx and Mars interplay, how the guitarist’s bludgeoning blues sound heavier when undergirded by guttural bass. As captured by Werman, their melded grind is as galvanizing as the driving, dirty elements of prime Judas Priest, but Mötley Crüe doesn’t bother with instrumental pyrotechnics. Their strength is their combined chemistry — how Sixx’s neo-gothic aspirations find a foil in Mars’ intentional primitivism, and how that dark muck becomes flashy when fused with the hyperactive Lee and Neil. This chemistry, of course, turned out to be so volatile as to be untenable. But for a brief moment, these four unrepentant rock careerists had their stars align so they could catapult from the gutter to the penthouse.
The very first music video I ever saw was Mötley Crüe’s “Girls, Girls, Girls” at my grandparents’ house. (My family didn’t have cable TV.) I was probably in 6th grade at the time, and when I stumbled across it on MTV, I was definitely shocked. Not by the over-the-top sexuality — which was awful even back then, and hasn’t aged well at all — but rather, by how unreal and even ridiculous it all looked to my naïve young eyes. I thought I was peering into a parallel universe.
Just how powerful is Taylor Swift? She can alter Hollywood’s release schedules, as Jason Blum recently discovered.
The producer had planned to premiere the continuation of the iconic Exorcist franchise on Friday, Oct. 13, a plum date for the release of a horror movie. "We had this amazing Friday the 13th in October, which is the single best day to release a scary movie," says Blum, who is making a planned trilogy of Exorcist films in partnership with the franchise's rights-holders Morgan Creek.
Then Taylor Swift surprise announced in August that she would premiere an Eras Tour concert movie on the same date.
Via The Playlist.
Nearly 30 years after his death on the Las Vegas Strip, police have finally arrested and charged someone for the murder of rap icon Tupac Shakur.
Nevada police detained Duane Keith “Keefe D” Davis today (September 29), and a grand jury indicted him in the killing of Shakur, The Associated Press reports. Davis, who has long been known to investigators, has admitted in interviews and in his 2019 memoir, Compton Street Legend, that he was in the Cadillac with Shakur’s shooter. He is now the first person to be arrested in direct connection with the killing.
In court today, a prosecutor announced that Davis was also charged with the intent to promote, further, or assist a criminal gang.
This interview with Buzz Dixon, who wrote numerous cartoons back in the ’80s (e.g., Dungeons & Dragons, Thundarr the Barbarian), shines some light on what it was like to create kid-friendly content that still pushed the envelope creatively.
I have grandchildren, and I’ve seen some of the crap that’s on the Disney Channel. They get away with it because they’ve got a Disney logo on it, but I could not imagine that stuff flying if it wasn’t a Disney program. I mean that just in the sense of rudeness, and the snark level. What I have seen on Disney has not been exceptionally frightening. It’s like the people who are writing these specific shows are all aspiring sitcom writers, and every script they write is an attempt to show somebody, “Hey, I could write a sitcom.” How about you write a script for a 9-to-10-year-old audience that they can appreciate? With Saturday morning cartoons, it was referred to as a ghetto, but the fact was, there was a set of boundaries and rules. You may have chafed against those boundaries and rules, but you knew what they were. If you could find a way of working within them, you could do quite a few episodes that would just be good, solid storytelling.
I was also struck by Dixon’s comment that the folks working on these Saturday morning cartoons had no real notion that their work would stick around. And yet here we are, 40 years after the fact, and shows like Dungeons & Dragons have developed devoted cult followings. There is, of course, the dark side of nostalgia (as we’ve seen with the Star Wars franchise) but at the same time, there’s something beautiful about this seemingly trivial work turning out to be far more meaningful than its creators envisioned.
Related: The Dungeons & Dragons series ran for three seasons but was canceled before its final episode could be produced. The episode’s author, Michael Reaves — who died earlier this year after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease — eventually posted his original script to his website. Wikipedia also notes that a fan-made version of the finale was produced and released in 2020.
Karen Swallow Prior has thoughts on bullies, bamboozlers, and anti-bullies.
So many people call out from within their own camps the disagreeable behavior of those outside their camps. These folks call out loudly, publicly, indignantly, righteously, piously, clangingly (if I may coin a word). It’s almost as though they aren’t even trying to convince, convict, or persuade the people in the other camp.
And that was the lightbulb moment.
It’s not about actually convincing or persuading those outside the camp. It’s about building and maintaining moral (or even immoral) authority within their own camps.
Now, as soon as I write this out, I realize it is such a painfully obvious truth, one countless others have realized before me, that I’m almost embarrassed to state it here as though I have only just discovered it.
It’s tempting to highlight this activity within a particular segment of American politics, and Lord knows I’ve written quite a lot about that. But the temptation in doing so is to turn a blind eye to any similar activity within your own tribe or camp — thus repeating the pattern that Prior highlights.
Google turned 25 this week, and you know what that means: 25 years worth of Google Doodles. You can also browse the full Doodle archive.
From the Blog
Recording under the Ruptured World moniker, Scottish author Alistair Rennie interweaves ominous soundscapes with broadcasts and audio journals to create a disquieting cosmic horror narrative.
On paper, it might be tempting to dismiss Alistair Rennie’s work as an exercise in uber-nerdery. Make no mistake, Rennie’s work can get pretty nerdy, the sort of stuff you might listen to for inspiration for your next Starfinder or Ironsworn: Starforged campaign. Here’s the thing, though: Rennie is so committed to his storyline, and his musical compositions are so rich and enveloping, that the “Planetary” albums really do work quite well as a multimedia narrative. (This is also enhanced by the albums’ liner notes and artwork, which further explore the series’ storyline and concepts.)
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