Weekend Reads (Dec 16): Hayao Miyazaki, Andre Braugher (RIP), Netflix, Google, “M*A*S*H”
Recommended weekend reading for December 16, 2023.
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Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
Hayao Miyazaki’s latest (and last?) film, The Boy and the Heron, is currently in American theaters, where it’s become a critical and commercial success. Which means that now’s a good time to explore one of the things that Miyazaki’s films so great: his approach to capturing and conveying time and space.
Miyazaki has argued many times about the value of concreteness. In the ‘70s, he said, “Lies must be layered upon lies to create a thoroughly believable fake world … when depicting a world with three suns, you have to construct a world that will seem to the viewers like it could have three suns.”
Or, in the ‘90s, “We are creating a fabricated world and everyone knows we can draw anything we want, but if we aim to give a sense of presence to that world we must approach it with humility toward things other than human beings.”
Those theories weren’t exactly his own invention. By middle age, when he started to direct, Miyazaki had already spent the ‘60s and ‘70s working under Isao Takahata. And these projects helped to imbue Miyazaki with his sense of time and space. The root of Miyazaki’s filmmaking is Takahata’s filmmaking.
I haven’t been able to see The Boy and the Heron yet, but that’s something I hope to rectify soon.
Related: I never pass up an opportunity to share this 2005 interview with Miyazaki, done around the time of Howl’s Moving Castle. It’s filled with gems, such as:
“Personally I am very pessimistic,” Miyazaki says. “But when, for instance, one of my staff has a baby you can’t help but bless them for a good future. Because I can’t tell that child, ‘Oh, you shouldn’t have come into this life.’ And yet I know the world is heading in a bad direction. So with those conflicting thoughts in mind, I think about what kind of films I should be making.”
In this extensive interview, John Woo — arguably the patron saint of action cinema — discusses his childhood, his religious background, his approach to action filmmaking, and his experience in Hollywood.
I never dreamed of coming to Hollywood. I wanted to do my own thing and continue shooting in Hong Kong, but there wasn’t a lot of good material to shoot. In the meantime, The Killer had drawn so much attention from the West, though I didn’t know that until then. All of a sudden, I got so many stories and scripts from Hollywood — I got nearly fifty scripts from studios and independent companies like Twentieth Century Fox and New Line Cinema. I wasn’t interested in most of them, because everyone wanted me to make an action movie. I needed to make something new, and I wanted to learn how to make better movies, so I took it as a challenge to come to Hollywood. Just to learn more and meet more people.
Geoffrey Reiter reflects on the Indiana Jones franchise and its iconic hero:
[W]hen we step back and look at the series as a whole and on a chronological basis, we see a gradual but discernible arc in the character of Indiana Jones, from self-seeking adventurer to self-sacrificial friend and family man. It’s not quite all I would have hoped from a man who’s beheld some signature miracles out of Judeo-Christian lore, but it shows him to be far from static.
Disclaimer: I edited this article for Christ and Pop Culture.
Andre Braugher, who rose to fame through his performances on Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Homicide: Life on the Street, died earlier this week from lung cancer. He was 61 years old.
He won a lead actor Emmy for his role as Detective Frank Pembleton on NBC’s Homicide: Life on Street in 1998, his last year on the series. Braugher’s intense performance made him one of the breakout stars to emerge from the critically beloved police drama that hailed from Barry Levinson, Tom Fontana and David Simon, the former Baltimore Sun reporter who wrote the 1991 nonfiction book, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets. Braugher also won another Emmy for miniseries or movie for his performance as a master criminal for FX’s 2006 series Thief.
Matt Zoller Seitz pays tribute to Braugher’s inimitable voice:
[W]hen Braugher spoke, a spotlight irised him, and you knew you were in the presence of greatness. He had theater degrees from Stanford and Juilliard, but they might as well have been for music. When he acted, the words were notes; the sentences, lyrics; every monologue, an aria. Actor-comedian Joe Lo Truglio, who acted with Braugher on Brooklyn Nine-Nine, wrote on Instagram about hearing his co-star “belting bass-y vocals” from his dressing room: “The man was so full of song, and that’s why the world took notice.”
Braugher’s voice could be empathetic, incisive and bitter, all at once, even when pronouncing one word: Really? Interesting. Hah! Goodnight. Even his nonverbal sounds were inspired: the hmmms, the chuckles, the sniffs. The voice could reassure, cajole, bully, inspire. It could burn away lies. It could draw viewers in for what they thought would be a warm embrace, then slug them in the gut. It could drop a breadcrumb that helped you wind your way back from the end of the story and note the instant when everything changed.
Braugher’s performance as Brooklyn Nine-Nine’s ultra-stoic, dentist-hating, balloon arch-birthing, hula hooping Captain Holt (aka, Velvet Thunder) really was its heart and soul.
One of the big reasons for this year’s actors’ strike was the fact that streaming services released very little viewing data, making it hard to calculate residuals. But this week, Netflix released an “engagement report” that reveals how nearly all of its streaming titles are doing.
More from Deadline:
During a 30-minute media conference call, Co-CEO Ted Sarandos reflected on the evolution of Netflix during its push into streaming over the past decade and a half. For many years, he and other executives had come under intense criticism for operating in secrecy. “The unintended consequence of not having more transparent data about our engagement was that it created an atmosphere of mistrust over time with producers and creators and the press about what was happening on Netflix,” he said. The effort to reveal more comprehensive numbers, he said, is “on the continuum of transparency as streaming becomes more and more mainstream. It’s more on par with other parts of media that have quite accessible information about how things are performing.”
The report lists every title that was streamed for at least 50,000 hours in the first half of 2023. During that time, Netflix’s most popular title was season one of The Night Agent, which was watched a total of 812,100,000 hours. (Not surprisingly, a second season’s in the works.)
Other popular titles include Ginny & Georgia’s second season (665,100,000 hours), Wednesday’s first season (507,700,000 hours), and Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story (503,000,000 hours). Lockwood & Co. — which I really enjoyed but was sadly canceled after its first season — received 113,600,000 hours of total viewing.
For years, E3 was arguably the most important video game event in the U.S., where companies and developers would announce their latest titles. But E3 is officially no more.
E3’s downward slide began several years ago, as major partners like Sony, EA, and Nintendo pulled out of the annual event and instead opted to hold their own individual shows during Not-E3 season. New challengers arose, like Geoff Keighley’s Summer Games Fest, and the COVID-19 epidemic proved to be the final nail in the coffin for E3. The ESA held an all-digital E3 in 2021 and ended up losing more money than it earned, while the 2022 and 2023 shows were canceled entirely.
Related: Due to its prominence, E3 was responsible for some of the biggest video game announcements of all time. I still remember freaking out with my roommates over that 2003 Halo 2 trailer, and Sony’s smackdown of Microsoft in 2013 was a sight to behold.
Speaking of video games, this week marked the 30th anniversary of Doom, a first-person shooter that’s one of the most iconic and influential games of all time. The game’s creators, John Carmack and John Romero, recently reflected on the game’s development and legacy.
I played countless hours of Doom during my freshman year of college. (My roommate had it installed on his PC.) Few things were more entertaining than getting a hold of the chaingun or rocket launcher and mowing down wave after wave of hellspawn. Needless to say, I was pretty pleased when my son asked to download it onto our Xbox earlier this year. Doom’s obviously waaay less advanced than all of our other Xbox games, but it was still fun to play… and the chaingun was still just as entertaining.
Related: Enterprising nerds, geeks, and programmers have figured out how to play Doom on a wide variety of devices, including Christmas tree ornaments, a tractor, and an electronic pregnancy test.
To the celebrate its 25th anniversary, Google has unveiled the Google doodle to end all doodles, a vast and searchable playground that highlights “25 of the most-searched people, places, and moments from the past 25 years.” More:
The user experience and engineering teams worked through game play and logic scenarios to create an unforgettable game experience. The biggest challenge? Building an accessible experience from the start. The team took on the task, creating a sound-first, guided experience that was only enhanced — not completed — by a visual layer. The result is a search-and-find game that is fun, engaging, and playable for people who are blind, low-vision, and sighted users alike.
Via Creative Bloq and TLDR Design.
Tesla’s Cybertruck is finally shipping, and Victoria Scott considers what its unique design and features (e.g., bulletproof stainless steel construction) says about our culture.
Pickup buyers, more frequently than other types of vehicle owners, say they enjoy their trucks because they are “powerful” and “rugged”. Most new vehicle buyers rate vehicle safety as a top priority in their purchases, and larger vehicles are indeed safer for occupants than small ones (although they have vastly more negative externalities, such as tire particulates and dead pedestrians).
So automakers have given us what we demanded, and the stylistic language has changed to match: the overarching trends of this decade thus far is to make our vehicles broader, heavier, boxier, and more militaristic in nature, as rounded lines don’t project power. The Cybertruck — which Musk stated at its launch “will win” in an “argument” with other vehicles — simply follows all of these themes to their logical endpoints.
A bulletproof three-and-a-half ton stainless-steel truck equipped with “Bioweapon Defense Mode” designed to slam through other cars is the perfect vehicle for a society where over a third of people are scared to walk around at night.
Via Pixel Envy.
Related: There are numerous concerns about the Cybertruck’s safety, especially concerning pedestrians, but there’s not much that can be done about them right now. “Even if the Cybertruck is as deadly as some observers predict, federal officials will have their hands tied for quite a while. Like it or not, such regulatory impotence is baked into America’s laissez-faire approach toward car safety.”
Finally, Isaac Willour considers how the American Right committed suicide on racial issues like civil rights.
As a young conservative, and one who’s read his fair share of Buckley and found it useful, it’s dismaying to learn about the darker parts of conservative pioneers like WFB, although it’d be too much of a stretch to call it surprising. In a sense, the Buckley-Baldwin debate seems to epitomize the conservative struggle on racial issues: a misunderstanding of appearances, an overinflated sense of own-the-libs-ism, and enough actual prejudice to make us nonwhite conservatives completely unwilling to defend what’s been said.
Yet even though Buckley may have evolved from the prejudice of his youth, the conservative movement on the whole wasn’t finished screwing up on the racial issues. Scholar Phillip J. Ardoin notes that during the 1960s and leading into the 1970s, “the Democratic Party’s general support of civil rights, and an expanded social agenda, has played a pivotal role in gaining and preserving the allegiance of African Americans. In addition, the Republican Party has also played a role in maintaining African Americans’ loyalty to the Democratic Party.”
Have we conservatives always been shooting ourselves in the foot? It’s starting to look like it.
Via Jake Meador.
From the Blog
One of my favorite TV shows of all time is M*A*S*H, which chronicled the exploits of the doctors, nurses, and staff at an Army surgical hospital during the Korean War. Somehow, though, I’d missed that this past February marked the 40th anniversary of M*A*S*H’s series finale, which set several records as the most-watched TV episode in American history.
To mark the occasion, I compiled a list of 15 of my favorite M*A*S*H moments.
M*A*S*H is one of those rare TV shows that I can watch whenever; I’m almost always in the mood for an episode or three. (Other shows with this distinction include The Twilight Zone, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Parks and Recreation.) With 256 episodes spanning 11 seasons — the series aired on CBS from 1972 to 1983 — M*A*S*H is a wealth of delightful dialog, hilarious comedy, and thought-provoking (and even moving) moments.
Related: Back in 2015, I wrote about M*A*S*H for Christ and Pop Culture and highlighted one of my favorite characters, the meek yet formidable Father Francis John Patrick Mulcahy: “Mulcahy displays an admirable faith that can only result from living out one’s convictions as best they can amidst many who hold little to no similar conviction.”
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