Weekend Reads (Apr 13): Clint Eastwood, Dick Tracy, CDs, Marvin Gaye
Recommended weekend reading for April 13, 2024.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven is one of the great movie Westerns. Even as it deconstructs the genre, it delivers fully on the genre’s tropes. But as Matt Zoller Seitz writes, some of that’s due to a particular editing choice that shouldn’t work.
The end of Unforgiven sat oddly with me after my first viewing, even though I loved the film overall and consider it to be Clint Eastwood’s second-best work as a director, after The Outlaw Josey Wales. It took me a while to conclude that my struggles with the ending had to do with the swift resolution of the story, which denied the main character, a retired and widowed gunfighter who gets back into the business to collect a bounty on a cowhand who cut up a brothel worker, an expected story beat that would’ve told us how Munny felt about the decision he’d made, what the mission did to him, and how it affected the relationship with the two children he left behind when he rode off to kill again.
I love Seitz’s final sentence: “Films are always better when they don’t explain everything.”
Kali Wallace reviews one of the great sci-fi films, Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still, which emerged when Hollywood (and America) was filled with anti-communist paranoia.
Right in the middle of all this came The Day the Earth Stood Still, a major studio film that was conceived, written, and filmed as commentary on the social and political environment in which it was made. Producer Julian Blaustein set out to make a movie about the paranoia and fear that gripped the world in the post-World War II atomic era; he was specifically interested in promoting a strong United Nations and said as much during press for the film. He looked around for a science fiction story that could be used as a basis for such a film and found Harry Bates’ short story “Farewell to the Master,” published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1940. Screenwriter Edmund North took a great many liberties with the original story, as is the way of such things, and the result is the script that director Robert Wise would turn into The Day the Earth Stood Still.
A new film from one of the greatest directors of all time seems like a slam dunk for Hollywood. But that’s not the case with Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, which is struggling to find distribution.
Coppola, 84, had hoped to announce a festival bow once a distribution plan was in place, but on April 9 revealed the film would premiere at Cannes on May 17. But while there was no shortage of curious suitors there — in addition to Rothman and Sarandos, Warner Bros.’ Pam Abdy, Disney live-action boss David Greenbaum, Netflix’s Ted Sarandos and Paramount’s Marc Weinstock were all spotted — multiple sources inside the screening tell The Hollywood Reporter that Megalopolis will face a steep uphill battle to find a distribution partner. Says one distributor: “There is just no way to position this movie.”
In 1990, Warren Beatty produced, directed, and starred in a movie based on the classic Dick Tracy comic strip, which also starred Al Pacino, Madonna, and Dustin Hoffman. But I was this week old when I learned that Beatty still produces the occasional Dick Tracy feature or special so he can hold onto the rights to the character.
As per the original agreement between Beatty and Tribune, he was allowed to hold onto the Dick Tracy rights as long as he produced some form of television or film project featuring the fictional detective. Thanks to his filming of the TCM special, Beatty technically held up his end of the bargain. And he did so again with the most recent special, ensuring that the rights may stay with him for as long as he lives. In the end, Beatty is just another example of how byzantine copyright law can be — but also how people have managed to make it work in their favor.
I have my issues with copyright law, but I actually respect Beatty’s efforts. There’s something delightfully petty about his efforts to hold onto the character just to spite Hollywood studios. Don’t hate the player, hate the game, as they say.
Related: Dick Tracy — the character, that is — enters the public domain in 2027. Other works that’ll be entering the public domain that year include Universal Pictures’ adaptations of Frankenstein and Dracula, Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights, Fritz Lang’s M, Salvador Dali’s The Persistence of Memory, and Jean de Brunhoff’s The Story of Babar.
If you’ve noticed that recent TV series look a little blurrier than expected, don’t worry: your TV’s not broken. The blurriness is the result of more and more TV series being filmed with anamorphic lenses.
The cinematographer Neil Oseman says that “ever since cinematography went mostly digital, filmmakers have looked for ways to undercut the clean precision of the images with some unpredictable characteristics. Introducing distortions, lens flares, [and] bowing in the horizontal lines, as many anamorphics do, is one way for cinematographers to achieve that.” Oseman, who blogged about the rise of anamorphic lenses on TV in 2020, says their use “has increased over the last five or 10 years” not only out of a desire for a more cinematic feel, but because “TV networks and streamers allow wider aspect ratios than they used to, so anamorphic lenses are an option where they weren’t before.” (Until about 20 years ago, most TVs weren’t wide-screen.) Anamorphic lenses are more expensive than spherical, but as Oseman notes, “TV budgets are high enough now for these expensive optics to be hired.”
Also, if you haven’t been watching Shōgun, which is the series most discussed in the article for its use of anamorphic lenses, then you’re missing out. I’m about half way through the series, and so far, it’s surpassed every expectation I had.
Speaking of Shōgun, the series has a really subtle — and nerdy — Star Wars connection: the choice of typeface for the series’ many subtitles.
“‘Let’s look to science fiction,’” Marks recalls saying, hoping to evoke the propulsiveness of the genre. “And there was a font in the original 1977 Star Wars that was used for a couple of lines, and we found this font [...] that seemed vaguely similar enough to it, which was also large enough to be read — which was probably what Lucas’ intent was, to make sure it could be read by young Europeans. So it just felt more inviting.”
Much has been made of the death of physical media like CDs, but interestingly, that particular format is positively flourishing in Japan.
Despite the fact that Japan is the 11th most populated country on Earth, they have been the second largest music market by revenue for a long time. You could use this point to argue why the CD has remained so popular in Japan. The Japanese people love their music. Of course, they remain infatuated with the compact disc, a format with high quality audio.
That’s a nice theory. But it’s incomplete. Though some of the Japanese CD infatuation is driven by musical factors, demographic and economic factors are far more important.
Related: Vinyl sales rose 10% last year, earning an estimated $1.4 billion, while CDs only brought in a measly $537 million. 2023’s best-selling LP was — surprise! — Taylor Swift’s 1989 (Taylor’s Version), which accounted for 7% of all American vinyl sales.
Writing for Treble’s “Treble 100” feature, Adam P. Newton reflects on Marvin Gaye’s landmark 1971 album, What’s Going On.
After more than 50 years it remains a tour de force of soul music, fusing political awareness and funk grooves with deep pathos. It featured the aching soul of an artist frustrated with his world because he knew it could be better. The record brought soul to fresh heights by updating gospel motifs and channeling Old Testament despair while also presaging elements of disco, fusion, and funk.
The songs addressed the stark social ills of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, from the Vietnam War abroad to the traumas of everyday life in ravaged inner city neighborhoods populated by people of color, including police brutality, unemployment, and poverty. “What’s Going On,” “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology),” and “Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)” spoke to a world I knew nothing about and experiences that were completely foreign to me.
What’s Going On was a life-changing album for me (read my review). And Newton’s piece gets bonus points for working in references to Adam Again and Starflyer 59.
George Grella offers a guide to the music of composer Jóhann Jóhannsson, who released several albums and also wrote numerous film scores, including Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival and James Marsh’s The Theory of Everything.
When composer Jóhann Jóhannsson died tragically and unexpectedly at the age of 48 in early 2018, the music world lost not only the most accomplished soundtrack composer of the second decade of this century but also a true pioneer. The last 25 years or so of music have featured a still-ongoing return of ancient drone traditions to Western classical composition, often via electronic means. The sound of all this is often like viewing the slow merging of galaxies; Jóhannsson is one of the first major voices working in this style, and his music reflects the quality of massive luminous objects floating through vast spaces.
I’ve yet to hear a Jóhannsson recording that I didn’t like. My favorite of his solo recordings is probably 2004’s Virðulegu Forsetar. And his scores for Arrival and And in the Endless Pause There Came the Sound of Bees are simply sublime. (I’m still upset that his score for Arrival was ruled ineligible for the Oscars.)
Finally, a recent pinup calendar aimed at “conservative dads” has sparked debate amongst the Right, and highlights the ways in which conservative Christians have been changed by their allegiance to Donald Trump.
As a core faction in the Republican coalition, conservative evangelicals have long influenced the party’s policy priorities, including opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage. And the influence extended to conservative culture, where evangelical norms against vulgarity were rarely challenged in public.
In some ways, they remain intact. Most pastors don’t cuss from the pulpit, or at all. Mainstream conservative churches still teach their young people to save sex for marriage and avoid pornography.
Yet a raunchy, outsider, boobs-and-booze ethos has elbowed its way into the conservative power class, accelerated by the rise of Donald J. Trump, the declining influence of traditional religious institutions and a shifting media landscape increasingly dominated by the looser standards of online culture.
Via Russell Moore. He writes: “What’s worse is that evangelical Christians — including some I listened to pontificate endlessly about Bill Clinton’s sexual immorality (pontifications with which I agreed then and agree now) — ridicule as pearl-clutching moralists those who refuse to do exactly what they condemned Clinton’s defenders for doing, namely, weighting policy agreement over personal character.”
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