Weekend Reads (August 24): Nick Cave, “The Crow,” Bulwer-Lytton, Alain Delon (RIP), Chick-fil-A
Recommended weekend reading for August 24, 2024.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
NPR’s Ann Powers sat down with Nick Cave to talk about his new album Wild God, the religious aspects of his music, working with the Bad Seeds, and the necessity of struggle in art.
This is the very nature of what it is to be a human being and to live in this world, as far as I’m concerned. And to see the human artistic struggle as a kind of inconvenience of some sort on the way to the product, which is the music, is a terrible thing. I try and look at it in every possible way because I don’t want to be some sort of jeremiad about this kind of stuff. I can’t see any good from these song generating platforms where you simply put in a prompt and a song comes out, no matter how good that song is. This is the idea that art can be produced without struggle. And, to me, that’s deeply worrying.
The Crow, starring Brandon Lee (RIP), turned 30 earlier this year, and Kristy Puchko reflects on its era-defining soundtrack.
As the soundtrack reaches its 30th anniversary, it hasn’t lost a bit of its entrancing power. Hitting play is like time-traveling back to my teen years, lured into the rush of hormones and emotions from the opening bird cries of The Cure’s “Burn.” Seeking to uncover how The Crow soundtrack came to be a three-time platinum hit that changed the soundtrack landscape and gripped a generation, Mashable reached out to Jeff Most, who produced the film and executive produced the soundtrack with Jolene Cherry, the music supervisor of the 1994 hit.
In separate interviews, they shared their recollections of the long and difficult journey of two and half years to not only complete the film after the death of their beloved leading man, but also to pull together an album that extended The Crow beyond the movie.
For the record, “Burn” is one of my favorite Cure songs — it was a highlight of their concert setlist last year — and it’s absolutely perfect for The Crow.
Related: My review of 1994’s The Crow. “I was captivated by the film as a high school senior, and though some parts haven’t aged as well as others, it remains a powerful and unique experience, especially for a superhero film.”
The winners of the 2024 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest have been announced, and as expected, they’re delightfully awful. I particularly enjoyed Tony Buccella’s winning entry in the “Romance” category:
If broken hearts were made of simple syrup, and shattered dreams were made from white rum, and agony and despair came from ¾ ounce of lime juice, freshly squeezed, and three mint leaves respectively, then Mary Lou just served up a mojito cocktail straight from the ninth circle of hell when she told Ricky the baby wasn’t his.
After Disney World announced that two beloved classic attractions would be closed, fans have started protesting the decision.
The removal of attractions like Rivers of America and the potential closure of the Liberty Square Riverboat marks the end of an era—one that was rooted in Walt Disney’s personal connection to American history and his love for storytelling through physical spaces.
These attractions were designed to immerse Disney park guests in a world of adventure and exploration, and their removal represents a shift towards a more commercial approach to theme park design.
This shift has not gone unnoticed by Disney fans, many of whom feel that the company is losing sight of its original mission. The petition on Change.org is just one example of the growing discontent among fans who feel that the park is becoming more focused on profit and less on preserving the magic that Walt Disney himself created.
Prolific voice actress Atsuko Tanaka died this week after battling an unspecified illness. She was 61 years old.
Atsuko was born on November 14, 1962 in Gunma Prefecture. She is best known as Motoko Kusanagi in the Ghost in the Shell franchise, Harumi Kiyama in A Certain Scientific Railgun, Carmilla in Fate/Grand Carnival, and Caster in the Fate/stay night series, among others.
Her more recent roles include Hanami in Jujutsu Kaisen, Flamme in Frieren: Beyond Journey's End, Rose in The Wrong Way to Use Healing Magic, and Ōmurasaki no Omae in YATAGARASU: The Raven Does Not Choose Its Master, among others.
Iconic French actor Alain Delon also died earlier this week at the age of 88.
Delon’s death marks the passing of one of the last surviving icons of the French cinema scene of the 1960s and 70s, when the country was on an economic roll as it reconstructed in the wake of World War II.
Kali Wallace reflects on Chris Marker’s La Jetée and its relationship to the rest of the time travel genre.
I think that’s what I love most about La Jetée, the way it distills time travel stories down to their most uncomplicated essence. There is perhaps nothing more human than obsessing over the past and the future. We are always holding onto the past, both as it happened and as it might have happened, what we didn’t do and what we could have changed. We are always looking toward the future, thinking about what will happen and what might happen, how we might change it and what we can’t predict.
La Jetée feels like a capsule of that very human experience, the same way a shoebox full of old photographs and journals and letters might collect memories and hopes and regrets and dreams all in the same place. We carry all of that with us, all the time, and its lovely to watch a film that captures that feeling so well.
La Jetée is one of those rare films that deserves all of the many accolades that have been heaped on it over the years. I first saw it nearly 30 years ago in a film history class, and it’s stuck with me ever since.
Related: My review of La Jetée. “Combined with the evocative score, the film feels both surreal, like a waking dream, and nostalgic. And with a running time just under 30 minutes, there’s no reason not to give into the temptation to watch it several times in one sitting.”
The latest trailer for Francis Ford Coppola’s long-anticipated Megalopolis features an array of critics’ quotes lambasting his previous films, like The Godfather and Apocalypse Now. But all evidence suggests that those quotes were entirely fake.
What’s the intention here? Did the people who wrote and cut this trailer just assume that nobody would pay attention to the truthfulness of these quotes, since we live in a made-up digital world where showing any curiosity about anything from the past is seen as a character flaw? Did they do it to see which outlets would just accept these quotes at face value? Or maybe they did it on purpose to prompt us to look back at these past reviews and discover what good criticism can be? If so, then it worked, in my case. I’ve read a lot of Pauline Kael reviews in my life, but I’d never read her review of The Godfather. I encourage you to do so as well.
The trailer has since been pulled by Lionsgate: “We offer our sincere apologies to the critics involved and to Francis Ford Coppola and American Zoetrope for this inexcusable error in our vetting process. We screwed up. We are sorry.”
Lionsgate also dropped Eddie Egan, the marketing consultant behind the trailer. “Sources tell Variety it was not Lionsgate or Egan’s intention to fabricate quotes, but was an error in properly vetting and fact-checking the phrases provided by the consultant.” And surprise, surprise: “It appears that AI was used to generate the false quotes from the critics.”
Related: Megalopolis had its world premier at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Afterward, numerous critics weighed in on Coppola’s film.
Look out Netflix: Chick-fil-A is planning their own streaming service.
Deadline understands that the fast-food firm has been working with a number of major production companies, including some of the studios, to create family-friendly shows, particularly in the [reality TV] space. It is also in talks to license and acquire content.
We hear that this includes a family-friendly gameshow from Glassman Media, the company behind NBC’s The Wall, and Michael Sugar’s Sugar23, which is behind series such as Netflix’s 13 Reasons Why. Deadline understands this show has been handed a ten-episode order.
Via 1440.
Related: Every month, I share my recommended streaming titles that are coming to Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime Video, et al.
Google’s latest phone comes with AI-powered functionality that lets you adjust and modify your photos with disturbingly realistic results, and Sarah Jeong fears what that’ll mean for our ability to determine reality.
If I say Tiananmen Square, you will, most likely, envision the same photograph I do. This also goes for Abu Ghraib or napalm girl. These images have defined wars and revolutions; they have encapsulated truth to a degree that is impossible to fully express. There was no reason to express why these photos matter, why they are so pivotal, why we put so much value in them. Our trust in photography was so deep that when we spent time discussing veracity in images, it was more important to belabor the point that it was possible for photographs to be fake, sometimes.
This is all about to flip — the default assumption about a photo is about to become that it’s faked, because creating realistic and believable fake photos is now trivial to do. We are not prepared for what happens after.
Related: Back in June, I wrote about Perplexity, an AI-powered “answer engine” that hints at AI’s fundamental problem. “AI encourages us to be increasingly accepting of those erroneous images and misquoted blog posts as truth. It encourages us to be lazy and choose convenience over truth because thanks to AI, it now requires so much more effort to determine what’s real.”
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