Weekend Reads (September 21): “Shōgun,” “Miami Vice,” Maggie Cheung, D&D
Recommended weekend reading for September 21, 2024.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
The 2024 Primetime Emmy Awards were this past weekend, and FX’s Shōgun dominated the ceremony.
FX’s drama Shōgun headed into the Primetime Emmys, having already broken the record for most wins in one season at the Creative Arts Emmys last weekend. Now, it’s extended its record even further with 18 total wins.
[…]
With 14 Creative Arts Emmys, Shōgun already broke the record that was previously held by HBO’s 2008 miniseries John Adams, which won 13 awards.
Shōgun’s second season has already been greenlit, and will include material from James Clavell’s original novel that didn’t make it into the first season. On the one hand, I’m excited for another season because that means more Shōgun. On the other hand, I’m a bit concerned how the writers will stretch that out to a full season’s worth of storytelling.
All that said, I’m not at all surprised by Shōgun’s success. As I wrote in my review back in April, “It’s a rare privilege to watch a TV series that’s made with so much confidence, style, and gravitas that you trust it implicitly… Come year’s end, I’m going to be hard-pressed to think of another series that achieves so much.”
Related: The full list of 2024 Emmy winners and nominees.
When it debuted 40 years ago, Miami Vice’s distinctly cinematic look forever changed the TV landscape, writes Matt Zoller Seitz.
From the black-and-white expressionism of The Twilight Zone, to the Pop Art splendors of the original Batman and Star Trek, through the grubby naturalism approximated on MASH and Hill Street Blues, stylistically distinctive TV shows had existed prior to the 1980s. But Vice made them all seem like relics. It seized the prerogatives of formally adventurous international and art-house cinema from the 1960s through the mid-’80s and applied them to a TV show. It created not just a world but a mood — and sometimes let the mood be the world. The creative triumvirate of Yerkovich, Mann, and Carter and the rapport of Johnson, Thomas, and their co-stars — Saundra Santiago as Gina, Olivia Brown as Trudy, Michael Talbott as Switek, and John Diehl as Zito — proved alchemically perfect. The show had a pulse, a personality, a signature.
The revival of physical media like CDs and vinyl is nothing new, and given recent revenue numbers, it looks like the revival is here to stay.
That’s the message from the Recording Industry Association of America’s (RIAA) mid-year report. CD sales in that time period totalled $236.7 million, nearly three times the income generated by downloads at $87.8 million.
In 2023 there were 36.83 million of the things sold, an increase of 2.7% from 2022. It seems that after years of falling sales, their decline has been reversed.
I also appreciate how the article considers the benefits of physical media’s physical-ness. For all of their convenience, digital downloads just can’t compare to holding a CD or LP in your hands, leafing through the liner notes, and seeing the artwork on your shelves.
This also holds true for movies, by the way. I’ve slowly been ramping up my Blu-ray collection, purchasing copies of films that I love and/or will never get to see any other way. Unfortunately, my budget doesn’t always allow me to get the releases I really want, like this ultra-deluxe Macross Plus box set.
In 1984, the BBC aired Threads, a TV drama about the aftermath of nuclear war. Described as one of the most harrowing films ever made, Threads has nevertheless developed a devoted following over the years. Jude Rogers delves into the Threads fandom and explores her own fascination with its bleak storyline.
I had a lightning-bolt realisation about my Threads obsession while making the documentary. I lost my dad suddenly in 1984, as I’ve written about before, a trauma that I kept buried under my day-to-day life. As a child I became fixated by other disasters I was exposed to via TV, revisiting them time and again as an adult. I’ve watched countless documentaries about the horrors of the 80s: about the IRA, Lockerbie, Hillsborough, Zeebrugge and the distressing fate of the Challenger shuttle, moments of horror and trauma from a frightening decade that other people experienced from the same perspective as me, hearts racing in their chests, while sitting on their sofas. These disasters existed outside my younger, grieving life, outside of the specific situation about which I felt couldn’t talk to anyone. World events held horrors that everyone understood, and felt like better places to put all these feelings — I felt comfort in being able to think about horrifying things in similar ways to other people. Watching Threads as an adult also reconnected me to the textures of my 1980s… the fashions, the haircuts, the contexts of my earlier grief. From a safe distance, I could make my traumatic past come alive, in a way I could control.
Related: I recently wrote about my childhood experience of growing up under the threat of nuclear war. “While we were anxious about such an attack, my classmates and I actually took solace in the fact that we’d probably be nuked early on. Better to die quickly in a nuclear blast, we reasoned, than suffer the horrors of war or live on a ruined planet locked in nuclear winter.”
Hong Kong film legend Norman Tsui died earlier this month from esophageal cancer; he was 73 years old. According to IMDb, he starred in nearly 180 films, including such classics as The Flying Guillotine, The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain, Wing Chun, and What Price Survival. However, the role I’ll always remember him for is the ambitious samurai in Ching Siu-Tung’s outrageous Duel to the Death.
Related: My review of Duel to the Death. “It’s a rare case where a movie’s insane action and drama complement and strengthen each other.”
Maggie Cheung — who starred in everything from Jackie Chan comedies to moody Wong Kar-wai films — became one of Hong Kong’s biggest stars throughout the ’80s, ’90s, and early ’00s, only to walk away from acting at the height of her career. The last 20 years have done nothing to dim her celebrity and star appeal, though.
“She essentially has the same amount of credits as someone like Meryl Streep — but 20 years less time. That’s unbelievable,” Lee tells me. “It’s tragic that she is not even more widely recognized and known as one of the greatest performers and actors of our time. I really feel that way about her.”
In the last few years, it seems more and more people — especially, younger people — feel the same way. On the social media accounts of film institutions like Criterion and Mubi, stills of Cheung from Irma Vep and In the Mood for Love are a curiously common presence. On the social movie platform Letterboxd, she’s a popular subject of breathless adulation. And on Film Twitter, a new generation of supporters post fancams in her honor, as if she were the hot new teen star on a Netflix series. Frozen in celluloid, the now 59-year-old Cheung has somehow become a poster girl for cinema’s multicultural present.
Few images in cinema are more glamorous or intoxicating than Maggie Cheung in Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love.
Ryan Britt pays tribute to Kerry Conran’s Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. Released 20 years ago this week, it’s a delightfully retro-futuristic romp that never got to enjoy the success it deserved.
Despite a critically acclaimed, arrestingly unique, specifically retrofuturistic noir style, a fantastic cast, and a fantastic score from Edward Shearmur, director Kerry Conran’s Sky Captain failed to capture the box office in the summer of 2004, denying us the possibility of future installments in the series. And yet just like how Sky Captain presents an alternate version of 1939, it’s tempting to long for an alternate version of 2004, one in which this movie was a bigger hit. Two decades later, Sky Captain remains fun as hell, smart with its own limitations, and better than most franchise films with similar goals.
Jason Snell reflects on the first ten years of Six Colors, an excellent source for all things Apple-related (including in-depth reviews like this one).
Ten years ago I took a leap into working for myself, not working in corporate media. For most days since, I’ve worked in my garage, writing articles for my site, recording podcasts, and writing the occasional piece for other places (including my former employer, which I couldn’t ever have predicted). Lauren and I agreed we’d spend six to nine months giving it a try before judging if it was a success or a failure, but it all started succeeding so quickly that we never really even got to the point where we needed to have the conversation. All of a sudden, Six Colors and Upgrade were my primary jobs… and they still are, here in 2024.
The damning allegations concerning Republican politician Mark Robinson’s behavior on a porn site, and his subsequent “it was AI” defense, highlight the “deep doubt” era in which we live.
As previously covered on Ars Technica, the emergence of generative AI models has given liars a new excuse to dismiss potentially harmful or incriminating evidence since AI can fabricate realistic deepfakes on demand. This new era of suspicion has already given rise to at least two claims by former US President Donald Trump that certain credible photos had been AI-generated.
Researchers Danielle K. Citron and Robert Chesney first formalized this subset of the deep doubt concept, called the “liar’s dividend,” in a 2019 research paper. In the paper, the authors speculated that “deepfakes make it easier for liars to avoid accountability for things that are in fact true.” They wrote that realistic deepfakes may eventually erode democratic discourse.
AI’s true legacy will almost certainly be the damage that it does to our ability to know, understand, and agree on what is true and what is false.
Finally, for all of you nerds out there, the Dungeons & Dragons’ 2024 Players Handbook dropped this week, and with it comes some pretty significant changes to the game’s mechanics (though it’s still backwards compatible with the 2014 edition). There are plenty of reviews and assessments floating around the Interwebs, but I’m partial to the Dungeon Dudes, who’ve released a slew of videos covering the changes to the game’s classes, feats, spells, and so on.
The other main D&D books — the Dungeon Master’s Guide and Monster Manual — are also getting reworked for 2024. Their new editions will be released on November 12, 2024 and February 18, 2025, respectively.
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Have you read Shogun? I read Clavell's novel a few months before the original miniseries The book is long with a lot of detail and has a high level of historical accuracy Clavell does not have a great writing style in my opinion so it can be a slog and it lacks literary depth I would give it *** out of 4 stars