Weekend Reads (December 21): National Film Registry, “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” 2024’s Best Action Movies, Classical Music
Recommended weekend reading material for December 21, 2024.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material. Note: There won’t be a newsletter next week due to the Christmas holiday. I hope you and your loved ones have a safe and enjoyable holiday season.
25 films have been added to the National Film Registry, including Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Beverly Hills Cop, and No Country for Old Men. The films, which are publicly nominated, are ultimately selected by the Library of Congress for their cultural, historical, and aesthetic significance.
The complete National Film Registry listing currently contains 900 films, and stretches all the way back to 1891’s Newark Athlete.
A Charlie Brown Christmas is an all-time holiday classic film, and much of that is due to Vince Guaraldi’s sublime soundtrack. However, its success took everyone by surprise, including Guaraldi and his band.
Guaraldi’s involvement in the special could almost be called an afterthought. Yet it would shape the rest of his career: he kept working on Peanuts shows until his death in 1976 — and his best-known songs appear in A Charlie Brown Christmas.
The list of films, books, etc., that are entering the public domain on January 1, 2025 has been released. Here are some highlights:
Films: The Cocoanuts (starring the Marx Brothers), The Virginian (starring Gary Cooper), and Blackmail (Alfred Hitchcock’s first sound film).
Books: Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, and the English translation of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front.
Songs: “Singin’ in the Rain,” “Happy Days Are Here Again,” and “Tiptoe Through the Tulips.”
Also, a pair of comic legends — Popeye and Buck Rogers — are also entering the public domain in 2025. It’s worth noting, however, that only the earliest incarnations of the characters will be publicly available. In this case, the earliest version of Popeye is not the spinach-loving sailor we all know and love.
Polygon offers their picks for the year’s best action movies from all around the world.
2024 picked up where its predecessor left off, with one notable exception: more original ideas, fewer franchise movies (although there were still a few standouts). Nations around the globe contributed stellar entries to the genre, with big-budget spectacle and precise low-budget projects alike providing the joys of hard-hitting action. And that’s all without a John Wick, James Bond, or Mission: Impossible in sight.
I’ve reviewed several of Polygon’s picks, including Jeremy Saulnier’s Rebel Ridge, which is one of my favorite movies of 2024 regardless of genre.
The Reactor crew share what brought them nerdy joy in 2024, from Star Wars kids to The Wizard of Oz to Kpop and the MCU.
To be honest with you, I’ve been looking for any and every excuse to talk about Kpop on this here nerd website, but beyond borrowing sci-fi & dystopian aesthetics for music videos, it’s rare that I can make the case for it. But NO MORE, because Stray Kids (my boys, my babies, my loves) have been hanging out with Deadpool and Wolverine, and I am LIVING. It’s long been known that Ryan Reynolds is a fan of the group… and this year both Reynolds and Hugh Jackman made a cameo in their music video for CHK CHK BOOM. In the Deadpool and Wolverine suits. Which means it’s canon, baby!!
Jayson Greene on listening to classical music in crypts and graveyards.
This feeling of awe represents Death of Classical’s greatest accomplishment. I have sat through countless “nightclub” classical concerts with a drink in my hand, but the truth remains that classical music rarely offers the kinds of pleasures promised by a jazz club or an evening of cabaret. The pleasures run deeper and quieter and don’t always mingle with the promise of a fun night out. Ousley’s series has reconnected us with classical music’s highest purpose — to help us grieve. When we are struck at the deepest places, this music rises up, wordlessly to meet us.
Jordan Whiteman delves into the origins and history of dungeon synth and his own involvement in the genre.
For many, many reasons dungeon synth is a deeply fascinating genre. First, it is a genre that was nearly lost and forgotten entirely. Dungeon synth began and experienced a period of explosive growth and interest alongside second wave black metal during the 1990s, before it tapered off significantly toward the end of the decade. It almost didn’t survive the turn of the millennium. It then went almost totally dormant for nearly a decade, with only a handful of artists and projects continuing to make albums through the 2000s.
Related: My review of Secret Stairways’ Enchantment of the Ring, one of my favorite dungeon synth releases.
Some of the most popular music on Spotify’s playlists is created by artists who are actually fronts for production companies creating canned stock music. Liz Pelly digs into the data and explores the impact these “ghost artists” have on regular musicians — who already get paid a pittance by the streaming giant (which, by the way, generated $4.24 billion in revenue last quarter) — as well as listeners.
Spotify, I discovered, not only has partnerships with a web of production companies, which, as one former employee put it, provide Spotify with “music we benefited from financially,” but also a team of employees working to seed these tracks on playlists across the platform. In doing so, they are effectively working to grow the percentage of total streams of music that is cheaper for the platform. The program’s name: Perfect Fit Content (PFC). The PFC program raises troubling prospects for working musicians. Some face the possibility of losing out on crucial income by having their tracks passed over for playlist placement or replaced in favor of PFC; others, who record PFC music themselves, must often give up control of certain royalty rights that, if a track becomes popular, could be highly lucrative. But it also raises worrying questions for all of us who listen to music. It puts forth an image of a future in which — as streaming services push music further into the background, and normalize anonymous, low-cost playlist filler — the relationship between listener and artist might be severed completely.
Via Pixel Envy.
Spotify loves to tout how they’re helping and supporting musicians, but their actions behind the scenes — like their “Perfect Fit Content” program — are the exact opposite of that.
The “Shuttered Venue Operators Grant” program was intended to support live venues and performing arts organizations during the COVID pandemic. However, several big name artists took advantage of the program to pay themselves millions of dollars.
Thousands of pages of accounting documents reviewed by Business Insider reveal, for the first time, how some wealthy musicians — including Chris Brown, the DJ Marshmello, and members of Alice in Chains — spent grants they received through the program.
The documents include detailed records explaining how celebrity musicians spent their grants, as well as correspondence between their accountants and the SBA. Business Insider has verified the authenticity of the documents.
They reveal how artists directed millions in taxpayer funds not toward touring crew members, but instead toward their own bank accounts, luxury purchases, and entertainment expenses — often while sitting on substantial wealth from other business ventures.
The artists in question did nothing illegal, it seems. But I think few would agree that Lil Wayne spending $1.3 million on private flights or Alice in Chains’ members paying themselves $3.4 million after already earning $48 million for selling the copyrights to their catalog was an ethical or morally defensible use of pandemic relief funds.
‘Tis the season to celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace. But after looking at the various reactions to the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, Jake Meador asks, “Do we even want peace on Earth?”
It is now Advent and we are now slowly and patiently passing through a season of preparation as we await our King Jesus who, we are promised, will bring peace. I wonder if we still want it. The Christ who is coming is not a respecter of persons. He does not treat “our” side indulgently while showing devastating severity with our enemies. He does not think the purpose of politics is simply to reward friends and punish enemies, with no regard for law or morality. He judges with justice and justice, we remember, is blind. Do the politicians and media figures so glibly speaking about Thompson's killing actually want justice? Do we? Do we want peace on those terms, I wonder?
Related: Meador highlights Mere Orthodoxy’s best articles from the past year.
The Associated Press has shared their top 100 photos of 2024, which includes photos of war and conflict, natural wonders, athletic events, and even Comic-Con.
We stared at the news from oblique angles. We saw entire landscapes of violence and of inspiration, and we saw intimate detail that only a modern digital camera with a talented human being behind it can deliver.
We saw how people across the planet elected each other, loved each other, broke bread with each other, competed against each other in the most prestigious of forums. We saw them pray for — and with — each other, kill each other, mourn each other.
From the Blog
Ever since September, there’s been a brouhaha developing between the owner/founder of WordPress (arguably the world’s most popular website content management system) and WP Engine (a popular WordPress hosting provider). Making the situation more frustrating and embarrassing has been the former’s petty behavior.
Obviously, checking a box about your pizza topping preferences is — I hope — less binding than indicating an affiliation with Mullenweg’s corporate opponent. Regardless, it’s incredibly childish. (To be fair, there’s no indication that Mullenweg, himself, made this change. But neither has he fixed it.) Rather than take the “L” like a mature adult, Mullenweg has opted for petulance and tantrums. Which handily describes his behavior ever since his first accusations against WP Engine.
Related: If you’re a blogger looking for a good website solution or platform, there are plenty of excellent WordPress alternatives.
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