Oh, let’s talk about the children’s movie previews I saw before Cats:
Harrison Ford and a Dog - I’m sorry dude, even if he does seemed trained so his reaction gestures aren’t that broad, you’re co-starring in a kids’ movie with a dog, and the story beats sound blunt as hell. No one you care about will even notice and you’ll use the paycheck to build a weed plantation on a Colorado mountaintop, though.
Movie where a tough Russian-ish spy mook has to mentor a little girl - still really cliche and treacly in a way I have to assume is pitched more to earnest parents. If this is the alternative I prefer the Shrek-style dumb knowingness over this dumb carebear shit, but I guess that’s my thesis on culture in general for the last few years.
Dr. Doolittle (with RDJ) - when I saw the title I was like “oh yes, that classic British kids’ property, where… ah… yes, animals! Where he does… some verbs… with animals!” The bit where the whole trailer’s all appealing to parents like “sense of wonder! an authority figure saying it’s okay to be scared!” and then a 3 second tag for boys “look, intense music and a dragon!"…
Lin-Manuel Maranda movie about the "dreamers” of Washington Heights defending themselves from evil gentrificationers, the dialogue was wretch-inducing diversity cliches - I rolled my eyes so hard and repeatedly I had to close them. It did highlight that all those “we gotta save our scrappy camp from the snobs across the lake!” stuff was narrativizing the white ethnic breakup of WASP hegemony, even tho by then WASPs were more outdoor-enthusiast totebaggers driving Volvos into the ground. Sorry, WASPs.
Trolls - from a culture war standpoint, this is more interesting. It opens with like, the Techno Troll as rave DJ playing Daft Punk’s One More Time, which 1) ugh 2) alllll flashing colors 3) sets up a hilarious contrast with Interstella 555
But then it turns out the plot is the Rock Troll (a mohawked-denim 80s type) is the villain, trying to claim the “5 strings” of music to secure supremacy. So at least… the Rap Troll and the Smooth Jazz Troll have to stop her?
I’m sure the climax is she thought she had to do this to survive and there’s some sort of reconciliation, probably as a loud party, but that “Rock is the oppressive villain Rap and Smooth Jazz have to defeat” is a viable take for youth media, hm.
Of course it looks excruciating, I hear the Angry Birds movie was interestingly xenophobic, but I’m not gonna watch that either.
New Pixar Movie – unlike the others looks quite competent in that Pixar way. Don’t approve of feelings for your dead relatives, esp. ones you never even met and I wish they didn’t apply their competence to that low shit, so. Speaking of Rock, is “fat friendly denim-jacket-and-patches guy with an airbrushed van” still a meaningful type to anyone? I feel like I’ve only ever encountered him in representations, like Brütal Legend and Day of the Tentacle, I’ve never actually met that guy in person
Cats was as batshit as they say and it was great, very specifically true to the spirit of 1981 London musical theater taking on prewar London
The only part I thought didnt work was the fight scene on the trash barge with Ian McKellen and Rebel Wilson
OK and the Jenny Anydots musical production with the human-faced cockroaches she kept eating, ngl that was weird but it opens the film with a decent nod to an earlier Bubsy Berkeley tradition of adapting stage musicals to film
They do a better job of rescuing incoherent source material than any movie since Resident Evil – with a bit of dialogue, scene changes, and close-ups, they stitch it into viable mechanical (Macavity plots to steal the Choice!) and emotional (Mr. Mistoffelees gets confidence and saves Deuteronomy, Victoria joins the Jellicles and saves/sets up Grizabella, they end up together) arcs
Judi Dench, Ian McKellen, and Taylor Swift are transparently enjoying the hell out of themselves
It is, in fact, the horniest movie I’ve ever sat through previews of treacly kids’ movies (Harrison Ford co-starring with a dog!) before.
The Taylor Swift performance of “Macavity” was a very Taylor Swift performance, showing off her standard vocal tricks, aspirating her leads and weighting her vowels and then swapping into a British accent for a line. For all that, it probably departs from the stage Original Cast Recording least of any take in the movie.
By contrast, the Taylor Swift-written song is like the most Taylor Swift song, uses all her standard writing tricks and her little-poor-me outside-looking-in perspective. Not to mention it is the defining song for Victoria, the new central viewpoint character (and Taylor is clearly ventriloquizing her vocal approach), so it claims basically the entire movie for her, specifically appropriates Grizabella’s pathos for herself, and steps on the last line of Memory with a callback.
So, it is the most Taylor Swift song.
(Her role here probably counts as some of that U.K. market-specific fanservice I’ve mentioned, too)
A correspondence in Chuang from a reader about shifting attitudes among white-collar workers in Beijing towards the situation in Hong Kong. A lot seems to have to do with media control and the highly monitored flow and interpretation of information, coupled with resurgent nationalist sentiment. Similar phenomena could surely be found in other territories where states and ruling classes have a vested interest in quelling sympathy for revolt elsewhere in the populations they control, pitting people against people along lines of division (in the border, in identity, in opportunity, etc.), or using rhetorics of subsumption to justify assimilationist policies that preserve the status quo. This is a chilling read when taken in consideration with questions of transnational solidarity and liberatory horizons for movements coming and underway that have been posed in preceding zines.
“It is now clear that many of my friends and colleagues who once kept an open mind about protests, or were perhaps only curious about the novel mass protests, are decidedly on the side of the central government against Hong Kong. What I have found particularly alarming is the loss of any sense of subtlety, or desire to understand the intricacies of the situation. Some have clamped down hard on easy to understand, pithy ideas. I hear them say things like: ‘well, Hongkongers have decided on independence, so they have all crossed the line. They are beyond reason.’ Many of my friends have often been openly critical of the CCP in the past, and stray from the party line on any number of controversial issues, like Xinjiang’s camps, or the ever-expanding police state, with its Great Firewall and surveillance cameras on every street corner. Recently, however, at least on Hong Kong, it seems that when push comes to shove, some have retreated to a sort of raw nationalism, defending some idea of Chinese-ness. The desecration of symbols like Chinese national flags, or the booing at the Chinese national anthem quickly became topics of discussion at the office water cooler, as they were circulated widely on WeChat. ‘The mistake these Hongkongers make is that they forget they are Chinese. They are becoming racist, and hateful of their own homeland, and that is just unacceptable,’ said one. Of course, examples of rising hatred against Hong Kongers in the mainland were not circulated on WeChat, like the beating of a Hong Kong hockey club at a tournament in Shenzhen, after they won over a mainland opponent. ‘I think the only way out of this situation is for Hong Kong to be returned to China a second time,’ said another, referring to the 1997 handover of the city, a former colony of Britain.“
when I lived in New York I decided to see if I could pass myself off as a traditional but apolitical Christian despite knowing next to nothing about Christianity, and it’s surprisingly easy, at least in New York
…I would imagine so, given that your standard traditional-but-apolitical Christian also knows next to nothing about Christianity, especially in the US.
Do they not? (Maybe if you don’t count Protestantism as Christianity, or if you do count Unitarianism, but Bible study classes seem pretty common.)
I mean I wouldn’t know any more about christianity if I hadn’t decided to be an atheist. I went to sunday school when I was a little kid but not as a medium kid. I went to church roughly 2x per year as a christian, so.
In my freshman dorm a hallmate heard weird sounds next door and it turned out to be our RA and her bible study group trying to cast out demons of someone’s spinal pain
And she gave him like a Baby’s First Evangelism guide to what they were doing and honestly this was what he hung up on, “does she think I don’t know who Jesus was?”
She probably came from a kinda bubbled missionary tradition and he was Asian maybe, tho on an Ivy League campus it was the Asians most likely to have a Christian identity
Also I took a history of American Protestantism course and in doing one take-home exam question interpreting a sermon on slavery I cited Matthew Henry’s biblical commentary, and a week after a TA pulled me aside after class and gently asked if I was a Christian
I wasn’t and I don’t know if she was but she made clear that as someone who engaged with American Christianity at a postgrad level she was astounded by the share of students in the class who were but didn’t know shit about it, who had a strong identity that was scripturally ignorant Real Mericanism that was even Americanally sophomoric, that a lot of the responses hadn’t even noticed the biblical references and tried to bullshit it as connecting to a Black uplift tradition that happened decades after the sermon and regularly confused Booker T. Washington with W.E.B. DuBois
I teach a philosophy class to high school seniors in a fairly affluent Silicon Valley suburb, which means that my students are like ½ Indian and 1/3 Chinese but almost all grown up in modern American West Coast culture.
A few weeks ago, most of the way through our unit on the Divine Arguments, one class ground to an absolute screeching halt because I referred offhandedly to Jesus being God, and it turned out that the vast majority of the class had never heard this before.
Like they knew of Jesus, that he was the son of God, sure, but I had 17- and 18-year old students genuinely saying that their minds had just been blown by this revelatory information.
Minor diplomatic kerfuffle in South America. Eduardo Bolsonaro, the 35 year old son of the President of Brazil, who likes to livestream himself playing CS GO (famed team MIBR are friendly with him and his dad) and shooting at firing ranges (when he’s not crying at them) retweeted this comparison of him on the right and the 24 year old son of the Argentinean president elect Estanislao Fernandez, who works as a graphic designer and likes to crossplay (click through for some great costumes) on the left. Estanislao didn’t reply directly, but criticized Eduardo on his own twitter account for being a failson who made all his money from his father while he works for a living and had to sell his costumes to make ends meet. President Bolsonaro is currently trying to appoint Eduardo to the plum job of ambassador to the United States. When asked to defend himself, Eduardo replied “I have experience around the world. I have done a student exchange
program. I know how to fry hamburgers. … I can speak English. and I’ve
seen closely the great respect that Americans have for Brazilians.”
This goes well beyond insisting that Nick Carraway
would have posted on Reddit or that Stalin was the original gaslighter.
It is a whole style of talking now, where you just yank a whole lot of
cultural touchstones together and present the end result as a substitute
for analysis, like “Edward St. Aubyn is just Henry Green for men who
read Tatler as an ironic gesture” or “Sally Rooney is just Joan Didion
for women who can’t drive” or “The Joker movie is just The Birth of a Nation for men with sinewy arm muscles and no girlfriends.”
Sometimes
the end result is funny, and interesting, and it does function as a
substitute for analysis, sort of, if you are in a hurry. Other times it
is depressing, and for nerds — just this endless chain of references
that goes nowhere, this horrible nest of easter eggs that has no effect
other than to make you feel on top of things, and too proud of your
faculty of recognition, which is one of the less impressive ones as
orders of cognition go. “The Bible is just Harry Potter for rednecks”
looks like something, if you stand far away enough and then move on to
thinking about another subject immediately, but it doesn’t withstand a
whole lot of pressure or scrutiny.
[…]
Perhaps all this was inevitable. The dream of the internet was that each
of us would be able to access the knowledge of all of human history,
and the nightmare that resulted is that we are now expected to know so
many more things than before, such that the only way to really get a
grasp on any of it is to superficially connect them to other things you
also barely understand. The most utopian vision of it held that it would
be a place that would connect us to others, that it would help us see
and understand the world more deeply. The version of the internet we
have landed up with often feels less like a place where we can connect
to others, and more like a place where we have to learn what TikTok is
in order to understand the import of the sentence “Ted Bundy’s
granddaughter outed her entire family on TikTok,” and then later on to
connect that event to another idiotic and depressing situation by saying
“this is exactly like when Ted Bundy’s granddaughter outed her entire
family on TikTok,” and on and on like that, until the moment comes where
we all lose our grip on reality completely.
Bless the Harts seems to be aiming at the same “red state animation” target as King of the Hill
w/r/t the Shane Gillis thing, Nick Mullen broke character to say “you wokesters should be terrified, that they wanted a conservative star in the first place shows that you were a market bubble and the market’s starting to correct itself” and he’s right
