Arts & Entertainment – Page 5

One Thing I Like About The Marvels

The Marvels is full of moments that remind you it’s essentially the polar opposite of Captain America: Civil War

The Marvels is undeniably a little bit of a mess. It’s abundantly clear that there were too many ideas that people got attached to, and the filmmakers tried to cram everything into it. In addition to what was undoubtedly tons of edits due to studio interference and so on, the result is that moments don’t land as well as they could have, and the movie ends up feeling both overstuffed and slight.¹

But I honestly don’t believe it matters a bit, because there’s more than enough charm and fun to carry the whole thing through.

The thing I kept thinking of throughout the movie was, oddly, Donald Glover’s story about his meeting Billy Dee Williams to try and get some ideas on how to approach the role of Lando Calrissian: after all the setup and research and questions, Williams’s response was simply, “Just be charming.”

I think it’s tough for post-Endgame audiences to appreciate just how much of the MCU was built on simply that mantra: just be charming and accessible. While looking for images from The Marvels, I couldn’t avoid seeing a review snippet that complained that the MCU was floundering now that it has lost all of its “heavy hitters.” I realize I need to remember that the franchise is over 10 years old at this point, so people might not remember, but I still can’t get over anyone suggesting that Iron-Man and Thor were “heavy hitters.” People need to realize that this entire franchise was built off the B- and C-listers. And the franchise was started by treating Iron-Man as a romantic comedy with also robot suits, with the overriding idea being “just be charming.”

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I also feel like there was a continuity error more glaring than I’d ever expect from an MCU installment: I’d swear that Kamala goes from wearing the Ms Marvel costume her mother made for her at the end of the series, to wearing a T-shirt and flannel, with no explanation for the change. I don’t care all that much, but I bring it up because I never ever notice that kind of thing, which makes me think it must have been glaring.

Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Moonlighting

Two tangentially-related tunes from artists in other bands

I’ve really been taken by the song and video for “By Design” by mmeadows, from their album Light Moves Around You. I’d heard about it via the Dirty Projectors newsletter, because Kristin Slipp is also in the current incarnation of Dirty Projectors.

One thing that is driving me crazy about “By Design” is that the sample of horns that gets repeated throughout sounds frustratingly familiar, like I’m this close to recognizing it from a different song, but I can never quite place it. Even if it’s not directly sampled from another song, though, it feels very much like the kind of stuff I was listening to in the early 2000s, when it felt like I was starting to discover new music again after a long hiatus.

Edited 03/09/2024: It’s taken several months for the synapses to make the leap and complete the circuit, but I think I’ve found what it reminds me of: “Bongo Bong” by Manu Chao. The horn sample doesn’t really sound all that similar, but it was just enough to trigger a buried memory.

That was around the time I got into the Beastie Boys, since I was a latecomer and only started being interested around the time of Hello Nasty¹. Money Mark started collaborating with the Beastie Boys starting with Check Your Head². That was enough to get me to check out his solo album Push the Button, which is still pretty solid.

My favorite track from that record is the instrumental “Destroyer,” and to this day I don’t know how he got that drum sound³.

1
Still my favorite of their albums, not that anybody asked.
2
Give him some wood and he’ll build you a cabinet
3
I asked him on Threads and got no response. Some people act like they’re “too busy” to respond to randos asking them open-ended questions about 20+ year old records!

Talk to Me, or, Good Grief!

Talk to Me seemed like a fun, scary movie, but it commits to the premise too hard to be that fun. Contains spoilers.

We chose to watch Talk to Me as a fun, scary teen horror movie for Halloween night, and reader, it was not as fun as I’d been led to believe. This is a very well-made movie that accomplishes almost everything I think it sets out to do, but I definitely didn’t enjoy watching it.

In fact, it’s as if I had the opposite of the suspension of disbelief while watching it. The premise of the movie is absurd, but perfectly in the way that befits a fun horror movie: teenagers have a new party craze in which they use a weird hand sculpture in a ritual to summon a dead person and briefly become possessed by them. It reads like a novel take on Ouija or Bloody Mary, where it’s spooky supernatural fun until something goes horribly wrong.

But watching things go horribly wrong in Talk to Me felt miserable — like, The Exorcist‘s relentlessly depressing scenes about loss of faith and how we fail each other as humans — instead of ratcheting up tension. The last third of the movie does have a structure similar to other horror movies, where the teens try to figure out the “rules” of what torments them. But the centerpiece sequence of the movie is so intense and violent, and the situation is so bleak, that I never once felt there was any glimmer of hope for these characters.

The movie also spends a lot of time showing us teenagers being absolute remorseless sociopaths. I remember my teenage years as being brutal, but not to the point of being openly hostile to everyone for no good reason, or hanging out with people who showed me (and each other) such open contempt. I don’t know if it was a case of teens these days being even crueler than they were in the 80s, commentary on bullying and social media pressure, or justification for why these characters would keep treating something so obviously horrific as if it were a fun game. It’s likely a combination of all three.

Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Ghastly Halloween

Two tangentially-related tunes spending Halloween night hiding under the covers

This Tuesday lands on Halloween, so that calls for a pair of spine-tingling spooky songs raised from the very depths of… well, Van Nuys.

That’s the hometown of The Ghastly Ones, a surf guitar band that made A Haunting We Will Go-Go, which starts with a brilliant opening track assuring the listener not to be alarmed if they find themselves transformed into an evil space robot or some other monster. It instantly became a lifelong favorite just for the correct pronunciation of “robot.”

And also because of “Ghastly Stomp,” which is kind of but not exactly a surf guitar cover of “Grim Grinning Ghosts,” the theme to Disney’s Haunted Mansion. I still love how much they commit to the bit, making the whole thing feel like an artifact from the 1960s, as if the vinyl release had surf rock on one side and spooky haunted house sfx on the other.

The other song is an actual cover, but I’ve only seen it on YouTube. It’s The Breeders doing John Carpenter’s theme from Halloween for their late-October concerts back in 2018.

It all calls back to a time when Halloween peaked, when it was all about hot rods and monster make-up and guitars and I wasn’t alive yet but am still somehow nostalgic for it.

I hope everybody has a fun Halloween, and may all your candy be Reese’s cups!

Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Gonna Take You Up to Glendale

Two tangentially-related tunes in honor of my new commute

This week’s two-fer is an entry in the “this blog is a public diary” category: I got a new job, about a month ago. It’s for a company I’ve been a huge fan of pretty much my entire life, and every single person without exception was friendly and personable and welcoming throughout the whole interview process¹, and it pulls in aspects of every job that I’ve had to date, and that’s all I’ve got to say about that.

Over the past few years, I’ve frequently been reminded of just how significantly my life changed when I escaped Telltale the second time. Most significantly in terms of how I think about work: before that point, I kind of assumed that the only interesting thing about me was my job. I’ve worked on some really cool projects, for some companies I’ve liked a lot², and since that’s where I was making the most impact, that’s what I primarily focused on.

But really, that’s not good for anybody. Companies get the most long-term benefit from people who are well-rounded, and who can find ways to be productive and creative regardless of who’s paying them. Which is all a long-winded way of saying that I’m happily keeping my job and personal life separate.

But I will say that I was interested enough in the job that I was even willing to start commuting again! I’ve been happily unemployed for most of this year, and I’d been working from home for several years before that. I’d sworn that I’d never take a job again unless I could work remotely. But now, I’m driving to Glendale!³

I’m pretty sure that the first I ever heard of Glendale, California was from the song “Debra” by Beck, where a guy used his Hyundai and the promise of Zankou chicken to start a three-way with a store clerk and her sister (I think her name was Debra). There’s something comforting about the fact that people have been relentlessly mocking the San Fernando Valley since before I was born, while I’m finding that it fits my sensibilities perfectly⁴.

And now that I’m pretty regularly commuting in the 21st century on the Ventura Freeway in my electric car, I can’t help but hear “Nation on Wheels,” often known as “The Monorail Song,” but not the one from The Simpsons. Industry! The Lifeblood of America!

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Which was a huge shock after my experience interviewing for jobs in the Bay Area
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And also some other ones!
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Which is a mercifully short commute by Los Angeles standards.
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And I aspire to own a Hyundai, thank you very much.

The Interminable Spooky Season

A recap of one squeamish coward’s 2023 haunt season

It’s hard to believe that we’re still a week away from Halloween, since it feels like it’s been going on for a year already.

Last year, I was unsure how I’d do with spooky Halloween-time events. It seems that if you’re into theme parks at all, you never stop hearing about all the haunts at Universal and elsewhere, to the point that if you don’t go to these things , we have to question your commitment to the season at all (if not the very concept of fun). But I have unpredictable, physical reactions to horror movies, so would I even enjoy them?

Turns out the answer was yes; I had a great time at a couple of last year’s events. My initial trepidation faded pretty quickly, and by the end of the night, I gauged the success of a house not by whether I made it through unscathed, but by how many times I’d been genuinely scared.

Against all reason, I’d become a Haunt Guy.

Well, not really. The type of interactions at Horror Nights or Scary Farm are the limit of how much I want to get involved. (Absolutely no touching allowed, for instance). And even for that, there’s an entire community of people who are way more into the haunts, their lore, and their history, than I will ever be.

So here’s my rundown for 2023, which only included three events. (We skipped Oogie Boogie Bash at Disneyland, since last year’s was enough for me to see that it’s not my kind of thing).

One Thing I Like About Tasting History

Good things can happen when people on the internet make an effort

I’ve gotten to be a fan of the YouTube channel Tasting History with Max Miller, which manages to hit the sweet spot that combines interesting, funny, and accessible.

The idea is pretty simple: Max Miller chooses a dish from some point in history, attempts to prepare (or recreate) the recipe, gives some historical or cultural context for the dish, then eats it. One thing that I love about the series is that there’s one thing Miller never says: “I don’t know how to pronounce that.”

Instead, if Miller encounters a term or a name in a foreign language, he’ll find an expert or a native speaker, learn the correct or preferred pronunciation, practice the correct pronunciation, and include only that in the video.

What impresses me the most is when he tackles episodes that deal with languages that can be difficult for Westerners, like Chinese. In this episode about nian gao, he’s careful to get the pronunciation correct, including the changes in tone, for all of the names. It’s often clear that he recorded it until he got it right, then edited that recording into the episode to make absolutely certain it was right, being careful to hide the edits and make it seem as natural as possible.

That kind of dedication would be pretty impressive for any show, I think, but is unheard of when it comes to a YouTube channel. Miller keeps the tone light, casual, and funny, but it’s also clear that he’s committed to getting the details right and showing respect to the cultures he’s talking about.

I haven’t had live TV in several years, so I watch a lot of YouTube¹. Obviously, there is a ton of obnoxious behavior on YouTube, but something that’s disappointingly common, even among people I like otherwise, is the tendency to straddle the line between “casual” and “professional.”

They’ll make casual, chatty videos that say stuff like “Now, you guys know me,” and then complain about parasocial relationships. Or do insincere calls for engagement that mimic having a conversation with people in the audience, but with no intention of ever actually engaging with the audience. And to be clear, the problem isn’t that somebody with 1000 subscribers isn’t actually friends with each of them — the problem is that false sense of friendly familiarity.

But the most common is to simultaneously insist that yes, this is too a real job, actually, and not just some hobby, because I am a professional video content creator, and also that they’re not under any obligation to know stuff or get details right. “Research” for a disappointing number of people means “glancing at the Wikipedia or IMDB page.”

And it’s extremely common to hear “I’m not even going to try to pronounce that.” Maybe it’s well-intentioned, as if a mis-pronunciation would be somehow even more offensive than not bothering to say it at all. But it all builds up over time to give the impression that a lot of people are making a good bit of money off of YouTube (and Patreon) without making much effort.

So I appreciate Max Miller making the effort. It sounds crass to say, but it’s true: a handsome and charismatic guy with millions of followers could probably get away with doing a lot less. Instead, he acknowledges that he’s neither a historian nor a chef, but instead of making excuses, he just takes the time and effort to get the details as close to correct as he’s able.

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Years ago, I signed up for the ad-free version of YouTube, and I couldn’t do without it at this point.

Destination_final-final-edit-usethisone_final.review

Recommending the first few entries in the Final Destination series, and reconsidering my previous reviews

As we approach Halloween¹, I keep seeing recommendations for good scary movies to enjoy. And I feel left out, because I’m not very good at horror movies and haven’t seen a lot of them.² But I realized I can do a better job at recommending the Final Destination movies — or at least, the first three, which are the only ones I’ve been interested in watching — than I have in the past.

I was surprised to stumble onto my old reviews written right after watching the movies for the first time — which I won’t link here, for reasons that will soon become obvious — and to discover that they suck. I really enjoyed the series, but my blog posts about them are pretty insufferably condescending about them. There’s a sense that I need people to understand that I liked them but was well aware the entire time that they aren’t high art. If there is a recurring theme of this now-decades-old blog, it’s that I’m very focused on getting it, but it’s rare that I actually get it.

Anyway, these movies are clever, brilliantly manipulative fun, and they get better the more I think about them. They’re essentially horror movies reduced to their most basic components and then reassembled, making full use of their formula instead of being weighed down by it.

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Which seems to be taking over a year at this point, since people keep getting started earlier and earlier
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In case you were wondering, I have been to Knott’s Scary Farm and Universal Hollywood Horror Nights since writing that, I enjoyed the heck out of both of them, and am now a regular haunt-goer.

Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Here We Go Again Because It’s Been a While

Two tangentially-related tunes for Tuesday, bringing back a series that’s just fun to do.

The other day, I fell down my own rabbit hole, so to speak, when I wanted to remember the name of a song and consulted this very blog you’re reading now! I ended up reading all of my old entries in the Tuesday Tune Two-Fer file — which was supposed to be an indefinitely ongoing series — and essentially got re-acquainted with myself from a couple of years ago, reading stuff I’d forgotten I’d written.

I wondered why I stopped doing them. The obvious reason is that my job got crazy busy, but I think the real reason is that I forgot what this blog is for. I’m happy when people read it and especially happy when they’re entertained by something in it, but mostly it’s for me. For writing practice, sure, but also as a diary that’s just public enough to encourage me to try and keep it interesting.

So I’m going to see how long I can keep it going this time. (Not to ruin the mystique of this blog or anything, but scheduling posts in advance is a huge part of the magic).

First is Three MCs and One DJ by The Beastie Boys from Hello Nasty. Back when I was getting acquainted with Mastodon, I did a little series where I posted one of my favorite music videos every day for a few weeks. It annoyed me that after I wrapped everything up, I realized I’d completely forgotten this one, which is certainly one of the best music videos of all time. (And it would’ve been the best video from the album had “Intergalactic” not existed).

I remember at the time feeling slightly annoyed that this video and the one for “Body Movin'” both used versions of the song that were different from their album version. Now, I’m really, really happy that this video, this extended gag, and this live performance (from the look and sound of it) exist as their own thing. Even if those of us who listened to the album enough to memorize it will never be able to resist adding our own “Bug out to the mic all the time!“

Continuing the theme is It’s Alright (Baby’s Coming Back) by Eurythmics. I’d completely forgotten about this video, which suggests that Dave Stewart would keep Annie Lennox in cryogenic suspension while he went off and lived in a 1980s anime. It’s not my business to judge anybody else’s relationship, but you can kind of understand why they broke up.

Literacy 2023: Book 14: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

The Agatha Christie Poirot mystery that’s considered a classic for good reason

Book
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie

Synopsis
When the wealthiest man in a small English village is violently murdered, the local doctor is inadvertently enlisted to help retired detective Hercule Poirot make sense of the various subplots and uncover the identity of the killer.

Spoiler Warning
If you haven’t ever read this book (or, like me, you read it decades ago and forgot the plot), avoid reading anything about it online. I had started reading it because I was listening to an episode of the You’re Dead to Me podcast about Agatha Christie, which was being so circumspect about spoiling it that it spoiled it. Then, while doing a search on Goodreads, I saw a spoiler right in the description for a related book. Plus the Wikipedia entry doesn’t even bother with spoiler warnings. It’s all fair enough, since the book is almost 100 years old at this point, but still requires some caution.

Pros

The back-and-forth between the narrator Doctor Sheppard and his sister Caroline is extremely charming, perfectly capturing two characters who have great affection for each other while still being extremely irritated with each other.
As I’ve been reading or re-reading Agatha Christie’s mysteries recently, I’ve been repeatedly surprised by how contemporary they feel, despite being a century old. They’re filled with quaint British mannerisms, and signs of a class hierarchy that probably doesn’t exist in the same way anymore. But otherwise, this book feels as if it could be transported into the 21st century with barely an edit required.
Kind of like And Then There Were None, it feels as if Agatha Christie constructed the mystery mostly to prove that she could do it.
Feels more experimental and challenging than many contemporary mysteries, while still being more accessible and charming.

Cons

Christie “proves her work” at the end of the novel, explaining to the reader exactly how the clues were presented and why they were presented that way. But there are still some deductions that depend on off-screen revelations or deductions that the reader couldn’t possibly have guessed.
Related to the above: the book gives ample clues that Poirot is off gathering information, but it doesn’t share enough about what he found out. The mystery works best when we have the exact same information as Poirot does, but we’re just not as good at making sense of it.

Verdict
Just remarkable. I’m glad I’m re-reading Agatha Christie’s books now, because I wasn’t able to appreciate just how impressive they were when I was younger and had no frame of reference. The characters are charming and relatable, and the plot is clever, experimental, and constructed in such a way that it feels as if Christie was challenging herself to make something new. This is deservedly a classic, even if you already know the ending.

One Thing I Like About Ahsoka

The live-action continuation of an animated series somehow managed to feel bigger on the inside

Watching The Mandalorian often felt a little unsettling, because it was so overwhelmingly my thing. Not that I was being targeted, but that the people who grew up around the same time I did had finally been put in charge of Star Wars productions. The closing credits really drove the feeling home, feeling simultaneously like a call out to the concept art by Ralph McQuarrie that I had hanging up on my bedroom wall, and TV series from the 1970s like The Wild Wild West that had a near-subliminal impact on my aesthetic.

Ahsoka was not that. It was completely, unapologetically, made for fans of The Clone Wars and Rebels, rewarding them for their loyalty with live action versions of their favorite characters.

I didn’t dislike those series, and in fact there’s a lot of aspects about them that I love, from the stylized character designs reminiscent of Thunderbirds, to the storylines that delivered on jetpack-wearing Mandalorians totally kicking ass years before The Mandalorian season one. But I could never really get into the series, either. Several times I’ve attempted to get caught up on both of them, but I never last more than a few episodes.

As a result, I could recognize a lot of what Ahsoka is doing, but I spend the whole time extremely aware that it’s not speaking to me as it would a super-fan.

Literacy 2023: Book 13: The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Neil Gaiman’s fairy tale about childhood, magic, memory, and forgetting

Book
The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

Synopsis
A man returns to his childhood home and feels compelled to visit the farmhouse at the end of his street. While there, he remembers the first time he visited the farm as a seven-year-old, when he met his friend 11-year-old Lettie Hempstead, along with her mother and grandmother, and went on an errand that brought back something horrible.

Pros

Neil Gaiman in his element, writing about all the things he does best: magic, myth, wonder mixed with terror, childhood, and the melancholy of adulthood.
Doesn’t pull its punches, feeling genuinely dark and horrifying but without crossing the line into gratuitous violence or edginess.
Combines all of the flavors of terror unique to childhood: fear of monsters, fear of getting in trouble, fear of loneliness and abandonment, and the sinking feeling that you’ve done something wrong that you can never take back.
Feels epic and weighty in scope while remaining a focused, concise story — it feels exactly as big as it needs to be.
You only realize after the fact that there is a non-magical explanation for everything; the story as presented seems so much more matter-of-fact and more real than any attempt to explain what really must’ve happened.

Cons

A little bit too vague for the sake of maintaining a sense of mystery. This is absolutely not a book about the “rules” of magic, and is instead meant to evoke feelings and the sense of impossibly ancient forces at work. That said, I still wish that there had been more of a sense of structure to what was going on, instead of characters constantly speaking in riddles.

Verdict
This is Neil Gaiman doing what he does best, and it’s one of his most satisfying books. He has a talent for writing about childhood and magic that conveys the full weight and melancholy of adulthood, but with a sense that as grown-ups, magic is only mostly dead to us, not entirely.