You are about to witness a spectacle
In case you haven’t been witness to the multi-million dollar online marketing campaign, the billboards, or the Keke Palmer Reaction Videos™ of it all, Jordan Peele has released his third motion picture, Nope. It’s a huge time for everyone who writes one sentence reviews on Letterboxed and also for the dumbest person you know to try and stake their claim as the next Roger Ebert with their take on how Nope was bad, actually, and spout bad-faith criticisms about the film and its “plot holes.” How did we get here? Now, obviously we live in stupid times when it comes to media consumption, this goes without saying. But I believe there was a catalyst for this type of “criticism,” and like most things, it started as a bit.
The YouTube channel CinemaSins first started publishing content in 2012, with a video entitled “Everything Wrong With The Amazing Spiderman In 2 Minutes Or Less.” The video was a humorous poke at the less than perfectly constructed superhero movie pointing out inconsistencies in the plot & character motivation, as well as moments like Peter Parker using a Sony cell-phone, something no sane person would ever do. The whole bit of the channel was that they were pointing out micro-annoyances and frivolous details that didn’t end up derailing from the experience of watching the movie as a whole. That isn’t what people took away from the channel; however, and the message people seemed to have gotten was that these nitpick-able offenses made these films Bad Movies, one’s worthy of mockery and think-pieces.
This type of reaction can especially be seen in the live action reboots that Disney is churning out. This combination of film critique mixed with brain-rotting BuzzFeed Feminism has lead the company to correct “the sins” of its animated movies in its new, crowd-tested and 21st century friendly recreations. “How come no one in the village remembers the castle or the servants who were turned into plates?” Beauty and the Beast (2017) has an answer for that. “Belle falling in love with the Beast is Stockholm Syndrome!” Beauty and the Beast (2017) refutes that. “How come Jasmine is so passive!!” Aladdin (2019) has a god-awful Pasek and Paul song making her into a girlboss. These new, needless additions don’t just bring the movies down, they actively insult the intelligence of the audience. This antagonistic relationship we have with movies and looking for faults to point out has the parallel effect of making us worse audience members and making movies dumber; if filmmakers can’t trust that audiences won’t understand necessary leaps in logic they’ll have to sully their own project to make sure that necessary points come across.
It’s this climate that makes the works of Jordan Peele, especially Us, stand out. Get Out was a near perfect puzzle-box of a movie, every set up had a payoff, the characters acted intelligently and had a consistent internal logic, it was a nitpicker’s wet dream, especially with the level of detail that Peele put into it. Us, my favorite movie of his, was a different story. While Get Out tightened to its conclusion, Us inverted that structure and unraveled as more answers were revealed; it asked us to believe in underground tunnels and government experiments, signifiers that dipped into the world of fairy-tale instead of the former movie’s magical realism. It is, in my opinion, a stronger film, certainly helped by Lupita Nyong'o's career best performance and Peele’s fantastic direction, but also due to its increased ambition spurred by Get Out’s success.
In the moment; however, it seemed that the majority of movie-goer’s did not share my view. The films’ ambiguity and examination of class launched a thousand “Us explained” videos, and people trained their microscopic critical lenses on it. The very aspects that made the film special were subjected to video essays on its lack of realism and consistency; the landscape bred by CinemaSins and YouTube film critics had made audiences ill-prepared for when a filmmaker took bold, original leaps and expected the audience to come along. Now that’s not to say that Us is flawless, it certainly did bite off more than it could chew at times, but I admire Peele’s willingness to push audiences and his ability to make well-crafted, genuinely scary movies containing interesting ideas. I really enjoyed Nope, and while I had issues with it I’m grateful that Peele is committed to making these kinds of movies and that he is given the budget now to buff his ideas up to a blockbuster-level. I do wish that we would move on from this vein of criticism and thinking, but I guess the monkey’s paw just curled another finger.
Bits and Bobs
Not to be hyperbolic but the Little Miss [Insert] memes are the death of culture. It feels like every few weeks we get a new templatized meme that people can take advantage of with just an Instagram story editor and a dream, and the results are catastrophic for the rest of us. They are somehow the triple threat of unfunny, basic, and irritating, and unlike the more charming “We need an American Girl doll who” memes they require no creativity from the user. Shame.
I rewatched Phantom Thread (a masterpiece) this weekend and was thinking about how it fits into Paul Thomas Anderson’s filmography as a whole. He’s a writer and director uniquely interested in masculinity whether it is sexualized and can be commodified (Boogie Nights), heartless and opportunistic (There Will Be Blood) or badly damaged and longing for connection (both Punch Drunk Love and The Master). I love Phantom Thread dearly for how it explores Reynold’s narcissism and obsessiveness, and how the women in his life enable and eventually shape him. It occupies such a singular place in his work and is just one of my all-time favorite movies.
I’m incredibly excited for Bodies Bodies Bodies, and have been loving all of the promotional and fashion moments that the cast has been giving us. It feels like it’s been awhile since we’ve had an ensemble cast of young up and coming actors be such a moment, it’s a really nice call back to the 90’s and especially Scream, which is great considering the subject matter of the film and the tone it’s going for. We will be watching.
I’m gonna be honest friends! I have no idea how much more Monkeypox discourse I can take!! On the left we have gay men trying to become the Larry Kramer of MPX and on the right we have kids thinking that health officials highlighting the fact that the disease is disproportionally affecting gay men is homophobic. I’m at capacity and we haven’t even hit the worst of it yet.
It’s no secret that Meta is being left behind in the new social media wars and that they’re taking down Instagram with it. It’s obvious what their play is, they’re attempting to reach the young users they are losing by stealing features from TikTok and converting to video, bu they’re still trying to jam those features into an ecosystem that wasn’t built for them. It won’t be a question of if but when will the next big photo-sharing and dumping app pop up, and I’m interested to see how people will migrate to it.
What I’m
Listenting to:
Intrusive - Rico Nasty: I love bass-boosted, glitchy Rico. I love it so fucking much. Perfect music to lose your mind to.
Summerboy - Lady Gaga: One of my favorite things of The Fame era Gaga was her ability to try on different hats and still make them distinct, and this is a great example. She’s in her Gwen Stefani bag with one of her best hooks, fantastic.
Alligator - Of Monsters and Men: Everyone’s favorite Icelandic Indie-folk/pop group from the radio in 2012 is still making great stuff! They’ve pivoted more towards rock to decent results but this track is a standout.
4 American Dollars - U.S. Girls: An alt-disco track about the perils of capitalism and American greed, what more could you ask for.
Reading:
Friend of the newsletter Juan A. Ramírez wrote an amazing piece on the Fire Island Pantry, the mostly teenaged staffed grocery store keeping an entire island of gay men alive during the summer.
Apparently ice cream men as a whole and not just the Choco Taco are endangered, is nothing sacred anymore?
A great piece exploring “algorithmic anxiety,” the of fear and reverence people have developed for the code that seems to determine what we buy, what news we see, and possibly who we are.
Obsessed with:
Maggie Rogers has been serving fantastic fashion and press moments throughout the rollout for Surrender, I’m loving everything she’s been putting out and cannot wait to listen to the album. I will also be fighting tooth and nail to get tickets to her release show on Thursday so wish me good luck.
This deleted scene from Girls truly plays on repeat in my head. The interactions between the staff, the homosexual running the show, “we have a file, we have a total file.” The fact that it didn’t make it in the episode is a crime.