I am exceptionally excited to announce that I will be joining Amazon in June.
Amazon is one of the few companies that is shaping how humans interact with technology and the world, and it’s full of ridiculously smart people that I’m looking forward to learning from.
The path to this next step in my professional career has been a long one. I’m so grateful for all the Seattle folks who helped me to make it to this point. I couldn’t have done it without them.
Matt Zoller Seitz, writing for Vulture, about the new Twin Peaks:
We tell ourselves we’re all right with shows like Twin Peaks and artists like Lynch because hating everything that’s not a meat-and-potatoes linear narrative with traditional bits of foreshadowing and callbacks and payoffs is square, and nobody wants to be a square, daddy-o.
But the truth is, whenever any otherwise compelling popular TV artist throws us a truly startling curveball — as the creators of The Sopranos, Lost, and Battlestar Galactica did — the tendency is to proclaim that it was pretty good until it “jumped the shark” or “shat the bed” or otherwise stopped being good.
And when it becomes clear that a series isn’t terribly interested in narrative housekeeping, and in fact has to remind itself to give a damn about that kind of thing, the popular audience tends to run the other way, because they don’t know how to process it. Even now, shows tend to be a lot neater and clearer and less intuitive than Twin Peaks […] Neither the culture nor the media that covers the culture are equipped to deal with mainstream work that feels genuinely new.
I am so amped for the new Twin Peaks after reading this essay. Lynch gives not a care in the world about narrative convention, satisfying storytelling, or adherence to genre conventions. If Lynch’s past decade of work has been any indication, audiences (including myself) will struggle mightily to figure out what the heck they are watching. The titanic online industry that dissects and recaps television shows is about to hit a Lynch iceberg and the results will be glorious.
I can’t wait to witness it/be a part of it.
I often have difficulty falling asleep at night without the assistance of podcasts. Left to my own devices while lying in bed, I’ll start planning my next day, thinking about the future, or worse, pondering every terrible decision I’ve ever made.
So I listen to podcasts to lull me into a peaceful slumber. But not just any podcast will do. These “falling asleep” podcasts need to have certain characteristics:
So with all that said, what are the shows that I fall asleep to? Before I list them, I want to make clear: Just because I listen to these podcasts in this fashion, it doesn’t mean that I think any of these podcasts are “boring” in any way. They simply fulfill all of the curious and extremely specific characteristics I listed above.
Here they are:
Battleship Pretension — Tyler Smith and David Bax have been hosting this podcast for longer than I’ve been hosting the /Filmcast. They are extremely well-informed, articulate movie geeks, but they also speak with a lovely, calming cadence that I find ideal for provoking thought and also falling asleep to.
The Flop House — Elliott Kalan, Dan McCoy, and Stuart Wellington discuss films that are critical and commercial failures in an engaging and funny way.
The Accidental Tech Podcast — Marco Arment, John Siracusa, and Casey Liss cover weekly tech news from the perspective of those who are power users and skilled reviewers. My favorite component of this show: Siracusa’s and Arment’s extended rants.
The Bugle — Hosted by Andy Zaltzman and a rotating list of co-hosts, this podcast covers the week’s political news with a sense of humor that is drier than the Mojave. The show isn’t quite the same after John Oliver left to host Last Week Tonight, but Zaltzman himself is still a great talent.
**
I realize that many people listen to the above podcasts without falling asleep to them. I’d encourage this! But for me, they fulfill a very specific purpose in my life and I’m grateful for that.
I’ve been catching up on a lot of old podcasts recently and finally had a chance to listen to the StartUp podcast’s 7-episode arc on American Apparel (originally broadcast in late 2016).
It begins as a profile of Dov Charney, the founder and former CEO of American Apparel, who is trying to launch a new clothing business. But as it dives deeper and deeper into Charney’s history, it provides a level of detail and insight that goes beyond the headlines. Charney comes off as enterprising, sharp and hard-working, but also completely self-delusional and self-destructive.
There is some tape in this series that blew me away — several gut punches that I did not see coming. It was riveting. I think I enjoyed this series more than I did S-Town, which is widely regarded as a game-changer in terms of long-form podcast storytelling.
Producer and host Lisa Chow should be proud of what she accomplished here. I’ve linked to all 7 parts below.
You can also subscribe to the StartUp podcast on Apple Podcasts.
Christopher Orr, writing for The Atlantic:
A well-regarded hollywood insider recently suggested that sequels can represent “a sort of creative bankruptcy.” He was discussing Pixar, the legendary animation studio, and its avowed distaste for cheap spin-offs. More pointedly, he argued that if Pixar were only to make sequels, it would “wither and die.” Now, all kinds of industry experts say all kinds of things. But it is surely relevant that these observations were made by Ed Catmull, the president of Pixar, in his best-selling 2014 business-leadership book.
Yet here comes Cars 3, rolling into a theater near you this month. You may recall that the original Cars, released back in 2006, was widely judged to be the studio’s worst film to date. Cars 2, which followed five years later, was panned as even worse. And if Cars 3 isn’t disheartening enough, two of the three Pixar films in line after it are also sequels: The Incredibles 2 and (say it isn’t so!) Toy Story 4.
The painful verdict is all but indisputable: The golden era of Pixar is over. It was a 15-year run of unmatched commercial and creative excellence, beginning with Toy Story in 1995 and culminating with the extraordinary trifecta of wall-e in 2008, Up in 2009, and Toy Story 3 (yes, a sequel, but a great one) in 2010. Since then, other animation studios have made consistently better films. The stop-motion magicians at Laika have supplied such gems as Coraline and Kubo and the Two Strings. And, in a stunning reversal, Walt Disney Animation Studios—adrift at the time of its 2006 acquisition of the then-untouchable Pixar—has rebounded with such successes as Tangled, Wreck-It Ralph, Frozen, and Big Hero 6. One need only look at this year’s Oscars: Two Disney movies, Zootopia and Moana, were nominated for Best Animated Feature, and Zootopia won. Pixar’s Finding Dory was shut out altogether.
TL;DR: Pixar has lost its way artistically because it is now making a ton of sequels, and some of its recent movies haven’t been great.
I don’t really buy this argument for a few reasons. Firstly, the article itself acknowledges that Pixar has frequently figured out ways to make excellent sequels, best exemplified in the Toy Story series. Sure, Finding Dory and Monsters University were mediocre, but the concept of sequels is not inherently creatively bankrupt. Yes, the idea of Toy Story 4 fills me with dread, but I’m willing to take a wait and see approach to that film in the hopes that Pixar will find a good angle for it.
And secondly: Inside Out. That movie came out less than two years ago and is, by many accounts (including mine), a masterpiece. Any animation studio that can produce a film like that in its recent past still has something remarkable going for it.
I say let’s give it a few years and see how Coco turns out before we start making judgments.
Ryan Faughnder, writing for The LA Times:
Last summer, sequels to “Star Trek,” “X-Men,” “Independence Day,” “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” and “Alice in Wonderland” all performed worse than their predecessors.
Now, even though they could be poised for a repeat of that scenario, Hollywood studios are sticking with the same strategy. Why? At a time when the risks of failure in the movie business have become more costly, studios are still focusing their efforts on films that are perceived as safe bets, especially with overseas audiences that increasingly drive profits. Additionally, the movie business is notoriously slow to change course because of the time it takes to make big films. So, in some cases, it may be too late for studios to pull the plug on movies that already appear doomed long before they hit theaters.
“Man, this is depressing,” one prominent producer, speaking on condition of anonymity to protect studio relationships, said of the summer lineup. “It is just entirely sequels and franchises, and something’s got to give.”
The damage? An estimated 5-10% fewer ticket sales for the period between May and Labor Day, leading to possibly the worst sales revenue of the decade.
What’s fascinating to me are the institutional factors that continue to lead us into this era of non-stop comic book movies and franchises. No studio executive will ever get fired for greenlighting another Pirates film — the Pirates franchise has generated over $3.7 billion worldwide.
Valerian on the other hand…
I had a chance to see Ridley Scott’s new film, Alien: Covenant, last night and I wanted to share a few thoughts on the film:
I think Covenant is definitely strong enough to recommend it. I just wish its profound ideas were in a better film. I discuss my thoughts further in this Periscope broadcast.
Forrest Wickman, writing for Slate, on the recent trend of supervillains using elaborate PowerPoint presentations to explain their plans:
But lately many supervillains have been taking things to a whole new level. Like wannabe entrepreneurs, they’ve begun preparing their own pitch decks, complete with slides and videos and futuristic holograms. If Game of Thrones has “sexposition” (in which the show uses nudity to hold the viewer’s attention while delivering dry plot exposition), superhero movies have what I’d call “decksposition.” It’s no less shameless, and a lot more dull, because decks are a lot less sexy than sex […]
But it’s Marvel Studios that’s combined these threads to make the holographic infodump a summer-movie staple. It started with the Iron Man movies, where, given Tony Stark’s entrepreneurial streak, it at least felt more natural to the territory. It’s plausible that a huckster like Stark might recap the night of his parents’ death via a hologram presentation at an MIT Alumni Honors event, as he does in his co-starring role in Captain America: Civil War.
The hologram technology Stark uses (which in the real world is still at least a few years off), is a regular feature of the Iron Man franchise. But by Iron Man 3, the series’ villains had started delivering their own evil TED Talks. In that 2013 movie, Guy Pearce’s Aldrich Killian explains the fictional technology he will use to try to take over the country, via a holographic livestream of his brain.
A few points. I think that due to the rise of superhero films, we are in the midst of a “supervillain arms race,” whereby the villains in these movies need to have plans of increasing complexity.
FINALLY, someone (@screenjunkies) shows how logical Lex Luthor’s plan was in BvSuperman https://t.co/eXPQVfvMRJ pic.twitter.com/WberDGmxHZ
— David Chen (@davechensky) July 19, 2016
It follows that filmmakers would want to liven up the exposition a little bit. I’m not sure what a good solution is to this problem — just have less complex plans? Or make the telling of them less visually interesting? It’s a tough issue.
Also, Wickman was prompted to write this piece due to a similar scene in the new Guardians of the Galaxy, where the main villain uses a multimedia presentation to explain his plans. As I tried to argue in our review of that film, the villain at least a character-based motivation for doing that.