All Bangers, All The Time, Vol. 2
más hot recsssss
Content Comrades,
How do YOU feel about the Daniels, the bombastic directing duo behind the video for Turn Down for What and the new A24 hit (?!) Everything, Everywhere, All At Once? I won't tell you which New York indie darling absolutely lit into me for liking their debut movie, Swiss Army Man, but it’s a strain of criticism popping up among a few people I like…
And while the Daniels' work may seem over-caffeinated & Sundance labs-y (twee, psychologically simple, eye-catching in a way that feels like advertising etc. etc.)… call me a rube, but I've found all their stuff to be, at a minimum, so fucking fun. Seeing Everything at a packed house at the Laemmle Pasadena, my crowd went apeshit for a collection of fight scenes I couldn't begin to describe. As a kung-fu-y romp, it rivals John Woo, The Matrix, and Kill Bill. Overall it’s an exhilarating/exhausting experience of sensory overload. There were stretches —I couldn't tell you when — when I wasn't sure what the hell was going on and was questioning the whole enterprise.
But by the end, I had a lot of feelings — to a point where I feel like these guys are both emotionally earnest & really know what they’re doing. Because much like the climax of their first movie, this one builds to a grown ass person looking at their aging parent in a state of vivid shame, wanting to be absolved of their shortcomings, to be healed by unconditional love. The twist in this movie is that you can empathize just as much with the parent who hasn’t given it yet.
Further recs. First, the the buzzy stuff...
—Rothaniel - Jerrod Carmichael's special on HBOMax - Even better than I heard it was. If by some miracle you haven't heard much, just watch it cold.
—Severance - Ben Stiller's limited series on Apple - A wickedly sharp satire about working in an office and the compartmentalization required. It's also such a fucking tease. I recommend it, because I'm psyched for season two, but I want a little less elegant implication and a little more story.
And for slightly deeper cuts...
—"Look At What We're Doing With Your Money, You Dick" How Peter Thiel Backed An "Anti-Woke" Film Festival - Buzzfeed - This is not, as Buzzfeed's title would suggest, another news item from the gutter of the internet about internet culture. It's really a profile of a talented person who had reached his wit's end and made a deal with a devil. A strange heartbreaker.
—"Content Influences Everything": Kevin Mayer and Michael Kassan on New Media's Roadmap - Variety podcast - An interview with Kevin Mayer, the guy who massively overpaid for Reese and Will Smith's production companies. Recorded live at SXSW, it's a rare glimpse at the insane chessboard underneath Hollywood (whose players I call The Infinite Money People). He has a plan: to combine the companies into one studio and then sell. And he's very, very convincing... in bursts… until you remember his buyers — hype-men in private equity, temporary custodians of tech goliaths who just wanna party, investment bankers who get paid no matter what — are probably even less sober. And if that’s not enough, the other interview subject is "a connector" who sold his company to $125MM to UTA. Him, I can't figure out... but I was once in touch with an employee of his, who was as glib as you'd expect based on this article.
—Celine Sciamma's Quest For A New, Feminist Grammar Of Cinema - funny genius Elif Batuman in The New Yorker, gushing over the director of Portrait of a Lady on Fire - "Perhaps the most destabilizing aspect of the #MeToo revelations was learning that the movies themselves—which I had taken to be reflections of universal aesthetic norms, maybe even of biological or ‘hardwired’ realities—were largely the imaginative products of a small group of sex criminals."
—All My Friends Hate Me - movie probably not in theaters anymore - a good British comedy that lives in the gaps that have formed between a group of old friends at a reunion. It's an expert harnessing of genre tropes to pick apart something human & hard to articulate. The filmmakers/cast are also involved in Stath Lets Flats, which some cool comedy kids told me to watch. That show lives up. Gets better in newer seasons.
Hollywood Forever Y'all,
Max