Reading, Watching, Listening 10/25/2024

A few words about dangerous times

Rap World

As I’m sitting down to write this (slightly delayed) Friday update, I’m reading NPR’s report about the Washington Post declining to endorse a presidential candidate for the first time in 36 years. This is reportedly because the paper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, is worried about the status of his government contracts should Trump win. That’s pretty bad in my opinion. Not that newspaper endorsements mean much, but of course it’s not about the endorsement. We’re all adults here, we understand what’s going on. Over at the Los Angeles Times, the editorials editor Mariel Garza resigned in protest, along with others, over their billionaire owner stepping in to stop a Kamala Harris endorsement. Not great! “In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up. This is how I’m standing up,” Garza told Columbia Journalism Review. That’s the correct attitude.

It’s nice to know at least some people have principles.

---

This week on the newsletter was all Late Eastwood, with a look at American Sniper, which I found fascinating and frustrating, and Sully, which I adored.

Late Eastwood #4: American Sniper

Late Eastwood #5: Sully

Next week I’ll be going hard, tackling The 15:17 to Paris, The Mule, Richard Jewell and Cry Macho, followed of course by the big capper, Juror #2, which is, thankfully, being released theatrically in Toronto. Of course, those are all for paid subscribers only, so you know what to do.

---

Reading, Watching, Listening

• “The Future of Film May Just Be Old Movies”, by Abe Beame over at The Ringer was a great read this week. A lengthy, in-depth look at the apparent boom in repertory cinemagoing, something I’ve written about more locally, but which has become a thing in numerous other cities and towns. Abe unpacks, from all kinds of angles, the place old movies have in cinemas, and why audiences, particularly younger ones, seem to be gravitating toward seeing older films on the big screen.

• “On Oppenheimer: Christopher Nolan’s Moral Stance” is an essay by Japanese novelist Keiichiro Hirano that I came across this week. Indeed, what I read is only a translation of parts 10 through 16 of a 16-part essay published in the literary magazine Shincho. In the essay, Hirano straightforwardly and methodically unpacks Nolan’s moral approach to cinema and narrative, looking at several of his films, including the thorny Dark Knight trilogy, as a means of understanding Oppenheimer. It’s excellent work, and particularly interesting given the writer is Japanese, and he does specifically address how Japanese people might relate to the film.

• The films of Lucio Fulci have been getting some love over at the Revue Cinema here in Toronto this week, and I’ve been checking out a bunch of them, like City of the Living Dead, and The Beyond, and I’ve really been getting a kick out of their whole dreamy, gory, Euro, bizarro thing. If that sounds good to you and you don’t already know about Fulci, do check out his films. Several are on Shudder, and I’m sure you can find some on Tubi.

• Rap World isn’t something I’ve been watching this week (I saw it at a screening just before TIFF last month), but Conner O’Malley just dropped it on YouTube. It’s about three friends in the suburbs in 2009 getting together to record a rap album. It is absolutely hilarious. Watch it.