Finally got to White Noise on Netflix (Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, directed by Noah Baumbach): This is a weird and surreal movie, interesting but at times stylized to the point of being exhausting. I enjoyed it, although I’m not sure I can fully recommend it.
But the end credits dance scene is incredible and completely mesmerizing. For some reason this official clip does NOT include the overlaid credits as seen at the end of the film.
Read the book recently, thought it was good. No real interest in the film version.
Guillermo del Toro and Stephen King are both saying the Dracula on a boat movie is very good.
Last week’s Foundation episode was finally good, and this week’s was bad again. I think this has helped clarify some things. Last week’s episode had no Salvor or Hari or Gaal; this episode had lots of Salvor and Hari and Gaal. Minutes into this episode, as they’re descending onto Ignis and AAH oh no there’s ions in the atmosphere, it’s fucking with the ship’s electronics, we’re going down for a crash landing AAAHHH I realized how completely fucking bored I was. They do this every episode! Any time Salvor and Gaal are on-screen the show is putting them in some life-or-death situation (last time we saw them they were doing the same escape-by-the-skin-of-their-teeth bullshit from the desert planet), and this happens so often that it has destroyed any sense of them being high-stakes. Putting these characters into some dangerous spot now just makes me yawn and wish they’d get on with it, because 3 times per episode now we’re watching them wriggle their way out of another one and it’s utterly meaningless. There’s nothing interesting happening to these characters, there’s no story being driven forward, they’re just jaunting around the fucking galaxy to find danger and get out of it and repeat.
I can’t imagine the books did these characters so dirty so I guess the show just doesn’t know what to do with them? Very disappointing.
RE: White Noise… Like McT, I read the book recently, but unlike him, went ahead and watched the movie.
I can see why the movie is polarizing. It’s based on a book that falls squarely into the “post-modern” genre and as such intentionally plays with structure, characters, pacing, etc.
Personally I liked the movie, and thought they did a good job of hanging onto the main theme of the book – death and how people deal with the knowledge of their own (and others’) certain ultimate demise – while also translating the “post-modernness” to film.
I also thought Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, Don Cheadle, and the various supporting actors did well, and I liked watching their interpretations of the characters.
And yeah, the final credits dance scene was awesome. Fans of LCD Soundsystem should seek it out.
Oh good! Trailers look solid.
Haven’t even seen the trailer yet, the tweets and memes surrounding this movie are enough to get me hyped.
The folks at An Injustice published my review of The English! 
The English Cooks Westerns Like The Bear Cooks Kitchen Dramas
Yeah, after the last couple weeks I can’t recommend Foundation anymore. The writing on this show sucks. Now that we’ve had two episodes ending with
Hari “dying” and then Salvor “dying” even though we all know something’s gonna happen to bring them back (oh, wait, there’s already another Hari alive and kicking anyway!)
we’re entering
territory, and that’s on top of the cringe royal marriage stuff. It’s a shame since the books are supposed to be GOAT sci-fi and season 1 seemed promising, but they have no clue where they’re taking this ship.
I read the books but haven’t seen the show. But if you wanted to do the books accurately at least once a season there would be a time jump with a mostly new cast of characters.
Time jump in tact but with sleep suspension, Hari wtf, clones, and a robot….
Caught an unusually high number of movies recently.
First up was 2001: A Space Odyssey, which I made MrsWookie watch after she didn’t get the reference in Everything Everywhere All at Once. She had actually forgotten that scene by the time we watched the original, so that was a miss. She generally liked it up until Jupiter: Beyond the Infinite, which is fair. But, any disappntment in the ending vanished when we caught Barbie and she could understand the opening scene.
Barbie itself was enjoyable. My main criticism is that the writing felt like they had an outline where they wanted to hit points ABCDEF and G, but there wasn’t enough thought or exposition put in for how we got between certain points. Primarily, there doesn’t seem to be any real reason why stating the paradoxes real world women have to live would snap a Barbie out of a patriarchal trance, when the Barbies all had zero experience or understanding of those paradoxes. It felt like a valid feminist argument was shoehorned into becoming a plot device with no reason for it to work as such. Relatedly, [the motivation for the cental Barbie wanting to become human was more due to Mater Ex Machina than it was motivated by her journey through the story. On the other hand, some points like Ken wanting patriarchy, and the Kens fighting each other, all made sense in the context of the story.. A minor thing, The Mattel board felt wasted. Their infiltration of Barbieland was basically meaningless. However, I suppose the real Mattel board would not sign off on the Barbies and Kens finding common ground to rise up against the capatalist corporate board, so there wasn’t any real role for the board to play. On the whole, though, the jokes landed, Kate McKinnon was amazing as always, and it was hard to tell whether Simu Liu or Ryan Reynolds liked playing their roles more. Worth a watch, but I don’t think I would re-watch it.
We caught Oppenheimer before Barbie, actually, and we both thought it was amazing. I would like to give a special shout out to Josh Harnett’s fantastic mane, which surely will grant him a spot in the Hollywood Hair Hall of Fame even if just for this movie alone. Even in the parts where they tried to age him and gray those locks, the neatly combed strands of folicular vivacity stole the scene.
Tell me you have a PhD without telling me you have a PhD lol
Really a great phrase well done
LOLOLOL DAVID ZASLAV LOLOLOL
https://x.com/variety/status/1696931488519082304?s=46&t=XGja5BtSraUljl_WWUrIUg
“let’s put this network with rapidly declining viewership and shitty programming behind a larger paywall, that’ll work”
The level of corporate brain rot the culture of quarterly reporting has created is truly staggering.
A few things I know to be true:
The best CEO’s pretty much always started their career at the company they run. They’ve spent 20+ years at that company working in that business (or they started it) and they already have solid reads and a working relationship with almost every important stakeholder in the organization. Any scenario where this isn’t the case what you’re looking at is a complete teardown of the companies management team, and there are exactly zero good situations where that needs to happen.
This means that there is no ‘market’ for CEO’s. The person you’re going to have be your next CEO shouldn’t be able to go be the CEO of some other company, that other company has a much better internal candidate they have 20+ years of history on. So it stands to reason that these most senior leaders of the company should make more money than the median employee at the company, but we’re talking at most a 5-10M a year job and that’s to run Disney.
Instead what we have is corporate decision making made based on how it will impact this quarters numbers (so that the CEO doesn’t get fired) and the quarter the CEO plans to exit (to maximize the value of the CEO’s exit package). That’s not an ideal way to set company goals for pretty much anyone but a very small group of insiders…
And we have tons and tons of CEO’s of major companies getting hired from the outside for insane money and then failing spectacularly. Nobody remembers Ron Johnson’s tenure at JC Penny? Let’s go more recent I have no idea where David Zaslav bubbled up from but it was clearly an idiot factory. The number of times a company has tried to hire some outsider to come and shake things up only to get a complete dumpster fire… and everyone thinks it will work for them. Everyone. Every time.
A take I’ve been workshopping is that the job of CEO has changed over time from being good at running the business you are in charge of, to being good at siphoning money out of the business you are in charge of to return to shareholders. Since the stakes involved are in the many billions of dollars for large companies, this justifies exorbitant pay packages for corporate raiders who will cut costs and fight labor to spend more on stock buybacks and make Wall Street happy.
Making Wall Street happy is all well and good, but every company has a few bastards on the payroll who would be perfectly happy to do this (why is it always the VP of Ops?). In fact they probably have a much better idea about what nonessential to the business stuff they could cut without doing any real harm to the companies long term prospects than any outsider ever could.
What’s really going on is that there’s this weird subculture of people who sit on boards, executive compensation consultants, and ‘qualified’ CEO candidates where everyone gets rich together trading on the current management teams exit date. It’s not even about keeping Wall Street happy, it’s about leveraging their power over the company to extract as much value from it as they can. Wall Street comes into this mostly by being apathetic to how much money is being wasted because it’s nearly always good for the price of the stock this quarter.
This is one of the major reasons I’m so heavy on BRK. That just isn’t how they operate in any way shape or form and I think as good an investor as WB is a lot of his outperformance is due to BRK subsidiaries having very different incentives vs publicly traded corporations.
Just one example of what I mean: the recent hazmat rail disaster in Ohio was due to cost cutting measures imposed by the railroad to extract maximum profits without any regard whatsoever to the long term health of the industry, workforce retention, etc. Very obvious that cutting down staffing and safety procedures on hazmat rail is fucking dumb because of the potential for generating a 10 figure cleanup bill (the railroad got lucky the town they poisoned was in a place where houses are worth 150k and there aren’t very many of them vs say in Pittsburgh 41 miles away).
The only railroad that isn’t doing Precision Scheduled Railroading is BNSF. BNSF is also investing vastly more money into assets than any other railroad. That’s because BNSF was purchased by BRK to serve as a cash sink. They didn’t just buy the company because they thought it was a good business at a good price, they bought it because it represented the opportunity to invest vast sums of fairly difficult to allocate money at a rate of return they find acceptable.
In one scenario you have ‘shareholders’ demanding that ever more money be extracted from the business regardless of what that will do to its long term viability or risk profile and in the other you have the money people literally paying cash for a company almost entirely so they can pour even more money into it.
If you think long term and everyone else is thinking extremely short term you have a large edge in late stage 2023 capitalism. The problem we’re seeing now is that the generation of business leaders currently in charge mostly got rich doing financial engineering to do at best value neutral shenanigans that increased their personal wealth at the expense of customers, employees, and shareholders if you take a view longer than 90 days.
So much of this can be attributed to the University of Chicago economics department and the drivel they teach in MBA programs it’s not even funny. What I’m very sure of is that nearly all of it is bullshit exists designed to cover for the people at the top of society systematically looting everyone else justified by a worldview where because markets are efficient absolutely blind greed is purely virtuous instead of being both immoral and very suboptimal for actually making the economic pie bigger.
One more obvious example and then I’ll stop derailing the thread. The current strikes in the entertainment industry are INCREDIBLY FUCKING STUPID from the perspective of the film/tv producers. They are, easily, the least essential people to the entire process. Other creative industries already are moving toward having major stars/creators essentially function as the producer/CEO of their own work. Taylor Swift probably netted a billion dollars this year with her tour.
Steven Spielberg is worth 4 billion dollars and he’s not the only Hollywood creative being blocked out of working so ‘the shareholders’ can get even more of the proceeds of his work with enough money to do his next project on his own dime and risk less than 10% of his net worth.
There are tons of rich people in the world looking for investment opportunities and all of the people you have to have are on the other side of the picket lines from the studios. They should have done what UPS did, given their unions a win on this contract cycle, and immediately moved on. Instead they decided the show would not go on if that meant paying writers and actors the kind of money they’ve always been paid.
The cost/difficulty of marketing has gone down dramatically over the last 20 years. The cost/difficulty of the technology it takes to make a movie has gone down dramatically over the last 20 years. The cost/difficulty of distributing the content has never been lower. Just about all the streaming platforms have done is build fairly shitty moats around pools of customers paying money monthly for content. If the content creators decide they want to get paid by the fans directly Louis CK already conclusively proved that the money gets better not worse for putting up with that hassle.
At a time when the very reasons (besides the always very important inertia) for their businesses to exist are questionable they have decided to put their foot down and refuse to negotiate a remotely sane pay deal with the people who are only still in bed with them because it would be really inconvenient to leave.
And all of this so that all of these companies crush their 3Q and 4Q net profit numbers for 2023. They’re currently salivating about the bonuses they will get for months of subscription fees without months of content creation costs. That is the level that the top of corporate America is operating on 8/31/2023. That and putting CNN news alerts on my screen when I try to watch something on HB fucking O.
