johnke.meThis is such a lovely way of displaying old magazines. Seeing the ebb and flow of the page sizes as their subject reaches and then recedes from its zenith. Byte was 90% advertising but with enough time, even those are fascinating artifacts.
The most thrilling bad movie I’ve seen. The racing is savage and a legitimate technical marvel. Not just from a “how did they get that shot?” point of view, but also from a narrative coherency point of view. The two leads are driving identical cars moving across the screen at crazy speeds and yet the every shot is completely legible. By the time we make it to the final race, the filmmakers are using shots of gloves to do invisible cross-cutting between the two leads to show the synergy between them and it all works and I was never once confused. I can’t overemphasise how much this part of the film impressed me.
Unfortunately, everything that isn’t actual racing is incredibly poor. Blockbuster cellulose is rarely great but this is noteworthy for how unexpectedly weak it is. The screenplay is a grab-bag of narrative cliches and those poor, unfortunate actors are asked to say some phenomenally ridiculous things. It’s a screenplay stuck in fifth gear, full of things that sound great when said in the middle of an adrenaline-fueled set-piece but so stupid anywhere else. Lines like “The question is, do they have the car?” “We have the driver” are great in the context of a film’s emotional climax, but “I’m offering you an open seat in Formula One, the only place you could say if you win, you are the absolute best in the world” — supposedly the film’s emotional call to action — is like nails down a blackboard for me and even the great Javier Bardem struggles to deliver it with any kind of heft. When we get the callback to this line at the end of the movie, it actually takes some of the air out of an otherwise joyous moment. And don’t even get me started on the constant “miracle” bullshit they keep returning to that feels like it’s from baby’s first screenplay.
I will say though (and I might be biased here) that Kerry Condon is the only person who can take the words and make them sound entertaining. Or at least, she was skilled enough to cut through the nonsense with a little bit of edge that they needed. Fair play, Kerry.
Also this film is (rightly) compared to Kosinski’s earlier film, Top Gun: Maverick, a film that was (rightly) criticised for its glamourisation of the U.S. military industrial complex. Well, let me tell you, I’d be hard pressed to choose which one I find more grotesque — that or F1® The Movie’s glamourisation of absolutely obscene wealth. Actually gross.
I’m a big believer in nostalgia as a form of self-soothing and this site is an incredible example of it. Currently working with 80s cartoons on the other screen and it’s bringing me a tremendous amount of peace.
sickos.jpg YES… HA HA HA… YES!
Since the rise of LLMs, the number of personal blogs I’ve been subscribing to has exploded. People are actually writing for other people again and not just for SEO bullshit and I love it.
I wasn’t a fan of Zach Cregger’s previous horror film Barbarian, which I thought was a weak piece of social commentary and a tonal disaster. I’m happy to say that Weapons was much more my cup of tea. It’s tighter and its themes are more cohesive (bonus points for releasing a horror movie in the 2020s where the theme is not just “trauma”). It takes some cojones to start a script from a place of “but what if the Blair Witch was an actual character in the film?” and I’m not saying he nailed it, but he got impressively close.
There was just one brief moment where I thought we were heading into Longlegs territory and, I swear, I sighed so hard, I deflated a little in the cinema. But fortunately it turns out to be more Ruth Gordon in Rosemary’s Baby than Longlegs. Phew.
A perfect follow-up to the Travis Kalanick interview from a couple of weeks ago where he talks about pushing the boundaries of quantum physics using a chatbot and “vibe physics”.
It’s astonishing how, coming so quickly after Delirious, you can see the Hollywood (read: fame/drugs) kicking in. This is angrier, more out of touch. “You know when your woman be going to the Bahamas?” No, Eddie.
I’d say it’s more focused than Delirious but that’s just because the first hour is one breathless dose of coked-up misogyny.
Still, there are moments of pure electricity here. As a teenager, the Bill Cosby bit was the funniest thing I’d ever heard and learned it off by heart. Plus it gave us Kanye’s Gold Digger and the Carlton dance so regardless of anything else, its cultural impact is unquestionable.
Graphite is a rust-based vector editor. It’s only a web app right now (desktop apps coming later this year) but tbqh sometimes I’m just doing something so quick that it doesn’t need more than this. Handy!
A really lovely talk by graphic designer Chip Kidd about the thought process behind some of the book covers he’s designed, like Jurassic Park and IQ84. He’s such a character! I loved this.