Too Many Cooks gave us too much credit for coherent imagination.

The Friday Article Roundup: The Next Generation

Posted By on in | Leave a response

The New Crop Go-Getters Brings Us:

  • toilets with heads
  • bad horror movies
  • a tornado sequel
  • a forgotten comedy
  • music that will change your life!

If any of you can be bothered send articles throughout the next week to ploughmanplods [at] gmail, post articles from the past week below for discussion, and Have a Happy Friday!

All hail the plans for a franchise based around the primary interest of Young People These Days – a video series about toilets with human heads:

Alexey Gerasimov, the creator behind “Skibidi Toilet,” is working with leading independent Hollywood entertainment studio, Invisible Narratives, to expand the YouTube Shorts series into myriad product lines and a potential television and movie franchise similar to the Marvel universe or Transformers, executives involved with the project told The Washington Post. “I’ve always been a director that believes in taking risks,” filmmaker Michael Bay, who is working on the project with Invisible Narratives as chief creative adviser, told The Post. “Audiences yearn for fresh, new ideas. With Skibidi, it’s a new world of what the younger generation is watching, and I’m taking it very seriously.” […] [CEO Adam] Goodman said this has allowed young people to feel a sense of ownership over the franchise. “They get to create their own sense of nostalgia for it,” he said. “They’re not inheriting it from their grandparents, or being told, oh you’re going to love Twister because I saw it back in the 90s when I was in high school. They discovered [Skibidi Toilet], it’s theirs.”

Good thing there’s new blood coming along, because Film Comment‘s Nathan Lee is here to inform us that this year’s horror movie crop sucks:

For all its twists and turns, Longlegs is more adept at conjuring an aura of complexity than actually being complex. A climactic exposition dump is as corny as the third-act fiasco of MaXXXine (a ludicrous reveal of the serial killer’s identity), and the pervasive stylistic quirks—timeline shifts, tranced-out longueurs spiked with smash cuts, narrative cul-de-sacs—are less compelled by any storytelling imperative than by Perkins’s emphatic formalism. But moody as it is, Longlegs is having an awful lot of fun with its material. How seriously, really, can we take a movie that enlists glam-rock legends T. Rex as handmaidens to Satan?

Josh Rosenberg talks to a meteorologist about the questionable science in Twisters:

The one big takeaway I would like to be made known is that you can’t destroy a tornado. That is fiction. I get emails from people claiming they can do ridiculous things, or that they have figured out tornadoes because of the tide and the moon and all kinds of really bizarre things. They seriously think they’ve got it. You never know what some yahoo is going to try to do in the name of science. So I guess I want that to be clear.

Slate‘s Dan Kois revisits a one time cult hit now difficult-to-find South African comedy sensation:

When I told a friend I was revisiting The Gods Must Be Crazy 40 years later, he said, “Oh, I remember that movie! It must be totally racist.” It really is. It’s also a fascinating artifact, and one that spread myths that persist even today. Made by a white director with funding from the apartheid government yet starring an unusually diverse cast, reverent of Indigenous traditions while deeply patronizing of its Indigenous main character, The Gods Must Be Crazy delivered an idealized, false picture of South Africa into the international marketplace. It highlighted the centuries-old Khoisan culture while misrepresenting and seeming to exploit the Khoisan actor at its center. Once one of the most popular movies in South Africa’s history, it’s now seldom discussed in the country and unavailable on either of the nation’s two primary streaming networks. And in America, where theaters once played it so long they wore out the film, it might as well be invisible—if you’d like to watch it, you’ll need to buy a DVD, if you can imagine.

At The Ringer, Matthew Jacobs digs into the history of one of cinema’s most famous soundtracks, the one for Zach Braff’s directing debut Garden State:

Braff: I think the script must have said, “This song will change your life,” and I just knew I had to find a killer song. How do you pick a song that’s going to work for the highest percentage of the audience? It’s a really tricky thing to do. […]

Mercer: I was just thrilled. I thought it was the coolest thing. I’m from Albuquerque, New Mexico, and it felt like some tentacle from the outside world had reached in and touched us. I don’t recall there being a vivid description of [how the song would be used]. Certainly there was no mention of Natalie Portman. It was a terrific surprise when it was a hit movie and famous people were in it and it wasn’t just another indie movie that kind of disappears.

Braff: I just knew that that song in the right place could really work. People just really, really fell in love with the Shins, just like I did. […]

Mercer: It changed my life.