This Week You Will Be Smitten With or By:

• rom-coms
• an Acme anvil
• a savvy streamer
• a blue heeler
• memoirs
• jammin’!

More than one love to Miller for contributing this week! Send articles throughout the next to ploughmanplods [at] gmail, post articles from the past week below for discussion, and Have a Happy Friday!

The new Bob Marley biopic is having trouble getting even one love from critics. Robert Daniels has a typical reaction at rogerebert.com:

Before the film began, a video message from Ziggy Marley, Bob Marley’s son, played: He promised this would be an “authentic depiction” of his father. When it comes to art I despise “authenticity,” which by the very nature of the word immediately presumes the existence of a definitive truth. I would rather have a sincere picture, a film interested in the knottiness of a person and the complexity of the life they lived. “One Love” lacks that kind of rhythm, spark, and vitality–the kind that gave Marley’s soulful music its bounce.

At The Spool, Sarah Gorr unpacks the rom-com’s fantasy of the amicable breakup:

In Sleepless in Seattle, we have one of the clearest and most memorable amicable breakups of all time, but also one that is often severely misinterpreted. Annie (Meg Ryan) is head over heels for Sam (Tom Hanks), or perhaps more accurately, his voice on the radio when she hears him on a late-night call-in show. She’s on a mission to meet him, obsessed less with the man himself than with the idea of what could be. So when she realizes that she must end things with sweet, slightly dopey fiancé Walter (Bill Pullman), the audience is prepared for heartbreak only to discover that Walter… gets it. Looking out at the Empire State Building, where Annie has asked Sam to meet her, Walter says gently, “So he could be up there right now,” expressing a level of optimism even Annie can’t bring herself to utter aloud.

Paul Thompson at The Ringer speaks on the parallels of the latest movie killed by Warner’s tax law gamesmanship and that movie’s star:

Coyote Vs. Acme is not some bizarre, divisive, or difficult passion project. It’s an all-ages comedy about the most recognizable characters a studio has ever created that has a hook (Who Framed Roger Rabbit meets Erin Brockovich or whatever) that could compel adults. But we have somehow arrived at a place where the production history of a Looney Tunes movie starring a former wrestler is now emblematic of art’s struggle against corporate greed. […] This is an extreme example, to be sure, yet still clarifies the precarity and seeming impermanence of art in the streaming era. To the extent that those streaming platforms have become the de facto media libraries for so many, individuals have ceded to rights holders and corporations control over their collections of movies and music, which can be shrunk or radically altered on the first of any given month. For decades, things have fallen out of print and become obscure, and axing something before its release, as Warner seems ready to do with Coyote Vs. Acme, is reminiscent of the way studios could control what was available in decades past. But today, Warner and its competitors are free to play this out over and over—able to yank things out of circulation at will. In the past, they never could have reached into your home and scooped up your DVD copy of The Spy Who Shagged Me.

As American streamers figure things out, rest of the world‘s Damilare Dosunmu reports on an African service that’s as been kicking their asses for years:

“In the last few years, Showmax has over-indexed on local content and they are clearly seeing the long-term impact of that strategy,” film industry investor and tech entrepreneur Jason Nkoju told Rest of World. “It’s a volume game, which the global streaming companies don’t fully seem to comprehend. I guess they will understand that now. The mass market prefers [its] own content.” When filmmaker Tobechukwu Ejiofor pitched a documentary idea to Showmax executives, they helped him develop it further, he told Rest of World, highlighting the company’s close involvement with African creators. Showmax also introduced Ejiofor to another filmmaker, Daro Umaigba, who was researching the same topic, and arranged a meeting between the two in Lagos. The company persuaded them to work together, Ejiofor and Umaigba told Rest of World, and the meeting eventually led to Freemen, a docuseries about how the Igbos, one of Nigeria’s largest ethnic groups, use a unique apprenticeship system to build generational wealth. The show premiered as a Showmax original this month.

Kathryn VanArendonk considers what makes adults lose their shit at Bluey for Vulture:

Bluey’s details are so carefully drawn: their family car full of stickers and crumbs and wrappers, the way a kid’s voice sounds when she complains about something small, the moment a parent completes enough of a kid game that they can quietly look at their phone. Bluey hits in the same way really great observational comedy hits: We are struck by the sensation of everyday life being reflected back to us in a way that makes it newly visible and newly appreciated. It’s overwhelming to feel seen.

In Bookforum, Jamie Hood reviews Blake Butler’s memoir of his wife Molly Brodak, and what a memoir can and can’t capture:

Even a diary—and certainly, a writer’s diary, with its expectation or hope of posthumous publication—is written toward an audience. In the case of Brodak’s journal, Butler ventures that she intentionally withheld damaging information from it and left it out for him to discover. “Oddly,” he writes, “her personal writing never mentioned her affairs in any way, the same way that her suicide note had steered around them, too, along with so many other traces of the truth.” His unacknowledged faith that there exists some single, biohistorical truth—always, of course, just over there—sustains Butler’s memoiristic energy but his failure to hook it or to make peace with its more frighteningly possible nonexistence generates the book’s more subterranean, textural points of psychic friction. Who was Molly, really? Why had she done this? How do we make meaning from meaninglessness? These are only further snags in the tapestry.