Hendog's Hollywood H-roundup, 9.20.22
Ezra Miller, 'Atlanta''s dual identity, the GTA VI hack, 'House of the Dragon' homophobia (?), and so much more!
If you’ve read this newsletter and/or known me for more than five minutes, you know that I have an opinion about absolutely everything. But not all opinions are worthy of their own 5000 word treatise (which I am so fond of accidentally doing)! Today I just want to get rid of these opinions in a loose, potpourri-style format I’m calling “Hendog’s Hollywood H-roundup”: in essence, all the entertainment-adjacent stuff I’ve read or watched or absorbed in the past week that, call me a narcissist, I think you might enjoy hearing about (and maybe even commenting on). As always, you are free to unsubscribe at any time!
👨🏼🎤 Ezra Miller ⚡️
Yikes! I’ve taken two graduate seminars this semester, one on the ‘Don’t Worry Darling’ press tour, the other on ‘Flash’ actor Ezra Miller’s two-year-long (currently on hiatus) crime spree/performance art project. I consider myself very learned on both. But this recent Vanity Fair story on Miller introduced even more fresh academia, including the time “Miller smoked marijuana, performed chaos magic, and played Call of Duty into the early morning” and, umm, a fairly consistent portrait of predation and technically criminal behavior.
Read the article and come to your own conclusions, obviously, but it’s clear to me Miller is grappling with… a whole CW teen soap’s worth of issues, most of which probably have their roots in mental illness. Certainly that’s what their mid-August press statement focused on. But at this point, I also find their weaponization of mental health deeply insulting. When you’ve assaulted multiple karaoke singers, broken into people’s homes, and absconded with children across state lines… you don’t get to scream “therapy!” like it’s base in a game of tag.
🎤 ‘Atlanta’: What *Is* ‘Atlanta’? 🍑
I side with many of the Vulture critics here in considering season three of the show a compelling but confused mess. On the one hand, Donald Glover and Co. swung for the fences with standalone episodes confronting whiteness in ways I (a white viewer) certainly hadn’t seen before; episodes rendered with an almost ‘Black Mirror’ discomfort I’ll probably think about for a long time. On the other hand, it basically forgot about all its characters besides Al/Paperboi (Brian Tyree Henry); Earn, Darius, and Val felt like afterthoughts in a season more focused on making Big Statements than rendering interesting, character-based stories.
We’re now two episodes into its fourth — and final — season and already ‘Atlanta’ has given Earn more to do than it did in an entire European tour. He’s having real conversations with Val! Going to therapy and confronting exactly what happened to him at Princeton (a question that’s been dangling since the pilot)! But I do wonder if, for some, ‘Atlanta’’s identity is now a matter of personal preference. Do you like the big swing ideas episodes, often completely detached from our main characters? Or are you invested in the relatively low-stakes, vibey dramedy of four people figuring it out in and around the ATL rap scene?
🧝🏻♀️ ‘Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power’ 💍
I want so badly to like this show. Amazon wants so badly for me to like this show, which they spent three quarters of a billion dollars to make. But — and I say this as someone who cheered on extended sequences of people walking in the Peter Jackson trilogy — this thing is just boring as shit. Pretty! Beyond pretty, with money you can see on the screen1. And offering notable, important casting progress with a roster that finally acknowledges, whatever “Tolkien purists” care to disclaim, the existence of Black people in Middle-Earth. But the racists are honestly wasting their tiki torch oil on this one, because the fact is there’s just no there there.
Watching ‘RoP’ just highlights for me what worked so well in the ‘Lord of the Rings’ movies: a homespun sensibility, often Kiwi-specific, that grounded its blockbuster moments (of which there were many!) in simple concerns, i.e. when Merry and Pippin would next be able to get high. You cared about these little hobbits, and dwarves, and elves, because the movies took care to humanize (a tricky verb given the species just described) everyone beyond the logistics of their Epic Mission™️. And that was in the span of three movies! (Yes, they were each 3+ hours long, but still.) ‘RoP’, slated for sixty episodes over five seasons, has way more tarmac at their disposal but seems so far ambivalent about all the little things that made ‘LotR’ sing. It’s like they built a skyscraper ($750 million show) and forgot to put in bathrooms (characters).
🎮 The GTA VI hack 💰
Over the weekend, an 18-year-old hacker tricked his way into Rockstar servers, downloaded several hours’ worth of game development footage, then shared his treasures to the world. The haul: video confirmation of Grand Theft Auto VI (6), possibly the most anticipated video game of all time. It has been nine years now since GTA V came out — already a lifetime in the real world (three presidents! TikTok! the term “cheugy”!); an eternity in the gaming one, during which ‘Assassin’s Creed’ and ‘Far Cry’ have put out something like twenty sequels each. So yeah, gamers have been frothing at the mouth for this one.
While Rockstar, understandably pissed, issued a statement condemning the hack, I can’t help but think… this is only good for them? Aside from the fact that, as the article points out, the whole episode feels like something lifted from the GTA universe itself, anticipation for this long-gestating game is now higher than it’s ever been. People desperately want to play it! That’s not going to change, even if someone used the source code and attempted to generate their own GTA clone (which would never work). This is not me endorsing hacking! Merely saying that, however unintentional, I’d call this a win.
🎥 Chloe Zhao pivots to TV 📺
As the line between film and TV grows increasingly blurred, I find myself banging the drum for more traditional definitions of both. There are things TV is great at — say, long-term character evolution; years, nay, decades-spanning stories — that feel less potent, or even possible in a movie. Conversely, you can fuel a 90 minute movie with sheer imagistic power — or hell, VIBES — that you’d scoff at as an engine for even a six-episode season of television.
Chloe Zhao is a FILM director. And a notably impressionistic one at that, her movies built around mood and feel (the aforementioned “vibes,” not a pejorative!) without much need for traditional Hollywood plot. So reading that Zhao will be making TV under a first-look deal, well… it just feels like a misunderstanding — and maybe misuse — of her filmmaking talents?
This is where I should be very clear that 1) wins for talented artists are wins across the board and 2) I can’t presume to know what motivates Zhao, or what her career aspirations might be. If I were her, I would absolutely be making that deal. (And maybe you’d be writing this Substack thread about me!) What I worry about is — and it’s not without precedent! — an entertainment culture that consistently takes our brightest indie lights and, without regard for their individual talents, swallows them up like the bathhouse monster in ‘Spirited Away’. Let Zhao (still conceding point two above) make ‘Nomadland’ and ‘The Rider’ and ‘Songs My Brother Taught Me’ forever! I want to see this woman’s big, wide-angle MOVIES, not the writers roomed interpretation of such.
[EDITOR’S NOTE: As with most concerns in my life, I am likely getting all worked up over nothing.]
🐉 Does ’House of the Dragon’ have a gay problem? 🏳️🌈
FULL SPOILERS here for the latest (read: 9.18.22) episode of ‘House of the Dragon’, a show made vastly better by the existence of ‘Rings of Power’. Princess Rhaenyra (Milly Alcock) has been coerced into marrying her cousin, Laenor Valaryon (Theo Nate), a union engineered by her father to preserve the Targaryen dynasty. Neither is that into it, romantically! Which makes sense — not for the cousin thing (totally normal in Westeros) but their respective sexual baggage. Rhaenyra wants to be with her knight consort, Ser Criston Cole (Fabian Frankel); Laenor wants to be with his knight consort, Ser Joffrey Lonmouth (Solly McLeod). Who you might surmise is a man.
Anyway, the mutually assured bearding looks like it might actually work for both parties, given there’s no escaping the kingdom’s patriarchal, heteronormative dictates. Their little quadrangle could even be weirdly… sweet, in its own way? That is until Criston gets mad and beats Joffrey to death, bashing his skull in and putting a bit of a damper on the wedding festivities. Later, Rhaenyra and Laenor, still fighting back tears, will be wed mere feet from blood and brain matter that have yet to be properly cleaned up. There has never been a happy wedding day in Westeros!
All of this felt pretty standard-issue ‘Game of Thrones’ (even compelling TV, I’ll admit) until a friend highlighted what it felt like for him, a gay man, watching one more gay character be — quite literally — gay-bashed in a way that felt excessive and unnecessary. This GQ article echoed as much, calling out the show for its lazy use of an outdated, painful trope. Narratively, I’d hesitate to say this…well, brutal scene of violence was motivated by homophobia. Laenor could have had a mistress and I think Criston would have reacted the same way (though likely not murdered the woman on a dance floor); to me, this was about heartbreak, not hatred. Still, none of this changes the imagery on display, or series-wide track record, and it’s (obviously!) worth listening when someone tells you they were disgusted by something, even if you weren’t.
‘Reboot’: A streaming comedy held down by its network roots
“I watch shows so you don’t have to!” could, given my recent output, be as good a Lifting Fog slogan as any, so let’s just keep it up and talk about ‘Reboot’, a new Hulu comedy. Not to be confused with first-of-its-kind CGI-animated 1994 animated show ‘ReBoot’, ‘Reboot’ (note the lowercase “b”) follows the cast and creators of a decades-old sitcom now being rebooted for the streaming era, with more Hulu-style quiet drama and less ABC-style sitcom shenanigans.
It’s an interesting, incredibly meta premise (the show-within-a-show is ON Hulu; references are made to ‘Fuller House’, ‘iCarly’, and a bevy of other very real “rebooted” shows) brought to life by a frankly stacked cast, including the second-best character on ‘American Vandal’.
But three episodes in, ‘Reboot’ feels caught between what it thinks it should be as a streamer (i.e. occasionally sad, and peppered with “fuck”s) and its clear network DNA. Which… makes sense when you learn it was co-created by Steve Levitan: one of the guys behind ‘Modern Family’, aka network TV’s last true comedy behemoth2. That pedigree is good and bad! Levitan has too much experience for this show to not be watchable -- sometimes very watchable -- with solid, if predictable jokes. But there's a "have your cake and eat it too" conundrum at work here. 'Reboot' wants to be edgier, realer than the network sitcoms it lampoons but seems (so far!3) unable to jettison their trappings: the setups and punchlines, the pratfalls, the wordplay. In some ways, 'Reboot' is a perfect sitcom; I understand these characters -- and their problems -- to be almost mathematically correct, in a narrative and comedic sense. But I just don't believe them.
Marvel should take notes!
This and ‘The Big Bang Theory’, probably
which is the same caveat I’d thrown in for ‘Rings of Power’, ‘House of the Dragon’, ‘Atlanta’, all the currently airing shows I’ve talked about today