Early 2024 POST-Pourri!
We're talking 'Mr. and Mrs. Smith', we're talking 'Argylle', we're talking NFL-branded relationships, we're talking SCAMMERS
Hi! It’s been months. As always happens after one of these extended breaks, I’m skittish on what to ‘Stack: a long-form piece about Lyft driving (“Lyfting Fog”)? Snippets of screenwriting efforts, some “window into the creative process” behind the manifold brilliant projects for which I have yet to be paid? Feet pics?
I hope to one day publish ALL those things but for this first Lifting Fog of 2024, in an effort to get my newsletter-ing legs back… we’re just gonna free-associate. Enjoy this smattering of random thoughts and opinions! Or don’t!
RIP ‘This Fool’
You may remember me singing the praises of this comedy back in Summer 2022. Did you know it had a second season that premiered last July? If you weren’t already watching, probably not! Hard to promote something as a writer or actor when you’re prevented from doing so by concurrent, historic strikes. So any hope ‘This Fool’ may have had to find a new audience likely floated away on the union breeze.
Which is a fucking shame, since what Chris Estrada and Co. made here was, at minimum, the most consistently funny comedy of the past two years and ALSO an emotionally rich, culturally-specific character piece. Estrada’s Julio spends most of the season trying to get a felon-staffed coffeeshop off the ground while getting over his ex (who he dumped). Cousin Luis (Frankie Quiñones, whose every line reading is poetry) continues to navigate post-incarceration life, which is of course its own kind of prison (sorry). They bicker and squabble like an old married couple while Michael Imperioli cats around in a robe and house-slippers. The show uses Randy Newman’s “I Love LA” better than anyone has since the end credits of the movie ‘Volcano’.
Tasteless Hulu execs who themselves should probably go bathe in magma killed ‘This Fool’. You can avenge it, spiritually, by watching all 20 episodes right now.
‘Mr. and Mrs. Smith’: TV’s first great Millennial drama?
Like many of you, I’m sure, I was inclined to hate on Donald Glover (and at one point Phoebe Waller-Bridge)’s ‘Mr. and Mrs. Smith’ adaptation when I first read about it. Not because I had any affinity for the original, whose tabloid reputation FAR outstrips its quality as an actual movie. If anything, this felt like a waste of Glover’s talents? ‘Atlanta’, for whatever its season three annoyances, was already an all-timer by season two. ‘Swarm’ was messy but provocative. Childish Gambino is a good rapper! By every metric, Glover is someone whose voice, vision, and creative courage I aspire to1, and want to see properly utilized, not squandered on boring IP. Waller-Bridge is currently working on a ‘Tomb Raider’ adaptation! Make of that what you will.
But wouldn’t you know it? ‘Mr. and Mrs. Smith’ beats the allegations.
The show flips the plot of the movie — where Brad and Angelina were a married couple stumbling on each other’s secret spy identities (and looking great doing it), here our titular couple are strangers thrown into an arranged spy marriage, ‘Americans’-style, from which something real slowly begins to emerge. Missions echo the stages of a relationship: learning to trust each other, making couple friends, debating parenthood. Sometimes the metaphors are a little pat (Ron Perlman is acting sort of like a baby! I wonder what this could mean??) but they’re always fun, with a through-line of honesty I’d say is a hallmark of Glover’s work. Co-star Maya Erskine, whose own ‘Pen15’2 was so brutally real you could never watch more than three episodes at a time, plays an equal part in this. She’s a perfect partner here; like Glover, willing to go there at every turn, make her Jane Smith weird and inappropriate and flawed.
‘Girls’, you could argue, was the defining Millennial comedy. Admittedly very white and very Brooklyn, it still managed to capture something essential about my generation’s coming-of-age: stumbling, extended adolescence, played out — some might say “performed” — on social media to audiences both real and imagined, a mounting sense we might be stuck there forever. ‘Smith’ takes those same concerns, ages them ten years, and puts them in a spy turtleneck. What is John and Jane Smith’s spy job if not high-risk Task Rabbiting? What is their to-die-for Brooklyn brownstone, if not the real estate we all yearn for yet remains wildly out of reach? What is their isolation, if not the product of years spent carefully distanced from each other via airborne pathogens (necessary!) or fresh new tech (killing us!). It’s not an explicitly deep show but the think piece material is absolutely there.
This photo produced almost 200,000 pounds of carbon emissions
Speaking of fake relationships!
Some things I want to state very clearly before we continue:
Taylor Swift makes very good music and has for over a decade. She’s an artist whose talent I would never dispute; a genuine songwriter who it doesn’t feel crazy to suggest might, for a certain segment of the population, be something like their Bruce Springsteen
Right-leaning conspiracy theories that Swift’s relationship with Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce is a “psy-op” meant to force a) your children to get vaccinated or b) your children to vote for Joe Biden are just stupid. OBVIOUSLY
Love is love is love is love and I’m not so far gone as to imagine that two uber-successful people with multi-faceted financial interests might not also be feeling the prick of Cupid’s arrow. As Kevin Garnett once said, “anything is possible!”
But also, like, Jesus Christ, ENOUGH already. Give us all FIVE SECONDS to breathe outside the unrelenting maw of capitalism. Can I prove that Taylor x Travis is at least 80% an NFL branding exercise, designed to expand football’s market share even more and sell Swifties overpriced #87 jerseys? I cannot. But I’ve been on this Earth long enough to possess what might be called a nose for bullshit and people, hardly any of this passes the sniff test.
It’s just this feeling of being sold something, endlessly, whether literal commercial goods or some false American promise. Post-Super Bowl, Kelce took the mic to (again, my opinion. Always my opinion!) try and engineer not one but two viral moments: first belting out the Beastie Boys’ immortal “YOU GOTTA FIGHT! FOR YOUR RIGHT! TO PARRRRRRRTTTYY!” before pivoting into the more geographically appropriate “Viva Las Vegas!” Now, it’s reductive bordering on stupid for me to invoke some sort of “he should remember that awful things are happening in the world!” chastising here — dude won the Super Bowl, he’s excited, whatever. But it’s also impossible for me to not see someone playing a part — in this case “21st century sensitive party bro,” a palatable Rock by way of Ryan Lochte by way of Sully from ‘Monsters, Inc.’ whose every off-field move has, yes, very much been engineered. Swift, meanwhile… I mean what else is there to say? She announces surprise new albums at the Grammys like, and I’m stealing this from somewhere, someone announcing their engagement at your wedding. She’s the youth baseball coach who, rather than honor the “mercy rule” when you’ve categorically trounced the opposing team, keeps running up the score as much as possible. Once upon a time you could have said her “Taylor’s Version” remasters were a radical act of creative reclamation, a genuine win for artists and artist’s rights. But now they’re an excuse to sell the same album twice, with 4-5 variant vinyl pressings.
No one seems to be talking much about this year’s Super Bowl commercials, which I’d have to say, yeah, were pretty forgettable. (The rapid and alarming ascent of discount Chinese marketplace Temu notwithstanding!) But what use are commercials when all our biggest celebrities are just commercials unto themselves?
‘Argylle’ review
There’s really nothing more to say! (Except follow me on Letterboxd.)
Scam City, Population: All of Us
Longtime Lifting Fog readers will remember the time I got scammed out of $7000, probably the worst financial moment of my life (paying to see ‘Argylle’ a close second) and something that still stings when I sit and think about it. Was I really that gullible? What is so wrong in my brain chemistry that I, specifically, could have fallen for this shit that in hindsight seems so obvious?
A few things have made me feel better about the whole ordeal lately. One is the movie ‘The Beekeeper’, in which Jason Statham literally blows up a call center after they scam the sweet old lady whose bees he’d been keeping (he is, of course, the titular Beekeeper). The other is a noticeable trend of scamming essays, from author and “enshittification” coiner Cory Doctorow over on Medium to, just today, financial columnist Charlotte Cowles at The Cut. She writes about the day after getting scammed:
…a few seconds passed before I remembered the previous day. I was my old self, in my old bed, milky dawn light on the walls. Then it all came crashing back, a fresh humiliation, and I curled into the fetal position. I felt violated, unreliable; I couldn’t trust myself. Were my tendencies toward people-pleasing, rule following, and conflict aversion far worse than I’d ever thought, even pathological? I imagined other people’s reactions. She’s always been a little careless. She seems unhinged. I considered keeping the whole thing a secret. I worried it would harm my professional reputation. I still do.
Sounds familiar!!
It’s a month later, and the dominant feeling for me remains embarrassment. I read the story above and I think… how did the protagonist miss so many very distinct, very bright red flags? How does a guy like that, pushing fucking 40, survive? It almost makes me wish I were one of these TikTok teens claiming dissociative identity disorder. That wasn’t me! It was my alter, Walter (he’s into wordplay). But nope — it’s all me. I very much know that guy, because I’ve been him forever: emotional, reactive, and a sucker for story (however “hat on a hat” David’s was), including this one I’m telling you right now. Am I an easy mark? Unquestionably, to a degree that concerns me. But then I think, well, this dude’s a sociopath. We were probably always going to find each other.
Scamming will only grow more sophisticated and prevalent as technology (especially AI) grows, putting all of us — even those of you who are smarter than me, approximately 99% of the population — at risk of getting screwed over by people who, and I say this as someone who abhors the death penalty, probably deserve to die. What do we do about it? Me, I’m outlining a movie (maybe a TV show, I haven’t decided) called ‘Scamees’, about a support group of scam victims who decide the only way to move forward with their lives is to, well, scam the scammers. Go ahead and steal this airtight, bankable idea but I know all 107 of the people on this subscriber list and WILL press charges.
Finally, this:
My first Tesla CyberTruck™️ sighting! Say what you will about Elon Musk’s politics, temperament, and business practices, he’s also a terrible designer.
Hendog, this is sounding dangerously close to the plot of ‘Get Out’
Also Hulu! But merely ended, not cancelled