Yeah, it's why I actually enjoyed the version with Stanley Tucci and Christian Bale, etc. because it seemed like it was made my horny stoned college kids with money.

Okay, so there's a "social media embargo" for a few more weeks, which means I can't give an opinion of the movie. However, I will say the soundtrack reminded me of the 90s indie film soundtrack-as-mixtape, however very queer and female-centric, as suits the movie. I hope they issue it on vinyl.

Me too. But I have a feeling there's a difference between a "score" by John Williams and a "soundtrack" for a Tarantino movie, aside from the fact that the second is all needle drops.

It's funny you mention this because I'm going to see a press screening of "Drive Away Dolls" with my girlfriend on Monday and my main interest is writing about the soundtrack, which (if IMDB is to be trusted) is *really* good. It sort of brought me back to that time in the 90s where you'd buy a soundtrack to discover songs that you'd never heard of and be knocked out by them. Like a great DJ. It's sort of a Tarantino soundtrack but mostly female singers and some *really* obscure stuff.

I definitely think great soundtracks are still a thing in streaming series- all my recent examples of epic "needle drops" come from series. But this is a movie (that looks like a 90s crime caper anyway), where the soundtrack is killer. I mean, it's one thing to revive Kate Bush for a series; it's a whole other to feature a Joyce Harris song that was so jaw dropping it wasn't released till 40 years after it was recorded- and then only on one CD compilation in the UK. (It's also a song I used to slip into DJ sets all the time just to see the look on people's faces.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xiBkDzNyrM

Two questions have been bugging me:
1. Is it a "soundtrack" if it features a bunch of old recorded songs, and an "original soundtrack" if it's an original "score"? Or is that just a score? And don't most movies have both?

2. What is the name of the music geek who picks out the old songs from their record collection to drop in the movie? There's some insider name for that job that I heard one time in NYC from someone who worked on movies and I cannot remember it. Not "music supervisor"- it's a nickname.

Anyway, I hope the movie is good so I can finally get that Joyce Harris song on vinyl.

P.S. Incidentally, I think "Repo Man" is the only example I can recall of in which the movie was released and flopped, and then the soundtrack was released and garnered a large following, so they rereleased the movie to theatres, where it now found its cult audience who came to it from the soundtrack.

I agree with all of this. I was tempted to get into all of the historical fudging, but decided it might get a little dull. I have to say this is one of those occasions where a movie has a much longer cut- about four hours- and everyone seems to wish they saw that one! Maybe we'll all be pleasantly surprised when the inevitable "special edition" DVD comes out and the movie isn't so rushed.

Bashing academic fields can be invigorating and enlightening. Yet too often conservative writing on academia reads as: I engaged with the academic literature, so you can take my word that it's without merit. Your case here seems to be that the "settler colonialism" concept is useless when applied to "the past" or "the West" or Israel, but it would be apt if applied to China (and only China) where it's highly useful. But no one ever does that, according to you. Just don't Google "settler colonialism" and "China."

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/720902
https://brill.com/view/journals/gr2p/13/1/article-p9_9.xml
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10357823.2022.2154747
https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/23624/1/9789048544905.pdf#page=518
https://aeon.co/essays/settler-colonialism-is-not-distinctly-western-or-european
https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/cja/article/view/10012
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5TzpL2slmE
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv28x2b9h.13?seq=1
https://umbc.edu/stories/settler-colonialism-helps-explain-current-events/
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3965577
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/30h7d8r5
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349459099_Settler_Colonialism_and_the_Path_toward_Cultural_Genocide_in_Xinjiang
https://www.manchesterhive.com/display/9781526153128/9781526153128.00011.xml
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settler_colonialism#:~:text=China,-See%20also%3A%20Chinese&text=Near%20the%20end%20of%20their,were%20resettled%20on%20the%20frontier.

Anyway, that's the first page of results. So, good news- academics are engaging with this question!

Right, yeah, I don't think they wanted him to be too sympathetic. Even him being unlucky in love was cast more as comedic. The interesting thing is he really was one of the only rulers of that era to actually rise from the ranks of ordinary people. They don't really get into how that happened; only that he was insecure as a result.

Yeah, the second time, they apparently slowly poisoned him, which maybe they should have done the first time.

I remember being struck that they French conquered Malta quite easily (I mean, they were basically fighting against medieval knights) but the night before setting foot on land, Napoleon decided to spend sitting up all night writing the island a very detailed constitution.
He was not lacking for energy.

Also, I think in 2023, we're calling blogs "newsletters".

That's the thing. I've read a lot of accounts of the man and, regardless of how we feel about him, he was *beloved* by his soldiers and the general populace. Certainly, he was also hated by plenty of writers, but even with someone like Madame de Staël, who was probably his greatest enemy, there was a grudging admission that he was a charmer.

Uh, not to start a fight, but I think this MC5 erasure is settler colonialism.

There's a lot to cover in his life regardless of what you decide to focus on. I think the Spielberg series, which is apparently based on Kubrick's ideas for a film, is going to run 9 hours. Admittedly, it's a lot easier to get people to watch 9 one-hour episodes at home than 4 hours in a theatre.

This is true! And a very successful complex, I hear.

Okay, another book to buy... I can do that!

That's funny because I just read this book on the plane back from Hamilton, where a bookseller friend recommended it with one big caveat- he grew up in Toronto and was irritated that the Hell's Angels hangout mentioned was not on that street for another ten years. Fact check, people!
https://www.thirdmanbooks.com/catalog/straydogs

It's actually debated whether or not it really was, although it's traditionally taken as the last. Prospero's last speech reads like Shakespeare's farewell. But, he at least collaborated on others, and some have suggested if you read it as one of his first, it hits differently.

Incidentally, I forgot to mention that the main reason I jumped to the Tempest this time was it was outside of the Strand in the dollar book racks that must explain how Tom Verlaine got so many books.

I was thinking recently that the thing that's changed for me with MeToo is I'm less likely to give these guys the benefit of the doubt right off the bat. Because the pattern *always* seems to go: dude is accused by a woman or two of repulsive behavior, which he claims is all a libelous conspiracy against him- and then, within a month, whaddya know 27 other accusers have stepped forward! I mean, I have relatives who still think Bill Cosby did nothing wrong, but I've found if you assume the first accusation is true, you're a lot less likely to be heartbroken down the road. And, yeah, I don't care if it's one of my heroes at this point. I'll be crushed if Jonathan Richman gets accused, but also assume it's true.

It was kind of funny how many pieces I've seen about how the film shows how bad living under patriarchy is for men, and also how bad a sort of weird fictional matriarchy would be for men. And then the happy ending for Ken is he's free to become self-actualized, with no suggestion of what that would actually look like, at the slight expense of apparently being alone the rest of his life. It gives the impression that the ideal path for a man under feminism is basically to piss off.

Yeah it was a weird take all around. I think they were trying to say that killing the guy in power doesn't lead to anything good, even if you personally don't care for him, but there are so many better parallels in history. And it's not like the Shakespeare in the Park crowd was pulling for assassination anyway. I mean, I hope not.

I was sort of riffing on a famous anecdote that was probably too good to be true. The Chinese premier Zhou Enlai was asked in 1972 about the impact of the French Revolution and responded "Too early to say." It's a great story; however, he probably thought the question was about the May 1968 uprisings.

Okay, this really is nit-picking because I understand and appreciate the post itself. However, it's not entirely pedantic to point out that what happened in Rwanda was a genocide and not ethnic cleansing. The distinction is ethnic cleansing is trying to remove a group of people from a piece of land, without regard to whether they die in the process, while genocide is setting out to exterminate a group of people.

I actually asked the late Alison Des Forges this question (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alison_Des_Forges she wrote the book on the Rwandan Genocide) and she put it as, in one case, think of it as flushing a group of people out of a territory by almost surrounding them, while in the other, the aim is to surround them and not let them escape.

Yeah, it's funny you mentioned that because I've been dipping in and out of Terminal Boredom, another collection of her stories, and they've definitely grown on me. But it took work. I always find sci-fi a little off-putting because the story's central conceit can become all anyone talks about. "We live in a mind-reading society in space. Let's talk for 20 pages about mind-reading and what that's like in space." I usually tap out. But there's something weirdly gloomy and existential in her stories that seems more like autofiction.

I will say the drugs and suicide and porn and jazz aspects are probably doing some of the heavy lifting in her "revival" though. I also think publishing's a little obsessed with "lost" great writers at the moment.

Yeah, wow, I do not intend to watch Cannibal Holocaust ever again. I saw it when I was 16 and that's enough.

It's interesting how movies slip through the cracks. We went to see UFOria at a local arthouse cinema because it had Harry Dean Stanton in it, and I've never met anyone who's even heard of it, but my girlfriend and I found it hilarious.

Huh. That sounds pretty good. And it's hard to resist a black comedy version of Shakespeare with Christopher Walken as a pitch.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, Lear has all the authority in the world he knows at the time, and loses his mind because he can't compel his daughter to say she loves him more than she should. It's totally devastating.