The Favorites, Holiday Weekend Edition
Some things for the 4th: Context Collapse #143
Here in the United States, the July 4th long holiday weekend is right around the corner. In recognition of that, your humble narrator is shaking things up a bit.
Instead of our usual Weekend Links, we’re gonna dive deep instead on a whole bunch of things that I’ve enjoyed the living hell out of lately. I hope you’ll like them too.
Enjoy.
Anatomy of a Product Placement (New York Times)
Loved, loved, loved this Sophie Haigney article on how product placements make it into movies and television. Given that PR, marketing and advertising have all congolomorated into one giant bulky, unwieldy Influencer Voltron in our year of the lord 2022, we needed this article.
A sample:
Agencies like Hollywood Branded connect the brands they represent with scriptwriters, producers, set decorators and prop-masters, who might in turn work them into story lines. (Hollywood Branded even has a warehouse full of discontinued BlackBerry cellphones, handpicked PassionRoses, minimalist eero Wi-Fi routers, and all manner of things they can ship to sets on a moment’s notice.)
Angelyne (Peacock)
Emmy Rossum’s new biopic mini-series on Peacock, Angelyne, takes a Los Angeles city icon who purchased billboards of herself for decades and makes it amazing.
As Variety puts it:
While less ubiquitous than she once was, Angelyne remains a hyper-local symbol of a Hollywood dream come to plasticene life. She was famous, as the often derisive saying goes, for being famous and not much more — which is, as the new Peacock series about her argues, exactly how she wanted it.
The Baby (HBO Max)
I’m a big fan of horror comedies. And the idea of a horror comedy about motherhood makes perfect sense. Enter The Baby.
Per the New York Times:
The star of “The Baby” doesn’t have any lines; his performance consists almost entirely of reaction shots. As adults die around him in increasingly baroque ways — a dive off a cliff, a pitchfork through the neck, a boulder on the car — he displays impressive range. He gurgles, coos and giggles, but he most often chooses a quizzical, slightly exasperated frown, as if to say, “You don’t honestly think I had anything to do with that, do you?”
Chip n’ Dale: Rescue Rangers (Disney+)
Well… This is a movie that I enjoyed much more than I thought it would. Chip n’ Dale: Rescue Rangers isn’t really a reboot of the 1990s cartoon that so many people of my demographic watched after school. It’s more of an excuse to let Akiva Schaffer, Andy Samberg and John Mulaney run riot on the idea of intellectual property and, err, off-brand remakes, Roger Rabbit-style.
The Guardian’s review:
What’s most surprising about a mostly rather surprising film is just how intricate the world-building is, director Akiva Schaffer, of Lonely Island fame, and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend writers Dan Gregor and Doug Mand, putting far more thought and effort into the specifics of one scene that most mainstream film-makers would put into their entire movie.
Generation Covid: How the Virus Changed Our Lives, From 0-100 (1843)
Over at The Economist’s 1843 Magazine, Megan K. Stack did a great oral history of interviews with Americans aged 9 to 100 about how COVID impacted their lives. Just speaking for myself, I lost one family member who otherwise would have lived decades longer to COVID, had several others in the ICU, had my small business lose nearly 60% of its project pipeline overnight and lost more than a year of playdates and normal life for my one-year-old. The worst part? I’m just one of many with that story.
Random Restaurant (Twitter)
Random Restaurant is a Twitter bot that randomly posts Google Maps pictures of restaurants from around the world. Japanese food from Nicaragua? A Nando’s franchise in Botswana? Israeli pizza? Malaysian soup stall? You won’t know until you get there.
Tyler Cowen Interviews Marc Andreessen
One recent podcast pick: Tyler Cowen’s interview with Marc Andreessen. Andreessen’s wrong about some things, has a POV on other things that’s influenced by his Silicon Valley kingmaker role quite clearly but has some great insights on technology trends and how technology companies work internally. Skip the cringy talk about Web3 and NFTs and go straight to Andreessen’s discussion of the office building as a relatively recent modern innovation and how large institutions like the Roman Empire worked quite effectively on a more-or-less remote work-oriented basis.
With that, enjoy your holiday weekend US readers and have a great weekend to everyone else outside of the States. We’re taking a bit of a summer hiatus and will be back publishing in a few weeks. See you then.