Because what my office really needed was a straight-jacketed Batman with The Joker’s living head in a lantern/tube-thing. (In all seriousness though, the series from which this bit of brilliance originates, Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo’s BATMAN: LAST KNIGHT ON EARTH, is amazing. Easily my favorite of their collaborations.)
Playing Cyberpunk 2077 while charging one's (attached) insulin pump via USB really adds a layer of immersion to the game that people with functioning pancreases don't get to experience.
SHE SAID (Schrader, 2022)
(watched sat/20230107-sun/20230108 via Peacock; directed by Maria Schrader from a script by Rebecca Lenkiewicz adapted from the book and New York Times investigation by Jodi Cantor and Meghan Twohy; starring Carey Mulligan, Zoe Kazan, Patricia Clarkson, Andre Braugher, Jennifer Ehle, Samantha Morton, and Ashley Judd. Released 13 October 2022)
A powerful film that everyone should see brimming with phenomenal performances – especially Mulligan (my favorite performance Mulligan performance remains David Hare's 2018 BBC series COLLATERAL), Kazan, and Ehle – but a powerful film that should have been so much more.
Still trying to put my finger on it – writing this being a process of processing – but my current thinking is that it was the direction of the whole that left me wanting, an amplifcation of a powerful story but an amplifier with a flickering spark: I was hoping for the heir apparent to ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN and SPOTLIGHT (perhaps my expectations were at fault?); certainly the source material, the most transformative and tectonic investigative reporting since the Boston Globe revealed the decades of child sex abuse allowed by centuries of systemic rot running rampant in the Catholic Church in 2002, warrants that treatment but – though Schrader's telling occasionally reached for it – SHE SAID never quite broke through its own restraint and left me wondering what a more visceral director like Lynne Ramsey, Mary Haron, Ava DuVernay, Kathryn Bigelow, Chloe Zao, Dee Rees, or Sam Taylor-Johnson would have done with the source material – if not with the script itself.
THE PERIPHERAL, s1 (2022)
Having read Gibson's original novel when it came out almost ten years ago, I can't attest to how faithful this streaming translation was (not that it really matters) but two things did stick out: one, I don't recall Flynn being so irritatingly passive in Gibson's original; and two, Alexandra Billings was phenomenal and needs to be in everything.
Yesbut: too much of THE PERIPHERAL's eight episodes were a slog redeemed only by its last few (probably once Ned Dennehy and Billings showed up): given the source and the WESTWORLDly and SIMPLE PLAN (love that film) talent behind it, I had hoped for more – suppose I was quasi-precient in saying "in Gibson and Nolan and Joy I (mostly) trust," this first season being a case study in that trust being misplaced for 2/3 of the fruits of their collaboration.
Nonetheless, given how this first season ended, I do hope for a season two – but that it took long enough to get rolling that a second season is required at all is problematic, at best.
brainzilch
As per usual: the zilch that was appearing in the longterm project pages prior to working on a deadlined something else for a couple of days was amplified to be, instead of a hodgepodge of rhythmic drivel in my brain, a zilch in said brain, a – if not the – signal that the time has come to accept that I've invested enough time in longterm project for now and that it's time to move on to something else; I've no interest in another seven-year paragraph – it all feels so long ago (nine years, to be exact, since its start) – so, ok, next steps: shift files around, move some things to backburner/purgatory, and move on into whatever the next thing will be via a reconceptualization of previous concepts.
