#303

A little bit about movies and TV

Every week I pin a mental note to the wall of some dusty corner of my brain, thinking “I will definitely remember this,” and of course, I don’t. On the note is a topic I think I might address here in this newsletter. Then, I sit down to write, and whoops! I can’t find the note.

Or, sometimes I do find the note, and whatever I put on it looks like gibberish. Why did I want to write about that? I’ll think, and chuck the note into oblivion. I guess the topic wasn’t that interesting, after all.

Anyway, kind of a grab bag this week.

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I’ve mentioned that during this period of unemployment, I have been doing laundry like a boss. You wear a pair of socks? Guess what, you can probably also wear them tomorrow, because that’s how fast the laundry service is running in this joint (right now, anyway, no guarantees for the future). So I am often folding laundry in front of the TV, or applying for jobs in front of the TV, or doing whatever in front of the TV. I often choose something I have seen many times before, the better to ignore it. I work better with this type of background noise. I can’t work with music playing unless it is instrumental music. Don’t ask me why song lyrics are different than spoken dialogue, they just are.

For a while, this was reruns of Downton Abbey. I know every single episode by heart and it is mostly very gentle television (save the Anna SA episodes, which I tend to skip because WHAT THE FUCK). However, I’ve grown tired of it for the moment and I’ve switched to nostalgic movies. I’ve watched most of the Mission Impossible franchise (except the Phillip Seymour Hoffman one, RIP but it sucks), I’ve watched The Hunt for Red October, Clear and Present Danger, Apollo 13, When Harry Met Sally, and Sneakers. At some point soon, I will watch Mystic Pizza again and then probably Say Anything and High Fidelity. Oh, and Some Kind of Wonderful, aka the most perfect movie with the most perfect soundtrack. I have been obsessed with this movie since 1988. I recorded it on VHS during a free HBO weekend at my parents’ house at some point and watched it until it was unwatchable, a dot-matrix lower-third scroll reading WANT MORE MOVIES LIKE THIS? CALL NOW TO SUBSCRIBE the whole entire time.

Obviously, these movies make me feel safe in a way, even the one where Tom Cruise throws himself off the Burj Khalifa, even the one in the submarine. They mostly hark back to a simpler time, when evil billionaires and terrorists could be reduced to cartoonish threats easily dispatched by Harrison Ford, who wore a suit for the occasion. Sigh.

(When I worked at a local arts magazine, we took part in a business exchange program, which is how I ended up hanging out with a Russian for a couple of months. After spending Thanksgiving with his host family, he told me he’d learned that Thanksgiving is when Americans “eat all day and watch football and Harrison Ford movies.” He wasn’t wrong! I also recently found a birthday card he sent me twenty-some years ago which he signed, “Russianly yours, Sergey.”)

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Last Thursday night, I made a pizza for dinner. In a little while, it will be too hot to make a pizza until September or October, so I loaded this one up with fresh mozzarella (okay, it was fresh until I put it in the freezer, but then it was, after a nice sit-down on the kitchen counter, fresh again!), soppressata, and banana pepper. I make the dough but I have mostly given over to using Rao’s sauce from a jar because it is always available at Grocery Outlet and you know my feelings about the Gross Out, a nickname I use affectionately as the Gross Out is actually very clean and not at all gross. I did, however, find this suspicious item the last time I stocked up on Rao’s:

What flavor? MEAT FLAVOR

We ordered Indian food one night last week because I had a job interview in the evening. It was too hot Monday and Tuesday to cook much of anything, so I made a caprese salad on Monday, which we ate with some nice bread, and a pasta salad with jarred pesto the following night. Life has a very unsupervised feel to it lately. We’re just out here doing whatever. Who is supposed to be supervising me, I cannot say. I guess it’s me? I’m not invested in this role at the moment.

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I wrote a big, long crabby post on Substack Notes about an idiot on LinkedIn and then deleted it because what purpose did that serve? But I am still annoyed about it. However, in lieu of rehashing it, instead I will complain about this snippet of a job description (which I also complained about in a Note):

PSYCHOPATH VIBES

“The pace here is genuinely uncomfortable. The right person finds that fun.” MASOCHISTS WANTED, APPLY WITHIN. Also, if you have to have a section in your job description titled “Fair Warning,” then it is time to log out of LinkedIn and sit with yourself for a while. (There is a reason this role has been posted over and over again for the past year.)

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Why are there so many shows about ranching on television right now? Or oil fields or other seemingly ranching-adjacent things? I wouldn’t know exactly what they are about, as I have never watched Yellowstone, 1923, The Madison, Dutton Ranch, 1883, Lawman: Bass Reeves, Marshalls, Tulsa King, Landman, or any of the related upcoming spinoffs.

I know that many of these are related to one another, that Taylor Sheridan is behind some or all of them, and that our current hyper-masculine, rugged-individualism, American-dynastic-fantasy political moment is probably to blame, HOWEVER, when is enough enough? When do we lose track of which ropy-armed Yogalates blonde is which? How many shaggy-jawed 1990s heartthrobs can one franchise possibly employ? How many innocent viewers will be harmed by leaden plot anvil after leaden plot anvil falling directly on their heads? (Again! I’m only guessing based on trailers I cannot escape!)

I know a lot of people like these shows, and I know my tastes are very different (I also did not feel called to watch Succession, a show that seemed like it was just about people being assholes to each other), but how can you possibly watch this many shows about this many assholes? It must be very compelling. If you are a fan and would recommend one or many of them, please share. There are only so many 1992-2002 classics I can watch.