Recent media diet: cannibals, spies, dust, operas, buckets of blood
Hey gang! Hope your weekend was legendary. Some recent media I've been consuming:
š Hannibal (TV series)
My daughter's obsessed with this one. While it's surprisingly gory for a network show, it intentionally never shows the acts of killing/torture/mutilation it alludes to, focusing instead on "villain logic" (one of my favorite storytelling techniques). Mads Mikkelsen is quietly brilliant. It's also from 2013, one of the great golden eras of TV when studios were trying really hard to put out good stuff. I think we might be in another golden age btw, hopefully a post-glut era of streaming.
š Dust Bunny (feature)
Speaking of Mads Mikkelsen, this quirky movie was also made by Hannibal director Bryan Fuller. It's mostly a music video, all style and no story, but still pretty fun to watch. Impressive what you can do with a single beautiful set and a big bag of trick camera shots (see also Iron Lung, below).
šļø The Night Manager (TV series)
This unusual "accidental" spy drama is also from that golden age of TV (2015), with moody titles predating (say) Westworld by one year. Beautiful, atmospheric, and genuinely mysterious. Between this show and the lovely film Life of Chuck, I'm officially a Tom Hiddleston fan.
š La Traviata (opera)
My parents used to play this on our giant old Zenith hi-fi (see photo from previous newsletter). My dad passed away in 2019, and my mom's getting older by the day. I think this opera fit in with their idea of the American good life, and it always makes me think of them.
š©ø Iron Lung (feature)
A theatrical feature release? Based on a survival horror video game? Starring a YouTuber? My daughter was psyched to see this one: a single actor (Markiplier), trapped in a creepy submersible for two hours, slowly drowning in literal gallons of blood. It's an overly long, mostly incomprehensible set piece, but I think that's the point. By being deliberately confusing, it serves as fresh fodder for the endless Cultural Theory Industrial Complex (where YouTubers scour every frame of shows & movies to come up with hidden meanings and conspiracies). Is this a new kind of movie, one deliberately made not just for, but of the comments section?
š¬ Got thoughts? Questions? Seen/read anything interesting? Hit me up on the ole discussion thread.