Happy Thursday, everyone! Christmas is almost here, it's 60 today in Chicago and...we just closed on a house. What a freaking weird day. So let's see that fun stuff I've run across this week or I've rediscovered while I'm weeding my shelves before making a cross-country move.
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I'm a life-long White Sox fan and it's interesting being a fan of a team that has a mark on its historical record as being the only team in Major League history that we know threw a World Series. So of course I'm fascinated Joe Jackson, popularly known as Shoeless Joe, a play for the 1917 Sox who probably knew about the plot to throw the series (mostly because their asshole owner, Charles Comiskey, was a huge cheapskate who cheated them out of bonus money at every turn). Even if he knew about the plot, Joe never participated (he went .304 with a .333 OPS in that series and was easily the MVP of the series) but was implicated with all the others and banned from baseball in 1920.
This novel is about a kid from our time who goes back in time to try and save Joe from this shameful fate...and it's oddly sad for a middle-school book. Like how it's about sometimes you can't change history and the future, as much as you might like.
I figured I'd highlight three actors who have played Joe. The first, in the fantasy film Field Of Dreams, is Ray Liotta, who I still think is playing Joe just a little too mean.
Then again, Ty Cobb can stick it.
And then there is D.B. Sweeney in Eight Men Out, which I feel makes the persuasive argument that Joe might have known about the plot but even if he did he definitely didn't participate...but still, he knew and that's bad enough.
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Naked is back in the news recently; David Thewlis is doing a show called The Landscapers with Olivia Colman and he just did an interview with The Guardian where he dug into Naked (which I believe is the first Mike Leigh movie I saw) and how it's aged to become more sour than it might have been in 1993.
"It’s almost 30 years since Thewlis’s seminal performance in Naked, Mike Leigh’s recently reissued masterpiece. Verbose, sexually violent, feckless and self-indulgent, his antihero Johnny sparked a lot of discussion about representations of misogyny. Were they intended to titillate and, if so, did this make them misogynistic?
‘Johnny was based on a person I knew who’d been ostracised by my friends’
But, surprisingly, that wasn’t the main critical focus of the film at the time. “When I was doing press for Naked,” says Thewlis, “that was never put to me as an actor. Violence against women just wasn’t what we talked about. Now, how could you not talk about it? Violence against women – and unreported violence against women – is such a talking point. We want to discuss misogyny. We want to discuss the fact that members of our government don’t even know the meaning of the word. I found the film much tougher to watch this time than I did 25 years ago.”
I'm definitely going to take a second look at this movie. I remember being absolutely turned off by at the time, and not in a sexual way, but it's Leigh and Thewlis and deserves a second look.
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I can never quite describe the distinction between Afro-Futurism (as some describe their science fiction) and African Futurism (as Nnedi Okorafor describes her work). But it's not up to me to decide or describe. What I am here to do is talk about how Okorafor is one of the best modern speculative fiction authors.
She has a particular talent for using a combination of old societies and newish tech and old traditions and then creating these wonderful woman characters who are thrown into saving the world. This and Who Fears Death and Lagoon and LaGuardia and god, her Binti trilogy about a Himba woman who gets accepted to a prestigious interstellar university only to have a tragic incident change her life forever; she'a a great author who I can't recommend enough.
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Hey, do you know what's surprisingly funny? The Seventh Seal. No, seriously. Is it about a guy coming back from the Crusades (an almost preternaturally beautiful Max Von Sydow) to a countryside ravaged by the Bubonic Plague? Absolutely. Are there also a ton of weird dark jokes about the epidemic and the crazed people in countryside, including a guy in a cloak with a scythe who may be literal Death? Also absolutely. This movie is the definition of a movie where people think they know what it is and are mostly wrong.
And really, look at Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey. Now there's a movie that gets why Death playing a board game is funny. (It doesn't hurt that William Sadler is so freaking great.)
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