Happy Thursday, everyone! Let's jump right in; I've not bought anything new this week so you will have to enjoy what I've been going through what I've been packing for our imminent move.
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So a few years ago, long-time TV writers Alan Sepinwall and Matt Zoller Seitz decided to embark on a weird little project. Why not try and rank all of US television programs and see what came out on top? What resulted was this very interesting book that came out in 2016 and has some fascinating and sometimes deeply personal essays about what the various series meant to them and how they influenced TV at the time and moving forward.
In particular...
Sepinwall writes the entry on The Cosby Show. And it's really one of the most emotional pieces of TV writing I've ever read, about how he was in the middle of introducing his daughter to the show and had to turn it off and have a conversation with his daughter about Bill Cosby and the (at the time new in the news) horrible, monstrous crimes. It's such a sad essay that confronts the crimes as well as talking about Cosby's importance in the history of TV. It's still a difficult cultural conversation that we have to have.
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Speaking of things we all would like to change...Stephen King always had a bit of a bugaboo in his head about Kennedy being killed. Which is completely natural for someone born in 1947, who would have just turned 16 when JFK was murdered in Dallas and then lived through the ensuing decade of silly nonsense of conspiracy theories and fiction about the Mafia, the CIA and a hundred other groups who supposedly killed Kennedy instead of the one person who did.
So why not try a novel about someone who has a one-way ticket back to 1958 and decides, "why shouldn't I I try to save Kennedy and improve the timeline?" But obviously King looked at it and realized, it would never be that simple. And goodness, it's not. There's the worries of making sure Oswald worked alone, trying to not infect the timeline too much and most importantly, not making too many personal connections as you work toward the goal.
Yep, that is where the protagonist fails. And it's really the central core of this novel. It's not so much about JFK as it is about love and remembrance. It has a bittersweet ending to beat all, one that is just so King.
The adaptation of 11/22/63 aired on Hulu and I skipped it because of James Franco, who ran out of chances.
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It's a great novel, but forget that. I want to use it to urge everyone to see the film adaptation. Annihilation was the best movie of 2018 and weirdly dumped in February instead of being promoted as the Oscar-bait it should have been for a whole bevy of categories. For some reason, unlike Alex Garland's previous excellent movie Ex Machina this just didn't get the attention it deserved.
It's a wonderful, sad movie that has fantastic performances from Natalie Portman, Gina Rodriguez, Tessa Thompson and Jennifer Jason Leigh. A movie about aliens and humans and how humans can be aliens to themselves and oh forget it, just go see it. It's currently on Paramount+ and FX Now and for rent and sale on various platforms.
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My recommendation for this week is X, the new horror movie from Ti West. It's all about a bunch of student filmmakers who go to a little farmhouse they're renting from an older couple to make their little movie...without telling them they're making an adult film. And mayhem ensures. Ti West is having a ton of fun riffing on '70s slashers here, especially the middling Texas Chainsaw Massacre that here he makes much better. It's gory, it's a little goofy and it has a ton of nice little performances, especially the lead performance by Mia Goth but also by Brittany Snow as the queen bee of this band of wanna-be porn mavens.
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