At the end of July, I spent a few days in Paris. While I almost never go to the cinema while there, it is a city that I can’t not see through the lens of cinema. Around every corner you almost expect to bump into Belmondo and Seberg, or Jesse and Céline, or Alain Delon and Yves Montand. We stayed at a hotel named after Zazie dans le metro.
I miss the old internet.
This is, undoubtedly, a sign that I’m getting older – it turns out that for me, my fifth decade is the one in which I start lamenting the good old days. I won’t deny that the internet is in many ways more useful now. If you’re looking for a practical piece of data, especially one likely relevant for many people – whether a shop is open right now, when a movie came out, how to knit a certain stitch – you can usually find it immediately.
But it feels as if the intensely personal little corners are gone. Speaking just about my primary passion, movies: it’s easy enough, in particular for new releases, to find showtimes, the cast list, major reviews and “the ending, explained!” It’s much harder to find the idiosyncratic essays. The personal recollections. The strange takes from an unexpected angle that will enrich your experience (or just baffle you).
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Life got busy, these past two weeks, leaving very little time for pop culture.
I did watch two movies with the tots, with two very different approaches to storytelling for children. Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (i.e. the 1971 film, with Gene Wilder) was a blast, and we were singing the Oompa Loompa song all weekend afterwards. But watching My Neighbor Totoro the day after really made the moralistic side of Willy Wonka stand out all the more.
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A short update this time, since last week was full of social events, and therefore a little light on pop culture. In fact, I will forgo the categories, since I barely read anything and did not really watch any television aside from (in accordance with last week’s plans) three episodes of Reservation Dogs. I did watch two great films. The first was the wonderful 4K restoration of La Double Vie de Veronique (with Irène Jacob in attendance!) shown during the opening night of the Kieślowski programme at Eye. The second film I’m not going to discuss here, but will be talking about on the upcoming episode of the Schokkend Nieuws podcast about the best genre movies of 2022, which we’re recording this Tuesday.
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The pop culture event of the week was probably that the Golden Globes were awarded. Since I was one of the new batch of voters recruited to participate this year, I considered staying up to watch… but sleep won out, in the end. It turns out being able to vote on awards doesn’t necessarily give you much more insight into the winners (and makes it very strange to listen to people theorize about the potential motivations of the voting body as a whole, on podcasts such as The Big Picture). Overall I don’t think it’s a bad list of winners, though, if a little on the bland/safe side. On the other hand, two of the movies I would have put at the top of my best-of list for the year were nowhere to be seen.
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It’s the time of the year for good intentions. The time of the year when I start logging movies on Letterboxd again, for however long it lasts. When I resolve to put away my phone at bedtime, and to read a book rather than aimlessly scrolling Twitter. Or to pick up my bullet journal yet again.
Looking back, there’s a theme to all these resolutions: it’s about living and consuming pop culture (and food, and alcohol, etc.) more consciously. Not letting time slip through my fingers, but trying to capture how I spent my time, and spending it ‘better’ somehow.
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Zoals zovelen heb ik de afgelopen tijd Community, de komedieserie die van 2009 tot 2015 uitgezonder werd en nu op Netflix staat, gekeken. Daarna ben ik doorgegaan met een andere komedieserie die in 2009 begon, en waarvan Abed, een van de personages uit Community, een grote fan is: Cougar Town.
Naar aanleiding van de veelbesproken aflevering van De Vooravond van afgelopen donderdag met Rebecca Gomperts had ik bijna eens een puur politiek stuk geschreven. Gelukkig vond ik toch nog wat popcultuur om mijn punt aan te hangen.
Ben ik een klootzak omdat ik mijn dochter verbied een korte broek te dragen tenzij ze haar benen scheert? Moet ik in actie komen tegen hoe mijn neefje te eten krijgt? Mijn vrouw heeft ervoor gezorgd dat mijn zus ontslagen werd – wat moet ik doen? Op de subreddit Am I The Asshole? komen de meest diverse dilemma’s langs – en het is slechts een van vele plekken op het internet waar mensen wanhopig op zoek zijn naar morele duidelijkheid.
In I’m Thinking of Ending Things wordt over van alles gepraat: de poëzie van Wordsworth, natuurkunde, musicals, de film A Women Under the Influence… Maar het is een kort gesprek over schilderen dat mij het meest bijbleef, omdat het iets verhelderde over het hele oeuvre van Charlie Kaufman.
Panpopticon 