Weekend Links, January 14
Happy weekend! And happy long weekend to Americans!
Five for the weekend
Watch: It’s a long weekend here because we celebrate the life and work of Martin Luther King, Jr., and so might I suggest a movie? Watch the startling and not at all comforting MLK/FBI, streaming on Hulu or available to rent on the digital platform of your choice (YouTube, Amazon, Apple, whatever). You can gather from the title what it’s about. I interviewed the film’s much-awarded director Sam Pollard when it first came out.
Read: A great, sometimes unnerving feature on Netflix’s plans for world domination, by Rachel Syme in the New Yorker.
Also read: On the flattery of those ubiquitous AI self-portraits, by Sophie Haigney in the NYT Magazine. Will I have my postmodernism students read this later this semester? Absolutely.
And also read: If you’ve ever watched a movie with visual effects — which, if you’ve watched any movie produced this century, you have — then you need to read Chris Lee’s piece on the way VFX people are forced to work and what’s changing.
Listen, undistractedly or not: This terrific and thought-provoking podcast episode on digital distraction, its consequences, and its possible fixes (this is a Spotify link but you can find it in your podcaster of choice):
What I’ve been up to:
I published a brief explainer on the Golden Globes — the good, the bad, the very ugly — prior to the Globes, which took place on Tuesday.
Other than that, I’ve been mostly preparing for the spring semester, which commences this Wednesday, and for Sundance, which commences very shortly thereafter.
Regarding teaching: It’s my 14th year of being a college professor, 13 of those full-time. But I haven’t been in a classroom since June (if you count my flat in Paris during this summer’s study-abroad course as a “classroom”), since I had my first (and probably last) sabbatical last semester to work on my book. Now I’m back to my three-classes-and-a-bunch-of-directed-studies-and-senior-theses nonsense, while also writing a book and doing my reportorial/critical duties at Vox. Is this fun? Not really! But is it necessary! Absolutely, and I’m glad to be able, at least for now, to pay the bills, though some day I hope that can be accomplished with more like 1.5 jobs instead of 2 or 3. This term I’m teaching my courses in introductory cultural anthropology, postmodern theory and culture, and the art and language of film this semester; I’ve taught them all many times before, so most of it is re-acquainting myself with my lectures and preparing quizzes and making sure I haven’t messed up the dates on my syllabus.
Speaking of Sundance: the festival has been online (which is to say, on my couch) the past two years. In 2021, we all knew it would be digital. But in 2022, we thought we’d be able to go to Utah until a couple weeks before the festival, when they had to pivot in a hurry thanks to omicron. But finally, I’m going again. Sundance is important to me — it’s the first festival I ever covered, and I was both a critics’ fellow with the (sadly gone) Art of Nonfiction Initiative in the Documentary Film Program, and a jury member in 2019 for the US Documentary Competition. I love independent films, and I love Sundance, where the hype starts real low and builds over the week and a half.
However. While watching sixty movies at home on my couch (what I did the last two years) is better than nothing, it’s a bit of a barrier to my critical practice — there are distractions, of course, and my TV is not that big, but more importantly for me, I find it almost impossible to remember the details of each movie, let alone how I felt about them, when I’ve watched them all in the same space. On the ground at Sundance, I watch more like 3 or 4 films a day, which overall means I see significantly fewer. But I watch them in different spaces — and, importantly, with an audience, usually of normal ordinary non-critic people — and that makes all the difference. I’ve already seen a few of this year’s films and I can’t wait.Other than that, I have nothing to report, or nothing I can report to you, anyhow. Stay tuned!