BriZigs LLC 2023 GRAND (RE)OPENING POST!!!!
Looking at the facts and figures of our first 2 weeks in the new year....
Welcome to the grand (re)opening of BriZigs LLC, formerly known as That’s Weird. Thank you to everyone who subscribed recently — we are now at 900 subscribers!! As you can see from this number, the merger has already proven profitable. We expect these numbers to increase exponentially in the coming months and we thank you for your loyalty to the new and improved BriZigs LLC brand. Today, we are cutting the imaginary ribbon at the imaginary opening ceremony, so let’s take a look at how the new year is already shaping up…
Welcome all to the official first post of BriZigs LLC and also welcome to 2023. I am 28 years old as of last Tuesday, and can now officially say I’m “almost 30” (ICK! ACK!). Nothing scares me more than the fact that I and everyone I love will be dead someday, but we’re off to a good start to this year at least.
Some quick, personal updates: For my birthday week I went to my old stomping grounds of Philadelphia to ring in the New Year with my lover and celebrate my birthday with my hometown friends. Over the course of the week I did karaoke, finished a 1000-piece puzzle, spent the night in a nice hotel and got room service (though the food did not come on one of those fancy trolleys you see in movies; sad!), went to an Indian buffet for the first time in a very long time, and also attended a family bar mitzvah, where I muttered under my breath more than once the fact that I did not receive a bat mitzvah because my parents assumed on my behalf that I “wouldn’t want to do all the religious training stuff” (not wrong but also, come on).
The post-UTI troubles I spoke of in my last post seem to have subsided as well (for now), and I’ve been (mostly) sleeping great—in case you’ve been wondering! I also need to schedule a haircut. I like to get a trim every six months and it’s been seven, but I shudder at the thought of being forced to spend $100+ at a salon in Brooklyn to trim one inch of hair off, with an additional $20 upcharge for the offense of having curly hair. So while I try to find a salon that will screw me out of my money the least egregiously, here are my thoughts on some things I have been reading and watching and doing since the New Year began.
Things I’ve been watching…
Severance
I don’t really watch television shows anymore because I think that they are all bad now. This might seem like a broad statement to make, but it’s because I have already seen enough. In the past few years, I’ve been swindled, bamboozled, cheated and disappointed by too many series that have either tricked me into looking like they might be good; or friends and colleagues had urged me to watch them under the same idea that “Yes, television is bad now, but this—this one is good.” Nope. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice…and so on and so forth. These days, I stick mostly to comedies (save for Succession and The Righteous Gemstones), which have shorter episodes and thus do not waste as much of my time if they turn out bad.
Enter Severance, an Apple TV series that premiered back in February 2022. I finally came around to watching it recently — after a year of allowing my eyes to glaze over every fawning post and article about it that I came across — due to being at my parents’ house over the holidays and having little to occupy my time. I needed TV shows to watch (I also watched The Terror; it was good!). I just finished my second viewing of Severance since finishing it on Christmas. I believe that it might be the best new show of the past year, and maybe the year before that. I put off watching it due to, well, isn’t it obvious? People were buzzing about it on social media around the time of release and I figured it was just another stupid long movie show that was getting far too overpraised due to the simple fact that, again, most series are bad now and we are forced to celebrate the crumbs. But I am obsessed with Severance!!! It’s good!!!!!
Severance — created by Dan Erickson in his showrunning debut following writing for Lip Sync Battle, and executive produced and co-directed by Ben Stiller — follows a group of employees who work in the “severed” department of a company called Lumon Industries. The idea of severance is simple: a person’s personal life and their work life are split into completely different factions in their brain. So, when an employee goes home, not only do they not remember their time spent at work, they don’t even know what they do for work (sounds nice, right?). The ethical issue that severance poses is that it’s not just that you don’t remember or know what you do at your job. Severance creates a whole separate version of you, a separate person who does this job, a person who did not ask to be born and is technically imprisoned at your place of work, trapped in your body.
The series focuses largely on Mark Scout (Adam Scott), in addition to his coworkers Dylan G. (Zach Cherry), Irving Bailiff (John Turturro), and newly severed employee Helly R. (Britt Lower), the latter of whom wants nothing to do with severance and is desperate to get out of it. Together and consistently at odds with their unnerving superiors Ms. Cobel (Patricia Arquette) and Mr. Milchick (Tramell Tillman), the quartet slowly deigns to uncover what Lumon is hiding while grappling with the inherent ethical quandaries of their severed lives.
It’s an interesting, technocratic dystopian concept with overt inspiration (both thematically and aesthetically) from Terry Gilliam, and Erickson and co. craft a compelling and funny myster-thriller-drama. Each episode manages to be narratively gratifying, the characters are complex, endearing, unique, and the finale culminates on a cliffhanger that leaves you craving more. What makes Severance especially satisfying in this latter regard is when you realize that the revelations leading to this cliffhanger are only the tip of the iceberg. Hardly any of the questions Severance poses across its nine-episode first season are answered, leaving a wealth of story opportunity for the writers. What’s become too typical to me is series answering the bulk of their questions and concluding on a cliffhanger nonetheless. Where are you supposed to go from there?
This sentiment has been beaten to death, but too many series now just befall same problem: feeling like movies that are too fucking long. Most of these series have one thin idea that might have been better suited to a two-hour timeframe (for example: everything that Mike Flanagan does). Television series have a specific function and purpose, and in the quest to create the next cinematic Breaking Bad while bringing on film directors with little to no television experience, TV shows don’t feel like TV shows anymore. I don’t particularly care for Rian Johnson but the jump from directing TV to movies consistently proves better results than vice versa, and I think Severance benefits heavily from its creators having television backgrounds. I seriously cannot recommend it enough!
M3GAN
In the embattled quest for modern-day camp and sleaze in today’s filmmaking, cinephiles are too readily willing to overpraise subpar art that makes any go of it. Take, for example, M3GAN. Let me first say that I don’t think it’s bad. I understand why it’s so popular and I like it enough myself. It’s a fun, silly time at the motion pictures! I gave M3GAN a heart on Letterboxd because I thought it was enjoyable and I had a good experience. But we shouldn’t kid ourselves calling M3GAN camp masterpiece. It only fence-walks the style and tone that it’s trying to recall, leaning far too heavily into a weird earnestness that clashes with the silliness of everything. It pulls back on the gore and potential camp that could make it genuinely great. There are handful of other examples of this in recent horror films, specifically—for example: X and Pearl, which I genuinely wish I never had to hear anything about again for the rest of my fucking life!
It should be noted, however, that apparently the filmmakers were forced to pull back on the kills in order to obtain a PG-13 rating, so that teens could seen the film after the trailer gained momentum on social media. So in the hopes that the originally conceived, unrated cut of M3GAN gets to see the light of day in the not-so-distance future, perhaps I’ll be eating my words. But as it stands, I don’t think M3GAN is all that people have cracked it up to be.
Toute une nuit, News From Home
I’m excited to explore more of Chantal Akerman’s work this year, and I’ve already hit the ground running with these two films. I watched S&S list-topper Jeanne Dielman back in 2021 and unequivocally thought it was a masterpiece (hence, why I put it on my own S&S ballot; no, actually, not to impress people with my knowledge of an “obscure art film”). Sometimes I can be a little closed off or have trouble with art that is a little more “inaccessible.” But I think really I just have my own preferences, and I love love love what Akerman does.
Possibly in the same vein as my affinity for Kelly Reichardt, I find that I can gravitate towards minimalist filmmaking despite rigid or cold formal structure because I love how much emotion can be hidden underneath it. I’m a very emotional film-watcher and I watch movies with slightly less of a focus on form in mind and more on how the movie makes me feel as a whole. Beyond narrative or character complexity, but mood, tone, atmosphere (all of which, obviously, are heavily influenced by form). And I love to be both surprised by finding myself moved in places one might not normally think to look, and to be moved profoundly by very little (I also watched and enjoyed Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives for similar reasons recently).
Toute une nuit (A Whole Night) observes the sporadic interactions between various characters throughout the course of one night; some romantic, some not. News From Home depicts a series of shots of New York City in the 1970s set to narration of the letters Akerman’s mother sent to her sometime after the director first moved to New York as a young woman, creating a portrait of their often emotionally turbulent relationship. I loved Toute une nuit and its brief glimpses into the lives and loves of people and situations we will never come to know, but I was moved more by News From Home. I’m romantic about New York City and I loved the filmed shots from the cityscapes to the quiet alley ways to empty subway platforms and intimate train cars, crafting a collage of the city as a paradox of bustling and abandoned. But it made me think about how isolated I often feel here, and my relationship with my own mother (far less fraught, though), who I miss.
Things I’ve been reading….
Dream Story
My boyfriend (I feel like I mention him a lot, he’s just around) got me a book of Arthur Schnitzler short stories and novellas for one of my Christmas presents, a collection which includes Dream Story. Many may recall that Dream Story served as the basis for Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, one of my favorite films if not my absolute favorite. For some reason I’d gotten the impression that Dream Story had only very loosely influenced Kubrick’s film. But at this point I’m almost finished reading the novella and it’s clear that Eyes Wide Shut recreates the plot and the characters of Dream Story almost beat for beat, just set in late 20th century New York City as opposed to early 20th century Vienna (most other names are changed, but Nick Nightingale’s forebear was simply named “Nightingale”).
I love reading the source material for movies I like—it’s how I first forced myself to start reading for pleasure back when I was in high school, after being extremely averse to reading for most of my young life (I was a television child, much to the chagrin of my book parents).
The Big Picture: Money and Power in Hollywood
This is a really interesting non-fiction book on the economics of Hollywood that I recommend for anyone curious about the intricate, shadowy business dealings that support the American film industry that don’t really get thought about too often by the average you or me. Sometimes it is a bit like reading another language if you don’t understand shares, investments, and other money nonsense things that get dealt with in big business. But one of the most fascinating things that I have learned so far, that I didn’t realize before I started reading, is how much of a money-mindset hustler Walt Disney was.
It’s wild to me how he has been painted by the world in his legacy as an idealist creative when that man has been hustling, grinding, and scamming since he bought his first storefront for the big big price of like, $50 I think. Maybe the book is simply biased, but the way he’s described makes it seem like he never really cared about creating art at all, only about creating intellectual property to sell. I didn’t realize the extent to which Walt Disney’s undaunted thirst for power (and his commitment to remaining an outsider from, hm, “those Jew” Hollywood moguls, as the book quotes him) is the direct source of the state of our film industry as it is now. Since reading about Disney, I am starting to reconsider that age-old question of “if you could go back in time would you kill Hitler as a baby?”
Things I’ve been listening to…
At long, long last, it’s here. It’s finally here. We waited, and now we have been rewarded. Many said that it would never happen, that it had already been six fucking months since the film came out. But nevertheless, the odds were defied— the Toxic/Viva Las Vegas mashup from 2022’s official film canon contribution, Elvis, has been released into the world.
I’m not quite sure why they waited this long — aside from Doja Cat’s seminal “Vegas” (a confusingly-named original song that fuses with “Hound Dog”), “Toxic Las Vegas” — as we have now learned that it’s called — is easily the film’s standout track. “Toxic Las Vegas” was noticeably absent from the Elvis soundtrack and unavailable to listen to anywhere else up until now. I suppose they wanted to build anticipation, but releasing it in January feels weird, right? I don’t know, whatever. I don’t know anything about how music works, I just know that the single released the morning I was in an Uber to my cousin’s son’s bar mitzvah and I listened to it for the entire 30-minute ride.
BriZigs LLC 2023 GRAND (RE)OPENING POST!!!!
“I don’t really watch television shows anymore because I think that they are all bad now. This might seem like a broad statement to make...”
No, you’re absolutely right and you should say it. (Also, happy belated birthday!)