1 if by land, 2 if by screen, 3 if by PG-13
It's the Fourth of July and amidst all the travel and fireworks I cobbled together his newsletter
Nova was always scared of the noises from fireworks but she liked looking at them.
Welcome back to Jacob’s Letter, a free pop culture newsletter full of puns and badly-PhotoShopped dog photos.
Happy belated Fourth of July and congrats to the USWNT, who are still not paid enough and gave back a sense of national pride during these troubled times.
This week’s issue is a bit abbreviated and a day late due to me traveling and mostly writing this on my phone, but we’re still going to talk about “Midsommar,” the PG-13 rating and some “Veronica Mars,” in addition to movie trailers and other features.
Movie review: A bad trip
Much like “Hereditary,” director Ari Aster’s debut film, “Midsommar” is an examination of grief. Also like “Hereditary,” it’s laconic, with lots of long shots and slow build-up to a dread-including finale. It’s also darkly funny and contains a great performance by a lead actress (here it’s Florence Pugh; in “Hereditary” it was Toni Collette) that probably won’t get the recognition it deserves. And it also successfully builds suspense for three acts before not quite sticking the landing.
“Midsommar” is about a breakup on a cross-country trip, but it also just as easily could be about any number of things: toxic masculinity, gaslighting, American boorishness while abroad, indecisiveness, nihilism, depression, closure, the 5 stages of grief — but most of all, this is a creepy folk horror cult film, complete with weird rituals and a creepy pagan people. It’s less jump-scare scary than it is dread-inducing, and the ending very nearly breaks the film with how absurd it is.
But it’s so visually striking you can’t turn away, even when it’s grotesque.
My rating: 4 bear costumes out of 5
Teen Noir: Veronica Mars Season 1 recap
As I have written before, I am very excited for the 4th season of this beloved cult favorite show about a teenaged private eye and her ex-sheriff dad solving crimes in their affluent California neighborhood.
The show started out as a riff on Austin’s rich Westlake High School, when creator Rob Thomas was a teacher there. It morphed into a show about California, but it could have been set anywhere there was a prominent class divide.
From Vox: Every episode of Veronica Mars, ranked
“Veronica Mars” was full of noir, camp, crime, quippy teens and lots of high school mysteries to solve. It also went to some pretty dark places in its examinations of class, race, wealth, sex and morality. The show was cancelled after three seasons, but a crowd-funded film was released in 2014 after a fourth season pilot was ordered by a network but never aired. Since the film’s release, series creator Rob Thomas has partnered with Austin author Jennifer Graham to write two books continuing the story of the plucky sleuth.
In preparation for the new season, Taylor and I have been rewatching the series from the beginning, and here are a few of my thoughts so far:
The pilot episode is still one of the best episodes of TV I’ve ever seen. In hindsight, it set up things that would go on to be discussed seasons later while also perfectly setting the mood and tone of the show for years to come and also planted all the seeds for the season’s central mystery — who killed Veronica’s best friend Lilly Kane — all within an hour.
This show’s influenced by everything from “Chinatown” to “West Side Story” and it wears its heart on its sleeve.
Some of the jokes here are funnier than any comedy I’ve seen.
TobyMac’s music even gets a shoutout!
The amount of guest stars this show got is insane, and includes a roster of a bunch of folks pre-fame: Paris Hilton, Sydney Tamiia Poitier, Joey Lauren Adams, Jane Lynch, Jessica Chastain, Ken Marino, Adam Scott, Amanda Seyfried, Max Greenfield…and that’s just in the first season. Paul Rudd makes an appearance in Season 3 as well.
It’s campy without ever fully getting too wild, and very noirish without ever taking itself too seriously.
Enrico Colantoni as Veronica’s dad Keith is one of the best performances of a dad I’ve ever seen, and he’s very well written.
Just go watch it, is all I’m saying. All available on Hulu or DVD now.
The PG-13 rating is old enough to launch a presidential bid
On August 10, 1984, “Red Dawn,” starring Patrick Swayze , C. Thomas Howell, Lea Thompson, Charlie Sheen and Jennifer Grey, was released into U.S. theaters. Other than being a prime piece of Cold War Americana, it was also the first film to be given a PG-13 rating by the Motion Picture Association of America.
The PG-13 rating was made official 35 years ago July 1, after 1984’s “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” was deemed too dark for a PG rating after parents were outraged at that film’s depiction of human sacrifice and violence. The rating was actually “Indy” director Steven Spielberg’s idea, per this Vanity Fair article:
I remember calling Jack Valenti [then the president of the Motion Picture Association] and suggesting to him that we need a rating between R and PG, because so many films were falling into a netherworld, you know, of unfairness. Unfair that certain kids were exposed to Jaws, but also unfair that certain films were restricted, that kids who were 13, 14, 15 should be allowed to see. I suggested, 'Let's call it PG-13 or PG-14, depending on how you want to design the slide rule,' and Jack came back to me and said, 'We've determined that PG-13 would be the right age for that temperature of movie.' So I've always been very proud that I had something to do with that rating."
The rating then joined other MPAA classifications of G, PG, R and X (later changed to NC-17, still the worst rating for any American film). PG-13 has since become a boon to movie studios, as most movies are marketed to that demographic. Last year, movies rated PG-13 made up seven of the Top 10 box office earners, according to Box Office Mojo.
However, the rating has been controversial, especially with what content gets allowed in a PG-13 movie.
For instance, characters can say the F-word once in a PG-13 movie as long as it’s not sexual in nature, but two f-words is an immediate R (e.g., one “Fuck you” is acceptable, but one “I want to fuck you” is not. Two utterances of the word in any context is an automatic R. The English language is wild!).
One exposed breast is OK, as in “Across the Universe,” but two is bad news. And seemingly, all sorts of violence is allowed as long as too much blood isn’t explicitly shown (think of basically ever “Avengers” movie ever vs. a pretty tame R-rated horror movie. That double standard for sex vs. violence is also an example of American’s comfort with violence over sensuality that stretches back to the Puritan era and influenced film’s early Hays Code. That subject is expertly covered in the documentary “This Film Is Not Yet Rated,” if you can ever snag a copy).
This is why movies like the sweet coming-of age film “Eighth Grade” and the extremely violent “Passion of the Christ” have the same R rating, when “Eight Grade” is much more PG-13 friendly and actually, y’know, depicts what it truly is like to be 13 years old. Anyway, you have Indiana Jones and Steven Spielberg to thank for today’s film landscape in more ways than one.
Trailer Park
Want more trailer news for all the movies coming out this summer? I have just the thing: Read my summer movie preview here at jakeharrisblog.com.
“Knives Out”
Rian Johnson’s first film since “The Last Jedi” is a whodunit in the vein of Agatha Christie starring a murderer’s row of talent. I’ve watched this trailer approximately 15 times already and I probably will watch it a couple more dozen times before Thanksgiving.
“Midway”
“In my dreams I’ll always see you soar across the sky…” oh wait, that’s from “Pearl Harbor,” which “Midway” looks an awful lot alike. This looks like it will benefit from direction from Roland Emmerich, he of action disaster movie greatness like “Independence Day” and “The Day After Tomorrow.”
“Jumanji: The Next Level”
The Rock channeling Danny DeVito is one of the most inspired choices any modern-day franchise has made. The first one wasn’t great, but it was fun. I’m expecting more of the same here.
“Official Secrets”
Kiera Knightley in a role from this century!
Letter of Recommendation
Movie: “Spider-Man: Far From Home” is a high school teen movie wrapped up in a superhero costume, and that is its greatest strength. Tom Holland continues to do great work as Peter Parker, and this movie manages to make jokes about what happened during “Endgame” while reckoning with Tony Stark’s legacy on the MCU and in the world the MCU created. Oh, and Jake Gyllenhaal as Mysterio is one of the greatest MCU villains of the whole franchise.
Music: It is a truth universally acknowledged that a man’s fondness for jam bands only grows as he gets older. Or maybe that’s just me and my ever-growing affinity for listening to listening to Pearl Jam, Shinyribs and Sturgill Simpson bootlegs. To that end, discovering the Tedeschi Trucks Band this past week was a pleasant surprise, and I’ve started going through their entire discography. Check out their latest album “Signs.”
Book: Mary Oliver’s book of poetry “Felicity” is a short collection, but packs a punch. It’s a series of poems about happiness that left me inspired and uplifted. Oliver is a treasure.
Friday News Dump
A list of online stuff I really liked this week:
Every time my computer crashes in the future, I’m going to think of this article in Wired about the technical difficulties during the moon landing, and be grateful instead of mad: https://www.wired.com/story/apollo-11-mission-out-of-control/
Who killed the Masked Marvel? This article about an unsolved crime in Entertainment Weekly is fascinating: https://ew.com/celebrity/2019/06/27/who-killed-the-masked-marvel-true-crime/
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This newsletter is written by me and edited by my favorite person, Taylor Tompkins. Views expressed here are my own and don’t reflect the opinions of my employer, yadda yadda yadda.
If there’s anything you want to see covered in a future newsletter, let me know!
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See you next week,
Jake