Happy Monday, and welcome to the first edition of Jacob’s Letter in 2021!
So far this year, I haven’t really seen or listened to anything new. I’ve mostly been playing catch-up on some stuff I missed from 2020.
But I have set some pop culture goals for myself this year: I want to see more non-English-language films. I want to see more films and read more books made by women and people of color. I want to watch more documentaries. I want to get back to writing more about country music. And I want to re-read the Lord of the Rings books. (I’m already a third of the way through the first book thanks to a book club I’m doing with my friend Marshall. We read three chapters a week and then call each other and talk about it on Saturday nights, because what else is there to do on Saturday nights now?)
To that end, this newsletter runs the gamut from country music to a movie about Buddhism to Disney+. Thanks for reading, and if you have anything you want to see covered in a future newsletter, send me an email!
Cross Canadian Ragweed lives on
Red Dirt Country band Cross Canadian Ragweed disbanded in 2010. Their final show in October of that year was the culmination of almost 15 years together since forming in Yukon, Okla. in the ‘90s. And fans have been clamoring for a reunion album or a reunion tour ever since.
Those fans didn’t quite get their wish this month, but they did get the next best thing. The Years: A Musicfest Tribute to Cody Canada and the Music of Cross Canadian Ragweed is a live album recorded at Musicfest in 2020 (pre-pandemic) full of country acts paying their respects to the Boys from Oklahoma.
Here you have Reckless Kelly performing “Fightin’ For,” The Randy Rogers Band doing their live standard version of “This Time Around,” and country stalwart Bruce Robison putting his spin on “Breakdown.” My favorites of the bunch are Jamie Lin Wilson’s take on “17” and BJ Barham’s heartbreaking rendition of “The Years.”
The only downside here is that listening to this cover album will immediately make you want to go and listen to the real songs. But that’s not because the covers are bad; it’s just because Cross Canadian Ragweed is so good.
Review: A literal meditative state
A lot of films have been called “meditative,” but Christopher Makoto Yogi’s film August at Akiko’s is one of the only films I’ve seen that actually put me into a meditative state.
There's the thinnest of plots here — a musician tries to reconnect with his family home by staying at a Buddhist bed-and-breakfast on the Big Island of Hawai’i following the death of his grandparents — but the plot is always second to the feeling of the film. Akiko’s form is its function. It’s a short movie about meditation that forces the viewer to meet it on its level. I could feel my breathing calming down and slowing midway through, and I appreciated how the sound design made me stop and want to listen to everything I could find.
It ends with a thought-provoking musical examination of shared space and familial tribute that I won’t soon forget.
I found this movie through the Criterion Channel’s curation of films about Hawai’i and its native population, a selection that also includes documentaries on Sand Island and the fight to protect Mauna Kea.
If you can spare the subscription fee, I’d say it’s worth a month’s payment alone just to see a few films that portray what it’s actually like to live in the islands, instead of the Waikiki/tourist version that’s often shown. If you don’t want to pay for that, though, it’s also streaming on Amazon Prime.
WandaVision and the Disney+ Multiverse
WandaVision recently debuted on Disney+, and while I’m liking it and its TV homages so far, I’m waiting for the inevitable moment where it all has to somehow wrap back into the Marvel Cinematic Universe at large.
The show kicks off Marvel’s Phase 4 of films and TV, and the entertainment juggernaut is trying to do for television what the Avengers cycle of movies did for films. An ambitious experiment, to be sure, but what happens when every single franchise is also trying to create an interconnected universe of TV, film, books and video games? I take a look in this piece for Book & Film Globe.
Call for submissions: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Do you love Nickelodeon’s Avatar: The Last Airbender? The popular show started streaming on Netflix right at the beginning of the pandemic last year, introducing itself to hundreds of thousands of new fans (myself included).
My next collaborative newsletter is going to be all about A:TLA and its sequel series The Legend of Korra. If you’ve got something to say about either of those series, send me a reply email with your pitch!
Letter of Recommendation
What I’m watching: Doctor Who
I avoided watching Doctor Who for years because I was annoyed with its fandom and the type of people that kept telling me to watch it. (This is also why I have never seen Sherlock or Supernatural and never finished Rick and Morty. Sorry.) Plus, on top of the 12 seasons of the reboot, there are 26 other seasons of the original show, and ain’t nobody got time to watch all of that.
However, Taylor got me hooked on the reboot about a year ago. We stopped watching after it got pulled from Amazon Prime, but now that it’s on HBO Max, we’ve been steadily making our way through the new series. It’s a silly, fun show with an underlying faith in humanity, which is nice to see these days.
Friday News Dump
A list of online writing I really liked this week:
I’m not as sold on Soul as some are, but I appreciate any movie that makes me think about life’s Big Questions. I also really liked this article about the Jesuit roots of that movie’s Big Question (via Juliet Vedral in Sojurners)
In keeping with my Lord of the Rings entry for my Christmas movies newsletter, I’ve started going back and re-reading the books and re-watching the movies. I also found this article where the cast interviewed each other after 15 years, and it’s a delight (via Nick De Semlyen in Empire Magazine)
I’m so tired of seeing the ‘80s endlessly depicted in pop culture, and this piece gets at why (via Rob Kutner in Book & Film Globe)
Next week
Seeing as how the adventure video-game adaptation movie Uncharted got its release date delayed yet again, I think it’s finally time to talk about the movie that was Uncharted before Uncharted ever existed. That’s right, we’re talking all about the Matthew McConaughey flop Sahara, a Clive Cussler adaptation that functioned as an Indiana Jones/James Bond homage and a proto-Uncharted adventure serial. It was supposed to be Paramount’s next big franchise until it became one of the biggest box office bombs in Hollywood history.
It’s got a lot of fans, myself included:
Next week, I’ll talk about how the movie flopped and why I love it so much. See you next time.
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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