The one with the new streaming network
This week: “Stranger Things,” more streaming shakeups and “Little Mermaid” #outrage
Opal has “Friends.”
Welcome back to Jacob’s Letter, a free pop culture newsletter full of puns and badly-PhotoShopped dog photos.
How was everyone’s weekend? We fired up our new grill, which we have taken to calling “Smoky Joe,” and made some hot dogs and hamburgers by the pool. Ate some great Hawaiian food. Saw some old friends. Took Opal on a nice long walk.
I also watched and read a lot of stuff last week, as detailed below. Keep reading to learn more about what’s in store for “Friends,” why “The Little Mermaid” casting controversy is actually just good marketing, what I thought about “Dragged Across Concrete” and more.
So no one told you TV was gonna be this way
Right after it was announced that “The Office” would be leaving Netflix for NBCUniversal’s new streaming service in 2021, WarnerMedia announced this week that “Friends” would be leaving Netflix for HBO Max in 2020.
(Insert your own “pivot!” joke here.)
HBO Max is WarnerMedia’s new streaming service that will reportedly combine 10,000 hours of movies and shows from HBO, Warner Bros., New Line, DC Entertainment, CNN, TNT, TBS, truTV, The CW, Turner Classic Movies, Cartoon Network, Adult Swim, Crunchyroll, Rooster Teeth, Looney Tunes and more upon launch.
Its biggest coup, though, was nabbing exclusive rights to every episode of “Friends.” It’s unknown how much money WarnerMedia paid for the saga of Ross, Rachel, Joey, Monica, Chandler and Phoebe, but I’m willing to bet it was somewhere in the ballpark of 150 million coffees at Central Perk.
(Who would have thought that the biggest draw for a new streaming service in 2020 would be that it carries a sitcom that finished airing in 2004?)
HBO Max is expected to debut in spring 2020 and will probably force HBO GO and HBO NOW users over to the new platform for exclusive content, although WarnerMedia has said that those subscriptions will not be affected. The price point for the new HBO Max is reported to be right around $16-$17 a month.
“Friends” has been on Netflix since 2015 and almost left that service at the end of 2018, but after an online whining campaign from fans, Netflix coughed up $100 million to keep the streaming rights to the show until the end of 2019.
More: The iTunes app is dying. What does that mean for my music?
The “Friends” news is the second big piece of streaming information to hit this month, after the internet had a mini-freakout about getting a two years notice that “The Office” would be leaving.
But all of the big news about “Friends” and “The Office” is just noise compared to what’s coming. Expect more an more of your favorite shows to change hands and go to different streaming networks in the coming years as each studio makes its own private streaming service that you’ll have to pay for and never really own. Even with digital files, you don’t truly ever own what you buy from music or movie or streaming services online (and that even goes for books, too).
As for me and my house, we’ll continue to buy the DVDs.
Movie review: No country for crooked cops
“Do not prioritize money over having a heartbeat.” An evil hitman/bank robber says that to multiple people throughout “Dragged Across Concrete,” writer/director S. Craig Zahler’s timely, complicated third film. That could be the film’s thesis; then again, maybe not.
Zahler is a divisive figure; With the brutal violence, slow pacing and sometimes far right-leaning politics of his films, he doesn’t just push buttons, he mashes buttons so hard that there are no buttons to push any more. His first film, “Bone Tomahawk,” was a violent (and some would say, racist) Western horror film about cannibals. His next, “Brawl in Cell Block 99,” was a slow, plodding exploitation film about the horrors of both the prison industrial complex and abortion, staring Vince Vaughn. And now with “Dragged Across Concrete,” Zahler’s made his most political film yet, although the ultimate message of the film is unclear.
The style of “Concrete” is no different from Zahler’s previous films. Long, unbroken takes are the norm, as is the dime store paperback dialogue (sample line: “A couple more years and you'll be human steamroller, covered with spikes and fueled with bile”) and brutal, unflinching and excessive violence (at one point, a dead man’s stomach is cut out of his body). It also retains those earlier Zahler’s insistence upon stirring the pot.
Here, Vaughn returns to collaborate with Zahler, this time with his “Hacksaw Ridge” director Mel Gibson. In a shrewd bit of casting, Zahler leans into Gibson’s public image as a violent racist and makes him a crooked, racist veteran cop alongside Vaughn, who plays his younger partner. When a video surfaces of them violently planting drugs on a Hispanic criminal to make a drug bust, the two of them are suspended without pay.
While watching Gibson in this film, I couldn’t help but think of his racist rants and drunken arrests, which were also caught on film and also ended his career for a time. I think that’s the point here, or else, Zahler is trolling us all.
“Like cell phones, and just as annoying, politics are everywhere. Being branded a racist in today's public forum is like being accused of being a communist in the 50s, whether it’s a possibly racist remark made in a private phone call or the indelicate treatment of a minority who sells drugs to children. The entertainment industry, formerly known as the news, needs villains,” their chief, played by Don Johnson, tells them.
Hard up for money (Vaughn) and looking for a way out of his bad neighborhood (Gibson), the two concoct a plan to stake out some of the old criminals they once put away and steal the gold they’re taking.
At this point, “Concrete” looks like another vigilantism fantasy about two loose cannon, good-ol’ boy cops who just don’t play by the rules and have been hampered by things like “society” and “progress.” But depiction doesn’t always equal endorsement, and while Zahler’s script calls for these characters to say despicable things to and about women and minorities and calls for them to commit brutal, exploitative acts of violence, it never lets them off the hook for the consequences of their actions. These characters get what’s coming to them, although to the people who would most want these characters to succeed, it might not look that way.
But that’s not to say “Concrete” isn’t exploitative and confusing in other ways. “Cell Block 99” and “Dexter” alumna Jennifer Carpenter is in the film for all of 15 minutes, only to be written as a shocking, misogynist pawn in the plot. A side-plot involving a black man trying to also do whatever it takes to survive seemingly equates his plight with that of the crooked cops’.
But by the end, the message of “Concrete” depends on your view of these characters from the outset. You shouldn’t prioritize money over having a heartbeat, sure, but that bon mot comes from the film’s villain. Whether or not you see Vaughn and Gibson as blue-collar vigilante heroes or the embodiment of a corrupt system depends entirely on your point of view going into the film.
My rating: 3.5 egg salad sandwiches out of 5
Did you hear the one about the mermaid and the straw man?
One of the reasons I publish this newsletter once a week is because it allows for stories to grow some context before I write about them. In today’s 24/7 news, not only is the first report often wrong, it’s also the only thing people remember on Twitter before being forgotten within 72 hours.
One such story that needs more depth is this “Little Mermaid” casting news. Just before Independence Day, news broke that Disney had hired Halle Bailey, of “Grown-ish” fame, to play Ariel in its upcoming live action remake of “The Little Mermaid,” joining Jacob Tremblay and Awkwafina and presumably Melissa McCarthy as Ursula (she’s still in negotiations for the role).
As everyone can plainly see, the animated Ariel is white. Bailey is black. Cue Twitter outrage.
Or…was there outrage?
Over the Fourth of July holiday, a tweet went viral from a user named Rebeccs with a photo of a “Little Mermaid” DVD cover that said “Us white girls, who grew up with The Little Mermaid, deserved a true-to-color Ariel. Disney, you made a huge mistake by hiring Halle Bailey. This is going in the TRASH.”
This sparked a huge backlash against Disney from racists, and then a backlash to the backlash from angered people and people who want to show the world how woke they are on Twitter.
Only problem was, that tweet was made by a bot and the photos in it were easily found on Pinterest by a reverse-image search on Google.
This didn’t stop the #NotMyAriel trend from going viral, though, because by the time some news outlets were reporting that very real racists were against the film, the source was traced back to the original bot tweet. Freeform, where “Grown-ish” airs, issued a statement on Instagram defending Bailey, as did Jodi Benson, the original voice of Ariel.
With this news, and the news over this weekend that “Captain Marvel”s Lashana Lynch will be the new 007 in “Bond 25” (NOT James Bond, but just the code name 007, which many clickbait sites would hope you ignore), I’m a bit worried.
Oh, I’m not worried about race-blind or diverse casting. While Disney films are overwhelmingly populated by white actors, they have been more open to different choices in recent years. Meg from 2018’s “A Wrinkle in Time” was black, as was Cinderella in Disney’s 1997 TV movie of “Cinderella,” starring the one and only Brandy. “The Princess and the Frog” was all black animated characters, and the upcoming “Mulan” remake looks to have an entirely Asian cast.
No, what I’m worried about is the way these casting announcements are made.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Disney made that bot account in order to drum up more publicity for “The Little Mermaid,” but the company certainly leaned into the “any publicity is good publicity” mindset while defending the upcoming film from trolls who might not even exist. Most of the tweets I saw about the issue all started with some variation of “All these RACISTS don’t want a black Ariel” without defining who those racists were or if they even existed; most people I saw online didn’t care who played Ariel and were just tired of yet another live action Disney film.
And in regards to the Bond news, most news outlets went with clickbait headlines like “Lashana Lynch—a Black Woman—Is Taking Over as 007. It’s About Damn Time.” (Daily Beast) or “Will the World Get to See a Female James Bond? It's Possible” (Cheat Sheet). By Monday, most outlets had the correct verbiage, but the damage had been done, and Twitter was aflame with hot takes about the franchise from bots and real people alike. From the looks of it, MGM hadn’t said anything to clarify who Lynch was playing one way or another.
I’m sure some real people were indeed very mad about both casting decisions. It must suck to be them and put that much emotional investment in a kids’ movie. But in both cases, the studios’ insistence on fanning the flames of controversy while announcing their “woke” casting moves is not woke at all; it’s opportunistic and entirely motivated by money and publicity.
The internet is mostly outrage all the time, and if there’s anything this age of social media has taught us, it’s that capitalism will find a way to commodify your anger. Whoever runs PR for Disney and the Bond franchise knew these casting decisions would spark backlash, and leveraged your backlash to hopefully make the studios more money when these films come out. By the looks of it, it’s working.
In short: Let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger, and think before you retweet.
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.
“Mulan”
This may be one of the only Disney remakes I’m looking forward to. It looks great and looks like they actually put effort into embracing the fact that it’s live action, instead of trying to transfer animation over to live action. They may have gotten rid of Mushu, but they got Donnie Yen, Jet Li and Yifei Liu as Mulan. Hopefully this doesn’t go the way of “Aladdin.”
“Paradise Hills”
I’m getting strong “Sucker Punch” vibes from this, but the production design looks great. And Awkwafina is usually great in everything.
“Jawline”
Looks like “Eight Grade: The Documentary,” but with a 16-year-old boy instead of a girl. I have no clue who this doc’s subject, Austyn Tester is, but I am interested in the subject matter and how it evaluates the whole “live broadcasting” ecosystem.
Letter of Recommendation
Movie: I enjoyed Christopher Nolan’s first film, the 1999 indie neo-noir “Following.” It’s a short, tightly edited crime thriller about a down-on-his-luck writer who starts following people around London as inspiration for his book, and then gets sucked into a criminal underworld burglary game of cat-and-mouse. The black-and-white suits the genre, and the way the story is framed shows Nolan’s early penchant for themes of duality and non-linear narratives, like in “Memento,” “Dunkirk,” “Insomnia” and “Inception.” I’m going to be extra careful locking my doors whenever I leave home now.
TV: The third season of “Stranger Things” cribs from everything from “Red Dawn” to “Back to the Future” to “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” to “The Neverending Story” to… “Jurassic Park” (wrong decade, but I am sure the shows and films about ‘90s nostalgia are nigh, if the “Friends” news above is any indication).
This season suffers from the usual things the show has always suffered from: a bloated plot and a too-cute-for-its-own-good mishmash of homage and pastiche. But when the show is firing on all cylinders with its performances and special effects, it’s the perfect summer show to watch. Personally, I didn’t like the way Chief Hopper was written this season, but David Harbour performed it well; the breakout here is Maya Hawke as Robin. You may know her parents, Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman.
These kids are growing up, and this season doesn’t shy away from that fact. If there is a fourth season (and I can’t see why not, given that this show has been one of Netflix’s breakouts), the events here set up a good endgame.
(Also, for my money, the best parts of this season were Dustin, Steve and Robin):
Game: For those who have seen “Spider-Man: Far From Home” and have played “Marvel’s Spider-Man” on the PS4, you’ll recognize a nice connection between the two in the end credits (I won’t give anything away, but there was an audible gasp in the theater). Since then, I’ve been renewing my fascination with the PS4 game and its story. It’s one of the best reasons to own a PS4 since the “Uncharted” series.
Music: Texas country stalwarts Wade Bowen and Randy Rogers snuck a fast one past us over the Fourth of July holiday weekend and released their second live album collaboration, “Watch This: Live From Dallas.” I saw them do this show in Austin at the Nutty Brown Amphitheater before a thunderstorm rained down on the crowd. It was one of the more memorable shows I saw in Austin.
More: Moving on ‘Solid Ground’: Wade Bowen’s new album takes you on a sonic tour of Texas
The lifetime of friendship these two have shared is on full display in these songs, and while there are no new recordings (aside from a new cover of Kris Kristofferson’s “Help Me Make It Through the Night”), I love live albums for the new inflections they give to old favorites. This one’s no different. Listen here:
Book: I first heard author and essayist Meghan O’Gieblyn as a guest on one of my favorite podcasts, “Good Christian Fun.” I picked up “Interior States,” her first collection of essays, immediately after hearing her behind-the-paywall GCF episode. The subjects here range from the Creation Museum in Kentucky to an evaluation of subtlety to a look at how Rob Bell helped to re-brand the concept of Hell. Her prose is concise, evocative, wry and nuanced:
Nostalgia almost always stems from an anxiety about modernity: the fear that progress is happening too fast, and that the past will be irrevocably lost….It is in such times, when the distance between reality and myth becomes unbridgeable, that nostalgia can coarsen into resentment and people begin hunting for someone to blame.
It’s in the running for the best book I’ve read this year. You can order it here.
Comic Book: I bought Tom King’s Eisner-nominated “Date Nights/Last Rites” comic on a recommendation from Keli at the comic book store after we talked about how great King’s “Mister Miracle” run earlier this year was. “Date Nights/Last Rites” is an examination of Batman and Catwoman’s relationship from beginning to end, and somehow manages to get you to cry real tears about some comic characters by the final panel.
Friday News Dump
A list of online stuff I really liked this week:
Can a premier lacrosse league work? I hope so, and as a former attacker for my middle/high school team, this was a fun read. (Via Katie Baker in The Ringer)
I don’t completely subscribe to the old adage of “if it bleeds, it leads,” but it does still irk me whenever readers or viewers get mad about the news never reporting “the good things that happen.” To that end, I enjoyed this piece about the dangers of Pollyanna-ing your news consumption. (Via Joanna Mang in The Outline)
Emily Nussbaum and Matt Zoller Seitz are two of my favorite TV critics/writers, and reading this interview, which feels more like a great conversation, is a delight. (via Matt Zoller Seitz in Vulture)
Young people are not leaving the American evangelical church because of a lack of interest in faith or God. They are leaving because of the hypocrites who lead it. (Via Peter Wehner in The Atlantic)
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See you next week,
Jake