If you squint, Steve Bannon could totally be Taylor Swift

Our 'Adventures on the Plex Server' column returns with a look at the way our hobbies consume our time and an accidental double-feature of generational Hollywood

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Some days, the movie robot works just fine.

Some days, it’s a huge asshole.

Almost four years into this hobby, it’s hard not to ascribe some personality to the various devices I’ve used to run my Plex server. I tend to call each successive one “the movie robot,” and indeed, each of them has had a name taken from science-fiction. HAL-9000 is the newest of them, a TerraMaster NAS device that is designed to run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

There are weeks where nothing goes wrong with the server at all. It will just chug along, playing whatever I ask it to play, and I can forget about it completely. Other days, it will fail ten times in an hour, requiring a reboot via computer each time. On rare occasion, I’ll turn the entire thing off, let it cycle down, and then do a hard reboot. That seems to fix even the most stubborn issue, and that’s after five or six months of continuous service.

There are also days where I fall down a rabbit hole because I decide to transfer something over, and in doing so, I end up creating “work” for myself. It’s not really work because it doesn’t actually help me in any tangible way, but it’s the kind of thing that scratches an itch that I created in the first place, and while I realize I’m ridiculous, I also get such satisfaction from finishing one of these little mini-projects.

For example… this particular issue of the newsletter is getting a late launch. Why? Well, you can blame Siskel & Ebert. I’ve been on the hunt for episodes of their shows for a while, and someone came through with a batch of stuff that I’m now uploading to my server. Normally, once you do that, you use a button called “Match” to make sure that the Plex Server identifies your file as the right movie or TV show. It does it automatically, but sometimes it’s wrong and you have to tweak it manually, and when you do, it pulls down metadata from one of several sources, including The TVDb, Plex’s own internal version of the IMDb, and other external sources. If there’s no good episode guide out there for something, there’s nothing Plex can do to match it, and in the case of Sneak Previews, not only is there no good match, there’s no good single resource to even go look up the information about what episode aired what date, what production season it was part of, or what movies were reviewed on every episode.

That seems like a criminal shame to me. I remember when Roger Ebert talked about a massive online archive that Disney was building as part of the ongoing relationship he had with the company, and that obviously didn’t pan out in the long run. I love RogerEbert.com, and I love that it’s not just a museum to Roger’s work but is instead an ongoing active publishing platform for other voices. I wish, though, they had a video archive that one could use to watch all of this amazing work that exists. It’s literally decades worth of his life that is largely unavailable by any official means.

So what are we supposed to do with that? Pretend the work never happened? Shrug it off and just accept that it’s gone? Or is that what private archives are for? Once I put every episode I can put my hands on into my Plex server, I’ll make sure I’ve always got it backed up somewhere and each new format I move to, I’ll make sure these come with me. There’s value to these shows, beyond just the entertainment factor of Siskel’s mustache in the early days.

I mean, seriously. Look at this thing.

That plus the fact that he bought the Saturday Night Fever white disco suit plus all those photos of him hanging out at the Playboy Mansion adds up to one undeniable fact: Gene Siskel was a stone-cold freak, man. That’s neither here nor there. It is, however, awesome.

Once I put the episodes in, I had to fix them manually. So now each of the episodes looks like this on my server:

You can see the original air date (as far as I can pin down), as well as a list of what they reviewed. And now that I’ve done that, I can browse those and enjoy them, and I plan to watch them all at some point. Already, I’m remembering what it was that made it so much fun for young Drew to tune in every week. I love my parents dearly, and I appreciate every move they made in my childhood to make sure we had a great life. But I was not raised in one of America’s cultural hotbeds, and I was not surrounded by budding cinephiles all desperate to talk about new movies with me. Tuning in to Siskel & Ebert, whichever of their various shows it was I watched, was a way for me to simulate having those friends. It was like being in the middle of one of those conversations, and it gave me permission to take films seriously… all films. Highbrow art films, big blockbusters, weird drive-in trash. They talked about all of it, and they treated all of it like it was worth a conversation.

There are definitely things about the shows that I wouldn’t do or that I would do differently now. I think their “Dog of the Week” segment is mainly an excuse for them to make each other laugh for a few minutes by trying to describe the film in the most insane way possible, with Roger usually winning and Gene usually helpless with laughter by the end. But it also feels like that, as well as their annual “Worst of” show, is part of that culture of superiority that can make criticism feel snide and mean. They’re at their best when they are simply advocating for what they love and when they’re truly passionate, and they both love films for such personal, weird, delightful reasons that I think it really did open a door for me to walk through as a writer and as a thinker.

To me, this is what Plex is for as much as anything. I have collected a number of things that aren’t currently available and probably won’t be again, and I know that at the very least, I have a digital archived copy, something that I can refer to if I ever need it. I consider film to be part of our shared cultural history, and someone’s got to take care of it if the studios and the rights-holders can’t or won’t.

Weird Coinci-dinks

I threw together a playlist the other day, a bunch of random movies I picked while browsing my server, and then started watching them, and it always blows my mind a little when you get some weird coincidence in the grouping of things. A great example happened the other day when I put on a playlist I’d built and hit shuffle. First up was 1950’s Summer Stock. Second up was 1989’s Tap. Why is that a weird coincidence?

Summer Stock is a studio-era musical starring Judy Garland, Gene Kelly, Eddie Bracken, Phil Silvers, Gloria DeHaven, Hans Conreid, Marjorie Main and more, and it’s a solid mid-level musical. Not mind-blowing. While the script is thin, clearly a Garland/Mickey Rooney vehicle that the studio repurposed a few years after the expiration date, it’s fun and there’s a ton of energy, and I am fascinated by the way the film struggles to shake off the studio-bound artificial nature of the movie musical a la On The Town at times while leaning into it for long stretches. I think both Kelly and Garland are playing about 20 years younger than they really are, and it’s weeeeeeeeeeird. But they’re also both wildly charismatic, and when they cut loose, it’s magic. Because of course it is. It’s Gene Kelly and Judy Garland for god’s sake. It’s a nimble comic supporting cast, too, and all the young show people who show up at Garland’s family farm to workshop and stage a new musical are terrific to watch. The dance sequences are all choreographed and staged by Nick Castle, and if that name sounds familiar to you as a horror nerd, yep. He’s the father of the other Nick Castle, the one who played The Shape in Halloween. That Nick Castle ended up making a film that pays homage to his dance-centric upbringing, and that movie, of course, is Tap, starring Gregory Hines.

I wish I could take credit for being smart enough to program those two films back-to-back, because it’s a wonderful way of looking at what studio musicals look like 40 years apart, shot through the prism of the same family at different points in time. One of the things I love about the career of the younger Nick Castle is the way he did a bit of everything, working with his friends, eventually making films of his own, then making very personal work that paid tribute to his family, which paved the way for him in the business in the first place. I got to know Castle a bit back when I worked at Dave’s Video, and one of the most brutal heartbreaks I’ve ever seen someone go through was when he went from the writer/director of Hook, a script he felt passionate about, to the guy who sat on the sidelines watching Hook turn into something totally different that he couldn’t control or fix or help in any way. Castle always struck me as someone trying to chart a fun, impossible to define path in a business that loves to put you in boxes. How else to explain the range of things he’s been involved in? How does one guy write The Boy Who Could Fly, Escape From New York, and Hook? And that’s the guy who played Michael Myers? The same guy who is in that hilarious rock band that does the Big Trouble in Little China theme? Really?

Yeah. Really. His dad was amazing. He was a choreographer a bunch of the early Shirley Temple films, and he worked steadily on dozens of films, including many recognizable titles like Hellzapoppin’, Ball of Fire, Buck Privates, Stormy Weather, Royal Wedding, Skirts Ahoy!, and, as I mentioned, Summer Stock, where he worked on two terrific numbers in particular. There’s a solo dance by Gene Kelly that was staged because Judy Garland was unable to shoot for a stretch of time. She was in rough shape on the film, and Kelly wanted to protect her and give her as much time to recover as she needed. He worked with Castle to stage this terrific dance involving a squeaky board, an empty stage, and a few sheets of newspaper. Once Garland was ready to work, they staged a new ending for the film, something that wasn’t originally planned, resulting in the “Get Happy!” number that has become one of Garland’s signature moments. Castle’s greatest strength was tap dancing, and he would stage these energetic, dynamic sequences where dancers were encouraged to fly. He was a perfect match for Kelly, who was such an athletic dancer, unafraid to show you how much work it was to be as good as him.

Tap is a love letter to the art form that was so clearly a major part of Nick Castle Sr.’s life, and there is no better human being to star in a film like that than Gregory Hines. There is no film that could not be improved by adding Gregory Hines tap dancing. Alien is a perfect movie. It does exactly what it sets out to do, with precision and surgical skill. And, yet, it would undoubtedly be better if Gregory Hines tap danced in it. Lawrence of Arabia? Would have hugely benefitted from more Hines doing some of the improvography that he does in this film. David Fincher’s Se7en? Awesome. But imagine if inside the box, it had been Gregory Hines… tap dancing. You see my point?

Tap is about a man who has to decide if he wants to keep fucking his life up or if he’s going to give in to his own undeniable gifts and simply dance, and there are a good half-dozen excuses for Hines to break into dance. Every single time, it’s gold. In addition, you’ve got Savion Glover, Sammy Davis Jr., and one amazing sequence where a bunch of Hollywood dance vets like Arthur Duncan, Harold Nicholas, Steve Condos, Bunny Briggs, and “Sandman” Sims all trade cuts, and it is shot with the eye of a filmmaker who understands why dance is great and what it is we’re supposed to be looking at. When Nick Castle Jr. made this one musical and then never went back, I feel like we missed out on something special. Tap suggests he had a real gift for it, and that he knew how to convey the joy that comes from being so great at something that it almost feels like magic.

Looking For Love

I love it when movie roulette coughs up an accidental double-feature that ends up being thematically revealing, but sometimes, I’ll throw several films in a row in on purpose. I just watched American Dharma, the Errol Morris documentary about Steve Bannon, and I can see why distributors would think it is a challenge. I can’t understand why it was so difficult to find a distributor who saw that challenge as worthwhile. Morris doesn’t give Bannon some blank check to just spout toxic ideology. Instead, he spends the entire film pushing and poking and asking questions that Bannon can’t begin to answer, and more than anything, it feels like Morris wants to give Bannon enough room to show you what he really is. Personally, I’ve never understood how this guy who looks like something that grew on Burt Young’s undercarriage managed to leverage himself into the kind of power broker who genuinely helped get a President installed in office. That power was momentary, and I think it has passed, but it’s scary that someone as intellectually vacant as Bannon even remotely came close to having that kind of power. The more he talks, the more desperate and sweaty his philosophy seems, and I think he stands revealed by the end of Morris’s film as a grifter, looking for the next movement he can ride for a while until they figure out how little he has to offer. There is a hunger that drives Bannon that no one is ever going to be able to feed, and it will most likely destroy him.

I worry the same thing is true of Taylor Swift after seeing Miss Americana, which is now streaming on Netflix. There are celebrity documentaries that feel like infomercials, and then there are the ones that feel more like actual films that have something to say about not only that person, but celebrity itself. Miss Americana captures some very personal and real moments as Taylor Swift struggles to take control of her public image, and I think it’s interesting how carefully controlled she is through much of the film. She’s well aware of what people think of her, and the older she gets, the more bruised she gets from the way she gets treated by pop culture. She is responsible for some of it, and in other cases, she is a target for reasons that bear examination. But control is clearly one of the most important elements of her life, and the kind of superstardom she craves depends on that kind of control, rigorously maintained over every aspect of her public persona. That’s no way to live in the long term, and the film does an impressive job of showing us the way those stress cracks manifest over time. Like Bannon, that hunger at the center of her seems voracious, and while she has had gigantic success, it’s clear that she sees every milestone of hers as something to surpass, not something to celebrate on its own.

I don’t have any hard or fast rules about what I want from documentaries, and neither of these will make my end of the year list. But they do manage to give us close-up portraits of people who have very sharply defined public images, driven not just by their own work, but also by the media conversation about them and around them, and in both cases, these appear to be portraits where the control they both demand has been taken away from them, and where we’re seeing a glimpse at the things we’re not supposed to see. That’s reason enough to catch them if you can.

Another Reminder!

Friday’s edition of our weekly Friday Snapshot will be the first issue of the newsletter behind the paywall, and I hope you guys will be there for it. If you’re not subscribed yet, you really should be. You can do it for about less than the average price of a movie ticket every month, and I think it’s going to be well worth your while.

There are a number of things I’ve got coming up that I can’t talk about yet. It’s weird having news that I can’t put in my newsletter. Seems to defeat the purpose. But suffice it to say, it’s going to get more interesting around here as the year wears on, and I can’t wait for you to see what I’m talking about. So sign up now and make sure you’re first to hear about it when the news finally breaks.

Plenty more for you this week, but for now, I’ve got more Sneak Previews to fine-tune.

Image courtesy WTTW Chicago
Image courtesy Warner Archive Collection
Image courtesy SPHE
Image courtesy Moxie Pictures