Is it okay to be happy right now?

A special free edition of the Friday Snapshot looks at how the new normal's falling into shape

It’s Friday, April 17, 2020, and here’s where we are right now…

I had a pretty great day yesterday.

Is it okay to say that? Right now, are we allowed joy at all?

I’ve been working on something for the last two years, and yesterday we had a big Zoom meeting with all hands on deck and it was great to hear how things are moving forward and to talk about what that might look like and I found myself almost levitating afterward because of all the potential in what we’re doing. At the same time, I also realize that this is a truly awful moment on an international scale.

This week’s new releases were supposed to be Antlers and Promising Young Woman and I was really looking forward to both of them. I hope we’re not months and months away from seeing either of them, but I get it. Anyone who holds out for a theatrical release, I understand.

I saw that Disney+ is releasing Artemis Fowl on June 8, and I think that’s a smart move in every way. That film was never going hold its own theatrically, not comparatively speaking. Disney has created their own difficulties here, setting this insane high bar for every film they release. When you build a system that is centered on the billion-dollar blockbuster, you set expectations that are impossible. So now they get to look like they’re doing the public a favor by releasing a “big” movie straight to the home market, but they also relieve the film from having to perform in any particular way. It’s as big a hit as they say it is now. Nice trick.

I’m not sure I believe that system will ever entire snap back into the shape it was in before this began. I know that was just a few months ago, but the argument against changing any of the broken systems we’ve been using has largely been “but you can’t just stop and start over,” and now, that’s not true, is it? If you want to refigure the way theatrical and home distribution works, this is your opportunity. If you’re a disruptor, this is your opportunity to disrupt by finding new ways of doing things.

The virtual cinema model is starting to gain some traction. You can go to Film Movement’s page or you can go to Alamo Drafthouse’s page or you can do it through Magnolia Pictures or Laemmle Theaters, and you can see a number of different new titles. I highly recommend The Wild Goose Lake, a gorgeous film noir from Diao Yinan about a mobster who kills a cop by accident, setting off a spiral of murder and violence in the Wuhan province. It’s an impeccably shot film, and Diao is one of a number of Chinese artists who have created strong, smart modern riffs on film noir convention. You can also see Corpus Christi, a spectacular Polish film about a young man who poses as a priest in a small village after being released from prison, not for gain, but because he believes he’s had a genuine spiritual calling. It’s an amazing performance by Bartosz Bielenia as Daniel, and if it was in English, he would have been a huge sensation last fall. Bacurau is a Brazilian title with a wild hook. A small remote village is reeling from the death of their beloved matriarch when they realize that they have vanished from all online maps. That’s about the time the armed mercenaries and the strange drones show up, and the film gets crrrrrrrrrrrazy. I’d say you can’t go wrong with any of those titles, and if you go through the Drafthouse, you can do some of their specialty programming like their Terror Tuesdays or their Weird Wednesdays, and it’s good to see them leaning into what makes them special.

Have you tried any of those options yet? Will you? Is it too complicated at this point? Are these theaters all going to end up creating their own online portals that would allow them to do this? I think we’re still in the early days, but I think a corner has definitely been turned now, and there’s no erasing that.

I was deeply saddened by the passing yesterday from COVID-19 of the brilliant cinematographer Allen Daviau, whose work was so closely tied to Spielberg’s in the early days and who shot some truly remarkable films like Peter Weir’s Fearless and Barry Levinson’s Avalon. I had the opportunity to get to know Allen a bit back in the early ‘90s, and he was a wonderful guy, open and funny and sweet. One of the best conversations I had with him was about the shooting of Amblin’, Steven Spielberg’s short film that served as his original calling card. Daviau talked about learning a shared vocabulary with Spielberg during that shoot, and when you look at the work they did together on E.T. or Empire of the Sun or The Color Purple, you see a very pure expression of that voice that we think of as Spielberg’s. That’s a collaboration, though, and it’s never more clear to me than when you see what happens when a director switches cinematographers. The ideas may be the same, but the execution changes, and when I think of Spielberg’s voice, I think of E.T., where he is working on almost purely emotional, expressive level, and I think of the gorgeous “Cadillac of the skies” sequence from Empire, maybe the most heartbreaking use of Spielberg’s ability to summon awe ever, and those things live and breathe the way they do because of what Daviau gave back to Spielberg. As Dean Cundey was to John Carpenter, so was Daviau to Spielberg. That’s not to say the only good work Daviau did was with him, because that’s certainly not the case. I’m particularly fond of his work on Defending Your Life, and I think he gave Harry and the Hendersons an extra coat of Amblin’ glow that no one else could have.

But as I think about him today, it’s Fearless that keeps punching a hole in me over and over, maybe because I just watched it and wrote about it as part of the Formerly Dangerous Movie Club. There’s an extended version of the plane crash, scored to Gorecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, that is my favorite sequence of his career. It’s a gorgeous dream, and it feels like something that was painted rather than photographed. That’s what his work expressed at its best. It’s like he could capture the insides of the people he photographed and turn them metaphorically inside out. And if we’re talking about career highs, Daviau was the co-author of the image that ended up defining Spielberg’s entire career:

I’m also sorry to hear that Brian Dennehy is gone. What a great actor, man. He was one of those guys who always gave you exactly what you cast him for. Always. I can’t think of a bad performance he gave in anything. I can’t think of a time he was anything less than completely natural. He looked like he was carved out a big block of wood, but he was charismatic and charming and could turn on the menace with ease. First Blood was his breakthrough, and I remember what it felt like when that film landed on us in ’84. He was such a monumental sonofabitch as Sheriff Will Teasle that it didn’t surprise me when he was everywhere for the next few years. He scored big in both Cocoon and Silverado, and I thought Twice In A Lifetime was a real announcement of just how great he could be, and how he was just as great as a leading man as he was as a character actor. I thought F/X was ridiculous fun, and a big part of that was the cat-and-mouse between Dennehy and Bryan Brown. Maybe his best film of the ‘80s is also one of the lesser-known efforts, Peter Greenaway’s The Belly of an Architect. Co-starring with Chloe Webb, Dennehy gave one of those dedicated, ferocious, take no prisoners performances that should have been nominated for every award under the sun if there was any justice. It’s surreal and brutal and just amazing in its ferocity.

Dennehy’s family announced that he passed from natural causes, not from any kind of Covid-19 related complications. He was 81, still a vital working actor, and it will be sad to never see him work again. More than anything, I regret not seeing him live, because I know he was dedicated to working in theater, and in particular, it sounds like he killed it in both Death of a Salesman and Long Day’s Journey Into Night in beloved productions. I love theater. I’ve worked in theater. My college education was geared towards theater. But I have been absolutely terrible about getting out and actually seeing things, and as a result, I have genuine regrets now about productions I really should have made the effort to see. I feel like there’s a hole in my cultural experience that I can’t ever fix as a result.

We talk primarily of the deaths of the famous right now, but the vast majority of the people who have died because of this horrible illness are just normal, regular people. I didn’t know Joel Weinberg personally, but he was the father of Scott Weinberg, my co-host and co-creator for ‘80s All Over. Joel was a retired Philadelphia firefighter, a hero many, many times over, and his experience sounds sadly, horribly typical. The worst part is seeing how much pain it causes Scott and his family because they can’t sit shiva. They can’t be with the community that would normally comfort them at this time. There’s a reason for these rituals of grief, and it’s to help the living deal with the enormous pain and sorrow of the sudden loss. The damnable thing about this virus is the way it is forcing people to forgo those rituals, cutting off the comfort that is so vital. We may feel connected by the deaths of people like Allen Daviau, whose work spoke to so many of us, across such a broad chunk of pop culture, but will really connect us in the end is the way all of us are going to either lose someone or know someone who did. It is going to cut closer and closer it continues, and right now, we’re not doing what we need to do nationally to really fix the problem.

One of the strangest things as new art is released right now is seeing how some people created something that feels very different in the shadow of coronavirus, like this final season of Brockmire. It started as a series about a baseball announcer who has a meltdown on the air after discovering that his wife is cheating on him. That meltdown snowballed into something truly epic, and Brockmire just rolled through his life like a wrecking ball. Part of the pleasure of being a fan of the show has been seeing the way they reboot the core concept every year, bending it in some radical new way, and never more radically than this year, when the show jumped into the future. Joel Cooper Church’s vision of America might have been hilariously dark if things weren’t so awful right now, but as it stands, it feels like they saw it coming, and some of the most bitter laughs are genuinely hard to stomach right now. It’s a brilliant show, and I love this final season, but these are painful laughs nonetheless.

I find myself equally unsettled by Fiona Apple’s new album Fetch The Bolt Cutters, an album I have been eagerly awaiting since the moment it was announced. I love Apple’s work, and there’s a whole lot of prickly brilliance that is obvious on the first listen here. But this isn’t going to be some soothing balm for us to use to coast through these troubling times. Apple’s art has sharp edges and broken parts and it will absolutely cut you if you engage with it fully. Comfort isn’t the point, and for some people, that may be hard to swallow. I’ve played it twice now, and I suspect it will take me many listens to really get my head and heart around it in equal measure. “Under the Table” and “Heavy Balloon” are my immediate faves, and I am just so happy to have her voice back in my head again.

AND FINALLY…

While I haven’t been reading any comics for the last few weeks because they haven’t been publishing any new comics, I am starting to ease back into the habit. I’ve only ever really used the DC Universe app for their shows like Doom Patrol or Harley Quinn, but I plan to dig into some older runs of things I haven’t read before. Why not? That’s what they’re there for. I saw that DC is putting out a trade collection of the limited-run series Superman Smashes The Klan, and I wanted to embed the trailer for you:

That is, pure and simple, one of the best comic books I’ve read in years. It is shot through with a profound love of the characters and also for the American ideal. Gene Luen Yang’s writing crackles and the art by Gurihiru is big bold pop perfection. I love this series. I strongly encourage you, if you have any fondness for Superman at all, to pick it up. It’s set in the ’40s, but you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand how urgent and contemporary it feels.

Here’s hoping you stay safe and sane this weekend. I plan to watch some stuff I missed in theaters, like the new film Wendy, while also carving out a chunk of time to marathon the entire season of Devs at once. Whatever you’re doing, take care of yourselves and each other.

As always, the titles in bold were particularly enjoyed.

THIS WEEK’S BOOKS: Broken by Don Winslow; Jimmy The Kid by Donald E. Westlake; Dispatch by Bentley Little; More Adventures of the Great Brain by John D. Fitzgerald; Who Censored Roger Rabbit? by Gary K. Wolf; The Source by Brian Lumley

THIS WEEK’S COMICS: The Goon #5, #6

THIS WEEK’S TV: Harley Quinn S2 E2; Tales From The Loop S1 E1; Big Mouth S3 E10, E11; Love Is Blind S1 E7, E8; Columbo S4 E5; American Idol S3 E11; Survivor S40 E10; Last Week Tonight with John Oliver S7 E8; Brockmire S4 E5; What We Do In The Shadows S2 E1; Married At First Sight S10 E16; Cursed Films S1 E4, E5; Ozark S2 E3; Chris D’Elia: No Pain; Brooklyn Nine-Nine S7 E12

THIS WEEK’S GAMING: Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey; Uncharted 2; Rock Band 4; NBA2K20

THIS WEEK’S MOVIES: Simon and Garfunkel: The Concert In Central Park; The Big Fix; It Started As A Joke; The Goodbye Girl; Never Rarely Sometimes Always; Police Story; Close Encounters of the Third Kind; Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound; We Summon The Darkness; Spirited Away; Fantasy Island; Anchors Aweigh; True History of the Kelly Gang; The Aviator (2004); The Prestige; Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson; Fury of the Demon; Blackbeard’s Ghost

Today’s special edition of the Friday Spotlight is free, but normally this is just for subscribers. It’s only $7 a month, and less if you go annual.

Image courtesy of Walt Disney Studios
Image courtesy of Film Movement
Image courtesy of Warner Bros
Image courtesy of Universal Studios/Amblin’