The Whestone 5/30/23
The Whetstone
A weekly newsletter where Maddie Weiner hones her thoughts about media and culture. Movies, books, television, music, and more.
Hello everyone! Since this is my newsletter, I'm going to make sure everyone has watched the Blanch trailer that I released last weekend. We're still waiting to hear back from festivals and will be for a while, so it may be some time before the short is publicly available online, but I'll keep you all updated, of course.
I'm thinking hard about bringing back Monthly Movie Nights on my Patreon, but this time I'm considering doing two nights a month, possibly the 1st Monday of the month and the 3rd Thursday, so that more people might be able to join one or the other. I had an idea to start showing movies that are research or inspiration for the things I'm working on right now, to maybe give my Patreon subscribers a look at the direction my work is headed in and at my own process. But I'm not really sure if I should keep doing these movie nights over Zoom or move to some other platform, like Discord. Patreon subscribers, if you have any ideas about that, please do let me know!
In other news this week, I've been watching a lot more movies, including Master Gardener in theaters, which turned out to be a pretty terrible experience! I saw a matinee at AMC Stonybrook (yes, I'm putting them on blast, they'll be fine) and the projector bulb must've been dying or covered in soot or something because the picture was incredibly dim, with a flickering brightness the entire time. It ended up being a pretty deflating experience - I have been waiting for Master Gardener to be released for close to a year, and my viewing experience was, honestly, ruined by being unable to see the images the way they are supposed to be seen.
How the movie was supposed to look
An approximation of how it looked
This reminded me of a very well-researched, if incredibly depressing, article I read in March by Lane Brown about this very topic. It's a fascinating article, but one point that comes to mind is that a lot of the projectors currently in use were bought way back when the original Avatar came out, and they have not been properly serviced. If you have gone to a theater since the pandemic (which not everyone has), I think you can tell! I hope theaters start to get it together soon, because, to me, there is absolutely nothing that compares to the theatrical movie experience. All I know is that, when I pay to see Killers of the Flower Moon in October, it had better look the way it's supposed to!!
This Week I'm...
WATCHING: Written on the Wind
Douglas Sirk's 1956 film is a Technicolor masterpiece and I highly recommend it. Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone are unbelievably good in it, and it's pretty salacious for a '50s movie! Dorothy Malone's character wearing a hot pink dress and driving her bright red convertible through the desolate oil town that her family owns - now that's cinema!
Written on the Wind.
READING: The Wicked + The Divine
I had a wild hair this past week to reread a comic book series I love, The Wicked + The Divine by Kieron Gillen (writer), Jamie McKelvie (artist), Matt Wilson (colorist) and Clayton Cowles (letterer). In this fantasy series, 12 gods from various belief systems all over the world are reincarnated every 90 years as teenagers. Their role is to "perform" for the masses, to be worshipped and to inspire, but they're given a 2-year expiration date. In the 1920s, for example, some of the gods were silver screen stars and some were writers based on Fitzgerald and Hemingway; the main events of the comic are set in 2014 and pretty much all of the gods this time are pop stars based on David Bowie, Rihanna, Florence Welch, etc. The series is a really interesting exploration of creativity, celebrity, and death - I think it's a classic.
LISTENING: Miya Folick's "ROACH"
Miya Folick has released her first new album since 2018 and I love it. Her lyrics are pretty honest and soul-baring, about her relationship with her parents, religion, and past romance. Check out the songs "Get Out of My House", "Nothing to See", and "So Clear".
LINKS:
- Some new trailers: Susie Searches, Problemista, the latest Barbie trailer, I'm A Virgo,
- The Criterion Channel's June line-up, which I'm really excited about, especially their series on Method acting and a new installment of Queersighted
- Some local crowdfunding campaigns that could use some love: The Astronaut Who Lost His Helmet (ending 6/8); Bluffing (ending 6/8)