Free Holiday Movie Zine
TL;DR: click here for free zine.
Hello. Some friends and I have made a zine of our favorite holiday movies. When I gathered folks together I asked them two things: define “holiday” however you want, and you can't do Die Hard. To discuss Die Hard is to discuss Bruce Willis, and to discuss Bruce Willis in 2022 is to discuss both elder abuse and worker exploitation. (Not to mention that any time we’re discussing movies we’re most likely discussing the labor of union workers.) There’s more about this in the zine.
Some of these movies will be new to you, and some will be comfortingly familiar. Some reek of the arthouse, and some just reek. But they are all glorious and worth your time.
There is a movie for every day in December. I hope they bring you some comfort. Whatever holiday you may be celebrating, let’s remember to take care of those around us.
All I ask in return that you make a donation to Elder Abuse.org (there's also a QR code in the zine).
At this point we are only sending zines to the US. I love my international friends, but international shipping is A LOT. However, if you reach out, I will happily email you a PDF and you can make your own zine. We will still love each other because that is an excellent compromise, and what is love if not a series of excellent compromises?
Because I super-love you, here is one of the movies:
Matewan
1987, directed by John Sayles
On Oct 28, 2022, South African oligarch Elon Musk purchased Twitter. Within days he fired half of the company’s workers, and demanded the remaining workers take a loyalty pledge. Part of the loyalty pledge was letting the remaining workers know they’d be expected to go “hardcore” (D. Boon rolls over in his grave.) by working infinite hours at a fever pace. Somehow, he was caught off-guard that most of the remaining workers didn’t sign up for this level of abuse. By mid-November, Twitter was down to a skeleton crew of workers, many of those beholden to the company because of their visa status.
In 1920, Joe Kenehan, an organizer for the United Mine Workers, arrives in Matewan, West Virginia, to organize miners against the Stone Mountain Coal Company. Matewan is a company town. The workers live in company housing. They’re issued company scrip to be used in the company store. They are beholden to the company for their basic needs.
It is a hard ask to compare tech workers to coal miners. I get that.
Tech workers, especially at the engineering level, are paid fairly well. Their needs are mostly met by the company. They’re fed in the company cafeteria. They’re bussed back and forth in luxury buses. They have access to company perks most humans on Earth would define as luxury. In fact, it might be fair to say that today’s workers traded many of the rights painfully won by the United Mine Workers and their ilk for swordfish in the cafeteria on Friday.
And yet, they are workers. This movie is their history as well. Is it a holiday movie? Is Labor Day a holiday?!
—Mike Monteiro