Mostly about the Oscar documentary shorts
But also a Baumbach ranking and some podcasts about Mumblecore
As I predicted last week, the little return to winter we got last Friday didn’t last. It’s definitely Spring now. Something I feel weird about because it’s definitely too early in the year to be having Spring, and it’s like an ominous little gesture toward the chaotic meteorology of our future.
One fun way to escape that depressing thought is through media. And, hey, it just so happens that this is the Substack where I talk about media. This is the Media Round-Up, where I (Josiah) tell you about all the media I’m producing, watching, listening to, or reading.
New from me
Nothing new from me, yet. I haven’t released anything in the last week, but I have recorded stuff that will be coming out later next week.
A new free episode of Fruitless will be out next week featuring AJ Ditty from The Worst of All Possible Worlds, meaning I’ve officially gotten an episode with each host. It was a lot of fun. It’s part of a broader “crossover event” where I went on their show (behind the paywall, on ‘Fancy Movie Time’) also. We’ll be releasing those episodes around the same time next week.
The “crossover event” is focused on Mumblecore. I said there were basically no decent movies to come out of Mumblecore (aside from The Color Wheel) when I appeared on their show last year and it bothered me for a year because, as annoying as the genre can be, there are more decent films than that from the movement. So I wanted to talk about some good Mumblecore movies. I talk with AJ on Fruitless about The Puffy Chair (2005) and on Fancy Movie Time we discuss Frances Ha (2012). I should also have one more Patreon episode of Fruitless next month which will also be discussing some Mumblecore, and then I will feel like I properly did penance.
Film
Last weekend, I caught a screening of the Oscar nominated documentary short films for this year with my Dad at the Des Moines Art Center. It was a fun little event—you get five movies in the course of two and a half hours. If you aren’t enjoying one, there’ll be a new one in twenty minutes.
Here’s my quick little ranking of the films, and then I’ll talk a little about each.
Island in Between
The Last Repair Shop
Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó
The Barber of Little Rock
The ABCs of Book Banning
My basic rubric with these short documentary films is really two things: 1) do they show me something I haven’t seen or thought about before, and 2) do they say something about the current moment. The order there is important though. I think a lot of films struggle from trying to do this backwards, starting with trying to say something important before having something interesting to show. When you work backwards like that, you get a lot of vague gesturing at politics and repetitions of common wisdom. More on that when I get to The ABCs of Book Banning.
Island in Between hits both of those two criteria I gave nicely. It’s about the islands of Kinmen, which are small islands belonging to Taiwan that are incredibly close to the Chinese Mainland. You can see the Mainland vividly from the island. Because of that, it has had a long history of being a tense spot, a little chess piece in the Cold War. On the beaches are rusted tanks and military equipment, covered in barnacles but mostly ignored by people visiting the beach. A giant speaker is set up facing the mainland, blaring the music of Taiwanese singer, Teresa Tang, who is incredibly popular in China. Occasionally a voice will explain how great Taiwan and democracy. This is broadcast all day, and we see shots of farmers working in rice fields quietly while this music echoes over them.
There are tons of haunting shots in the film. It’s a really interesting look at everyday life in the center of a major geopolitical struggle.
The Last Repair Shop looks at craftspeople who repair musical instruments. The director interviews them and, because of the diversity of craftspeople and musicians, each little interview goes on to touch on tons of complex issues—an elderly gay man who talks about his experience of the 60s and 70s, an Armenian refugee who fled Azerbaijani ethnic violence, etc. I enjoyed this one. I was shown stuff I’d never seen before, like the repair process for numerous orchestral instruments, and it was vaguely connected to the current events and wished to humanize some of those issues.
Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó is a very cute movie, but I don’t have a ton to say about it. Director Sean Wang films his two grandmothers going about their daily life and having fun. It’s a sweet film.
This is where I start to sour on the films a bit. The Barber of Little Rock is a deceptive film. On first glance, it looks like a pretty liberal or left wing film. It’s about the racial equality gap coming from a black perspective and it certainly pays a lot of lip service to that subject, but really the movie is about Arlo Washington and his bank.
Now as we know, banks have not been good to black people in American history. You can Google that history if you’re unfamiliar, start with the search term “redlining.” Washington founded Arkansas’ first black-owned bank in order to push back against this. They give loans to help start small black-owned businesses—the main one the film follows is the titular barber shop.
Now I’m not criticizing this. The reality is that we live under capitalism and, unless you’re about to do a revolution tomorrow (you’re not), there are some compromises you need to make. On top of this, one of the chief, racist mechanisms for keeping black people down—both at home and abroad, read How Europe Underdeveloped Africa—is by withholding access to capital. They have to be part of the machine without receiving the benefits from it. On a huge, geopolitical level, this looks like developing mining infrastructure in Africa during the colonial period, but having those minerals and resources processed in Europe in order to prevent Africans from receiving any of the economic development, technical education, and wealth accumulation that comes with the industry. On a local level, this looks like banks not giving loans to people from certain neighborhoods that just so happen to be majority black.
Washington is doing what he can to address this problem within the system, and I find that commendable. But also, the film’s hagiography of Washington left me with a sour taste. With so much about how important small businesses are, how important the American dream is, and how life changing a business loan can be, I started to sense it all felt like a big commercial for a bank. As that kept going, it left me with more and more of a bitter taste in my mouth. It doesn’t help that the film-making isn’t particularly interesting, so it really does feel like a corporate media product.
I felt a bit vindicated with this when I briefly talked to my Dad about the film and, as a conservative, he really liked the film. Which, at first glance, seems odd since there is a lot of discussion of historical injustice and racism—not talking points conservatives tend to love—but the ultimate solution is provides for these things is capital and the power of the free market. And that’s what any good ‘fiscally conservative’ type would want. It is fundamentally a neoliberal film.
Lastly we get to one that was a really bizarre experience. The ABCs of Book Banning is a documentary about an important subject and it’s from a perspective I almost entirely agree with, and yet I found the whole thing incredibly cloying and tedious. It does so many things I despise in a documentary: children interviews where the kids are clearly regurgitating the political sentiments of their parents and really not adding anything aside from some cute “darnedest things” to get the audience chuckling (and boy did they chuckle). But really, if this is a subject as serious as the film frames it as—and it goes for the Nazi comparison immediately—certainly having 30% of the film be a random child looking at the camera and going “so… if you banned these books, I just have a question… uh, why?” is kind of undermining that seriousness.
It’s an incredibly lazy film. Aside from the interviews with children, the film is essentially just going down the list of banned books, reading a good quote from them and then stamping “banned” over it, to get the audience to go “What?? No way.” It is a half-hour of this. This is literally the whole film’s structure. Show a book, either do a quick animation of it, an interview with a kid reading it who says “it’s good!,” or read a quote, and then tell everyone it got banned. No exploration of the movements trying to ban the books, no exploration of the history of book banning in the U.S., etc. It is the type of preaching to the choir I can’t stand—it’s pandering, it’s not shocking enough to be any real political provocation, and it doesn’t really educate you on what is even happening right now. We deserve a better movie about this subject.
I think a better way of doing this topic, especially in a documentary short, would be to avoid trying to cover all these books. You can’t really do any of this justice by spending two minutes on every book that’s been banned. It needed more substance and tension to make it’s point. I would instead focus on one book, and maybe one legal case surrounding the book. Film chunks of the school board battles and arguments about it. I think you may be able to make the point better by being less didactic: just show the right winger’s explaining how Tango Makes Three is making their daughter a transgender communist. You don’t need a shot of kids rolling their eyes in reaction, just keep it focused on the unhinged rants and bullshit worldview undergirding this wave of book banning. Ask some insane QAnon mom to explain what they mean by wokeness invading their schools through Captain Underpants or whatever. We will be able to come to the conclusion on our own.
I don’t think I would be so harsh on this film if it wasn’t nominated for an Oscar. It looks like a little segment you would find on YouTube or whatever, and it’s fine at doing that. But award winning documentary? Good Lord.
Pivoting away from the Oscar shorts, I rewatched The Puffy Chair and watched Frances Ha. Both of which I’ll save my thoughts for the podcasts that will be out next week. I also watched This is John, which is the short film the Duplasses made before The Puffy Chair.
Having watched Frances Ha, I’m officially a Baumbach completionist (well, okay, I haven’t watched his little interview ones like that film where he talks to De Palma, etc). So here’s my official ranking.
The Squid and the Whale
Marriage Story
Frances Ha
Margot at the Wedding
Meyerowitz Stories
White Noise
Greenberg
Mr. Jealousy
While We’re Young
Mistress America
Kicking & Screaming
Highball
This is likely to change. I’m already thinking about switching Greenberg and White Noise. But this is it for now.
Music
I’ve been listening to a lot of music the last few weeks, which has been a nice change of pace. I felt like I had lost touch with music despite it being my go-to artistic medium for most of my life. It’s felt good to be looking for new music and stuff again.
Despite listening to a lot, I don’t have anything to really say about most of what I’m listening to, so I’m going to do my favorite cop-out and pull out statsforspotify.com and give you my top tracks for the last 4 weeks. Here you go:
Ketamine - Single Mothers
I’ve Seen Footage - Death Grips
Grubby - Drug Church
Get Got - Death Grips
Temple Grandin - AJJ
Death Machine - AJJ
Half-Lit - Single Mothers
Coming Clean - The Get Up Kids
Bagged - Drug Church
Cody’s Theme - AJJ
Millions Miles of Fun - Drug Church
Talk About - Dear and the Headlights
Grown Up - Danny Brown
Overdose - Single Mothers
Rejoice - AJJ
Mother of Earth - The Gun Club
Getting Naked, Playing with Guns - AJJ
Leather - Talk Show
Late to Work - Marc Rebillet
Permanent Rebellion - L.S. Dunes
And on that note, I’ll see you all next week!