This is my favorite time of year, although usually it comes more toward April. The time of year here in Iowa where it’s between 50 - 70 degrees F. Both in the Spring and the fall. It always puts me in a good mood. That being said, I’m really tired. But that’s normal.
Welcome, everyone, to the media round-up, where I (Josiah) tell you about all the media I’m producing, watching, listening to, and reading.
New from me
I did the exact thing I wanted to avoid. I have ended up releasing no Fruitless episodes in the first half of the month, so I’m going to be racing to get everything out in the second half. I’m an idiot.
However, I do have an episode recorded! It should be released sometime over the weekend or at the beginning of next week. This is a really exciting one. I talked with Will Sloan, co-host of both the Important Cinema Club and Michael & Us, about Motern Media (I’ll talk a bit more about that in the film section). If you have read this newsletter or talked to me about film much, you probably know that Sloan has been one of the biggest influences on my taste in film. The episode was really fun.
Since no one reads this newsletter anyway, I’ll reveal the whole plan here. I’m planning on making my next video essay about Motern Media, so I decided to interview Will Sloan on the podcast and then use clips from the interview in the video essay. That should be out by the end of the month, I think. I tend to work fast with editing, the hard part is the writing.
On that note, let’s move to film really quick and talk a bit about Motern.
Film
I don’t recall how much I’ve talked about Motern Media on here thus far, so I’m officially entering it into the media round-up cannon, so I don’t have to explain this whole thing every time I bring him up.
Motern Media is the ‘brand’ of Matt Farley and his collaborators, particularly Charlie Roxburgh and Tom Scalzo. Farley is known mostly for his music. Since the early days of Spotify, he has been churning out improvised songs based around search results. He will sometimes record several albums in a single day, getting a Wikipedia list of something like all the cities in a state or a list of common names and just improvising a short song for each. Because he’s been doing this so long, he has been able to make a small, middle class salary from this music. Spotify underpays their artists and usually provides a few cents, maybe a few dollars, per song. But if you write 24,000 songs…
Aside from the music, though, Matt Farley makes movies. Which is why Motern Media is in the film section of this newsletter right now. They don’t really make any money on their films, but they make them for themselves. These are really fascinating movies. In an old piece on my main Substack that I wrote when I was first watching these movies, I called them “campy, poorly acted films,” which I meant endearingly, but now I think even that’s too harsh.
These movies are generally genre parodies. Or, at least, they start out like one, evolve into a broader genre pastiche, and then kind of just transcends into it’s own thing. They have the feel and look of backyard movies. You know, the ones you might have filmed as a kid and asked your Dad to play the villain in or whatever. They all have the look and feel of that, however the actual directing, storytelling, and cinematography is incredibly competent. It’s just that they love to give these overly written lines to nonprofessional actors, friends and family, and have them deliver them almost phonetically. The plots are absurd, and often the joke of the film is an absurd plot that everyone takes completely seriously at face value. The films are ironic, but they’re never winking at the camera—to a degree, a lot of people seem to not realize it’s a joke. They embrace and revel in their own amateurishness and make it an aesthetic.
I mean aesthetic in the traditional meaning of the world, not the online one. It’s a specific style, but it’s also a creative philosophy. This is what I’ll get into more with the video essay and on the podcast episode, but the gist is that they are compulsive creators who believe in amateur film making and believe in making projects you want to make, regardless of how marketable of an idea it is. Motern Media is the goofiest and most fun act of defiance against mainstream film making around right now. They are well worth your time.
This week, I caught up with some of their newer films. I rewatched Heard She Got Married, and then watched the sequel, Heard She Got Murdered. Afterwards, I watched Metal Detector Maniac. All three of these are from their current black-and-white period, that I believe they’ll be moving away from shortly. They released a burst of five or so films after COVID that are all black-and-white and a little more grounded and melancholy than their usual stuff. Don’t get me wrong—these are Motern films, and they are only grounded and melancholy relative to their other stuff, but because of the context of their other films, the emotional aspects actually have some real gut punches. This era of their films is great because it asks “what does one of those backyard movies look like when you’re middle aged?” They’re weirdly mature movies. They’re also really funny. Metal Detector Maniac might be the hardest one of their films has made me laugh.
Outside of Motern, I also watched Dune in preparation for seeing the sequel sometime this weekend. I’m really excited.
Reading
You thought you were done with Motern? Nope.
This week I was also reading, in preparation for the podcast, Motern on Motern: Conversations with Matt Farley and Charles Roxburgh by Will Sloan and Justin Decloux. This is a really fascinating book where Will and Justin from the Important Cinema Club treat Farley and Roxburgh like the genuine artists that they are and walk through their history and creative process. It’s an incredibly funny read and also incredibly inspiring. In general, Motern’s whole artistic philosophy is infectious. The act of even writing the book, Motern on Motern, was inspired by their artistic philosophy: it began with the thought “wouldn’t it be funny if…,” which is a maxim for Motern. If you have the thought “wouldn’t it be funny if X,” then you must do that idea. No one else would have thought of it. That’s the start of all great things.
So Will says, “Wouldn’t it be funny if someone wrote a book like Bergman on Bergman, but about Motern Media?” Justin loves the idea. And so they did. It’s a ridiculous project idea that’s for no one but a few weirdos, and that’s why they wanted to do it.
This is why Motern will remain really influential on me throughout my life, despite so much of my artistic or stylistic preferences in my own work being very different than Motern. Their spirit is encouraging. They inspire creativity in others because of how defiantly creative they are themselves.
And on that note, I’ll see you next week.
You’re not an idiot. Your dingus friend Chris decided to buy a house and mess up the recording schedule.