Working Class Art House, The First Purge, and Spotify Wrapped (12/5/2022)
Your weekly Josiah round-up
Good morning. It’s Monday, and I’m pretty tired, so let’s write a list.
New from me
A Fruitless episode I’ve been sitting on for months is finally out. You can find it here. I talked with my friend Chris Barker about the revolutions of 1848 and the way it shaped politics today. 1848 impacts so many different things in a sort of a domino effect that our conversation flies around to Soviet Russia and abolitionists in the Midwest. I was also happy to have the chance to briefly talk about one of my favorite directors, Miklós Jancsó.
Aside from the new Fruitless episode, there is also a new episode of Mammonburg featuring another good friend, Josh Christianson, where we talk about the news and mostly the insane Kanye West interviews.
Film
…which I will throw the Kanye West interview into the “film” section here because it was one of the most insane things I’ve watched in a long time. I watched about an hour of it unintentionally. My girlfriend and I put it on out of morbid curiosity and found ourselves trapped in it—it’s sort of a hypnotic experience, like a bad acid trip or something. Truly a baffling media object that says something damning about the times, surely. There’s a good Substack from John Ganz about this.
Aside from the interview, I watched some solid movies over the week. Last Tuesday, I went to the theater with my girlfriend to see Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022). I loved the original Knives Out (2019), and I’m delighted that this is going to become a franchise. It’s a great combination of old whodunit genre tropes mixed in with fresh social satire. This most recent film is definitely weaker than the original, and the satire is a bit more heavy-handed, but it is ultimately a fun movie that even incorporates COVID-19 in a not completely annoying way. (What is it with this? Why is it so hard to put COVID in a movie without it feeling like an irritating gimmick?)
Speaking of COVID-19, I watched a low-budget British film that got sent to me on Twitter. Usually when I get a Twitter message that someone has been sending out to a lot of people advertising a movie or something, I ignored it, but for whatever reason this one stuck out to me. In part, it was because they mentioned Béla Tarr in their influences and I’ve been on that kick recently, as I talked about last week. Either way, I watched the film (which is available on Tubi): Nobody Loves You and You Don’t Deserve to Exist (2022).
This is one of the few movies I’ve seen that incorporates COVID-19 for a purpose. The film is pretty abstract—a set of monologues exploring the life of a grieving man in Manchester, UK during the 2020 lockdown. The director, Brett Gregory, describes the film as a “working class art house film,” and there is something to that. It is reflecting on a very specific cultural and social rot in the United Kingdom right now, brought about by the failures of the slowly defunded welfare state and the everyday racism that haunts the former colonial empire. I think it’s definitely worth a watch, as long as you’re prepared for lengthy, theatrical, and emotionally raw monologues shot in single takes.
Over the weekend, I caught up with the Purge franchise. My girlfriend and I had watched the first three films throughout the year (the first two are solid, Election Year is terrible), so this weekend we watched The First Purge (2018) and The Forever Purge (2021).
The First Purge is definitely the best film in the franchise by far. The franchise has always struggled with its political critique. In the first two movies, the critique is ham-fisted but mostly on point. The third film, Election Year, is an embarrassingly liberal reformist film, including a genuinely disgraceful scene where numerous black people dying in order to save a Hillary Clinton / Elizabeth Warren stand-in so that she could win an election. But The First Purge makes up for this. It places the film in the perspective of the predominately black working class in Staten Island. If you want some strong, class-based critique of American politics, this movie has it. If you want a movie to directly affiliate right wing militias with the security state, this movie has it. If you want a slow burn that builds to some really fun urban warfare action sequences, this movie has it. It also stands alone pretty well, so you don’t necessarily need to see the previous three films to watch it.
I should also mention that the aforementioned Josh Christianson released an episode of Odd Splice in 2020 about The First Purge featuring Pat Blanchfield and Dan Yowell.
On the other hand, The Forever Purge (2021) begins to be a little more ham-fisted in the way Election Year was. There’s a few seemingly out-of-place monologues about what “America is” and whether there’s a place for immigrants in it. It’s absolutely a film looking back on the Trump era and naming fascism as a force in American politics that was empowered by conservative courtship until it eventually turns on conservatives. I appreciate all that, but nevertheless found good chunks of it unbearable, especially as it struggles to make sense of class again. The action is fun, though, and I appreciated the focus it had on Latinos in Texas.
Reading
Haven’t been reading much the last week or so. I’m doing the Education for Ministry course through the Episcopal Church right now, and we are reading Reading the Bible from the Margins by Miguel A. De La Torre, which I am enjoying. I’m hoping to get myself reading again more this week. I’ve started falling out of the habit.
Music
Spotify Wrapped came in this week. I was struck with how I listened to a lot less music this year than I had in previous years. Music hasn’t had as much of a role in my life lately as it used to, which I’m kind of trying to change.
But if you’re interested. Here are my top five most listened-to artists for 2022:
Bambu
mewithoutYou
Protomartyr
Sharon Van Etten
The Tragically Hip
And here are my top five most listened-to songs for 2022:
The Chuckler - Protomartyr
Chairman Mao - Bambu
Golden Era Shower - Bambu
Excuses - The Morning Benders
Good Things - Sleater-Kinney
So there you are.