Yesterday I finally saw “One Battle After Another” – because I suspect it’s going to win the Oscar and I wanted to be au courant – and I’m still a little traumatized by Sean Penn’s haircut. But that was one of the least preposterous things in the movie. I thought, because of all the buzz, I was going to get a serious movie, one perhaps with an important message, and the first 10 minutes gave me that impression. But it quickly descended into an implausible entertainment. Maybe because I write nonfiction, I like stories that have a basis in reality. More and more, it seems, screenwriters sit in their writers’ rooms and come up with narratives, characters, dialogues, scenes simply because they are cool or outrageous; the fact that they have no relation to the real world, logical behavior, means nothing to them. As long as it will make for great viewing. (I suspect we have Tarantino to thank for this.) “One Battle After Another” is often gripping, and occasionally funny – an action-packed movie of the type that appeals to adolescents – but it is not in the least bit plausible. I mean, why would a man who’s on the run continue to wear a plaid bathrobe?
Phil Rosenthal was at the Fort Lauderdale Travel & Adventure Show on Saturday and he came across just as he does on his show, Somebody Feed Phil: warm, wide-eyed, joyful. He steered clear of politics, though, in reference to the border, he said that, instead of a wall, we should build a table. He gave a little insight into the show, mentioning that he doesn’t eat until the scenes of him eating, a situation similar, he said, to dogs in commercials. Somebody asked him if the show was going to be renewed for another season, and he said he didn’t know. He added that network executives don’t just look at ratings; they consider shows that people binge watch. So he suggested that everyone go home that evening, tune in to his show on Amsterdam – the first in the series – and just leave it on through the night. “You don’t have to watch it,” he said. “Just let it run all the way through.”
Flipping through the current issue of the magazine I was once editor of, I noticed quite a few stories without a byline. This was a leftover from my successor, who wrote much of the magazine himself – after the publisher cut the freelance budget – and, understandably, didn’t want to look like a one-man band. There were also numerous stories without a personal voice. This was new, a product of the current editor. (My successor was an excellent writer.)
It occurred to me that the magazine, like others of its type – glossy, bland, luxury/lifestyle magazines – is ripe for AI, which demands no bylines and is incapable of producing a personal voice. Particularly since both are things readers of such publications rarely notice are missing.
The Jan. 12th issue of The New Yorker contains an article about Pope Leo XIV that includes a short section on his time at Villanova University. I read this with interest – I was a senior there when the future pope was a freshman – and was surprised to find, in one long paragraph, two small errors. Both have to do with sports, specifically basketball, so could be seen as insignificant, but they did cause me to wonder about the magazine’s vaunted fact-checking department.
The author, Paul Elie, states that Villanova played its home games at “the Palestra” on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania. The team played some of its games at The Palestra – as did St. Joseph’s, La Salle, Temple and of course Penn – as part of Philadelphia’s celebrated Big Five. But its home games were played at the more prosaically named Field House on the school’s campus.
Elie uses this misinformation to suggest that the school’s success as a “men’s-basketball powerhouse” is a recent phenomenon. (He notes that three recent graduates now play for the Knicks; as always with New York publications, it's all about New York.) Yet in 1971, Villanova played for the national championship, losing to UCLA by six points. Hundreds of students welcomed the team home in the Field House, where forward Clarence Smith gave an emotional reading of Kipling’s If.
I sent a letter to The New Yorker, which I suspect will not be published.
Tony Dokoupil is the new anchor of the CBS Evening News, replacing John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois. He’s handsome and likable and earnest, judging by his sermon that was pasted on to the end of Friday’s newscast. He denounced the elitism traditionally found in New York City newsrooms and painted himself as a man of – or at least a deliverer of news for – the people.
Clearly, the new chief of news at CBS, Bari Weiss, sees Dekoupil as someone who can bring in the new generation. At 45, he’s 12 years younger than the boyish Dickerson, with little sign of his predecessor’s political acumen. Which, Weiss probably believes, is to his advantage.
It all reminds me of my last year at the Sun-Sentinel (2008) when everybody – editors, managers, reporters – racked their brains trying to come up with ideas, innovations, graphics that would bring in the younger generation. It was, I knew even then, before we all had screens in our pockets, a hopeless endeavor. There was nothing we could come up with that would get young people to read the newspaper. That ship had sailed.
It's the same situation with the evening news. No young people are going to sit down at 6:30 to watch a man read from a teleprompter about events they are uninterested in or have already gotten wind of on social media. The days of widely read newspapers and widely watched news shows are over. And no pretty face is going to bring them back.
PS Dokoupil was called into service early, on Saturday evening, for the Venezuela story. At one point, speaking of Maduro, he said “the apprehending of he and his wife.” With grammar like that he’s going to lose viewers like me.
Ever since “Shtisel,” the superb Israeli series, I’ve been looking for a show that also “reckons with love, loss, and the doldrums of daily life.” It’s hard to pull off, hence the glut of science fiction series, detective shows, and broad comedies. The British series “Trying,” about a young couple wanting to start a family, is charming, with some excellent characters, but it doesn’t reach the artistic heights of “Shtisel.”
Last night, we watched the seventh and final episode of “Asura,” which struck me as a kind of Japanese “Shtisel.” The main characters are women rather than men – four grown sisters – but the show has the same slow pacing, the intermittent drama, the quiet humor, the illumination of the universal in an alien world. Just as with “Shtisel,” we were sorry to see it end.