but you have to admire the commitment to originalism

Do yourself a favor and stay away from Spike Lee’s recent, inferior remake

The rubicund complexion and look of guilty surprise aren't helping

Assumed an impetus for the close reading book was to train facility in common ground, which then establishes criteria for professional judgment. This motivated the synthetic approach in my Hollywood/American modernism book. Imagine our generation cares about this more than our predecessors.

Severance is a show designed to be taught, and to frustrate interpretation

lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-...

A24 gets to seem like the Little Guy while it's the Medium Guy (boutique prod/dist with a $3.5b valuation); Apple is Apple.

In this fantasy, the Little Guy is the Medium Guy—King is Stackin' Hats—and the big guys—bank, creditors—get what they want. The allegorical payoff of this fantasy of equivalence goes: Spike/40Acres gets to feel like a Little Guy despite clout;

King, though, was never an artist, or if he was an artist, his medium was always money—he just was Stackin' Hits. We might say, then, in the fantasy of the movie, that even if King leaves Stackin' Hits Records, it comes with him. So he keeps his money, his house, his family, his métier: always whole

who literally loses the house on the hill and is brought low in properly tragic fashion, and who recommits to his vocational passion of cobbling. Gondo is a craftsman and an artist; he might have lost his way through the thickets of finance, but he's been given the chance to set things right.

is that there are no actual stakes for David King. Unlike Kurosawa's Gondo Kingo, Spike's King gets the money back, seemingly in time to avoid defaulting his debt—we know that King has "two weeks," and though the timeline is fuzzy, it does seem that he gets to keep his penthouse. Not so for Gondo,

Emphasis on LOOKS (I assume you chose the word with care, as always). What makes Highest 2 Lowest more of a musical fantasy—I thought Singin' in the Rain b/c backstudio, but Oklahoma! might be more appropriate; I just haven't seen it—than a serious reckoning with obligation—the High and Low model—

Sorry, I sent too early. Congratulations on your engagement!—AD

Andrew DeWaard’s chapter “Derivative Television and Securitized Sitcoms” in DERIVATIVE MEDIA might be up your alley. The book is open-access through Cal Press. You might also find what Ive written about “Severance” useful: lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-...

Hot diggity now I gotta go to the movies

@aarontpratt.bsky.social your bag

Did Heller write something better than Catch-22? If so it’ll jump to the top of my queue

The theory of allegory is as good as the reading