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Owen Wilson dishes out his secret to a life well lived and much more! $$PLAIN_TEXT_PREVIEW$$
MY FAVOURITE THINGS | Feel Like Jumping
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“But I just think that sometimes to do something—to say something—you have to risk people saying, “Oh, that’s kinda bullshit, what that guy did.” Sometimes you have to just walk through that fear and just try to tell it.” — OWEN WILSON
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As I sat for my first dose of Pfizer last week, I got to reflecting on the emotional rollercoaster of the last eighteen months and everything we once took for granted; birthday parties, holidays abroad and public spaces free of suspicion and surgical masks. Even as my arm began to ache from the vaccine, I couldn’t help but marvel at our ability to come together and invest considerable time, energy and resources into finding a solution to the first global pandemic in a century. Sure there has been far too many missteps that have resulted in far too many casualties. But the bottom line is that the great majority of humanity chose to work together in search of a way forward. As we navigate our way back to calmer waters I only hope we choose to remain united in the face of far more existential threats on the horizon.
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In these increasingly divisive times, it’s hard to summon the names of many A-list celebrities who have managed to avoid a metaphorical flogging OTI (on the internet). Owen Wilson is one of those rarefied souls, whose ability to play the game of life his own way has always made him an outlier in the best sense of the word. As this Esquire profile attests, Wilson’s secret sauce lies in his ability to never take it all that seriously. To hunt down curiousities with a childish whimsy and find novel ways to overcome the bitter realities of existence. In thinking about Wilson’s life as a metaphor for our current moment, his ability to heal from a suicide attempt and come out the other end with a new lease on life gives me hope for us all.
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I never thought one book could teach me so much about myself and this current moment. While it’s taken me most of winter to carry Larry McMurtry’s 1985 voluminous novel across the finish line, tucking into this oversized tome has been like catching up with old friends, vicariously experiencing the pleasures and pains of frontier life. It’s also helped me to accept the fragility of existence and better appreciate the modern medical system. In the Old West of the eighteen-eighties, life could be snatched out from under you in the blink of an eye. Be it a rattlesnake bite, Kiowa hunting party or a mean-spirited cowboy that’s on a drunk after losing his wages at the gambling table. I can’t wait to tuck into the celebrated 1989 television adaptation starring Tommy Lee Jones, Robert Duvall, Diane Lane and Danny Glover.
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After glimpsing Jonathan Coe’s Mr. Wilder and Me on Billie’s bed side table, I found myself skim-reading this fictional accounting and while it left me wanting, its passages on the septuagenarian filmmaker reignited a desire to hunt down some of his overlooked classics. While Billy Wilder’s 1948 dramedy — shot on location in post-war Berlin — wasn’t easy to hunt down it was well worth the effort. Wilder is best remembered for delivering stories that were way ahead of the times and this tongue-in-cheek masterpiece pulls no punches in exploring the bitter side-effects of cultural devastation and human desperation. It also serves as vital viewing for Gregor Jordan’s 2001 masterpiece Buffalo Soldiers which I fell back in love with last week. For any intrepid fans of the Austrian-American genius be sure to check out Gene Phillips’ 2010 biography Some Like It Wilder.
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Karina Longworth continues to mine some fascinating stories out of the icons of yesteryear. In this season of her hit podcast You Must Remember This, Longworth helps us pinpoint where our obsession with celebrity was first ignited. Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper were far more than mouth-pieces for Tinseltown and the industry at large. They were gossip columnists whose clout rattled studio heads and terrified the most beloved stars of the day. That these divorced single mothers built a cult of celebrity around themselves in a man’s world no less is truly awe-inspiring. While it was sad to learn that each would profit from destroying the other’s reputation, their legacies would help contribute to the irrevocable blurring of tabloid fodder entertainment and hard news journalism.
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Jean Smart has swapped out her pajama-set from Mare of Easttown for the glitz and glamour of Las Vegas stardom in this hilarious tongue-in-cheek satire. When Deborah Vance, an aging comedic titan, finds herself being phased out of her cushy casino residency, her manager enlists the help of a reluctant Gen Z television writer after an ill-timed tweet finds her out of a job. I love that creators Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs and Jen Statsky were able to capture the generational divide with such sass and honesty. Call me a traitor but I found myself siding with the Boomer generation at so many turns, opting for a culture that walks the talk in place of tweeting and tiktoking. And while Vance’s lavish wealth and success is nothing more than a pipe dream in this day and age, her tenacity and talents prove that true grit pays dividends.
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I had a hankering for some nostalgic cinema and decided to return to Bennett Miller’s directorial debut to scratch the itch. There is something revolutionary in Miller’s classically visual approach, for while the camera rarely moves, each and every scene pulsates with an innate purpose. Resounding credit lies in Dan Futterman’s airtight screenplay and Philip Seymour Hoffman’s superb disappearing act as Truman Capote. What makes this film so very special is its flouting of convention, opting against a straight bio-pic to examine the creation of a twentieth-century classic and Capote’s final publication. This umpteenth re-watch has finally convinced me to hunt down a copy of In Cold Blood after tucking into the first installment from the New Yorker archives.
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I was binge-listening to Mark Maron’s WTF podcast last month and savored his recent conversations with Matt Damon and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Yet it was his deep-dive with New York Times film critic A.O. Scott that really got the gears grinding. Maron cites Scott’s remarkably prescient piece which comments on the future of my bread and butter. As Scott surmises, movies are becoming less special and more specialized with a quick look at the latest Marvel installments, from Wandavision to Loki, suggesting that the boundary line between cinema and TV has gone the way of the dodo bird. At the same time, Silicon Valley continues to shift its weight behind the metaverse, inching ever closer to a Ready Player One landscape. One has to wonder whether communal entertainment is drawing its last breath.
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Austin Kleon’s newsletter turned me onto this wonderful sleep tape from Jeff Bridges. My love for the Hollywood native and his unquenchable thirst for life continues to grow with every passing year. Not only is he a skilled photographer and actor but a genuinely invested human being. These sleep tapes, a creative offering to help raise money for hungry children, have proven the perfect accompaniment to lounging around the house and has become the latest acoustic foil to calm Ridley during our trips to the shops. While I ordinarily have no time for the human voice in meditative soundscapes, Bridges proves the exception to the rule, his gravelly lilt leaving me smiling in wonder.
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Lee Isaac Chung’s autobiographical portrait of his formative years in rural Arkansas is a welcome reprieve from the intense visual antics of most modern films. And while this story of Korean immigrants putting down roots in red-state America has attracted significant notoriety in the age of the forty-fifth president and his hollow appeal to make America great again, its undercurrent is decidedly apolitical. In reflecting on the film and its stellar cast, I was reminded of Jay Caspian Kang’s wonderful NYT Magazine profile on Steven Yeun, the Korean-American actor whose talents are unmistakable. Tune in to episode forty-seven of Popcorn Therapy to hear me spotlight the meditative drama and it’s Libran director (who shares the very same birthday!).
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This New Yorker profile on Jesse Armstrong got me all hot and bothered for the upcoming season three premiere of Succession which debuts next month. The creator of the sleeper hit came up with some of my favourite English creators including Armando Iannucci (Veep) and Chris Morris (The Day Today, Brass Eye) after finding fame with the cult English comedy Peep Show. As Rebecca Mead reflects on the bespoke formula behind the first two seasons of the HBO series, it got me to thinking about my own love for the show. While it is filled with a cast of characters I love to hate, it is their inability to fulfill any of their artificial aspirations that warms my bitterly twisted heart. “We are all individuals with our own psychological makeup and impulses, and yet we find ourselves in vises of social and economic situations, which means that we are bent in and out of shape—and we’re bent out of shape by the psychologies of our families. So navigating the space between these worlds is a good arena for where the conflict between human beings happens.” — Jesse Armstrong
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Werner Herzog, whose unique filmography and stubborn passion has always inspired me, has set down the camera to pen his memoirs and a biography on the late Hiroo Onoda. Onoda, a Japanese army intelligence officer from WWII, became an icon of his generation for being the last ‘holdout’ to surrender in the Philippines in 1974. Onoda’s incredible tale of survival, living off bananas and coconuts in the depth of the jungle, is a true tale of caution. How Onoda’s life and specifically his twenty-nine years in exile has never been adapted into a film until now is mind-boggling. I’m looking forward to hunting out a copy of Herzog’s biography on the late Japanese veteran when it hits stores next year.
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The passing of iconic music producer Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry got me to reflecting on Kevin MacDonald’s Marley which I wrote about in this newsletter earlier this year. While there are some phenomenally colourful talking heads in the 2012 doco, Perry takes the cake as the most harebrained of all of them. While his contrarian nature and eccentric dress reminds me of a Rastafarian Kanye West (who officially changed his name to Ye this year) his musical talents and prodigious output are simply astounding. This 1972 release from Perry and The Upsetters — his tight-knit band — left me bopping along all week. If this album scratches your itch be sure to check out Tighten Up. Vol 2, an incredible compilation of nineteen-sixties ska and reggae from Trojan Records. “I see the studio must be like a living thing, a life itself. The machine must be live and intelligent. Then I put my mind into the machine and the machine perform reality.” — Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry
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