This is a feature I've been toying with making more permanent for a while, discussing some of the ideas for posts that never quite panned out. This year I had a couple that got as far as me actually writing the full posts before I realized that I had to abandon them. But waste not, want not, so at least I'm going to use them for a little self-analysis in this post.
Wolfwalkers and Physical Media - One of my favorite films of 2020 was Cartoon Saloon's gorgeous "Wolfwalkers," which was acquired by Apple TV+ and has been an exclusive on that service for over a year now. It had a tiny theatrical release - and in COVID times that means next to none at all, and more alarmingly it wasn't released on any kind of physical media until only a few weeks ago, as part of a Cartoon Saloon boxset. Since other films with Apple TV+ distribution like "Cherry" and "CODA" have also been missing physical releases, I wanted to dig into the potential implications of these movies skipping over so many of the traditional windows of distribution - VOD, DVD/Blu-ray releases, cable and network television broadcasts, and so on. "Wolfwalkers" feels like a film that should have had a much bigger cultural impact than it did, and I'm worried that the Apple TV+ exclusivity is severely limiting its potential audience.
And this ties into the wider issues of media siloing and paywalls that have been cropping up recently. The trouble here is that all I have is a lot of conjecture and my own experiences with finding media as a kid - which seem wholly out of date. Do kids still consume movies the way I did, stumbling over them at the library, or broadcast as filler television programming on the weekends anymore? Do more households have Apple TV+ than I think they do? I've also already touched on most of these issues before with my post about Apple TV+ and the "Peanuts" holiday specials last year. This is a topic I'm still keeping a wary eye on, but don't feel comfortable writing anything more about yet.
The John Mulaney Situation - I try to avoid the celebrity gossip ecosystem as much as possible but John Mulaney's wild ups and downs over the last eighteen months have been hard to ignore. The comedian's recent substance abuse and relationship troubles read like a stack of tabloid headlines. A good chunk of Mulaney's fanbase turned on him because he wrecked the nice-guy persona he'd built up over the years. So, this looked like a good opportunity for me to talk about parasocial relationships and the pitfalls of modern celebrity and internet fame again, and I could be mostly objective because I've somehow managed to completely avoid John Mulaney's work until now - I literally only watched two of his specials in order to write the post.
However, the more I tried to justify what I was doing, the more I wound up in the same trap of essentially rubbernecking the car crash. By trying to analyze Mulaney's actions, and his fans' responses, I found I was getting sucked into their drama and potentially contributing to the media scrum. I also quashed a post about a much more obscure, down-on-their-luck former internet celebrity and their morbid fan base for similar reasons. However, I was so fixated on the idea of the Mulaney post, I had to research and write the whole thing before I could get it through my head what a bad idea it was.
Rank 'Em: The Early James Bond - Finally, I was planning this set of posts for a while, to go with the "Rank 'Em" post I'd already written about the modern James Bond movies (1995-2015). I managed to finally finish all the Bond films, and was revved up to rank the first sixteen films, from 1962 to 1989. However, I kept putting it off and putting it off, and eventually I had to face the fact that I'm not especially interested in spending time trying to write about these films. I like some of the early Bond films, but others were a real slog, and many of the earliest installments have aged poorly.
I'm never particularly objective when I'm ranking movies, but in this case I found myself wondering if I could get away with ranking the wildly campy "A View to Kill" and "Moonraker" higher on the list because they were childhood favorites. And that was when I decided that I should leave ranking old James Bond movies to the actual fans of old James Bond movies.
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