Fin: Go Go 'Godzilla,' The Internet dies a little more, liberal uncle humor takes a hit, and RIP Norman Lear

This week’s Friday notes column

Hello everybody, and Happy Hanukkah to my fellow Jews.

The other night, on the latter end of a personal double feature, I caught Godzilla Minus One, the new Toto Japanese Godzilla film that’s been the talk of just about every critic I know since its arrival a little over a week ago. And I was blown away, even though the front end of the double feature was Citizen Kane (shown at the Philadelphia Film Center, in the home stretch of its Sight and Sound 100 countdown.) 

A lot of people have said this, but I agree: The new Godzilla movie has a much better grasp of both storytelling and action filmmaking than probably 95 percent of what Hollywood has been churning out lately. It has clear stakes, it knows how to set up and pay off emotional beats, and for the majority of the action sequences, you can see what’s going on. Revolutionary, I know. It’s the last of several movies this year to come out of nowhere and truly engage with audiences.

When it comes to action-adventure, it was the long-in-the-tooth franchises that came through, all doing very innovative things. The three best action movies I saw in 2023 were the fourth John Wick, the seventh Mission: Impossible, and the 37th Godzilla. 

The Internet dies a little more again

Film critic Vince Mancini, whose podcast the Filmdrunk Frotcast has been one of my favorites for many years, is now writing a Substack called The Content Report, and I encourage you all to subscribe. He’s got reviews, but also some first-rate analysis of where content and the Internet are today. 

In a post this week, Vince wrote about the general decay of the Internet. Not only are writers getting laid off left and right, with sites closing and the people running them not especially caring about the written word or the role it plays in society, but archives of various sites we all love have been disappearing too:

Once I was forced out of the media brand I helped to build, it was clearer than ever that I essentially had zero control over what happened to virtually my entire portfolio and the evidence of my working life for more than 15 years. I created it, but I don’t own it, and I don’t get any say on what happens to it (which was mostly true even when I still worked there). I’ve come to rely on Google and my past work as much as my own brain when it comes to trying to remember what movies I saw in 2012 or my interests in 2017.

Yes, it’s all very, very bleak. But then again, not all media layoffs are bad… 

Bye-bye, Borowitz 

Conde Nast did a bunch of layoffs earlier this month, and ensnared among them was humorist Andy Borowitz, author of The New Yorker’s The Borowitz Report humor column. 

My feelings on Borowitz and his style of humor have been well-documented, especially in my 2018 essay for Splice Today on The Case Against Liberal Uncle Humor:

“Your conservative uncles might go on Facebook every day and share conspiracy theories and racist memes. But it’s your liberal uncles who share something arguably even more horrifying: Andy Borowitz columns.”

Borowitz, for the last several years, has been posting the most witless, obvious, bite-free political satire; the New Yorker purchased his website, The Borowitz Report, in 2012. For this, for years, he was rewarded with a nearly permanent spot at the top of the magazine’s most-read stories list, often overtaking some of the best reporting from some of the best journalists in the world. Also, most of the great journalists who you think of as “New Yorker writers” are not employees of the magazine; Borowitz, it appears, was. 

Per Variety’s story about his departure, which I’m convinced was written by someone who shares my opinion of Andy’s work:

Among Borowitz’s final pieces for the New Yorker are “George Santos to Spend More Time with Imaginary Family,” “Ivanka Unable to Remember Name of Her Father” and “Clarence Thomas Collapses from Exhaustion After First Full Day of Regulating Himself.”

Forget Trump, abortion, and Israel. America’s greatest divide may be between those who think Andy Borowitz is funny and those who don’t. If you’re left of center and your parents are still alive, chances are they love him. I think he makes Mark Russell look like Bill Hicks. 

Borowitz, despite the layoff, should be okay for money. And that’s because, in case you didn’t realize, he is also the co-creator of the Fresh Prince of Bel Air. Sure, the show wasn’t his idea, he and his then-wife were essentially assigned to executive produce it, and he only worked on it for the first season. But I imagine he’s collected a massive amount of royalties from that, over the years. 

RIP Norman Lear 

Anyone who has ever said or thought the phrases “go woke, go broke,” or “keep your politics out of entertainment,” I would like to introduce them to the work of Mr. Norman Lear, who spent the past eight decades disproving that entire attitude.  

Lear, who died this week at the age of 101, had the longest and most prolific career of any TV producer, writer, and creator in history, making such shows as All in the Family, Good Times, Maude, Sanford and Son, The Jeffersons, and many more, several of which were spinoffs of others. 

Throughout, Lear’s work was stridently political and progressive, and probably the best possible version of that particular style. Everyone remembers how different audiences got different things out of the character of Archie Bunker, but Lear was never afraid to make a political statement — often a controversial one — with his work. 

I especially love the “your father was wrong” scene, from All in the Family, with Carol O’Connor and Rob Reiner. It’s a discussion about prejudice, and how it is passed down and excused:

Lear’s career as a TV writer began in the 1940s when he was in his 20s, and he continued to have credits well into his 90s, executive producing the great One Day at a Time re-imagining that started in 2017. 

Pluto TV, this week, is running marathons of several of the Lear shows. And the great 2016 documentary Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You can be rented from Amazon and Apple. Hopefully, PBS, which ran it a while back, will air it again soon.

George Santos, HBO villain 

Last week, after George Santos was expelled from Congress, political writer Josh Barro wrote a brilliant political obituary, fitting Santos into a Republican Party that he sees as “dominated by high camp miscreants” like Donald Trump, Kari Lake, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, who “stand on the shoulders of the homosexuals who created the trashy reality TV aesthetic they are living out.”

Barro: 

It seems you can be a gay Republican, or you can be a messy-bitch-who-lives-for-drama Republican, but being both at the same time remains a bridge too far for many conservatives. Or, maybe the way to put it is that Republican voters’ growing tolerance for crime by politicians does not extend to extremely gay crimes like stealing campaign funds to pay for Botox. We have made much progress toward equality, but this shows that there is always more work to be done.

Santos, of course, has been compared to a Bravo villain, but Andy Cohen has gone on record that he doesn’t want Santos on his network. (Though were his crimes any worse than those of Teresa Giudice?) However, the ex-Congressman may be headed to another cable network: Yes, HBO. 

Deadline reports that HBO is working on a movie about Santos, from Frank Rich, the former New York Times columnist who more recently has worked on The West Wing, Veep, and Succession. HBO has optioned a book called "The Fabulist: The Lying, Hustling, Grifting, Stealing, and Very American Legend of George Santos.” 

Could this result in a good movie? Who knows. There’s certainly plenty of material there. But Santos’ story is one of those so over-the-top that it’s hard to imagine a fictional story topping the real thing. This is one of those projects where they’ll probably have to cut out some of his crimes for time.

Santos, for his part, is likely looking at serious prison time, so don’t expect him to appear at the premiere.

This week’s writings 

This week, here at the Substack, I reviewed Poor Things and crowned it the best movie of the year, reviewed Matt Singer’s book about Siskel and Ebert, looked back on the 10th anniversary of Inside Llewyn Davis, and reviewed the documentary We Live Here: The Midwest.

At Splice Today, I reviewed Ava DuVernay’s new film Origin.

For the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, I went through the most Jewish moments in Barbra Streisand’s new memoir, “My Name is Barbra.” The story also got picked up by The Forward and the Jerusalem Post.

For Living Life Fearless, I argued that there should not be a fourth The Hangover movie.

For AppleInsider, it’s the latest crime blotter. I appear to have beaten most of the world to that story about a thief refusing to take his victim’s Android phone because it wasn’t an iPhone.

Next week: A big project I’ve been working on for a while, the latest incarnation of the Oompa Loompas, and documentaries about comedies and a sports legend. As always, thank you for your support.