Fin: 'Stop Making Sense', start writing about Taylor Swift, and remembering a Philadelphia movie gone wrong

This week's roundup, with links, news items, and other things.

Thank you all, once again, for reading this newsletter for its first two weeks, your support is appreciated. For the new subscribers among you, this is my weekly news and link roundup. 

Revisiting David Byrne's big suit

One of the big highlights of this year's Toronto International Film Festival was the on-stage reunion of Talking Heads, a long-defunct band not particularly known for getting along with one another. The occasion is the premiere of a new 4K restoration of their seminal 1984 concert film, Stop Making Sense. 

I'm not in Toronto, but I was able to catch a screening of Stop Making Sense, in IMAX, followed by a live simulcast of that reunion, in the form of a Q&A by Spike Lee. 

The film is fantastic. I was sitting with people who grew up watching it regularly, but I think I saw it one time, a long time ago, on a CRT TV. This was much better, as the performance by the band builds and builds, and major risks are taken (and pay off) with staging, musicianship, and wardrobe. 

Yes, David Byrne's giant suit is amazing: 

The movie was followed by one of the most awkward Q&A sessions you'll ever see. I once saw Spike interviewed on stage at the BlackStar Film Festival by #MeToo founder Tarana Burke, and I think this was less comfortable: 

See the film, when it's re-released on September 22. 

And speaking of classic rock documentaries, my old friend Sean Burns wrote for Crooked Marquee's Classic Corner this week about Martin Scorsese's The Last Waltz, with the expertise of someone who has seen that movie many, many times. 

"[Robbie] Robertson was only 33 years old when the film was shot – same age as another Scorsese protagonist who pulled into Nazareth."

Damn, that's a great line. The Last Waltz is getting a re-release of its own, in November, through Fathom Events,

When Robbie Robertson passed away a few months ago, my first thought was of that quote in "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls" from one of Scorsese's ex-wives: "It's a shame Marty wasn't gay, because the best relationship he ever had was probably with Robbie." 

"This. Sick. Beat." 

When a journalistic beat involves covering the actions of a single person, that person is nearly always a president, governor, or political candidate. I do remember ESPN once employed a reporter, the late Pedro Gomez, to personally cover Barry Bonds, and Brian Windhorst later did the same for LeBron James, but that's the exception and not the rule. 

So I was interested to see this week that newspaper company Gannett posted a job listing this week for a Taylor Swift Reporter. The job, which it appears will entail writing for both The Tennessean and USA Today, seeks "an experienced, video-forward journalist to capture the music and cultural impact of Taylor Swift." 

We are looking for an energetic writer, photographer and social media pro who can quench an undeniable thirst for all things Taylor Swift with a steady stream of content across multiple platforms. Seeing both the facts and the fury, the Taylor Swift reporter will identify why the pop star’s influence only expands, what her fanbase stands for in pop culture, and the effect she has across the music and business worlds. 

The successful candidate is a driven, creative and energetic journalist able to capture the excitement around Swift's ongoing tour and upcoming album release, while also providing thoughtful analysis of her music and career.

The ad lists an uncomfortably wide pay range of between $21.63 and $50.87 per hour. And yes, it's worth mentioning that Gannett has been one of the worst offenders over the last 25 years when it comes to obliterating journalism jobs, and this is money being spent to cover Taylor Swift that isn't going to be used on covering municipal political corruption. 

All that said, this would probably be an awesome job. You get to travel the world and be in some very glamorous places, and presumably get press tickets to the highest-demand concert tour in history. Everything you write will get massive clicks, and there's a very, very good chance of the whole thing leading to a book deal. Also, probably 95% of the people applying for this will be fans, so anyone who's a real journalist will have a leg up. 

(Twitter user @Bshoup, by the way, gets credit for the amazing pun that heads this item.) 

The case against Post Malone  

Like a lot of people who get into their 40s, I've gotten away a bit from paying attention to popular music. I realized as far back as college newspaper days that I'm good at writing about film but not so good at writing about music, and at some point, I just lost any sort of expertise when it comes to what the new cool bands are. 

But as long as I've been a father, I've been cognizant of something: I'm not always going to like the music my kids like, and that's okay because that's how it's supposed to be. Music aimed at youth isn't for me, and that doesn't necessarily make it bad. 

That said, I remember Post Malone being the very first music that my kids played for me and my reaction was, "What is this garbage?" Jeff Weiss of the Washington Post appears to agree, and this week offered a priceless takedown of that particular tattoo-faced menace: 

Post Malone’s music is dead-eyed and ignorant, astonishingly dull in its materialism, an abandoned lot of creativity with absolutely no evidence of traffic in his cerebral cortex — and there’s also a negative side. Even if his intention is sincere homage, the bludgeoning witless imitation can’t help but feel like minstrelsy. White people will inevitably appropriate the most culturally relevant music genre, one that’s become almost intrinsically bound to the modern conception of pop, but it’s not asking too much to attempt modest synthesis or the incorporation of a single new idea, or at least to not be so grotesquely desolate. We went from Eminem to Cheddar Bob. If Post Malone were black, he wouldn’t have sold half; he simply wouldn’t exist.

Post Malone has also been in a handful of movies, but once again, those face tattoos kind of make it impossible for him to play anyone besides Post Malone.

Billy Heywood's mom has got it going on 

A lot of you came here from Craig Calcaterra's mostly-about-baseball Cup of Coffee newsletter, and a big thank you to Craig for the shout-outs in this newsletter's early days. 

There happened to be a fantastic piece of baseball/movie crossover news this week: The Chicago Cubs called up a young prospect named Pete Crow-Armstrong, an outfielder. And it turns out his mother is Ashley Crow, who played the mom in the 1994 movie Little Big League. (Pete's father, Matthew John Armstrong, is also an actor, and both parents were on the TV show Heroes.) 

The viral tweet (or whatever tweets are called now) stated that "she is officially the mother of an MLB player nearly 30 years after the release of the movie," although the kid in Little Big League was not a player for the Minnesota Twins, but rather the owner and later the manager. 

A lot of people confuse Little Big League with Rookie of the Year, which came out nearly exactly a year earlier and was also about a kid who got to be around a big league baseball team. The Crow-Armstrong story might have been even more perfect if it had been the mom from Rookie of the Year since it was the Cubs and the kid was a player, but it's still a very good one. 

I've long had a soft spot for Little Big League, since I grew up in Minnesota rooting for the Twins and going to the Metrodome which, while downright terrible as a baseball venue, was the place where I discovered baseball and got to attend two World Series. 

Little Big League succeeded at making the Dome a character and making use of weird features like the artificial turf and the "Hefty Bag" in right field. But as fun as those movies are, I'd imagine a Major League Baseball locker room is the last place in the world a 12-year-old boy should be. 

And speaking of Rookie of the Year, a treat earlier this week for my fellow Immaculate Grid obsessives… 

This week's writings 

This week, here at the SS Ben Hecht, I shared my "50 Things I Believe About Movies" manifesto, reviewed the football documentary Kelce, looked back at the Coens' Burn After Reading, and reviewed A Haunting in Venice. 

• For the Philadelphia Inquirer, I wrote about the 30th anniversary of the John Cusack movie Money For Nothing. When I interviewed Cusack a few years ago — for a local appearance pegged to another 30th anniversary of one of his movies, Say Anything… — he mentioned that Money for Nothing was the only movie set in Philly that he's ever made. 

Money for Nothing is one of the great fascinating failures of 1990s movies. It was based on the locally famous true story about an out-of-work longshoreman in South Philly in 1981 who found a bag of over $1 million that had fallen off a truck. 

Amidst a long meth binge, Joey Coyle spent the next several days doing a lot of things that someone who just found a bag of money absolutely should not do, starting with telling many, many people about it, including local mobsters. He got caught about four days later while trying to get on a plane for Mexico; he was acquitted in the subsequent criminal trial. 

The prolific journalist and author Mark Bowden, then an Inquirer staff writer, wrote a three-part series in 1986 that was adapted for the film. 

A movie based on that story should have been a tense thriller, in the tradition of Dog Day Afternoon or the third act of Goodfellas. Instead, Money For Nothing was positioned as an underdog comedy, put out by a Disney subsidiary, which meant that they omitted the drug part completely. As Bowden wrote in his book, the filmmakers all had different ideas of what the tone of the story should be, leading to a muddle. 

Coyle went on to die of suicide about three weeks before the Money For Nothing's release, leading the movie to be essentially buried. It made less money at the box office than the amount of money Coyle found in the bag. 

Despite not really working at all, the film had a really strong cast, including James Gandolfini as Joey's brother, Benicio Del Toro and Philip Seymour Hoffman in small roles, and Vito from The Sopranos (Joseph Gannascoli) in his movie debut. 

As for Cusack, he's a very talented actor whose work I've always admired, but he's not exactly believable as a blue-collar South Philly guy who works on the docks and is James Gandolfini's brother. 

• You may have noticed that Jewish people love the band Phish. When you go to a Phish concert, as I've started to do again the last couple of years, you see a lot of guys with Jew-fros, shirts with Hebrew letters, and donut-themed kippahs. 

That's the subject of a new book called "This Is Your Song Too: Phish and Contemporary Jewish Identity," which grew out of an even better-titled academic conference panel called "People of the Helping Friendly Book." The book is edited by Oren Kroll-Zeldin and Ariella Werden-Greenfield, and there's a lot in there about Phish playing the high holiday prayer "Avenu Malkeinu" live. It's seen as something of a holy grail (wrong religion, I know) for Phish to play the song live, although I saw it at my first-ever Phish show in 1999. When I was, alas, on a night off from working at a Jewish summer camp. 

I interviewed the authors for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, and I can assure you that if you're Jewish, or you've been to Phish shows, or both, there will be lots of things in the book that are recognizable to you. 

Also, I'm mentioned, albeit indirectly, in the book: 

I was one of the secular friends in the car with Ben. 

• If you're new to my writing, among my gigs is a bi-weekly column looking at Apple-related crime for AppleInsider. It covers everything from big Apple Store heists to iCloud being used in indictments of politicians, to iPhones and iPads being stolen from people all over the world, whether celebrities in India to the president of South Africa. I've been doing this for four years and I've never had trouble finding such stories. 

In last week's column, I pointed out that Apple TV+ has reached a deal (for $5 million) to adapt Michael Lewis' upcoming book about disgraced crypto king Sam Bankman-Fried and the fall of FTX. It's not clear if the Apple project will be a movie or miniseries, but as The Ankler reported, it's one of eight- EIGHT! - FTX-related projects that are in the works throughout Hollywood, although I doubt they'll all get made. 

A few weeks ago, Bankman-Fried had his bail revoked ahead of trial, but a while before that, a judge had ordered that he no longer be allowed to use a smartphone. He would therefore become the first-ever subject of an Apple TV+ program to not be allowed to use an iPhone. 

• Speaking of Michael Lewis adaptations, for Splice Today I reviewed Radical Wolfe, a new documentary about Tom Wolfe, which was based on a magazine profile by Lewis, who is among the interview subjects in the film. It’s a fantastic documentary, making the counterintuitive choice to have Jon Hamm read Wolfe’s writings, while also getting into all that went wrong with the movie adaptation of Bonfire of the Vanities.

• For Living Life Fearless, I wrote about two 50th anniversaries of movies from 1973. One is George Lucas' American Graffiti, and the other is Norman Jewison's Jesus Christ Superstar. 

How unbelievable is it that the same director directed the definitive Jewish movie musical (Fiddler on the Roof) and the definitive Christian one (Jesus Christ Superstar) back to back? 

• And finally, if you heard that a sitting member of Congress was escorted out of the theater shortly after the intermission of a touring production of “Beetlejuice: The Musical,” it probably wouldn’t have taken you more than a couple of guesses to figure it out who it was, right? I wrote about that for 19FortyFive.

Next week, I’ll have an interview with the filmmakers of one of the above movies, reviews of some new ones, and a look back at a 30-year-old movie that’s all right, all right, all right.

Shanah tovah to my Jewish readers, and to all, thank you for your support.