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junker-town · 5 years

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What sports movie and TV show should we stream as soon as Disney+ launches?

Donkey football. Straight-to-TV movies and more!

Disney+ launches on Nov. 12 and the corporate overlords at the Mickey Factory are whetting our appetites with a slow rollout of every movie we can expect on the service.

We started noticing there are a lot of sports movies being made available, and honestly there are some none of us have ever heard before. Some of these look good, others exceptionally dumb to the point of us wondering if it’s even worth our time — but in any event these are the movies we’re oddly looking forward to checking out.

I want to watch Gus, this movie about a lonely football donkey.

Gus (1976) pic.twitter.com/Pyfsq9AdEi

— Disney+ (@disneyplus) October 14, 2019

I don’t know anything about Gus. I don’t need to know anything more about Gus. I already know that I want to see Gus more than any movie I have in my life. Here’s what I can glean from the poster alone:

Donkey plays football.

Someone made the donkey a helmet.

It looks sad.

That poppy-out-eye-guy Don Knotts is yelling a lot.

His sweatshirt says “ATOMS,” but it really looks like “NOMS.”

I looked up the poster and somehow it made me EVEN MORE invested in seeing Gus.

via Wikipedia.org

I’m honestly angry at myself that I haven’t seen Gus. God I’m hoping there isn’t some regrettable stuff in this movie. I don’t want to get Milkshake Gus’d.

— James Dator

I want to watch Brink! as soon as humanly possible

Brink! (1998) pic.twitter.com/xE79dGMXSX

— Disney+ (@disneyplus) October 14, 2019

First of all, please respect the exclamation point in the title. This movie is called Brink!

Of all the sports content coming to Disney+, I’m most excited and concerned about the Disney Channel Original Movie can of worms, and what it might do to my Shows To Have On In The Background While Looking At My Phone queue.

They made so many movies about sports, too! Johnny Tsunami, Double Teamed, Luck of the Irish, The Thirteenth Year was kinda about swimming.

But Brink! is the standard here. Team Pup N Suds forever. Soul Skating forever. Take my money, Disney.

— Michael

Getting Disney+ for Cadet Kelly, thank you

Cadet Kelly (2002) pic.twitter.com/xffkm51ADa

— Disney+ (@disneyplus) October 14, 2019

If you were a fan of the Disney Channel in the early 2000s, you know that Lizzie McGuire and Even Stevens were must-watch shows. Which meant that Cadet Kelly was a must-watch movie. It was a little like Glee for military school. Hilary Duff stars as the title character, Kelly Collins, who is forced to enroll at a military academy when her stepfather becomes the Commandant (because there are somehow no other schools in the area).

Christy Carlson Romano co-stars as Cadet Captain Jennifer Stone, a commanding officer, who is not impressed by Collins. The two end up being rivals, both for the attention of a boy (yawn) and just out of general dislike. Stone makes Collins’ life miserable, leading to Collins serving a punishment by cleaning the uniforms of the drill team. Collins is initially unimpressed by the team, but takes a liking to it and works hard to join. Standing in her way, naturally, is Stone, who is in charge of the team and not exactly thrilled with the idea.

The two face-off in an unrealistic and silly drill battle on the school lawn. The camp factor would probably be the charm of this movie when watched nearly 20 years after its release.

You might be wondering why I included this on a sports list. It’s simple, really. If you’ve ever watched a drill competition, drilldown, or colorguard performance, you will know that they take an incredible amount of athleticism, precision as well as physical and mental agility. As with most things Disney-related, it’s a bit watered down for general consumption. But if you watch a Northern California winterguard team toss wooden rifles or sabres in the air, get them to spin a half dozen or more times before catching them between their legs, you will agree that they are athletes. So this is a sports movie (it is centered around competitions, after all), and a fun bit of nostalgia for the early 2000s era of Disney.

— Sami Higgins

The Replacements is every sports movie in one

"I need you to get me the ball" The Replacements#movie #movielover #moviescene #NFL #football pic.twitter.com/G4BI4leAkh

— Not Megamind (@NotMegaMind) October 13, 2019

Grizzled old coach? Yup. Reluctant hero pushing through the mental blocks and self-doubt that cripples him? Got it. A music score which basically defines every emotion that is supposed to be playing out on the screen? You betcha.

Wait. How about the entire movie coming down to the last play and everyone is on the edge of their seats — Nay! STANDING IN ANTICIPATION! — until it all unfolds in the very way you think it will? Abso-frickin-lutely.

The Replacements is not the kind of movie that is going to throw twists and turns at you or catch you off guard. It is a cut-and-dry feel-good movie which takes us through a professional football strike with a team of — you guessed it — replacement players who no one thinks can ever come together to win anything. Thankfully, there is just enough dancing, wrenching injuries and bad life choices, and too-good-to-be-true moments to make up for the inability of the ragtag players to see eye-to-eye and just agree to play some football.

However, there are bright spots. Gene Hackman does a nice job as the head coach (not Hoosiers nice, but nice enough) and we get some competent football playing instead of just the normal montage and flashy sequences of people being crushed by blocks or blown up by tackles. And, you know, it’s just entertaining without having to work your brain too hard.

There are intense, gut-wrenching football movies out there. There are sports movies that will definitely leave you breathless. The Replacements is not those. But it is stupid fun, with some OK actors playing in some OK roles. You could go much, much worse (ahem — The Game Plan), you can get about the same (like Ice Princess) or you can go much, much better (The Sandlot, Miracle, Remember the Titans — all of which I would pick above The Replacements but were such obvious choices I decided to spare you) when Disney+ begins streaming, but you might as well watch The Replacements while you’re at it.

— Sam Eggleston

Double Teamed is the best basketball movie ever

Double Teamed (2002) pic.twitter.com/IsvDPBNSvS

— Disney+ (@disneyplus) October 14, 2019

The 2002 Disney Channel classic Double Teamed tells the story of real life twins and eventual WNBA players Heidi and Heather Burge. This flick has it all: The pushy father that wants his girls to attend a new school to up their chance at better scholarships, the sister that doesn’t want to play sports who instead joins the cast of the school play, and the friend whose father can’t come to games because he’s too much of a big time business man.

And this, the most savage ankle breaking move in basketball history:

I remember that this pump fake was The Move that won the championship, it got like 7 slo-mo scenes and a training montage pic.twitter.com/pYgBDoboeI

— Micah Peters (@micahpeters_) October 14, 2019

Never mind that the Burge twins are supposed to be 6-5 high schoolers and played by slightly-taller-than-average grown women that don’t look alike.

Am I partial to this because Heather and Heidi eventually went to the University of Virginia to play basketball? Maybe. Is this movie a classic that you should watch immediately? Absolutely.

— Caroline Darney

Alley Cats Strike will make you want to go bowling

Alley Cats Strike is one of the best Disney Channel original movies ever created. At least, that’s how my 8-year-old mind remembers it.

Bowling is fun if you’re doing it casually with friends, but this movie made me want to actually bowl competitively. It also has one of the best scenes that I’m just going to drop here:

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If you grew up and had seen this movie, there’s no way you didn’t want to try what Delia did to get the spare.

The subscription is worth this movie alone. Again, that’s 8-year-old me talking here.

— Harry Lyles Jr.

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bluewatsons · 5 years

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Past and Present in "Strange Simultaneity": Mark Fisher Explains Hauntology at NYU, Rhizome (May 18, 2011)

Still from Chris Petit "Content"

If I might extrapolate from what Simon calls these 'comments on half-erased or never-quite-attained songform': perhaps Ariel Pink's appeal is that his sound musters the sonic equivalent of the 'corner of the retina' effect that the best ghost stories have famously achieved. To understand what this entails, we need to reverse, or at least nuance, the commonplace which has it that the ghost is at its most scary only when it can't fully be seen. To say this implies that the ghost could be made the positive object of apprehension. Yet spectres are unsettling because they are that which can not, by their very nature (or lack of nature), ever be fully seen; gaps in Being, they can only dwell at the periphery of the sensible, in glimmers, shimmers, suggestions. It is not accidental that the word 'haunting' often refers to that which inhabits* us but which we cannot ever grasp; we find 'haunting' precisely those Things which lurk at the back of our mind, on the tip of our tongue, just out of reach. 'Haunting refrains' we are compelled to simulate-reiterate are sonic objets a around which drives circulate. To return to Mike's point, we can now begin to see why it is important to think of the 'negative' aspects of Ariel Pink's sound not as the covering over of porcelain-perfect pop in fuzz and scuzz, but positively, as the means by which an anamorphic sonic object is produced. The anamorph, remember, can only be seen when looking askance, out of the corner of the eye. In this respect, Ariel Pink has much in common with Jessica Rylan, who should be added to the hauntology canon forthwith. After seeing Rylan live last year, I referred to 'the beguiling illusion of a sonic object that would be perfect if only you could hear it more clearly. Yet the 'perfection' is an effect (a special effect, you might say) of the blurring and distorting techniques themselves.' I made similar observations after seeing Ariel Pink live, writing of 'a deliberate fogging of the digitally hyper-clean, with the result that what you are hearing is as much doubt and speculation as anything else.' Why hauntology now? Well, has there ever been a time when finding gaps in the seamless surfaces of 'reality' has ever felt more pressing? Excessive presence leaves no traces. Hauntology's absent present, meanwhile, is nothing but traces.... - K-PUNK, HAUNTOLOGY NOW, JANUARY 17, 2006

Thirty years ago "should sound ancient," Mark Fisher said at the first of two presentations for NYU’s “Colloquium for Unpopular Culture" on May 4th. "Think about what thirty years means —or what it used to mean. That's the difference between pre-rock'n'roll 50s and post-punk." Fisher, author of Capitalist Realism and editor of The Resistible Demise of Michael Jackson for Zer0 Books, teaches at University of East London, Goldsmiths, University of London, and the City Literary Institute. His blog k-punk covers digital culture, speculative fiction, and speculative realism among other concerns. For over five years he’s steered conversations on — the topic of that evening’s lecture— hauntology. Jacques Derrida coined the term “hauntology” in Spectres of Marx (1993), describing the accumulation of ghost-like traces of the past as we move further in the future. Fisher applies this term to describe music with a particular nostalgia, sometimes sounding indistinguishable from that which was composed decades ago. “Time out of joint” as Hamlet said to Horatio. Perhaps an inevitable symptom of this condition, Fisher’s 2006 comments on hauntology remain relevant five years later. So “why hauntology now” —still— in 2011? Fisher started his talk mentioning a conversation he had with Simon Reynolds, author of the upcoming book Retromania, regarding Darkstar's cover of a 1982 Human League b-side. The song is unique for reasons beyond the band's "curatorial act" of “resituating it in contemporary electronic music culture.” While Darkstar may be “more advanced technically,” when it comes to the overall aesthetic "neither sounds more futuristic."

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The Human League - You Remind Me Of Gold

The difference, he explained, is Human League preceded the future while Darkstar arrived after it. But these sounds from the past and present seem in “strange simultaneity.” “I have a better sense of the 1973 sound and texture than 2003 —not because I ceased to pay attention, but because culture and time relation has changed.” Music typically marks time. But “something odd is happening” if you can imagine Darkstar or Amy Winehouse or the Artic Monkeys performing decades in the past without any sense of disjuncture. This “flattening sense of time” appears to Fisher as a byproduct of what

Marc Augé called “non-places.” The airports, retail parks, franchise coffee shops, and other homogeneous buildings absent of local flavor are indeterminate temporally as well as locally. Fisher brought up Chris Petit’s film Content, for its depictions of non-places. The film is of particular significance to him as its footage of a container port was filmed not far from his home, more than an hour's drive from London. As he wrote in Sight and Sound:

At one point in Chris Petit’s haunting new film Content, we drive through Felixstowe container port. It was an uncanny moment for me, since Felixstowe is only a couple of miles from where I live – what Petit filmed could have been shot from our car window. What made it all the more uncanny was the fact that Petit never mentions that he is in Felixstowe; the hangars and looming cranes are so generic that I began to wonder if this might not be a doppelgänger container port somewhere else in the world. All of this somehow underlined the way Petit’s text describes these “blind buildings” while his camera tracks along them: “non-places”, “prosaic sheds”, “the first buildings of a new age” which render “architecture redundant”.

Content could be classified as an essay film, but it’s less essayistic than aphoristic. This isn’t to say that it’s disconnected or incoherent: Petit himself has called Content a “21st-century road movie, ambient”, and its reflections on ageing and parenthood, terrorism and new media are woven into a consistency that’s non-linear, but certainly not fragmentary.

Content is about ‘correspondence’, in different senses of the word. It was in part generated by electronic correspondence between Petit and his two major collaborators: writer Ian Penman (whose text is voiced by the German actor Hanns Zischler) and the German musician Antye Greie. Penman’s text is a series of reflections on the subject of email, that “anonymous yet intimate” ethereal communication. Some of Penman’s disquisitions on email are accompanied by images of postcards – the poignant tactility of this obsolete form of correspondence all the more affecting because the senders and addressees are now forgotten. Greie, meanwhile, produces skeins of electronica that provide Content with a kind of sonic unconscious in which terms and concepts referred to in the images and the voice track are refracted, extrapolated and supplemented.

Fisher ended his presentation discussing the music most closely associated with the term hauntology — Burial, The Caretaker, and artists on the label Ghost Box. The Caretaker with its distant ballroom melodies from the 20s and 30s, takes its name from a famous line in The Shining (a film dripping with hauntological significance.) Burial, however, looks critically at a more recent time — the 90’s rave and drum’n’bass scene. Fisher called Burial, “the Edward Hopper of our time.” The lyrics and titles of his songs are self-aware of the nostalgic expression of scratch and crackle. The music Burial samples and mimics was ecstatic at the time, but he transports listeners to the underbelly — the “sense of dilapidation, broken glass, and empty warehouses,” the morning after a rave party. Responding to a question from the audience about his UK-centric examples, Fisher explained Los Angeles-based Ariel Pink was one of the first artists mentioned as an example of sonic hauntology. Then again, the UK has a particular history starting with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Extremely strange experimental music composed by Delia Derbyshire and others found its way into people’s suburban homes. Fisher called it, the “greatest penetration into everyday life of experimental music.” It was a “utopia we actually lived in.” Ghost Box artists, drawing from “library music” samples, are in many ways re-dreaming this past. Fisher did not talk about hauntology as it applies to photography, but the Instagram and Hipstamatic iPhone app toy camera mimicry is yet another example of contemporary culture restless in temporality. The topic has fascinating artists like Harm van den Dorpel. Likewise, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling writing on atemporality in the digital age, find the specter in fashion and design. If “history has run out,” as Fisher says, hauntology only grows more relevant as years go on.

#music #mark fisher #kpunk #ariel pink #bbc radiophonic workshop #ghost box #hauntology #human league #london #sound #atemporality #instagram #modernity #critique #history #library music #aesthetics #editorial

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chestnutpost · 5 years

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Life Isn’t Perfect, But ‘PEN15’ Is

This post was originally published on this site

It’s hard to believe it has been nearly two decades since 2000, but watching “PEN15” makes that year seem like a long-lost relic. The new Hulu show, which follows two best friends navigating junior high, brings back dial-up internet, landlines, locker mirrors and nascent AIM relationships. Happily, it has more to offer than easy nostalgia.

What keeps it fresh is the twist in its casting: Adult women Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle, who created the show with “Take My Wife” director Sam Zvibleman, play the two main characters (also named Maya and Anna), setting an off-kilter tone for everything that follows. If watching teens freak out over a furtively passed note from a love interest is funny, it’s even more hilarious to see 30-somethings do it.

Maya and Anna are social outcasts determined to make seventh grade their best year yet. It begins on a rocky foot, with Maya being labeled that year’s UGIS, or “ugliest girl in school.” It only gets wobblier as the duo face intimidating cool girls, young love, periods, masturbation, family drama and their diverging identities.

From “Big Mouth” to “Everything Sucks!” to “Sex Education,” there’s plenty of teen fare out there. So what makes “PEN15” worth your precious bingeing time? The specificity of the early ’00s references provides instant gratification for elder millennials, while the perspective that Erskine and Konkle bring to their characters elevates it beyond a simple “Remember when?” kind of show.

HuffPost writers Matt Jacobs and Jill Capewell gushingly address the question everyone has on their minds: Should you watch it?

Matt: I haven’t loved a comedy as much as I love “PEN15” since … I don’t know when. Maybe the first season of “Orange Is the New Black”? The time Selina Meyer walked through glass? Our first glimpse of swole Chidi on “The Good Place”? Anyway, it’s been a while. How much do you love it, Jill?

Jill: Matt, I love it so much! The promise of gel pen references drew me in, but the love Anna and Maya have for each other — and the hilarious ways they show it — kept me there. Plus, I was in seventh grade as AIM was coming out and cargo skirts from Delia*s were cool, so I am probably the exact target demo for the show. I had major flashbacks when I saw Anna’s two face-framing wispy strands of hair.

There were so many perfect references to that time period in the early aughts, when the internet was new and clunky and the best thing we knew to do with it was ask each other “a/s/l?” in chat rooms. Maya’s “diper911” screen name, for example, nails the freewheeling, random nature of how we saw the World Wide Web back then and how we presented ourselves on it in turn. We didn’t yet view our social media personas as “personal brands.” Plus, lol, diaper emergency. How did it feel to see the awkward early teen years (let’s face it, we were all awkward) played back for you in such exacting detail?

Hulu

Matt: Such excruciation, but even more than that, it felt like a real swoon, honestly. Maybe it’s because I’ve had such existential dread about social media lately, but revisiting a world where AIM is the nearest source of anxiety was comforting in a way that transcends easy nostalgia.

“PEN15” is a show built on gimmicks, and it rises above every one. The off-kilter casting, the 2000 setting that requires clichéd Y2K-era signifiers, the whole “let’s revisit how awful middle school is” ethos that “Eighth Grade” did as recently as last year. Magically, it all works.

I think casting Erskine and Konkle gives the central characters a nuance the show otherwise couldn’t hope for; they bring a perspective to the roles that teenagers wouldn’t. What’d you make of them playing 13-year-olds opposite actual 13-year-olds?

Jill: I was also thinking that “PEN15” is able to stand out among the many “awkward teen years” offerings out there, and I think it is helped in part by having adults play the two main characters. For one, it’s delightfully absurd to see — I cackled when Maya and Anna were trying to cuss out an actual teen on their first day of seventh grade. Seeing adults posturing as brace-faced and bowl-cut adolescents never gets old.

And another component is that crucial perspective you mentioned. The audience is constantly reminded that this will end up just being a phase in these girls’ lives. Having Erskine and Konkle playing teenagers lends an odd believability to the series, as wild as the optics are: You know they lived as the outcasts they play on screen, so I can trust the foibles and emotional roller coasters the characters go through. Plus, it speaks to the fact that we never truly outgrow our weird teenage selves.

I was concerned about how they were going to pull off Anna’s first kiss — but some camera-angle magic took care of that.

One thing that really surprised me as I got further into the series was how much heart it has. The show is able to segue from pure nostalgic joy to resonant truths about growing up without feeling like an after-school special. The arc of Anna’s parents fighting more and eventually getting divorced reminded me how crushing that can feel when your parents are your whole world. What did you think of the show striking a balance between pure fun and these bald truths about getting older?

Hulu

Matt: “PEN15” does get bittersweet by the end, but I also love the touch of sadness that’s nestled into its humor. Its physical comedy ― Maya’s timpani solo, for example, or the girls’ hallway catwalk on the thong episode ― is “I Love Lucy”-level good. But even within those moments, I felt pangs of melancholy, in part because it reminds us of the intimacy inherent in adolescence. Even a great adult friendship lacks the connectedness of a bond based on youth, when you get to learn about the world alongside classmates and neighbors who are just as uncertain (even the ones who mask that uncertainty in bullying tactics). We don’t realize what our teenage kinships mean until it’s too late, and that’s something Erskine and Konkle tap into without ever saying as much.

Jill: I think you hit the nail on the head, Matt. It’s easy to brush off your teen years as a wasted time of being young and dumb, but it’s really when we start to become who we eventually are. What I think makes this show feel so revelatory is the respect it gives to aspects of teendom that don’t often get treated with importance. No stray feeling is too inconsequential, because it didn’t feel inconsequential then.

Hulu

Matt: That’s right. Things are only ridiculous with hindsight. An internet romance is serious business, and so is your first cigarette or your terrible haircut or your shared thong. A middle-school relationship can be almost entirely silent and avoidant and still feel like the most meaningful thing you’ve experienced, like Anna and her band boyfriend Brendan, who scribbles notes but can barely sustain a conversation.

The last few years have been a golden age for popular culture about teens who feel isolated from the world around them. But most of the genre has been character studies built around one protagonist (“The Edge of Seventeen,” “Lady Bird,” “Eighth Grade,” “Skate Kitchen”). Here we get to see how two girls’ lives intersect and diverge, and the way they vow to share every moment along the way. (“Broad City” is probably the aptest comparison, but that show has faced narrative limits that “PEN15” can more easily avoid.) It’s in that very togetherness that we see them as individuals just starting to figure out what sets them apart. The beauty, for us, is knowing how long and fruitful that journey will be. I almost don’t even want a second season because I’d rather imagine it for myself; the limitlessness is poetic, ya know?

Jill: I understand what you mean — on one hand, I want more of this great show, but on the other, I just want to imagine Maya and Anna side-by-side learning how to shave in the tub before the school dance forever. I don’t want them to age, even if they’re 31 in real life. We can’t go back to 2000 and, honestly, I’m not sure I’m ready to, but with “PEN15,” we can always pay a quick visit. That is, if our mom gets off the phone so we can use the dial-up.

This has been “Should You Watch It?” a weekly examination of movies and TV worth ― or not worth! ― your time.

RELATED COVERAGE

The post Life Isn’t Perfect, But ‘PEN15’ Is appeared first on The Chestnut Post.

from The Chestnut Post https://thechestnutpost.com/news/life-isnt-perfect-but-pen15-is/

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