🍿 Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (2022) was an unexpected delight with a tight story, smart humor, and subtle Spider-Verse animation influences. It’s Sony Picture’s world now, followed by DreamWorks Animation, leaving Disney/Pixar a distant, sad third.

I think I figured out what bugged me about Netflix-produced live action shows: their gloss-to-effort mismatch.

Imagine a 2x2 with the horizontal axis showing effort required to make something (time spent developing the script, repeating takes, editing) and the vertical axis showing how glossy the output is (which is mostly a function on equipment quality and CGI). Here are the four quadrants, clockwise from top right:

1. High effort, high gloss: the HBO quadrant or, if you are move into movies and like aliteration, the Kubrick quadrant — where show runners obsess over every detail and are sometimes even accused of mistreating employees. The quadrant where a man notorious for going behind schedule over budget builds a ship only to sink it — and win nearly dozen Academy Awards for it. Note, however, that many HBO shows are actually in the
2. High effort, low gloss: the CGP Gray quadrant, where hundreds of hours of research are sublimated in talking stick figures. The Wire and Curb Your Enthusiasm would be here, as would some of the best movies coming out of Hollywood which have to make an additional effort not to be too glossy and feel “more authentic”, though there is a thin line between actual and high-gloss authenticity. Interestingly, CGP Gray himself is on YouTube, but most of YouTube is in the
3. Low effort, low gloss: the YouTube quadrant, epitomized by its very first upload and now flourishing with DIY instructions, unboxing videos and attempts at ASMR. I suppose most if not all of TikTok, YouTube shorts and Instagram Reels (or are they Stories?) would also be in this, the quadrant for the rest of us. Note, however, that much of what we now think as “YouTuber content” falls instead in the
4. Low effort, high gloss: the Netflix quadrant, also known as “we’ll fix it in post”. Expensive actors aren’t that expensive if you only do one take per shot and you don’t need to scout for locations if every scene is shot in front of a green screen, but hey it’s a Dolby Atmos DolbyVision Dolby Everything 4K HDR 120Hz wonderland which screams high-quality but feels fake. Much of highly lauded AppleTV+ content would also be here, Disney+ as well, Amazon Prime Video goes without saying. Billions of dollars spent on fake gloss that people easily sense, and even if they can’t put it in words they vote with their eyeballs which continue to be glued to the other 3 quadrants.

To be clear, there is effort spent on the gloss too — but that effort could in some cases be seen as polishing a turd. So another way to name the quadrants would be:

1. Polished diamond
2. Diamond in the rough
3. Turd in the rough
4. Polished turd

Only one of those doesn’t make sense, and it’s the one we are avoiding! “Turd” may be too harsh — I view this very blog as having both its feet planted firmly in quadrant 3, but I hope you get the idea. Terminology aside, it’s a useful mental model to have.

Netflix has just scooped up two of the very best things I recently saw:

• Scavengers Reign (originally on Max)
• Godzilla Minus One (originally in theaters)

They mostly make chum, but between licensed excellence like the above and a few gems of their own a subscription is still worth it.

🍿 Meet the Fockers (2004): lowbrow American entertainment at its finest, but you can see how the line from lowbrow to crass is about the be crossed. The third installment — which we haven’t seen yet — apparently did cross it, as did every comedy DeNiro has done since.

🍿 Meet the Parents (2000) is the kind of lowbrow entertainment one needs after a long day at work. Sitcoms used to fill that niche, but the old ones we’ve watched several times over and the new ones are either too high-octane or too unfunny.

🍿 Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (2024) showed yet again that more is not better. There are too many characters, too many plot lines, too many Serious Things Happening, and not enough heart. If there is a third — and Phoebe is too good of a character for there not to be one — they better tone it down.

🍿 The Shining (1980) came out many decades ago, but from the opening I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-a-drone bird’s eye views through the masterful tracking shots of the Overlook Hotel to the anxiety-inducing stills of Jack Nicholson and his eyebrows it beats any and all of the modern-day perfectly-shot too-slick-to-be-real CGI trickery. I have been rewatching the movie several times over several decades and the cinematography is getting comparably better and better — quite damning for Hollywood.

This time around, however, I could better appreciate what’s truly scary about the movie: not the blood-filled hallway, or the hag soaking in that bathtub, or even the haunted twins*, but rather the ease with which a middle-aged man becomes bitter and starts blaming his family for holding him back. Not everyone is capable of extinguishing a star.

The Beatles wanted to do a LotR movie, starring:

McCartney as Frodo, Starr as Sam, Lennon as Gollum and Harrison as Gandalf. The Beatles' choice of director? Stanley Kubrick, fresh from making 2001: A Space Odyssey.

But Tolkien didn’t like the idea of a pop group being associated with his books. I am not sure about that cast either, but just imagine Kubrick’s Lord of the Rings. In the style of Barry Lyndon, perhaps? (ᔥMarginal Revolution)

🍿 The Incomparable podcast recently had a series of episodes dedicated to the Back to the Future triology so of course I had to see them all again. My favorite is still Part 1, but with time Part 3 rose up to the number 2 spot and the accompanying episode of The Incomparables has nicely outlined all of the reasons why.

🍿 Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021) was fun, and I’ll pat myself on the back for being only 3 years late to this party.

Now, instead of jumping straight to the sequel we’ll check out the director’s 2008 live-action debut which I’ve never heard of before but my oh my does it look promising.