FanFare, So Fine, Throws the Bums a Dime

January 6, 2025 1:46 PM

THIS WEEK IN FANFARE... New release movies under discussion this week: HBO's Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary, chronicling the history of that smooooooth West Coast sound; the 2024 remake of Nosferatu from filmmaker Robert Eggers (The VVitch); Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan in the new biopic A Complete Unknown; Clint Eastwood's Juror #2; Saturday Night, a behind the scenes comedy/drama about the launch of SNL; the New Zealand oddball family comedy Bookworm; the queer rodeo drama National Anthem; and Amy Adams turning into a dog in Nightbitch . TV shows under discussion include: Star Wars spinoff Skeleton Crew on Disney Plus; Apple TV's post-apocalyptic Silo; the new season of Netflix's Squid Game, and Soulsville USA just got a series post.

Recently Released Movies:

• Saturday Night - the new behind-the-scenes drama about the launch of Saturday Night Live which Kitteh says shows Chevy Chase as "talented, but a huge huge asshole"
• Juror #2 - Clint Eastwood's final film, a courtroom drama that barely made it to theaters, though phunniemee says it's pretty good.
• Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary - an HBO documentary chronicling the pop-rock subgenre and stars like Steely Dan, Toto, and Michael McDonald. caviar2d2 says it's an A++ watch.
• National Anthem - johnofjack posted this drama about a 21 y/o construction worker who joins a team of queer rodeo performers.
• Nightbitch finds Amy Adams with 99 problems, and turning into a female dog is, in fact, one of them. Halloween Jack was unsure but says the movie made him want to read the book. Azrael Brown liked it. jeoc and Showbiz Liz were not convinced.

Older releases, new to FanFare:

• Edge of the Knife - A folk horror film made by the Haida people in their endangered language. ormondsacker liked how it never slid into being a standard horror film.
• Ms. 45 - Dismissed as rape revenge schlock on its initial release, commenters seem to think far more highly of it in 2025, with particular praise for Zoë Lund.
• Outrageous Fortune -orange swan shared this eminently quotable femme take on the 80's buddy comedy, starring Bette Midler and Shelley Long.
• Slumber Party Massacre II - the sequel to the bonkers, sorta feminist/sorta exploitation 1980's slasher is a bonkers, sorta feminist/sorta exploitation 1980's musical. here's a song.
• Ilya Muromets - Huuuuuge CinemaScope production from 1950's Soviet Russia is both impressive and unintentionally hilarious to commenters. Also got the MST3K treatment.
• The China Syndrome - 1979 nuclear melodrama with impeccable timing according to MonkeyToes.
• Old Joy - Kelly Reichardt's slow cinema exploration of male friendship struck a lot of deep chords for Azrael Brown.
• Body Snatchers (1993) - Following up on Lemkin's excellent post about the 1978 version, here's a post for Abel Ferrara's 1993 version, which has that amazing Meg Tilly monologue.
• Final Cut: Ladies and Gentlemen - a wild exercise in editing that stitches together clips from hundreds of films, offered up by ginger.beef as a compliment to rahomi's awesome post on the Blue.
• Cherry 2000 - Hey remember that post on the Blue where it turns out lots of us love Miracle Mile? This is Steve De Jarnatt's other feature. It's much sillier, but kind of fun anyway. Plus: Melanie Griffith.
• Revenge - Did you love Coralie Fargeat's amazing film The Substance? This rape revenge thriller is her earlier film, and like Ms. 45 above, turns that subgenre on its ear to create something feminist and interesting.
• Micro Men - a BBC biopic about rivalry in the early home computer era.

Current TV shows under discussion:

• STAX: Soulsville USA - box just added a full season post for this HBO docuseries about the legendary Memphis soul label.
• AEW Collision and AEW Dynamite- The Pluto Gangsta keeps you up to date on the latest in wrestling. TNT/HBO.
• Queer Eye - back for season 9 on Netflix.
• Ludwig - This BBC show hasn't made it to the US yet, but already has a fanbase on FF.
• The Agency - Star-studded remake of the French series Le Bureau des Légendes is produced by George Clooney. Streaming on Paramount Plus.
• Creature Commandos - A new adult animated series based on the DC comic. Streaming on Max
• Silo - Apple TV's post-apocalyptic mystery gets a post for season 2, episode 8.
• Skeleton Crew - A Disney+ Star Wars spinoff starring Jude Law.
• Squid Game - Netflix's smash hit Korean import about a life-or-death game gets a post for its new season.

TV show rewatches:

• Severance - Folks are getting ready for season two with a rewatch of season one on Apple TV.
• Person of Interest - miss-lapin is running through a rewatch of one of FF's most beloved shows. Amazon Prime.

Other stuff:

• Podcast: Old Gods of Appalachia - Atreides tracks the latest episodes of this Appalachian folk horror anthology.
• Book: Metal from Heaven - latkes posts a "bloody lesbian revenge tale and political fantasy."
• Book: The Reformatory - zardoz shares a historical horror novel.
• Book: The Black Guy Dies First - johnofjack shares a definitive and surprising exploration of the history of Black horror films, from the creators behind the acclaimed documentary, Horror Noire.

posted by DirtyOldTown (51 comments total)

Thank you for putting the work into this, I love it! Poking through now.
posted by showbiz_liz at 1:53 PM on January 6 [7 favorites]

Boy oh boy, I love it, DOT! I really think that weekly FPP's about FF will help drive more conversation over there. Seeing it like this really shows that there's a slew of interesting media.

For those who don't like acronyms:
DOT=DirtyOldTown
FPP=Front Page Post
FF=FanFare
posted by ashbury at 1:54 PM on January 6 [16 favorites]

I've been waiting patiently for the Babygirl post so I can talk about the "Father Figure" scene.
posted by grumpybear69 at 1:59 PM on January 6

Please also check the "Recent comments" view to see stuff that isn't from this week that is still getting traction.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 1:59 PM on January 6 [4 favorites]

Flagged as seeking clout.
posted by Lemkin at 2:00 PM on January 6 [8 favorites]

yeah this is good
posted by Sebmojo at 2:26 PM on January 6

I've been waiting patiently for the Babygirl post so I can talk about the "Father Figure" scene.

You should create it, grumpybear69! Fanfare isn't scary, I've made more posts there than I have for the blue. You can super bare-bones it, do like an IMDb-level couple lines summary and mention it's currently in theaters, then drop your opinion on that scene in the first comment. Easy peasy.
posted by sigmagalator at 2:30 PM on January 6 [6 favorites]

If you appreciate this post, do me a solid and follow one of the links to a FF discussion for one of the things you have seen and drop a comment, would you?
posted by DirtyOldTown at 2:40 PM on January 6 [7 favorites]

One thing I'm learning on FanFare is to watch for the random not-new stuff -- I don't follow new TV/film that closely but like there's two movies that are at least 5-10 years old that I've seen in the past year which appeared this week on FF that I had something to say about.
posted by AzraelBrown at 2:41 PM on January 6 [6 favorites]

AWESOME!
posted by supermedusa at 2:46 PM on January 6

well who needs FanFare if we can just bitch and moan enough and DOT will be like "OKAY FINE" and type it all up for the blue

Thanks DOT!!
posted by ginger.beef at 2:53 PM on January 6 [3 favorites]

This is an excellent post, and I should contribute more to Fanfare l.
posted by Wordshore at 2:54 PM on January 6 [4 favorites]

For anyone who doesn't know - FF has a Recent Comments view that lets you see active posts. And if you make a comment in an old post it's not just lost to the ether - anyone using that view will see it (as will anyone using their Recent Activity if they ever commented in that thread or added it to their activity list).

Just wanted to mention this since both Recent Activity and the FanFare Recent Comments view (it's almost invisible on mobile! and literally invisible if you're not logged in!) took me a surprisingly long time to discover. #makeRCtheFFdefault
posted by trig at 2:54 PM on January 6 [7 favorites]

Great post, thank you for making it and this should be a regular thing please.

If anyone has a passion for large boats that end up where they don't belong, I have rewatched a bunch of Roland Emmerich movies lately. I don't have anything of value to add to the conversation, but god do I love to be stupid.

It's literally only been while composing this comment that I realized I'm the one who's posted all of these to FF. No ragerts. (I've only seen this one once.)
posted by phunniemee at 3:02 PM on January 6 [3 favorites]

How to make a super bare-bones FanFare post about a TV show:

Pick a show. If it's not on the list, suggest it--moderators usually turn these requests around pretty quickly. Use the IMDB summary for the post. Remove spoilers and whatnot as needed.

This whole paragraph is optional: For the 'more inside,' add some information about how/where to find it. Justwatch is, misleading Amazon sponcon aside, usually a good source of this information. Add a trailer or a review, or both, if you can find them (Rotten Tomatoes can help with this).

For the tags, name the category and the title. Maybe a couple of the more prominent people involved, if you really want to run with it. For the title, pick a non-spoilery quote from the show.

Now, let's let a hundred FanFare posts bloom!
posted by box at 3:05 PM on January 6 [4 favorites]

Pony request:

This whole paragraph is optional: For the 'more inside,' add some information about how/where to find it. Justwatch is, misleading Amazon sponcon aside, usually a good source of this information.

Can the JustWatch link be automatic in the sidebar of the post?
posted by phunniemee at 3:09 PM on January 6 [1 favorite]

This was a terrible movie, and I say this as someone who enjoys action movies. The worst movie I've seen in years. I was mad that they didn't even get the special effects right, they were really bad, a lot of very obvious green screen stuff, plus the bad acting and bad writing, well.... It was bad.

in case folks are wondering if it's permissible to drop critical comments in a FanFare thread

edit to add attribution: bq
posted by ginger.beef at 3:10 PM on January 6 [5 favorites]

I hope these roundups help me get off my duff and start watching TV/movies again. Thanks, DOT!
posted by gentlyepigrams at 3:16 PM on January 6

While bq isn't wrong, this is my retort.
posted by phunniemee at 3:24 PM on January 6 [1 favorite]

Thank you for putting this together, DOT.
posted by doctornemo at 3:28 PM on January 6 [1 favorite]

Excellent. Thanks!
posted by cocoagirl at 3:43 PM on January 6

If you appreciate this post, do me a solid and follow one of the links to a FF discussion for one of the things you have seen and drop a comment, would you?

You all deserve to know what I thought of The Substance and now you can find out.
posted by Lemkin at 3:44 PM on January 6 [2 favorites]

The Ludwig link goes to the JustWatch page, not the FanFare discussion.
posted by stevil at 3:58 PM on January 6

I will say that I don’t think JustWatch picks up movies from Kanopy, if you use that service. I have never been able to get them to show things that should be on Kanopy. If there’s a trick to it, I sure don’t know about it, but if you’re looking for the different places you can watch something, Kanopy won’t be there.
posted by kitten kaboodle at 4:11 PM on January 6

The thing about Kanopy is that, like Swank, each library can pick up what they want and leave what they don't. So something can be available through one library's Kanopy service but not another's, depending on local demand for that title/kind of title.
posted by johnofjack at 4:20 PM on January 6 [5 favorites]

I just randomly noticed yesterday that the justwatch page for Hannah Arendt shows both Hoopla and Kanopy. My library has Hoopla but not Kanopy, and in any case I'm not actively logged into any of them.
posted by phunniemee at 4:26 PM on January 6

The Ludwig link goes to the JustWatch page, not the FanFare discussion.

Here it is. Just 2 episodes currently but if people are interested I can put up the rest (or anybody else can, even without a smooth disguise).

I think it's supposed to stream in the US on BritBox in "early 2025". According to justwatch it's in the UK, Spain, and Croatia (why this group??) at the moment.

Btw I don't know if this happens to anybody else but if I get to justwatch from Google sometimes it serves me a page for a different country than the one I'm in. Make sure you've got the right country in the URL or the country dropdown.
posted by trig at 4:36 PM on January 6 [2 favorites]

I have a close friend who worked in comedy with Chevy Chase, and she confirms (several times a year, it seems) that he is indeed a huge, huge asshole, though he may have some talent.
posted by lhauser at 6:33 PM on January 6 [4 favorites]

I just submitted my first post there.

The whole movie is on YouTube, so I put the link in the "where to watch/stream" field, but it doesn't seem to have stuck.
posted by Lemkin at 7:11 PM on January 6 [1 favorite]

Yeah, that field doesn't do anything, unfortunately.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 7:19 PM on January 6 [1 favorite]

in case folks are wondering if it's permissible to drop critical comments in a FanFare thread

Oh, sometimes the critical comments are even better. Really bad films can inspire some gloriously baroque insults and I love that.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:27 PM on January 6 [7 favorites]

One of my favourite scathing reviews of a movie I love is Pauline Kael's review of Bugsy Malone. But it's not just vicious insults (though there are plenty) but a ruthless dissection of all the movie's flaws, like plot elements that are set up and never paid off.

Just wandering belatedly into a thread and saying "this sucks" doesn't make you Pauline Kael.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 8:59 PM on January 6 [6 favorites]

That review of Bugsy Malone utterly fails to capture how a child under 8 would have received the film
posted by ginger.beef at 9:38 PM on January 6

Mod note: [We've included this delightful new development on the sidebar and Best Of blog! Don't forget to bring your Jujubes!]
posted by taz (staff) at 1:54 AM on January 7 [2 favorites]

This is an excellent recap that pointed me to a couple of things I missed on Fanfare. Thanks DOT!
posted by mmoncur at 5:01 AM on January 7

DOT you are the GOAT of FanFare!
posted by ellieBOA at 6:16 AM on January 7 [1 favorite]

FanFare has become my favorite part of MetaFilter these days. I'm kinda done with discussions about reality these days. FanFare is under visited and under-used. I admit I do not make postings there but I try to contribute comments when it's something I have an opinion on. I urge everyone to visit and contribute.
posted by SoberHighland at 6:40 AM on January 7 [5 favorites]

Just wandering belatedly into a thread and saying "this sucks" doesn't make you Pauline Kael.

Oh totally. It's the completely ornate insults I love - like this one from Roger Ebert's review of Freddie Got Fingered:

"This movie doesn’t scrape the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn’t the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn’t below the bottom of the barrel. This movie doesn’t deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence with barrels."

That's just one paragraph from a glorious review where he invokes Dali and Bunuel and compares the film to a "vomitorium".

Sometime, for fun, you may want to pull up all his zero-star reviews from his web site and browse - a pissed-off Roger Ebert is GLORIOUS.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:52 AM on January 7 [2 favorites]

My favorite Kael one liner was when she described the first Star Wars as "a box of Crackerjacks that is all prizes." It's perfect, because it simultaneously expresses a view of the film as an endless series of little delights... without any real content at all. You don't even have to agree with that to see that it's a brilliant metaphor.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 7:03 AM on January 7 [3 favorites]

There is no such thing as "yacht rock". It is soft rock. It always was soft rock and it will always be soft rock. Let the genre wars commence!
posted by MrNoodlePants at 9:10 AM on January 7

Tell that to the Titanic.

But back on the topic, and also Rock, can we have one category that is nothing but Joan Cusack?
posted by taz at 9:15 AM on January 7

Fittingly, this old post came up in my timehop today.
posted by phunniemee at 9:29 AM on January 7

won't someone put some AI slop together that manages to feature Liam Neeson frantically punching hostile hotdog vendors at a Blue Jays game until he punches the correct robot vendor sufficiently to stop a ticking bomb embedded in its robot chest which, if allowed to go off, would result in an earthquake that would stretch to Detroit

also he has a wisecracking lawyer sidekick who frets about the legal implications
posted by ginger.beef at 9:45 AM on January 7 [2 favorites]

in case folks are wondering if it's permissible to drop critical comments in a FanFare thread

That said, I swear I ran across a mod deleting a negative comment about a show from a FF post recently which was... Ech. Sometimes things aren't good. That's fine. As long as it doesn't turn into an argument, I'm fine liking things other people don't like and vice versa, and sometimes it's good for my media consumption to get kicked out of complacency where everything is, y'know, fine.

But yeah, once it turns into yucking someone else's yum, that's probably the line.
posted by Kyol at 9:48 AM on January 7

Also an ongoing Stargate SG-1 rewatch with some cool behind the scenes comments from 5_13_23_42_69_666.
posted by lucidium at 12:48 PM on January 7 [2 favorites]

I've been rewatching star trek ds9 (probably for most episodes since they first aired!) and it's been great reading thru "old" discussions as I go, even if I often don't have much to add (or am too tired / busy to). Very often some great stuff I missed or alternate way of viewing the meaning of an episode is in every thread. Ir at least validation when an episode just doesn't work for me.

My family also often participates in monsterdon and watching things "with" people is fun. I wonder how we could do organized rewatch-rewatch events / recurring events to add to even existing fanfare posts in groups? Regardless I'm glad fanfare exists and thank you for the "catch up" post!
posted by R343L at 7:31 PM on January 7 [1 favorite]

This is quite cool, and it inspired me to make/seek out a post!

The trouble is the one I wanted to find is a riveting thriller called Peacemaker (2020). Originally titled Rauhantekijä, the Finnish TV series unfortunately has the same name in English as the John Cena TV series. Thus I could neither find the series on FanFare nor add it. Anyway, I'd thought I'd ask about it in an all-FanFare thread lest anyone else have troubles with IMdb's strictures.

Can anyone help?
posted by Violet Blue at 3:51 PM on January 8

I just "suggested" it to whatever that goes to using the IMDb url. Should show up as an option for you whenever the mysterious suggestion critters handle it.
posted by phunniemee at 3:54 PM on January 8 [1 favorite]

This may sound counterintuitive, but my dearest dream for FF is that one day, my posts can be a tiny drop in the bucket.

Ideally, at some point, enough people will be posting that more of the stuff I watch will start being posted by other folks instead of me. And that enough additional stuff will be posted on top besides that whatever posts I am making can fade into the background a bit.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 9:27 PM on January 8 [1 favorite]

Got some good news/bad news for you, Violet Blue. Your show is available to post about now!
posted by phunniemee at 10:09 AM on January 9 [2 favorites]

Thankfully if I remember correctly they stay in that order as I discovered while posting Dark Matter (2024) versus Dark Matter (2015). Unfortunately the second season of the John Cena show will be released eventually and there will be much confusion. But not as much as Doctor Who (1963) vs Doctor Who (2005) vs Doctor Who (2023).
posted by Kyol at 10:21 AM on January 9