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I’ve also started going down the rabbit hole of watching Criterion Closet videos. Rian Johnson’s and Ryan Coogler’s are so sweet. Johnson just talks about his friends’ movies. 🥹 And Coogler talks about watching impactful films with his father. 🥹

Mine likes to turn on even when I want to switch to something else.

(But it came with several side tangents)

It will never not be funny to make fun of Mr Beast for misunderstanding Squid Game.

I’ll take “nano banana” over “we misread a work of speculative fiction and are naming our company after this clearly evil thing in the story.”

😭

And that is a huge value add in my opinion.

If steady work like that can subsidize someone writing a work like Arnesen’s “Even When He is Silent”, I genuinely think it holds value beyond being corporate music or pop arrangements for high school. Steady gig work can subsidize passion projects that speak deeply to us.

Like pop choral arrangements, it may not be musically or artistically fulfilling. But it’s steady work for a lot of composers. At least more advanced show choirs and marching bands are still commissioning custom arrangements. Generic corporate music gigs will be replaced by AI. Or have already.

If you lower that number to 10K people, that’s almost everything someone would want to go to, and will either be walkable or have adequate transit. 10K is a large farm town that itself probably has surrounding municipalities within 8-10 miles of it.

Universal Music Group is also very fast with copyright. And they’re worse about fair use claims. There are videos that use fair use that had to dub over 6 years ago because Universal is so bad.

There’s a solid proshot on YouTube. I would avoid the Disney film because it misses a lot of why the show works. It’s sort of in the same vein as Shrek and deconstructing fairy tales with humor.

Also, if you haven’t seen it, Martin Scorsese’s Silence is a masterpiece that explores this very phenomenon of performative faith in a way that is personal and at times uncomfortable, regardless of your faith. It asks hard questions. Ones Evangelicals aren’t ready to explore.

See also: God’s Not Dead movies. Evangelicals want to perform faith. Not act as they’re actually called to by their own scripture.

Into the Woods does very similar. Everything is in the first act. Sondheim was a master at doing it.

I love that almost all musical material in the second act is introduced in the first. It makes the score feel more connected. It draws musical connections and recontexualizes melodies. a lot of modern musicals throw a lot of songs at the wall. Legally Blonde and Shrek are super guilty of it.

Reduction of a police and surveillance state is good, actually. Reducing the number of armed officers by funding community programs that help people reduces load on police and increases trust in community and the police, actually.

Also they seem to draw the line at *checks notes* prosecuting war criminals and architects of genocide.

I think it’s the best musical written since Ragtime and Parade, and it’s certainly my favorite since 2000. It definitely has a tighter score than a lot of musicals since 2000, genre aside, the score is more like Sondheim or Les Mis in how tight it is. And it’s in my top four favorites period.

No lie detected. O Brother is a banger too.