lol, i'm back
Surprise! Bet you thought you'd seen the last of this newsletter, huh? No such luck, my little cabbages. MalonE-Mail is forever!
A quick recap for those not in the know: in March 2018, I was hired at The Verge, by the legendary Laura Hudson, as its first internet culture editor. It was a perfect fit for me for many reasons, so I agreed to move to New York to do it. It was great for a while! I got my own place, and Oscar did his best to adapt to the weather. Then in November—days after burying my grandmother, I might casually add—I was told I was being laid off at the end of the year. Cool stuff! Love media.
Now I don't want to say that I *snapped* when I was laid off, per se. I don't want to say it broke me, because that wasn't quite it, either. But something did change, as I was being informed, for the second time in my career, that I was professionally expendable. The closest I can get to an analogy is a flicked switch: it just occurred to me that I didn't have to live like this in order to contribute something good to the world and do what I loved at the same time. I realized that I owned almost none of my creative output; everything I had published up until that point, with a few minor exceptions, belonged to a media company in perpetuity. And for what? To barely subsist on a deflated salary, supplemented by some corporate-fed idea of fighting a good fight?
that's how i feel about that
Anyway, long story short, now I'm back in Los Angeles (living in the perfect little bungalow of my dreams), where I'm now mostly writing SEO content for Slack. (I did recap the second season of Star Trek: Discovery for Vulture, but that was almost 100% for the fun of it.) I honestly love it; Slack's content team is an unparalleled delight to work with, and the work I'm doing doesn't hold me emotionally and creatively hostage, the way freelance journalism so often can. What's more, I have a bit more elbow room to make and write stuff because I want to, and not because I need to get paid for it.
So that's where I'm at! TL;DR: got a job, moved to NYC, got laid off from the job, moved back to LA, pivoted to tech, am now undergoing a whole-ass creative transformation. While I do that, though, I realized I needed a way to channel all my pop culture opinions without actually writing about them for money. Thus, this new and improved, highly subject-to-change MalonE-Mail format! Enjoy.
Detective Pikachu & the Too Many Cooks
Went to see Detective Pikachu with my brother last week. Like everyone else, I was enchanted by the trailer; indeed, the movie itself had the same potential the trailer did to level up the Pokémon franchise. The premise is that this kid Tim (Justice Smith) finds out his dad, a detective, has died in a fiery car crash, and he has to go to Ryme City, where he lived, to gather his things. The kid used to want to be a Pokémon trainer, but has generally been beaten down by life (his mother died when he was a kid, the dad moved to the city for a job and he refused to go stay with him) and now works as an insurance salesman.
In Ryme City, the whole dynamic between humans and Pokémon has been revolutionized, thanks to the influence of an Elon Musk/Rupert Murdoch type named Howard Clifford (Bill Nighy): instead of the whole dogfighting thing (which has gotten a lot of guff over the past 20 years), humans and Pokémon live and work side by side, pairing up in work and life, much like people and dæmons in His Dark Materials (which, more on that later, trust). Tim's dad's Pikachu somehow survived the crash, which apparently was caused by Mewtwo, who was escaping a lab where he had apparently been captured for a second time, and runs into Tim at his dad's place, where they both came looking for clues — the Pikachu for what happened to him (he has amnesia), and Tim for any absolution (he feels kinda bad about never giving his dad a chance). The pair team up, much to Tim's chagrin, when they realize his dad might not have died after all, and after a gang of Aipoms outside the apartment—driven rabid by a vial of mysterious "R" gas from the dad's desk, which Tim unwittingly opens—attack and chase the pair. Objective: figure out what R is, and why investigating it got his father murked (or fake-murked).
I'm going to get into some spoilers here, so skip to the next section if you must: it is rare for a premise so simple and elegant and ripe for success to fail so tragically in its execution. Look, it probably had a little to do with the four (4!) screenwriters it took to produce the script as it appeared onscreen, and a lot to do with the Pokémon Company/Nintendo's viselike grip on the franchise's image. Throughout the thing, it's painfully clear there were about 15 powerful people with very strong opinions about the movie's purpose—whether it should be a children's movie for new fans or wish fulfillment for the millennials who grew up with the original games; whether it should be a reckoning with the ethical ramifications long lobbed at Pokémon as a concept, or simply a classic coming-of-age tale about Tim's daddy issues—and none of them wanted to concede an inch in service of making a good film.
The result is a beautifully crafted set of images with absolutely no understanding of its own characters' motivations and not an ounce of conviction to make the commentary it seemed so primed to make. There was almost no "suspicion craft," so to speak, that would suggest literally anyone but Clifford as the Giovanni-esque villain lurking behind the manufacture of this drug. Who but Clifford, famously wheelchair-bound by some mysterious disease and dedicated to bettering the "relationship" between humans and Pokémon, would have the gall to spend billions on recapturing and experimenting on Mewtwo in order, at the climax, to literally merge his consciousness with Mewtwo's body and subsequently force the same fate on every citizen of Ryme City? Nevertheless, it takes all of two minutes for the dude to convince Tim, thus far quite a savvy amateur detective, that it's his son (Chris Greere) disseminating the gas because he...hates his father's lifelong obsession with Pokémon? It's nonsensical, especially since the only lines we hear from said son—on the set of an interview at the Cliffords' cable news network—are petty and not at all bright.
Time after time, the movie sets up perfect opportunities for itself and squanders them — it's the kind of thing that drives me, as a writer, absolutely insane with frustration. When the drug is mass-released at a Pokémon Day parade, why not make Clifford's plans backfire, the human-Pokémon social structure he designed for exploitation instead rally together to stave off the assault? (You know Pokémon loves a good inspirational teamwork scene.) Why not give at least a little more explanation as to why the younger Clifford could have been a viable suspect? And maybe this is just me being the obsessive I am, but why completely ignore this new people-and-Pokémon-are-equals power dynamic and what that means for Pokémon autonomy—especially given that it was secretly engineered only to further enslave them? Why did 100% of the exposition have to be made literal with embarrassingly clunky dialogue? (Also beside the point, but I'm still unclear why it had to be Ryan Reynolds.) We broke so many worldbuilding rules here! It didn't have to be like this!
Anyway, if you're still on the fence, I'd say go only if you're in it for the cute Pokémon. Because yes, the CG renderings are stellar. (The Bulbasaurs alone almost flipped me from my staunch belief that Charmander is the best starter.) It's everything else that will make you sad!
Diplo DJing with Loudreds was pretty fuckin' good tho
INTERMISSION:
Hey, so things are about to get pretty fucked for people in the South who need or provide abortions, huh? I'm not interested in so-called allies who fail to put their money where their mouths are, so if that's you, go 'head and unsubscribe. Otherwise, I encourage you to donate to the National Network of Abortion funds at the link below; they know what they're doing and will get your money where it needs to go. Remember: rich people will always be able to get abortions. This is about deciding who gets to make choices about their own bodies. It's sure as hell not about children.
Please, educate yourself and speak up. This is going to fuck up your life, too.
The New His Dark Materials Teaser is Ruining My Life
As you may know, His Dark Materials is my Game of Thrones: it's the semi-subversive fantasy series (children's books, in this case) that's about to be an HBO series. When that will happen is TBD, since they haven't shared a release date yet, but if the new extended preview—which they wisely rolled out a few days before, and then in front of, the GoT finale—is anything to go on, it might actually redeem that 2007 trainwreck film adaptation and thus save my immortal soul from the pop cultural depths it has reached over the past few years. (Sadly, I'm already gritting my teeth for disappointment with Dark Phoenix, Terminator: Dark Fate, and various other attempted quote-unquote feminist retcons.) It's already got the actual dream casting—Dafne Keen, Ruth Wilson, Lin-Manuel Miranda, my eternal celebrity crush James McAvoy—so if it fails...well, you see why this teaser has me losing my mind.
Anyway, highly recommend reading the first book, The Golden Compass, ASAP. It's sold as Narnia for atheists, but I'd also strongly recommend it if you loved Orphan Black and Harry Potter.
Fuck me up, Iorek Byrnison!!!
What I'm Reading
Just finished: Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams, a delightfully quick read about a 25-year-old black woman in London as she attempts to get her life (and mental health) together on a "break" with her white boyfriend of three years. I'd strongly recommend doing it on audiobook — Shvorne Marks' Brixton accent is a very pure magic that brings the characters to life in a way that words on the page might not (for Americans, at least). I loved these characters so, so much, and was sad to leave them by the end.
Before that: The Shining, because good weather makes me crave mass-market horror, I guess? I have Pet Sematary on deck now. If you like horror too, might I recommend Emily Hughes' newsletter Nightmare Fuel?
Also, add me on Goodreads, if you're into that sort of thing!
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