In the life of the culture writer, two things are certain in this day and age: One, we’re all hyperventilating about AI learning to write better than us, or rather, rich tech bros deciding they write well enough to stop paying us. Two, it’s that this business is feast or famine: Some weeks (like last week!), you’re putting out something every week. Others, you get a much-needed break, compounded by the innate fear that new assignments may just never come.
This week was a pretty mild one, as far as output goes: More planning and dayjob stuff than anything else. That said, I still got a couple fun things out of the gate!
Any self-respecting cinephile with more money than sense is well aware of the Criterion Flash Sale. Twice a year, Criterion drops its releases to 50% off, leaving many film fans shaking down couch cushions and chasing down overdue Venmos from friend dinners so they can blind-buy new releases and chase down old favorites. With that in mind, in lieu of my (shamefully dormant, but soon to return) Criterion Corner column at The Spool, I offered up a listicle of 13 Criterions that were worth such half-off delights, from their vibrant release of David Lynch’s Inland Empire (complete with dee-liteful chat between Laura Dern and Kyle MacLachlan) to an early John Woo wuxia flick (Last Hurrah for Chivalry) in which our heroes have to fight off a dude who can swordfight in his sleep.
On the podcast front, I was thrilled to get the podcast I cohost with pop culture writer extraordinaire Nathan Rabin, Travolta/Cage, back on a more regular schedule. For those unfamiliar, we’re a podcast that is going through the filmographies of John Travolta and Nicolas Cage in contemporaneous order, to see how the two movie stars’ personas, trajectories, and role choices intersect and divert.
One of the odd consequences of being in the pod’s late-period phase is that, in the 2010s, Cage’s output vastly outpaces Travolta’s, so we’re doing some Cage-heavy double features while we wait for Danny Zuko to catch up. Problem is, that leads us down the road to some hella stinkers, like this week’s double feature.
Paired this week is 2014’s Dying of the Light (a warmed-over political thriller that compounds all of Paul Schrader’s weaknesses as a writer/director with the fact that the studio took it away from him in post) and 2015’s The Runner, an equally-tepid House of Cards riff in New Orleans.
I’ve got a curious soft spot for The Runner since it was the first film I ever reviewed for Consequence — my first big-boy paycheck for a movie review. Still, I’d never confuse that with any sort of positive sentiment towards the film itself: It’s leaden, confusing, and sleepier than Joel Hodgson on Dramamine. And, in an age where political scandal seems to go absolutely nowhere, aged like milk a single year later.