Ciara appeared on The 250 with on Darren Mooney and Andrew Quinn’s podcast The 250 to talk about the terrible live-action remake of Snow White, though they mostly ended up talking about other things. Check it below, or wherever fine podcasts are found!
How Capitalism Incentivizes the Destruction of Art
Wile E. Coyote is a famously loyal customer of Acme Corporation, producers of nitroglycerine, bird seed, giant rubber bands, explosive tennis balls, do-it-yourself tornado kits, and jet-propelled pogo sticks. His brand loyalty is absurd considering his actual experience of using Acme products to try to catch Road Runner: anything Acme-branded inevitably backfires. He’s the one who gets blown up by the explosive tennis balls. When he uses the tornado kit, he’s the one who gets sucked up into a twister. The jet-propelled pogo stick launches him backwards off a cliff.
In Coyote vs. Acme, Wile E. Coyote decides to sue Acme with the help of a down-and-out human lawyer played by Will Forte. A live-action/animation hybrid in the tradition of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the film involved artists sketching line drawings of the animated characters over a rough edit which was then used as a reference for the animators and visual effects artists. It was a combination of 2D and 3D animation which captured the look and feel of the original Looney Tunes designs in a live-action world.
Coyote vs. Acme “is about a giant corporation choosing stock over empathy, doing nothing ‘illegal’ but morally shady stuff for profit. It’s a David vs Goliath story,” the film’s editor, Carsten Kurpanek, wrote on X. “It’s about the cynical and casual cruelness of capitalism and corporate greed.”
In November 2023, Warner Bros. announced that they wouldn’t be releasing it. The crew were not informed in advance; instead they were blindsided after the decision had already been made. The film had been completed. Test audiences reportedly scored it very highly. But Warner Bros. decided that they would rather take a tax write-off of $30 million.
Thirty million dollars. To shred a completed work of art. Once again, things blow up in Wile E. Coyote’s face.
I wrote about the cancellation of Coyote vs. Acme and what it says about the state of the movie business for Current Affairs. You can read the whole thing here!
Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey – The 250 episode 365
Ciara and Dean appeared on Darren Mooney and Andrew Quinn’s podcast The 250 to talk about Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey. Give it a listen to blissfully absolve yourself of ever watching it:
Top Gun: Maverick: The Sundae Presents Bonus Episode 5
Ciara and Dean co-host The Sundae Presents, a podcast in which they each make the other watch films they haven’t seen. It’s another emergency episode from our top secret vault! Dean finally got around to watching Top Gun: Maverick, so Ciara finally got to grill him about it. They talk about the original film, the death of the movie star and how Tom Cruise saved cinema.
Top Gun: Maverick – The Sundae Presents
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A Night to Dismember: Love at Worst Sight Episode 4
Ciara and Dean co-host The Sundae Presents, a podcast in which they each make the other watch films they haven’t seen. Specifically, films considered among the worst of all time, for a new miniseries called Love at Worst Sight. For the final episode, Ciara showed Dean the (theatrical release of the) sole horror film by one-of-a-kind sexsploitation director Doris Wishman: A Night to Dismember. They talk about how she cobbled it together after the original cut was lost (and found), the purity (and perversity) of its auteurist vision and Wishman’s place within (and outside) the history of cinema.
A Night to Dismember – The Sundae Presents
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Ishtar: Love at Worst Sight Episode 2
Ciara and Dean co-host The Sundae Presents, a podcast in which they each make the other watch films they haven’t seen. Specifically, films considered among the worst of all time, for a new miniseries called Love at Worst Sight. In episode two, Ciara finally makes Dean watch Elaine May’s iconic comic flop Ishtar. They talk about its legendarily troubled production, how it became a punchline and why it deserves to be reclaimed.
Ishtar – The Sundae Presents
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The Great Wipeout of Television History
I’m not much given to ranking such things, but if you put a gun to my head and asked me to rank my favourite sitcoms, The Likely Lads would easily make the top tier. It aired three seasons on BBC between 1964 and 1966—which, because it’s British television, means twenty episodes and a Christmas sketch—following Terry and Bob, two young men working in a factory in the north-east of England. It was commissioned because The Beatles were big and that made someone at the BBC want a show about young northerners, even if they ended up in Newcastle instead of Liverpool.
Terry and Bob are instantly, vividly realized: they are united in their shared ambitions of getting drunk, picking up girls, and watching football, but there is always a tension between Terry’s pride in being working-class and Bob’s ambitions for social mobility. Bob will always blame Terry for his bad behavior, but the phrase “pushing an open door” was invented specifically to describe Bob. While many 1960s sitcoms are warm, wholesome and full of wacky misunderstandings, The Likely Lads is vulgar, realistic and incredibly modern. Season one’s “Older Women Are More Experienced”—in which Terry dates an older woman and Bob dates a younger one—ends on a punchline that wouldn’t feel out of place in Peep Show. It’s a show I adore, that I will evangelise for any chance I get.
Of the twenty episodes produced, only ten survive.
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Whedon v Snyder: The Justice League Special: The Sundae Presents Episode 12
Ciara and Dean co-host The Sundae Presents, a podcast in which they each make the other watch films they haven’t seen. Ciara and Dean each brought a film this episode, but also… the same film? For their first (proper) double episode, Ciara made Dean watch the Whedon Cut of Justice League, and Dean made Ciara watch the Snyder Cut. They talk about corporate heartlessness, the inherent silliness of superheroes and Batman getting old. They also laugh at the bad guy a lot.
Whedon v Snyder: The Justice League Special – The Sundae Presents
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Eternal Subscriptions of the Spotless Mind
We’re living through a time that future media historians will call a major turning point in the digital era. The younger, techier companies that created the modern streaming market, like Netflix and Amazon, have used up their first mover advantage and the regrouped old guard are gearing up to crush them. (Apple are on the tech side, but did not use their first mover advantage, because they’re idiots, presumably.) The biggest conglomerates in the film industry – Disney, AT&T, Comcast, ViacomCBS – will stop licensing their films to streaming services owned by other companies in favour of exclusively streaming them on services they own: Disney+, HBO Max, Peacock and Paramount+ (formerly CBS All Access) respectively. It’s gonna take a few years to make the shift, as deals that were signed before launching these services cannot be rescinded. But they’ll pretty much all be expired by the end of this decade and very few will be renewed, especially once HBO Max, Peacock and Paramount+ go international. That’ll leave any streaming service without a major studio archive increasingly reliant on their original releases as enticement to stay subscribed, which will always be a worse value proposition for a consumer than original releases plus loads of existing films. Amazon seem to be futureproofing Prime against this threat by buying MGM and securing a back catalogue of their own. Netflix and Apple seem to be doing sweet fuck all, but that could change any minute. It’s Silicon Valley vs Hollywood in a fight to the death over which shower of assholes in California get to shape the future of global media, and it terrifies me.
Streaming has only been around for the bones of a decade and it’s already transformed the industry so much, mostly for the worse. Suffocating overproduction, cinemas decimated, expanding power of corporations to censor art. The casualties of the first streaming war (June 2011 – March 2020) have already been severe, and that was before Disney, one of the most awful, nihilistic media companies in human history, got involved. What fresh horrors will come now the second streaming war (May 2020 – present) is afoot? I obviously can’t know what Bob Iger and his ilk are cooking up in their high rises, but I can try to think like them. I’ve looked at graphs of market trends and nodded slowly, I’ve brainstormed and wordclouded and powerpointed, I’ve put a photo of Martin Scorsese on a dart board and shot it with a revolver. I’ve danced with Minions in the pale moonlight, huffed the helium from Walt Disney’s cryopod and sought prophecy in the entrails of a still-living Boots the Monkey. I’ve read the fucking Economist. And lo, the Invisible Hand came forth from the great maelstrom of the market, laid a single finger on my forehead and answered my prayers. I have seen the future that Disney and all the other rogues will bring about in their ruthless, pointless pursuit of wealth. It has come to me as if in a vision, and, buddy, it is fucked up.
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Mickey Rourke: The Star That Should’ve Been
I used to think no one pursued a career in entertainment without hoping to be famous, but that’s not true. There are plenty of faces you’ve seen in films over and over, but couldn’t tell me their names if your life depended on it – and they like it that way. There are plenty of working actors, writers, musicians who just want to make a living doing something they love. But with Mickey Rourke, it seemed he was destined to be a star, regardless of what his initial goals were. The look he had, the roles he played: he should’ve been the next big thing. And he kind of was, but he kind of wasn’t. Either way, it stopped. The general consensus is that it stopped because Hollywood had enough of him and his attitude. Maybe he had enough of Hollywood. Maybe it was suicide by cop. Maybe he didn’t know that an actor couldn’t want the amazing heights of fame and so, like someone too cowardly to break up with someone, even when they know they should, he made them make the decision for him. He made the cop shoot him, the girl leave him, the industry toss him.
And so that might be the key to understanding the whole “reluctant star” thing. “Careful what you wish for” may not always apply, especially when referring to someone who did no such thing. Did Mickey Rourke sit in his bedroom daydreaming of – wishing for – the Hollywood glitz and glamour? I doubt it. He just wanted to be good and for people – not everyone, but some nebulous, satisfactory someone – to respect him for it.
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The Sundae 