TT 122: Early jazz blogs, James Newton and Misha Mengelberg
New DTMs:
“Back to be.jazz” is a little bit of personal history. Great to see Mwanji Ezana again…
“Updates on James Newton and Misha Mengelberg” promotes varied cool stuff.
JAMES NEWTON SCROLL-SCROLLING VIDEOS! omg. As I write in the post: “I’ve embedded these videos, but by all means go over to Newton’s new channel, hit a few links, and teach the algorithm to promote these beautiful pieces, or at least grant him a little more searchable edge against his ‘competitor’ James Newton Howard. (!)”
Saw NO TIME TO DIE in London. It is what it is. The scene with Ana de Armas was the best part. I am no Bond diehard but my fanatical interest in genre fiction inevitably interacts with the massive movie franchise. The creator, Ian Fleming, had a sardonic wit, and in my view the movies are best when they are not taking themselves too seriously.
I suppose any of the Bond actors have worthy scenes, but I don’t think there’s a single Bond movie that is good the way, say, THE BOURNE IDENTITY is good.
In the end the current Bond movies seem to be another franchise that is trapped in the memories of the fans who got engaged as a teen (or even as a prepubescent) and now fiddle about with making it “adult.” The one mildly profound detail in the new movie is its forthright engagement with children. In the first scene there’s a child killer and related themes develop. One can feel a subtle question about gun violence in our entertainment…
…But again, there’s just not that much there, it is what it is, including about 30 straight minutes of machine-gunning at the end.
The score by Hans Zimmer was worst part….
.,,Still, it was a fun three hours. Afterwards Billy Hart said, “That’s the kind of movie I like.” Yeah. I like ‘em too. Escapism is important.