Contrary to popular belief, Cory’s Reads is not dead.
In fact, we just crossed 100+ subscribers. My sincere thanks go out to each and every one of you.
And with that gratitude in mind, I am committed to bringing this newsletter back to your inboxes on a monthly basis, albeit with more of a focus on brevity. That shift may be disappointing to some, but trust me when I say it is a godsend for many others, myself included.
I love to write. It’s the only thing I can say with near-certainty that I am good at. But when I write, I write a lot. And don’t get me wrong; I like writing a lot. I wish I could write even more. But I’ve been writing a lot less here and elsewhere as I have gained momentum in the other areas of my career. If Cory’s Reads is to make its triumphant return — pffffttt…as if it ever left — it will need to be digestible enough for you to chew and simple enough for me to prepare.
The challenge, of course, will be to stay true to that promise.
As I look around the newsletter landscape (as opposed to a landscape newsletter), I see this emphasis on succinctness all over the place. Indeed, TikTok has already capped an entire generation’s attention span at 25-30 seconds, but singling out Gen-Z (did you know there’s a Generation Alpha out there as well?) wouldn’t be fair. We’re all guilty of it. And when seeking out our news — or whatever kind of information this newsletter could possibly contain — we are much more likely to consume that which is delivered right to us, preferably in bite-size chunks. I have found myself particularly impressed with The Dailies, an ultra-brief newsletter synthesizing the biggest developments and trends in Hollywood. I recommend it to anyone with an interest in the entertainment industry.
Newsletters such as The Dailies, and maybe even Cory’s Reads, feel particularly vital amidst the several crises facing the film and television industries.
Paramount — once a bastion of Hollywood’s Golden Age — finds itself in limbo. Amazon Studios is being accused of using AI to put the finishing touches on its ill-advised Roadhouse remake. And even with the WGA and SAG strikes in the rearview mirror, pay equity continues to be a major issue for the Costume Designers Guild and other female-dominated crafts.
There have been many reasons to feel dubious about cinema’s long-term survival over the last several years. I have lamented the fate of film and television many times in this very newsletter, and yet even as economic pressures ramp up, the artforms always endure.
Of course, survival may not be enough. And that concern is written across countless projects in recent years. Can film still do what it is meant to do? Wait…what is film meant to do?
Some of our greatest storytellers seem less confident than ever that the movies are capable of accounting for the enormity of the crises around them, particularly as the motion picture industry fights battles of its own. Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon marked arguably the most dramatic departure of the auteur’s legendary career, not necessarily in terms of genre but in terms of perspective. Of course, in trying to tell the horrific story of the Osage murders, Scorsese still finds himself tethered to the white man, prioritizing Ernest Burkhart’s (Leonardo DiCaprio) role in the narrative. In a moving coda at the end of the film, Scorsese appears onscreen to acknowledge the limitations of his storytelling, and pay tribute to Lily Gladstone’s Mollie Burkhart. On one hand, Scorsese is using the tools provided to him by cinema to account for his film’s shortcomings. On the other hand, he is ceding to the possibility that film — a medium he has all but mastered —may not suffice in telling this sprawling story.
Cinema’s capacity for meaning-making (or lack thereof) was brought to its cold, logical conclusion in Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, a film I did not enjoy yet cannot stop thinking about.
Of course, no one is meant to enjoy The Zone of Interest. It is a film about vapid, awful people — Nazis, to be exact — who are utterly unconcerned with the death machine that funds their lifestyle. In clarifying this point, Glazer commits to a superficial style as well. The film uses only natural lighting, and there is little “plot” to speak of, as we primarily follow housewife Hedwig Höss (Sandra Hüller) and her children in their day-to-day activities: gardening, swimming, trying on expensive clothing. In some ways, The Zone of Interest is an anti-film, daring its audience to look away out of boredom or complacency. Glazer kickstarts the film with a similar sense of malaise, opening on a black screen and fixating on such emptiness for an absurdly long period of time. At other moments throughout the film, the frame is overtaken with a blood-red backdrop. By drawing attention to the materiality of film itself, Glazer suggests a kind of film-within-a-film, as if an altogether different story rests at the core of The Zone of Interest, begging to be freed.
That “other film” is best represented by Johnnie Burn’s award-winning sound design, evoking the horrors of the Holocaust by suggesting their offscreen presence. Most Holocaust films center these atrocities, and understandably so. But Glazer and Burn work together to strip their Holocaust project of the sentimentality that often defines similar films. When Glazer jars his viewers awake by flash-forwarding to present day in the film’s final scene — we watch as a group of janitors clean the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum — it feels like a tacit admission that even his own attempts to ground the tragedy in the mundane lives of those responsible for it may still be insufficient in properly paying tribute to the events. The Zone of Interest is a film simultaneously preoccupied with the pursuit of reality, as well as its elusive grasp.
Both The Zone of Interest and Killers of the Flower Moon fall into a new category of film known as “post-cinema,” a term first coined in reference to the emergence of new media throughout the 21st century, but which now seems to have arrived at an inflection point for cinema itself. Consider this newsletter the first in a series of writeups about post-cinema and where we go from here. These anxieties around the future of film and its waning aptitude in an increasingly fractured media environment have consumed me as of late, much like they have Glazer and Scorsese. So I invite you to join me in my anxiety as we navigate that dystopian environment on a monthly basis.
Thank you all for reading! Because this newsletter is also meant to serve as a bit of self-promotion, I have decided to add a new section to the end of each issue. I do a lot of writing over on Letterboxd, and so I will be featuring one of my reviews each month. This first one is for Julio Torres’ fantastic Problemista, releasing in theaters nationwide on March 22nd.
Letterboxd Review of the Month
2024 finally has its first great movie! Honestly just went for the Q&A hosted by Kate Berlant and John Early but I've always respected Julio Torres for his singular approach to everything he does, and Problemista is no exception. For as much as the film feels indebted to the countless other semi-autobiographical films that have nearly become compulsory for every living comedian, its surrealist bent and hilariously unnerving depiction of the horrors of the American immigration system inject it with an immediate urgency that few other films could achieve. It also doesn't hurt that Tilda Swinton devours this role with a reckless glee. Legitimately among her career's best work.
Torres did make an interesting point during the Q&A about how he didn't want the topic of immigration to be the only reason the film "mattered" or even got made in the first place. While I could imagine Problemista making a particular impression on those all too familiar with the intricacies of that nightmarish process, I think the film also succeeds by broadening its scope to account for the many other forms of bureaucracy that plague our everyday lives and threaten to undermine our very existence at a moment's notice. It's all pretty bleak stuff, but in the playful hands of Torres and his impressive cast, it's also shockingly funny!
Follow me on Letterboxd at @creid61, and keep up with the rest of my work on Instagram at @coryreid6125.
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