Hello and welcome to the second Casual Friday, an experimental divergence from our usual coverage. The penguin is fine. Thoughts on today’s issue? Hit reply.
Vengeance, B.J. Novak’s “love-hate letter” to podcasts, opens today. The first-time director plays a journalist and podcaster chasing a true-crime story in West Texas – the death of a woman with whom he had a one-night stand.
“Intensely shallow and ruthlessly ambitious,” he initially spends his time chasing dates at Manhattan cocktail parties. (Bless Sean Burns of WBUR: “I suggested that Vengeance might be best appreciated as a cautionary tale about why one shouldn’t under any circumstances hang out with John Mayer.”)
Onscreen podcasty media hasn’t yet hit the mark for me (sorry, “Only Murders”). But this film appears to take our harmful true-crime voyeurism seriously. The podcaster’s biggest flaw is that he sees these small-town people as characters, Novak tells Vince Mancini of Uproxx. That’s the danger.
Vengeance is still a dark comedy, and Novak made a point to pack in the details. A producer hypes “a dead white girl: the holy grail of podcasting,” a Pod Save America shirt makes an appearance, and this: “I got Terry Gross to play the head honcho of the whole podcast network.” Bananas.
Fun facts: Google’s knowledge panel says that ‘101% liked this movie’ (alrighty), and The New York Times calls it “a dish best served with Frito pie.”
You were warned – Fridays are for absurd stock photos. This collage of headphones on random objects is possibly the dumbest thing you’ll love today. We’ll never know why that melon ended up on that beach, but what matters is that it did.
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