Watch List Weekly Recap 5/5/23
Maypole Mondays, What To Watch Fridays, and the death of a lost boy.
This is the Friday recap of Ty Burr’s Watch List postings for the week. If you’d like to cut down on in-box clutter and receive this weekly email ONLY, please go to your account page and under “Email notifications” uncheck every box except “Weekly Digest.” If you’d prefer to not receive it at all, uncheck just “Weekly Digest.”
An unorthodox week for the Watch List, with two non-movie posts — one I’d been mulling for a while and one unplanned but fueled by sorrow and anger.
For paid subscribers, the 1st of May gave me the excuse to dive a bit into the pagan DNA of May Day and its associated revels while linking to one of the most ingeniously structured pop songs ever written, XTC’s “The Wheel and the Maypole.”
Music 🎸
I Want My Maypole
Ty Burr • May 1, 2023
May Day in New England is when the world finally, irrevocably turns green – the rich, luminescent green of freshly uncorked leaves. Winter dogs New Englanders through March and into April, gray days and mitten weather lasting past exasperation and Easter, but by the start of May it’s as inarguable as the Baltimore oriole that arrives in my neighbor’s tree every year on the morning of the 1st or 2nd.
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I was just going to run a Friday What To Watch and call it a week, but then Jordan Neely was done to death on a New York City subway and too much of the media and social media response seemed to imply he had it coming. As someone who rode the MTA daily back in the bad old days and rarely, if ever, felt the desire to murder anyone, there were some things I felt needed saying.
Blood On The Tracks
Ty Burr • May 5, 2023
I have my usual Friday “What to Watch” post all cued up and ready to go later today, but it’s sometimes hard to natter on about showbiz when real life pulls up to stare you in the face. So forgive me while I express some of the despair and sorrow I’m feeling this morning, for
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Here’s the aforementioned What To Watch, with a quick overview of the whats and whys of the WGA strike, some pointers to new movies in theaters and on demand, and, for paid subscribers, a few repertory recommendations for the different streaming platforms. Have a good weekend.
Good Movies 📽
What To Watch: Strike Edition
Ty Burr • May 5, 2023
It’s always the worker bees who lose out on the honey whenever a technological upheaval hits the media industry. The writers of the Writers Guild of America – the women and men who pen the screenplays for the movies you love (or loathe) and the television series you binge – went on strike this week because, while they’re busier than ever creating TV’s new Golden Age, they’re seeing less and less of the gold. You can find any number of online Baedekers to explain the impasse between the WGA and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP): Alissa Wilkinson does
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