Long Weekend Watching

What's in your holiday queue?

Between heatwaves and the holiday, there are plenty of reasons to stay inside over the next few days and catch up on some quality viewing.

The new season of The Bear has divided fans. It’s also reignited a strange debate over what genre the show really is. This could be a good time to revisit Gabe’s piece about how the show uses the structure and style of classic sitcoms to tell its stories (which aren’t always comedic).

Arielle covered The Bear in her essay on quiet storytelling, too, specifically the season two episode “Honeydew,” which finds Marcus far from home, honing his craft in a new kitchen, and the show becomes briefly calm as we watch his progress. Arielle writes:

The slower pace doesn’t mean that things don’t happen. The episode works precisely because it gently pushes the story forward and also offers a momentary respite from the clamorous world of the kitchen we’re so familiar with. It’s also extraordinarily well-paced, allowing us access to greater character depth without sacrificing narrative movement.

It’s all very human. And Together, Alone loves human creativity. It was the subject of our June podcast, with a particular focus on the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence in creative fields.

If you’re heading to the theater this weekend to see Kinds of Kindness, consider reading Arielle’s piece on Yorgos Lanthimos’s previous movie, Poor Things, and the value of amoral characters on screen.

And if you’re staying in, the Criterion Channel has just put up its new collections for the month. One entry in the collection of movies set around Times Square is The Sweet Smell of Success, a movie that shows a time when one of the most powerful people in the country was a newspaper columnist. It’s one of Gabe’s top journalism movies. And last month, he wrote about another of his favorites, Joan Micklin-Sliver’s Between the Lines.

Whatever you watch this weekend, tell us about it.