🎉 The Weekly Recommendations 🎉
📚 The Oscar Wars
WHO: Michael Shulman
WHERE: Amazon / Audible
WHY: This is a fascinating look at the history of the Academy Awards, why it was started, how it endured, and how it transformed.
Even if you aren’t an Oscars fan, this book has excellent insight and context on some of the biggest years in movie history, which I found to be fascinating.
Plus, each chapter is sectioned out either by chunks of years or just one year in particular, so you can skip around and focus only on the time periods of movies you are most familiar with.
-Knox
🍿Extraction 2
WHERE: Netflix
WHO: Chris Hemsworth, The Russo Bros
WHY:
Look. It’s just a great action movie. Chris Hemsworth was built to be an action star with flares of comedic timing, and this movie capitalizes on that.
The story is simple, but some of the action sequences are redonkulous, including one extended assault set-piece that styled it as one uninterrupted take of action.
There’s also a rando cameo that was a delight because I am a HUGE sucker for cameos.
-Knox
📚 The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder
WHO: David Grann
WHERE: Amazon / Audible
WHY:
Ole Davey Grann is a season pass with me, given what he did on Killers of the Flower Moon and now with this.
The Wager tells the story of a mid-1700s shipwreck that left the displaced crew desperate to survive, with competing visions on what that should look like.
It’s part Castaway, Lord of the Flies, and The Last Duel as it explores what desperation can do to people and how the black-and-white of survival can quickly turn into a gray area.
-Knox
WHO: Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt
WHERE: HBO Max
WHY: My son is on a huge Tom Cruise kick, so I recommended we check this one out, and he loved it. There’s a surprisingly chill amount of profanity involved and no weird sex scenes. Also, BONUS POINTS for Emily Blunt mentioning wanting to do a sequel recently.
-Knox
✍️ MINI-ESSAY: A Movie Pitch ✍️
I’ve had a pipe dream of writing and making movies since high school. Every summer, without the burden of school schedules and homework, I’d force my youth group friends to act out scenes from my terrible scripts and, in many cases, also do very dangerous stunts.
I would then stitch all these scenes together, produce a final cut, and I even taught myself how to edit parts of other movies into my “movie,” so mine would begin with a pre-roll barrage faking studio involvement from the likes of Paramount, Warner Brothers or Sony.
We would then hold screenings for all the youth group girls that were our age, and I would watch everyone watch the “movie.”
No copies of these movies have survived to see the light of these modern days, and for that, I am thankful because I can’t even begin to describe how comprehensively bad they were.
But all that to say, as much as I love movies, I’ve loved the idea of making them even more.
And now, this summer, I’ve had the weird/disorienting fortune of being in a conversation with a movie studio within a movie studio about developing/writing a movie for them.
NOW LOOK: I’m typing this out like I’m saying it to you, the reader, but I’m really just reiterating it to myself so as to not get my hopes up: the likelihood of this actually happening COULDN’T BE slimmer. It’s probably more likely that I’ll be named a Supreme Court Judge or a Real Housewife of Chattanooga than it is that something will come out of this.
BUT STILL, it’s a lot of fun to think about, and I wanted to share not just that but also, below, the treatment and first act of the movie idea that this studio conversation is about…