The annual Post-Turkey Day Hangover FAR is here yet again! Check out these articles.

Thanks to Miller for pausing his gravy intake to contribute this week. Send articles throughout the week to ploughmanplods [at] gmail, post articles from the past week below for discussion and Have a Happy Friday!

The Reveal’s Scott Tobias and Keith Phipps discuss the merits and foibles of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis:

In the year 2024, when we’re having to grapple with so many franchises and write a lot about world-building—I’m recapping Dune: Prophecy for Vulture, and woof do you feel the heavy-lifting on that one—I feel particularly appreciative of how boldly and efficiently Lang establishes this Utopia powered by an underworld underclass that’s far from utopic. Is it simple? Sure. Can you miss the Biblical significance of Fredersen’s tower being called the Tower of Babel? You cannot. But cinema often thrives on strong, clear visions like those early foundational minutes of Metropolis, so long as the filmmaking itself has a certain graphic force. You might criticize Lang and his then-wife Thea von Harbou—who wrote the script based on her novel (which was itself reportedly written with the screen in mind)—for a near-propagandistic depiction of the class divide, but their future Industrial Age would not have been so out of line with the recent past, when unchecked labor abuse led to danger and vast inequality. The science-fiction genre gives you all the more license to put that in stark terms.

For some extra holiday celebration tips, Polygon’s Petrana Radilovic suggests several movies that are better on full tummies (or wine-induced hazes):

Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones – I will refrain from making any statement about the prequels versus sequels versus original trilogy versus the Disney Plus shows, but Attack of the Clones rules when you’re not really paying attention to it. The scene where Obi-Wan discovers that someone has ordered an entire army of human men and he just kinda goes along with it like an elaborate game of improv? High comedy. Padme freeing herself from chains and her clothes ripping in a way that’s oh-so fashionable? Slay. Yoda going apeshit with his lightsaber? Blessed. The entire “Across the Stars” montage? OK — that’s actually good.

Tim Lewis interviews Richard Linklater at The Guardian:

TL: [Filming] Merrily We Roll Along will take you to at least 80. Will you always make films?

RL: I don’t know what would prevent that. Even bodily, it’s a physically demanding thing, but I have a picture on my wall of John Huston making [the 1987 film] The Dead. He’s sitting in a chair hooked up with an oxygen mask making his last film and I go: “That looks pretty good!” I’m not even a smoker, so maybe I won’t need the oxygen mask. To be in my 80s or let’s go for 90s… but who the hell knows? I have a lot of other interests, but it’s been a fun way to process the world.

At The New Republic, Stephen Catlin reviews a book on the U.S. campus roots and eager global consumption of “cancel culture”:

In France, the rising population of immigrants from former French colonies in the Middle East and North Africa since at least 1989 has been framed in the media as a direct threat to the social cohesion and cultural integrity of the secularist republic. Those who criticize this reaction to postcolonial demographic change as racist or Islamophobic are, according to many French commentators, speaking a distinctively American language of “le wokisme.” Thus, cancel culture discourse serves a distinctively French political project by yoking one French majoritarian panic (about Muslims) to a separate claim that French debate is being distorted by socially “fractious” ideas about race and colonialism from without. These ideas originate, supposedly, not from Francophone intellectuals like Frantz Fanon or Aimé Césaire, but rather from American campuses. Caring overmuch about what American college students are supposedly doing and saying—and even more importantly, what they are allegedly not allowing to be done or said—is, [author Adrian] Daub finds, a global pastime.

And at the Dublin InQuirer, Honey Morris profiles a local band playing locally:

Behind them, the sky over Dublin Bay was silvery blue. The wind was salty. The tide was distant and the occasional ferry passed on the horizon….The raw and improvised noise set lasted a little over 30 minutes. It was the second in an ongoing series of outdoor gigs, said [NiIall] Murphy once it was over.

Whether people come by isn’t vital. It’s just fun to go out and do something and be surprised if people show up, [Enda] Rourke said. “It’s part of the play.”

It’s about reclaiming the city, too. Sure, the band isn’t playing Whelans, or getting booked for Culture Night, Rourke says.

“But this concrete is here for us to sit on. Come and use it,” he says.