Hello, lovelies! I’ve found lots of things of interest this week – from Canadian horror to punk rock.

On the 10th, Tatiana Siegel of The Hollywood Reporter discussed the sex trafficking at the Cannes Film Festival:
“Before Hollywood’s #MeToo awakening in 2017, there was nothing unusual about taking a meeting alone in a hotel room during the Cannes Film Festival. Hundreds of U.S. film companies like The Weinstein Company booked suites at glorious resorts along the Croisette like the Majestic and used them as makeshift offices during the festival and accompanying market.”

Also on the 10th, Matthew Monagle talked about the Canadian-ism of Shivers for Film School Rejects:
“This is the unique space that Shivers occupies. At once both a low-budget horror film and a work of national cinema exploring issues of Canadian modernity, Cronenberg is able to bridge the divide between the cinematic output of two countries like seldom can. In one of the film’s final scenes, a now-infected nurse tells Doctor St. Luc about a recent sex dream and the erotic philosophies spouted by her imaginary partner. ‘Disease is the love of two alien kinds of creatures for each other,’ she recalls, offering a near-perfect summary for Shivers itself. Cronenberg’s movie, ‘diseased’ as it may be, is the perfect love story between Canadian nationalism and Hollywood independent horror. It may have outraged his contemporaries, but both the film and the filmmaker have withstood the test of time and proven that horror is a more-than-acceptable way for English Canada to have a film industry.”

In honor of its 20th anniversary Ed Gillett of The Quietus, made his case that Moby’s “Play” was truly the first album of the 20th century on the 13th:
“On its release in May 1999, Play faced overwhelming indifference from the gatekeepers of 20th-century pop music: major labels, FM radio, the music press and record stores. Forced to work without that infrastructure, Moby inadvertently mapped out a process that other independent artists would soon have to follow as those traditional institutions withered away. For better or worse, Play is the first record of the 21st century: the patient zero for a recording industry scrabbling to survive after the collapse of recorded music.”

Again on the 13th, Aaron Bady, Sarah Mesle and Phillip Maciak reviewed the Game of Thrones episode “The Bells” for LARB:
The problem, ultimately, is not that Daenerys is a mad queen; there is no such thing. It’s a redundant phrase. Power corrupts and absolute power — dragon power, destiny power, fantasy power — most of all. To be a king or queen is to win the game, and to win the game, everyone else has to lose, and die. That’s the game. And if the fantasy of ‘High Fantasy’ is always that absolute rulers might rule well and kindly and with good intentions for their people, then Game of Thrones has abruptly woken up and remembered what a queen is.

Also on the 13th, Alexander Billet, a comrade at Jacobin, discussed why the Clash matter:
“In other words, the Clash’s importance lies not in their ‘genius,’ but in their decision to participate as artists in a chaotic and bleak world while never forgetting art and music’s capability to map a different future. Past the overproduced noise interference of marketing, the Clash were willing to dive headlong into contradiction and pull at its stitches until they popped.”

Finally, Sarah Shevenock looked at how the continued fragmenting of streaming will lead to people dropping services for Morning Consult on the 14th:
“As the streaming market becomes more fragmented, with WarnerMedia, Walt Disney Co. and NBCUniversal all preparing to launch streaming services within the next two years, Netflix Inc. is faced with the very real possibility that some of its most popular licensed shows and movies will leave the service, taking subscribers along with them.
While new polling finds that the youngest subscribers in particular are more likely than other age groups to say they would leave Netflix to follow certain programming, analysts suggest that this may not be that big of an issue for the streaming service.”

Enjoy!