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SHOWS:
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AUSTIN: I’m coming to Austin! Wednesday November 16th is the first show, and should have shows through that Sunday!
Hello Sternal Journalists!
The Sternal Journal has many purposes and I doubt I know what many of them are, but I believe that one of the most practical purposes I can serve here is, from time to time, eliminating the nag of the inconsequential head-scratcher.
These are the little, meaningless (often pop-cultural) questions that slowly materialize in the margins of our awareness as headlines that we breeze by or snippets of conversation we don’t even register at the time. It accumulates slowly and silently until one day, you notice it all at once and have to grab the nearest person by the lapels and beg them to tell you why everyone is talking about Kevin Sorbo all of a sudden.
One tiny example of this is the recent memes about Leonardo DiCaprio only dating women under 25. Those memes pop up often enough so when I saw one or two, I thought it was just an evergreen joke being deployed, but then I saw a few more and got that icky feeling of cultural ignorance and had to DM the person who posted the next one I saw begging them to explain.
This, of course, was very Googlable. If I had just searched DiCaprio news, I’m sure I could have put two and two together. But sometimes, it’s not. As was the case for my main inconsequential head-scratcher this week, why is everyone suddenly talking about the length of standing ovations???
You likely don’t have exactly the same news diet I do, but I don’t think this is totally entertainment-niche because of the heavy overlap with celebrity culture. But it was during Don’t Worry Darling Did Harry Styles Spit on Chris Pine Fiasco that I saw reports that the standing ovation for that movie at Venice Film Festival was four minutes. That tracked as long, but I didn’t think much of it.
Until just a half hour ago when I was procrastinating writing this SternJourn and I saw on Instagram that, at the very same film festival, Brendan Fraser received a six-minute (!) standing ovation for his Darren Aronofsky film, The Whale. While I don’t often follow film festival news too closely, I don’t remember this sort of Nate Silverfication of audience response being such a thing in the past. And since I hadn’t heard of it, I had no idea whether the Standing O’s themselves were new or not.
So basically I was (very intensely and yet extremely low-stakedly) wondering:
Why am I suddenly hearing about this? Is it new or was I just a doofus?
Are the standing ovations themselves new or (again) am I a doofus?
And maybe this never would have crossed your personal screens or minds, Sternal Journalists, but I assume those of you who are unpiqued by this topic already stopped reading.
(Or maybe you did just now)
Either way, I’m happy to say I found answers for both, so you needn’t head-scratch any longer!
The coverage IS a new thing, or at least that’s what I gleaned from the existence of articles like “Stop Counting the the Minutes of Film Festival Ovations” which was published five days ago in IndieWire. There are a lot of interesting points in this article, but the most concrete reason it posited for the ramp up of coverage of ovations themselves is that festivals, as a response to the fast pace of the internet news cycle, placed embargoes on reviews to films themselves:
“Running this gauntlet made the industry wary of glamorous festival premieres, and festivals responded with a pragmatic solution. Berlin and Cannes instituted embargoes: No reviews or social media reactions can run until after the gala premieres. For Venice, the embargo remains in place until after the film starts. The result is a news cycle that’s more centralized around the intense collective response rather than any individual reaction.”
Festivals, by trying to protect films from being “demolished by snarky tweets before the credits rolled,” simply narrowed the things that reporters could report on up to a certain time. And when you have to file something, length of an ovation is snappy and one can at least convince themselves that it is "newsy.”
But they’re really not because long ovations are NOT new at all, as I learned from The Atlantic’s “Why Cannes Film Festival Standing Ovations Are So Long.”
The tradition of long ovations at Cannes and other European film festivals goes way back, including but not limited to Pan’s Labyrinth’s 22-minute ovation(!). And the article suggests that it’s a result of both the level of prestige of the filmmakers present, and basically how the seating layout puts them on display for the rest of the audience:
“At the head of the social hierarchy are the film’s cast and crew, who are likely to be high-profile names, seated in a position that is visible (perhaps on-screen) to the rest of the audience. That audience is usually made up of movie buffs inclined to show respect, even if they found the film lacking. Because ovations typically begin at the front of the audience, those who could afford the best seats—perhaps friends of the film’s team, or the wealthiest attendees—prompt the rest of the audience to leap to their feet. Those with no such clout are helpless to follow. Even if they decide not to engage, they’re in no position to influence anyone else.”
Everyone who made the movie stands up and claps to celebrate the fact that they did it, and I don’t know if you’ve ever been in an audience where a standing ovation has happened, but in my experience, as long as the first few rows start, everyone follows suit.
So there you have it. If you felt like long standing ovations were suddenly a big story and you had no idea why, you are not crazy. If you hadn’t noticed it and still got this far, feel free to hit me in the comments or a reply with another innocuous head-scratcher and I’ll try to do the research for you!
And now…
Recommendations
Shia LaBeouf on REAL ONES with Jon Bernthal. Podcast. I started watching this with the same skepticism, morbid curiosity, and irony as I’ve watched some episodes of the Joe Rogan Experience, but I was pretty captivated by it. Will probably write more in a future SternJourn. They don’t shy away from talking about LaBeouf’s abusive history and he’s very intentional about stating that he unequivocally hurt people and talking through his journey to make amends, but of course there’s no reason to engage with any of it if that is a triggering topic.
NOT TIGHT. Album. Rediscovered this album from jazz fusion duo DOMi & JD BECK. It is so fun and interesting. Play it while cleaning or walking somewhere.
A Brewery’s Anti-Violence Mission, Complicated By a Killing. Article. This New Yorker article about a white entrepreneur in Wilmington, NC who started a brewery with the goal of hiring only active and rival gang members felt like a wildly American story from every angle. People with the best intentions abound, but (spoiler) it does not have a particularly happy ending—or beginning for that matter.
My 34 joke. Joke. I always assume people see everything I post on Instagram which is wildly flawed and narcissistic. So in case ya didn’t, this is one of the little jokes I used to open my show at Edinburgh.
Also, here’s a beautiful pic I took of the clouds tonight during a visit to the Grove with The Sternal Journal’s own Catalina Correspondent, Chris M. The windows the camera in the closest foreground are (I believe!) the corporate offices of current Mayoral candidate and American Girl Doll scion Rick Caruso (NOT an endorsement!!!!)
Alrighty, that’s all for the week! Hope your head-scratchers stay inconsequential!
Love,
Julian
P.S. I spend anywhere between two and twelve hours a week on the Sternal Journal. If you enjoy receiving it (and are RICH) consider becoming a paying subscriber. For just a few bucks a month, you can provide me with a bit more time to come up with fun topics, poems, and interviews; and you with probably fewer typos.