Pretend It's a City

🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿

🎙️ EPISODE 325: 02.16.2021 *Review starts @ ~ 11:52 While I hated the bait and switch premise of the recent Bob Dylan Netflix concert documentary that Martin Scorsese directed, I found it otherwise extremely well-done. Perhaps there's a future in this, the immensely popular streaming service docu-series, for the young up-and-comer filmmaker. Marty and/or people on his team have a definite knack for finding some deep cut footage to mix in. Old commercials, archival stuff, etc. It works really well. So do the music choices for the most part. But, let's be honest, the star of this is Fran Lebowitz, a human character seemingly waiting her entire life to be the main attraction of a creation such as this. Before reluctantly starting this 7-parter, she was firmly in the "name rings a bell" department of my brain and nothing beyond. I'm real glad I dove in. She's a crabapple delight!

Of course it helps to have Scorsese steering the ship, a real life friend who doesn't insert himself into the many observational threads Lebowitz navigates, aside from a warm and constant chuckle. Her old school sensibilities and unwavering opinions are the selling point here, but I was enamored by how applicabl nearly all of them were. She isn't just going "back in my day" or "the way it used to be;" she realizes what from the past sucked and what would've been nice to see stick around. It isn't one flat view. When she makes fun of people for being obsessed with exercise, for example, it doesn't come with the belief that what they're doing is wrong. Rather, having lived as long as she has already—a lifelong smoker—it's a true an–frankl–refreshing mockery of the whole business of being alive. Of course she's against sports and Communism. Her's is an individualism in the most classic sense. And that it isn't annoying is the true talent.

CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ EPISODE 325A - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 326 ⫸

---