Monday
The death of Martin Amis at the weekend triggers a slew of coverage more affectionate than can be imagined for that of many other writers. In America, the obituaries are sober, respectful. In Britain, where the news is much bigger, the pitch is slightly different, not just fond but shocked – hard to imagine this country’s literary life without some kind of Amis at the helm – and also, to my eye, slightly stricken. For many years, Amis-baiting was a minor national pastime and it seemed to me on Monday that along with the sadness was a detectable unease, the sick feeling of: “Oh god we didn’t mean it and now it’s too late.”
If Hitchens didn’t mellow at all in his final years – that was the impression, I have no idea if it’s true – it seems to me Amis did. Beleaguered by back trouble, a house fire and, although his love for America was well documented, the mild out-of-water sense of being in the wrong country, in the last few years he seemed to run on a quieter setting than the roaring Amis of yore. He was very elegant about Trump, and Covid, but the last two times I interviewed him, once in his mother-in-law’s house downtown in the Village and once in his newish loft apartment in Brooklyn, the main thing I took away was a sense of how much he adored his children.
I didn’t go back to the novels this week. I’m one of those Amis readers who always preferred Experience, for its tenderness and directness, its amused lack of obnoxiousness relative to some of the fiction. You can open it on any page and get sucked right back in. My eye fell at random halfway down page 15, where Amis writes, “the 19-year-old hero of my first novel was described in one review as ‘both a gilded and a repulsive creature.’ I accept this description, for my hero and for myself.” Impossible not to smile, cancel the afternoon and keep reading.
Tuesday
The long-threatened Netflix crackdown on password-sharing started in the US today, with “primary account-holders” (childish snigger) receiving a stern email from the streamer warning them if they want to share their log on details with people who don’t live in their house, they may do so for $7.99 per additional person.
It is a pretty mild response to a problem that Netflix estimates, worldwide, totals 100 million users using the service without a subscription. No system of fines is in place but account-holders who are travelling must log on from their home addresses at least once a month or risk being blocked as freeloaders. Kids away at college will have to shell out the additional $7.99, too.
Or not, as it happens. Part of the calculation that has kept Netflix apparently dithering around this decision for so long is the quandary facing all streamers at the moment: that there are too many of them. Most of us are a single bad episode away from cancelling at least one of the multiple platforms we pay for every month and for my money, Netflix is in particular peril. The 10-part Ali Wong comedy drama Beef yanked me back from the edge during a three-day binge last month, but if it weren’t for tween shows such as Sam and Cat, Henry Danger, and Bunk’d, that my kids are addicted to, and the fact I still haven’t finished Better Call Saul, I’d have bailed on it long ago.
Wednesday
One doesn’t think of Jude Law as operating within the Daniel Day-Lewis school of method acting, but news from Cannes this week about the 50-year-old’s role as Henry VIII in the new movie Firebrand forces a recalculation. The film depicts the king in his irascible sixth and final marriage, to Catherine Parr, and to up the authenticity of the project Law invested in preparatory measures that included visiting a perfume maker for a special Henry VIII scent. According to remarks made at the film festival, Law’s instructions were to create a cologne that combined the toxic mix of rotting flesh (the king had leg ulcers), BO, and what might delicately be described as the smell of the human body pre-Andrex. The threshold for gag reflexes has, one assumes, plummeted since the 16th century and Law might reasonably stand accused of forcing an historically inaccurate response from his co-stars. Either way, “when Jude walked in on set,” said the film’s director, Karim Aïnouz, “it was just horrible.”
Thursday
Here comes 80-year-old Harrison Ford in the trailer for the new Indiana Jones movie, Dial of Destiny, riding a horse through a subway tunnel while being chased by a train and in the company of a slightly startled-looking Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Elsewhere in new releases this week, Helen Mirren plays a senior citizen in White Bird, a by-numbers Nazi movie about a New York private school bully – her grandson – learning a lesson about kindness when she creakingly wheels out her war story for him. Mirren is three years younger than Ford and I’m not saying I need to see her being chased by a train – although I wouldn’t turn that invitation down – but it is striking that, were a 77-year-old woman to be seen cavorting on a horse or jumping over rooftops in an action movie, it would be taken as the most ludicrous parody.
Friday
Heads up on what a Ron DeSantis presidency might look like with Elon Musk running the tech, which, for sheer chaos this week, lacked only the screech of a dial-up connection to give it that final apocalyptic vibe. DeSantis, announcing his run for presidency, chose the forum of an audio livestream on Twitter Spaces, where he was supposed to be in conversation with Musk. After a delayed start, the stream immediately started to glitch, while David Sacks, the moderator, tried to put a brave spin on things. “We got so many people here that we are kind of melting the servers, which is a good sign,” said Sacks, while in the background, Musk could be heard, like the guy from IT, promising he was trying to free up more server capacity. When the audio cut out again, users received the notice: “This space has ended.” If only.
