Good morning.
Before we get to talking about one of the great recent movie theater experiences I’ve had in awhile, I want to follow up on last Friday’s newsletter.
Last week, I talked about where the future of live sports was going. Well, sure enough, this week news broke that Disney, Fox, and Warner Brothers Discovery were teaming up on a new bundled “streaming joint venture.” The idea here is that each company would non-exclusively license their sports rights to this new unnamed streaming product and gain one third of whatever revenue was earned from subscribers and advertisers. As I understand this, each company would still stream the sports they have rights to on their branded platforms but also make them available on this new product. This is basically a sports package on cable delivered as a new app because having live sports in one place is a service people still need—and may need even more as sports move to disparate branded streaming apps. What a world we live in.
Some other media stories that I was paying attention to this week:
Casey Newton and Nilay Patel talked about the drama at Substack and the future of online media and the internet. What else do expect from a Verge podcast.
Spotify may be turning things around on the back of The Ringer’s podcast strategy: lots of cheap, conversation based podcasts focused on different topics and markets that can suit the needs of many different advertisers.
The state of digital news subscriptions. Things are tough!
Some good thoughts in Garbage Day on what drives a person to become a subscriber.
The New York Times missed on digital ad revenue. The headline and packaging for this are a bit more doom and gloom than the story. But goes to show you that the digital ad game is hard and getting harder for everyone. Makes more sense to advertise on an unnamed “streaming joint venture” focused on sports than on a website.
Now, let’s talk about The Promised Land (2023) starring Mads Mikkelsen.
I don’t know about you, but when I go to the theater for a flick I like to sit down with my popcorn and Dr. Pepper and get absorbed in a world.
Of course, this experience can take a few different shapes.
Like I said back in December, I absolutely loved The Holdovers (2023). I completely lost myself in its sense of place and the empathy the movie had for its characters. That was partially because that sense of place rang so true to my own experience, but was also because the movie seemed to really care about its realism.
I’m a sucker for character-driven movies based in reality. Whether it's something like My Dinner With Andre (1981) where the level of action is low (one single conversation over dinner) but the stakes are deceptively high (the nature of friendship and deciding how to live and accept how you’ve arranged your life) or something like Straight Time (1978) where I lose myself in the tragedy of an ex-con trying to live an honest life in a world that won’t let him (that happens to be filmed beautifully and practically vibrate off the screen.)
But I’m also a sucker for classic melodramas like Terms of Endearment (1982) and Officer and a Gentleman (1982) or sweeping epics like Lawrence of Arabia (1962). Now, these are classic movies with indelible characters and lots of plot and story, but they each also create a distinct world that feels real and true. Those two aspects allow me to forget the world I’m living in and reside completely in the world of the movie. I know Aurora’s Houston and Emma’s Iowa. I’ve never been to the Puget Sound or gone to flight school, but I know the dead ends Zack and Paula are trying to avoid. I’ve never been to the Middle East or fought in conflicts related to World War I but I know what is to be driven by a desire to be remembered, to do something great, the way T.E. Lawrence is.
And let me tell you, The Promised Land is a movie that takes you to a place and lets you live there.
I saw this movie last Friday and was blown away (clearly). I went to the theater knowing pretty much nothing about The Promised Land except that it was a Danish period piece starring Mads Mikkelsen that took place in the 18th century.
I’m not the world’s biggest Mads Mikkelsen fan. I haven’t seen all of his work. Like a lot of people, I loved Another Round (2020) because it was a pretty tight and low action character piece. I watched it again last summer and thought it was even better than the first time I saw it. So seeing him lead another Danish film seemed like it would be worth a shot.
I was not prepared for a movie that was at some moments brutal and violent and then just as quickly laugh out loud funny; a movie that was at turns heartwarming and then heartbreaking; a movie that was over two hours long but could have gone on for another two hours. This is a movie about a man on a personal mission to prove himself and to prove a point: he is going to farm the heath in the Jutland region of Denmark. The catch? No one has ever been able to grow crops on the heath.
But as much as this is a “great man” movie in some regards, it is also a movie about focusing so much on one thing that you lose sight of what is happening to your life. This movie is also about the terrors of being a woman in the 18th century. This movie has three complex female characters that are if not at the very center of the movie with Mads Mikkelsen then pretty damn close to being at the core with him. (Amanda Collin was astounding as Ann Barbara.) One of these female characters is a child.
This is a movie that features a castration and also a moment where someone says, “Miss, the captain’s potato crop has come through!” and you feel like standing up and clapping. This movie has a running joke about hemorrhoids that it finally lands with a tremendous button and also features one of the most chaotic antagonists I’ve seen in a movie in a long time—one who can make you laugh, scoff at his cowardice, and also fear him completely. Simon Bennebjerg absolutely goes for it as Frederik de Schinkel and succeeds in everything he brings to the character.
There’s more details I could go into (like how the movie is based on a popular Dutch novel, how that novel has a very loose basis in historical fact, that this movie is called The Bastard in Danish, and how its really a classic Western set in 17th century Denmark) but I’ll spare you since I’ve ranted and raved enough at this point. Go see The Promised Land in a theater if you can. There’s way worse ways to spend $20 to $30 bucks in a given evening and, if you ask me, there’s not many better ways to spend your cash than seeing a movie like this.