scene
Editor’s notes: HBO’s ‘Industry’ is hot
Ryan Israel | Friday, February 5, 2021
Elaine Park | The Observer When I love something, I write about it — not quite love letters, but tributes. I love when celebrities can be connected to Notre Dame, so I draw the dots — and then connect them — between Taylor Swift and the Golden Dome. Or, I obsess over Leonardo DiCaprio wearing a hat. There are a lot of albums that I love and play on repeat all week, shows that I binge and try to live out, movies that I tweet about and tell my friends to watch and cultural happenings that I talk about incessantly. Over the past three and a half years, I’ve written reviews, interviews, thinkpieces, lists and guides, constantly finding different ways to format an article on whatever thing I loved at the moment.
Editor’s notes is a new format, a bi-weekly “column” or what these days is called a Substack. It’s my unreserved ramblings on the celebrity I can’t get out of my mind, the song that’s just too good or the movie I love to hate. I’ll admit it — they’re 600-or-so-word love letters.
Don’t talk to me unless you want to talk about “Industry” on HBO
Like any good Scene writer, I watched a lot of TV over break. Of the five or so shows I binged, my favorite was “Industry” on HBO. It wasn’t the funniest (“What We Do In the Shadows”) and it didn’t have Nicole Kidman (“The Undoing”), but the new HBO drama was definitely the hottest — and likewise, my favorite.
“Industry” focuses on a cohort of young graduates vying for a full-time position at London’s top fictional investment bank with a name, Pierpoint & Co., that sounds non-fictional. In the same vein as fellow HBO hit “Succession” as well as all other movies and shows based in the business world — “The Wolf of Wall Street,” in particular — “Industry” gets into all the seedy parts of corporate culture. There’s manipulation, harassment, backstabbing and the like, drunk confrontations and plenty of drug-fueled party scenes.
The show plays these things up, but it doesn’t romanticize them because that would involve making finance seem better than it is. If anything, “Industry” makes things look worse. Still, all that drama, deceit and treachery make for really good TV.
And back to its superlative as the hottest TV show, “Industry” finds the five main characters — who are all young, dumb and full of love — in countless hookups, both with each other and a large cast of peripheral characters. Nobody does it like Robert though, the party boy who goes above and beyond to win over Yasmin in a scene that pushes even HBO’s boundaries.
Riz Ahmed dyed his hair blonde and therefore deserves a Golden Globe
My new favorite actor Riz Ahmed bleached his hair blonde and then delivered a phenomenal, awards-worthy performance in “Sound of Metal,” available now on Amazon Prime. He follows in the footsteps of other male leads who went bleach blonde and then absolutely killed it: Robert Pattinson, who delivered a maximum of five lines of dialogue in “Good Time”; Guy Pearce, who was a great faux Brad Pitt in “Memento”; and Ryan Gosling, who revived his role as a guy in love with his vehicle in “The Place Beyond the Pines.”
Vampire Weekend is a jam band
Everyday Ezra Koenig and Co. take one step closer to becoming a jam band. First there was “Father of the Bride,” Scene’s favorite album of 2019, and then their live shows, appropriately recorded as bootlegs, which included plenty of extended versions of the band’s best songs. Now there’s “40:42,” an EP that features two 20-minute-and-21-second covers of their barely minute-and-a-half song “2021.” The better of the two covers is done by true jam band Goose, who keep the original’s memorable melody.
I interviewed Goose guitarist/keyboardist Peter Anspach in April for WVFI’s Radiothon and we both had the poster from the “Father of the Bride” vinyl in our Zoom background, so you know he’s a real head.
The weekend @ ND
The Snite Museum of Art, the least stressful and also my favorite place on campus, is open till 5 p.m. on Friday and Saturday. A certain someone — me — curated a playlist last year to accompany a grouping of works on the second floor, so bring your friends and your headphones.
