\n<\/p>\n
\n\tWith Marshall Curry\u2018s The New Yorker at 100<\/em>, a magazine famous for its erudition and curation receives a polished, amusing and generally superficial Reader\u2019s Digest<\/em> summary of a documentary.<\/p>\n \n\tVery little is wrong with the 96-minute version of The New Yorker<\/em>\u2018s history that Curry (Street Fight<\/em>) is recounting (premiering at Telluride ahead of an eventual Netflix launch) \u2014 other than the completely unavoidable awareness of all the pieces of the story that aren\u2019t being told with desirable depth, or told at all.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\tThe New Yorker at 100\t\t<\/p>\n<\/h3>\n \n\t\t\t\t\tThe Bottom Line<\/span> \tShould have been a six-hour docuseries. \t\t\t\t\t\t\tVenue: <\/strong>Telluride Film Festival \n\tWhen Tina Brown took over the magazine in 1992 as only its fourth editor-in-chief, there were fears from the outside that she would deliver a product that was glossier, more star-studded, but generally less substantive than what the magazine\u2019s devoted readers were looking for. The New Yorker at 100<\/em> is a glossier, more star-studded, but generally less substantive documentary take than the magazine\u2019s devoted readers probably crave.<\/p>\n \n\tMy parents subscribed to The New Yorker <\/em>throughout my childhood. I loved the cartoons and some of the snootier and more investigative content, but what I truly adored and what shaped me as a writer and thinker were Roger Angell\u2019s musings on baseball and Pauline Kael\u2019s film reviews. Kael is featured in the doc\u2019s pre-credits prelude as if she\u2019s going to play a major role in the documentary, but then she\u2019s never mentioned again, while Angell is simply never mentioned. Can you tell the story of The New Yorker <\/em>without Roger Angell? I suppose. Can you tell it without Pauline Kael? Not well.<\/p>\n \n\tBut I\u2019m guessing most New Yorker <\/em>obsessives will feel similar gaps of their own, leading me to my bottom line: The New Yorker at 100 <\/em>should have been a six-hour docuseries. The magazine and its occasionally complicated legacy deserve nothing less.<\/p>\n \n\tCurry\u2019s approach to The New Yorker<\/em>, tied to this spring\u2019s 100th anniversary issue, is more like the sort of overly packaged tribute issues you might see at your grocery store checkout counter, bringing together a collection of pretty pictures and hastily reported pieces to honor a deceased movie star or a new Star Wars<\/em> movie.<\/p>\n \n\tDavid Remnick, Pulitzer Prize winner and New Yorker <\/em>editor since 1998, is the documentary\u2019s amiable guide on what is a multi-tiered journey through the magazine\u2019s past and present.<\/p>\n \n\tThere\u2019s the production of the 100th anniversary issue, which we witness from the earliest story pitches to design concept meetings to art pitches to different stages of the editing and production process.<\/p>\n \n\tThis is an opportunity for Curry to give cursory capsule introductions to a number of current New Yorker<\/em> heavyweights, including longtime art director Fran\u00e7oise Mouly, cartoon editor Emma Allen, fiction editor Deborah Treisman and veteran office manager Bruce Diones, key staff writers like Nick Paumgarten, Hilton Als and Rachel Syme, and head researcher Fergus McIntosh, current guardian of the \u201cvaunted fact-checking department.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tThen there\u2019s a by-the-numbers journey along that 100-year history, narrated by Julianne Moore. She steers us through capsule summaries of key New Yorker moments, including the publications of John Hersey\u2019s Hiroshima<\/em> and Rachel Carson\u2019s Silent Spring<\/em> and the rise and abrupt departure of the aforementioned Brown. It\u2019s left for Moore to give damning statistics on the magazine\u2019s exclusion of Black writers for most of its early history and then to highlight William Shawn\u2019s recruitment of James Baldwin to write \u201cLetter from a Region in My Mind,\u201d which is treated here as a complete and total solution to a problem that was barely investigated.<\/p>\n \n\tThen there are lots of pretty and funny and pretty funny celebrities \u2014 Jon Hamm, Sarah Jessica Parker, Jesse Eisenberg and many more \u2014 sitting in an all-white room in a chair from the original New Yorker<\/em> offices talking about how much they love The New Yorker<\/em>, when they first became aware of The New Yorker<\/em> and, in many cases, what it meant when their writing first appeared in The New Yorker<\/em>.<\/p>\n \n\tThe sheer number of times my notes on The New Yorker at 100<\/em> say, \u201cThat was fun, but tell me more\u201d exceeds a dozen.<\/p>\n \n\tHearing about the cartoon selection process, Allen\u2019s strategy to sway Remnick\u2019s selections and getting to see the person behind the name Roz Chast is fun! But tell me more!<\/p>\n \n\tWitnessing the rigor of the fact-checking process and getting a hint of the sort of people who would gravitate toward this demanding job is fun! But tell me more!<\/p>\n \n\tSeeing how some of the magazine\u2019s staff writers have these wildly open-ended beats that allow them to wander the streets of Manhattan, regularly frequent fringe art shows or travel to foreign countries just to find a potential story is fun! But tell me more!<\/p>\n \n\tIn my ideal world, the 100th anniversary issue and its production could have gotten a full hour. The magazine\u2019s history of long-form journalism could have gotten an hour. The cartoons easily could have received an hour. The magazine\u2019s evolution from a primarily male, entirely white thing to whatever its current staff looks like could have gotten an hour. Criticism, with a focus on Pauline Kael, could have gotten an hour. Covers, with more discussion of iconic avatar Eustace Tilley and several controversial issues, could have received an hour. I\u2019m not sure everybody would have wanted an hour on fact-checking, but I would. All that and I still left out Roger Angell.<\/p>\n \n\tIt\u2019s like this: The New Yorker at 100 <\/em>is a commercial for The New Yorker<\/em> and it isn\u2019t masquerading as anything else. But at that point, it should at least be a commercial for the magazine that befits the voice, aesthetic and ethos of the magazine in a meaningful way. This film\u2019s approach would have been entertaining and justifiably pithy for more magazines than I can count. It just feels wrong for The New Yorker<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" With Marshall Curry\u2018s The New Yorker at 100, a magazine famous for its erudition and curation receives a polished, amusing and generally superficial Reader\u2019s Digest summary of a documentary. Very little is wrong with the 96-minute version of The New Yorker\u2018s history that Curry (Street Fight) is recounting (premiering at Telluride ahead of an eventual<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":18444,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[5712,274,11254,11255],"class_list":{"0":"post-18443","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-doc","9":"tag-netflix","10":"tag-starry","11":"tag-superficial"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18443","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18443"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18443\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/18444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18443"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18443"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18443"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\n\t<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
Distributor: <\/strong>Netflix
Director: <\/strong>Marshall Curry
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t1 hour 36 minutes\t\t\t<\/span>\n\t\t<\/p>\n