Cover of GTA VI from the Wall Street Journal.
Gamers have been waiting 13 years for the next edition of the monster hit open world phenomenon of Grand Theft Auto (GTA). This is the game series your mother / congressperson / general-purpose scold has warned you about. It has sex, violence, robbery, drugs, you name it. If it’s in video game critics’ fever dreams, it’s in GTA. This is also the sequel to a game that made $1 billion is sales in its first day of release back in 2013. The series as a whole as sold nearly 475 million units worldwide, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The release of this game might be compared to the release of a new Marvel movie or Taylor Swift album, except that a new GTA edition might well be bigger than either.
While I’m always suspicious of trend stories about gaming culture from outlets like the WSJ, I don’t doubt their reports that large number of people are scheduling vacation time now for the Nov. 19 release.
Journalism Side Note: This article is one of the long-running series A-Hed stories from the Wall Street Journal. They describe them this way:
The A-Hed, named for a headline shaped like a capital A, has run on the front page of The Wall Street Journal since 1941.
Who was famed chef / author / television personality Anthony Bourdain? (WaPo gift link)
Movie poster for “Tony.”
Few celeb deaths have reduced me to tears. Dolly Parton’s passing last week was obviously one, but the death that really gutted me was that of chef Anthony Bourdain, who died of depression back in 2018. He was brought to mind recently with the release of the biopic Tony earlier this summer. Rather than taking a comprehensive look at this complex man’s life, it instead focuses on one critical summer early in his career. Such “based on a true story” films inevitably play fast and loose with the facts – it’s impossible to tell a complex story in a two-hour film any other way. Washington Post food writer Tim Carman gives a thoughtful review of this film based in part on his personal friendship with Bourdain. Click on the head for this item for a gift link to it.
Carman also wrote a beautiful remembrance of Bourdain back at the time of his death. He also tried making Bourdain’s recipe for the French classic boeuf bourguignon
By all means, go see the film, but don’t stop there. Read his books and get to know this fascinating person more completely.
And finally – Have you had the Stephen Sondheim talk” with your theater child? (The New Yorker)
I’m a big fan of the “Shouts and Murmurs” satire feature The New Yorker. And while Jesse Eisenberg is best known as a prominent movie actor, he’s also a regular contributor to Shouts. In this one he has the coming-of-age talk that every theater fan eventually must have – explaining Stephen Sondheim.
Angela Lansbury from Sondheim’s Sweeny Todd