#18: April & May Round-Up (Deluxe Edition)
Challengers, Girls rewatch, and I am the nation's biggest fan of The Fall Guy?
If you’re reading this, I hope you’ll consider donating to either one of the many campaigns from Palestinians in Gaza seeking food, shelter and evacuation fees (here’s one with only 13 donations so far, a family with two kids aged 5 and 6) or to a campaign like Crips for eSims for Gaza, even if it’s just $5 or $10!
Sorry! & Catching Up
I am getting this out so late, which I swear to god I’ll never do again because writing up 2 months worth of pop culture intake was so daunting I kept putting it off. As a result, this post is too long for email, so click “view message” or read this on Substack!
I hesitate to commit to a full announcement, but I think I might move to a twice-a-month format for these roundups to avoid this kind of backlog. In any case, I promise to (try to be) more consistent & I reserve the right to play around with formatting/post timing!
In April, I watched the eclipse, walked Manhattan top to bottom, & wore actual heels for the first time in years for a best friend’s engagement party. This month, I was in Prague to visit my parents & my grandmother who flew out from Japan and who I haven’t seen in over four years, and Adam joined for a few days too. My grandma was a goddamn delight—between the gap in seeing her last and the significant language barrier, I don’t always feel like I know her very well, but I had an amazing time hanging out with her! She’s a spry 79 year old who can do the front splits, goes to the pool every day where all the boys have a crush on her, she loves to chat even to absolute strangers who definitely do not speak Japanese, and was extremely dessert-motivated as a traveler. She also wore my late grandpa’s Uniqlo puffer the whole trip, which really makes me cry to think of.
Back in New York, I’ve been procrastinating on putting my suitcase back up on the high closet shelf, it’s officially sticky so we installed the bedroom AC, I went to a Mets/Dodgers game where Ohtani didn’t even play, and said goodbye to Danielle, my 2nd friend now to officially Leave New York.
Movies
New Releases
Challengers Is Here!!!!!!
I’ve been excited about Challengers from the earliest whispers of “Mike Faist in Luca Guadagnino sexy tennis movie” and between Luca’s habit of starting and dropping projects and the strike push (valid!! this film needed the press tour we got!!!), I am sort of still in awe that Challengers is HERE and it is BASICALLY PERFECT!!!!!!
Challengers is FUN. It’s also exceptionally well-written and dramatically compelling—the thwarted athlete robbed of G.O.A.T. status by an injury, her lapdog husband through which she plays tennis vicariously, their (I said their!) down-on-his-luck charming asshole of an ex-boyfriend who they can’t quite live without.
It is, in the words of Saweetie, “something fun. something for the summertime. Something for the girls to get ready and party to.” There’s the three exceptionally hot leads kissing each other in every permutation. The loving close-ups of rippling muscles and dripping sweat and minute but meaningful shifts in facial expression. There’s the thumping, adrenaline rush of a Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross techno score which comes blaring in whenever characters are playing tennis or fighting. There’s Guadagnino’s garish, exuberant formalism—the tennis ball POV! The red lit storm which employs tornado swirls of paper debris to represent emotional turmoil! And there is the ending, an electrifying final tennis set that ends right at an astonishing emotional high without bothering with a tortured epilogue. I’ve seen it twice and both times it ended I felt such a burst of energy I could scale a wall, or at least go out dancing until the sun comes up.
A Recommendation for Stress Positions
I really liked Theda Hammel’s funny, specific and non-annoying pandemic comedy Stress Positions. John Early plays an over-the-hill party boy and recent divorcee named Terry Goon (Terry Goon!) whose 19 year old model cousin, Bahlul, comes to stay with him in Brooklyn during the height of the pre-vaccine pandemic. The real highlight is Theda Hammel herself playing Karla, a charismatic, amoral tornado of a trans woman (and friend of Terry’s) whose every word is at turns uncouth and a little inspiring. A new screwball star!!!
I Am America’s Biggest Fan of The Fall Guy (Besides Film Critic Bilge Ebiri)
Perhaps Universal Pictures would be interested to know that I loved The Fall Guy. I’m happy to cop to the fact that my affinity for The Fall Guy is 100% because I spent a lot of time on movie sets as a kid when my dad would bring us all to work and to the end of time I will have affection for movie sets— jumbles of wires to potentially trip over, “quiet on set!”, the craft services truck (heaven), dust, heat, rain, the summer camp energy, and watching some of the world’s greatest craftspeople coming together to make a movie.
I find David Leitch’s previous work pretty unwatchable, but The Fall Guy trades in the smarm for an earnest rom com about how film stunt workers deserve appreciation and respect for the difficult job they do. The rom is between Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt and I like that the stake of every action set piece is “Ryan Gosling must get this action sequence over with so he can go hang out with Emily Blunt.” I was edge-of-my-seat stressed out when Gosling was involved in a high speed truck chase through Sydney at the exact same time he had promised to go to redemptive karaoke with Blunt after previously ghosting her for a few years. That’s a perfect stake!
Lastly, my galaxy brain take on The Fall Guy is that it’s sweet that the banter between Gosling and Blunt is sort of basic—it made them seem like a real couple! They WOULD think “we’re getting margaritas!” is a Joke, and not just a statement.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
In a thrilling turn of events, George Miller has landed on an imperfect but nevertheless glorious intersection of Fury Road’s kinetic, death-defying, desert-crossing action and the Scheherazade-esque epic, romantic yarn-weaving of Three Thousand Years of Longing (the film is broken up into chapters!). As an aside, it’s awful how much the 2010s ruined the word “epic” but like Furiosa re: her childhood, I want it back! There’s some unevenness and obligatory prequelizing1 here, but I’m mostly left with a sense of deep awe and excitement when I think about Furiosa, especially the multi-day chase sequence involving her extremely hot sniper mom Mary Jabassa and the paragliders in the Stowaway sequence.
The rest:
I already wrote about how much I love La Chimera and The First Omen, and I hope everyone will be Challengers-pilled enough to watch La Chimera!
I really wish I liked Dev Patel’s Monkey Man more, a well-intentioned, clumsily stylish, muddled debut that tried to do 10 things at once and doesn’t quite nail any of it—but I genuinely admire his political convictions, even if they were awkwardly rendered!
Civil War has Jesse Plemons (huge! film-improving!) and a thrilling finale but it’s also got total rocks for brains. I continue to find its politics around war photographers strange and almost fascinating—Garland repeatedly called it a “love letter to journalists” even though it plays like a damning indictment of detachment and self-serving ambition. This was weirder still, and maybe a bit unintentionally smart, when juxtaposed with Palestinian war journalists, whose life-threatening lack of detachment (they and their families have been targeted by Israel) has made their work all the more powerful and vital.2
Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare was pretty dumb, but watchable.
Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire was dumb and near unwatchable.
I also wish I had been more taken with I Saw the TV Glow, a creepy, lonely, personal movie that I could not find my way into emotionally (kind of because I’m cis, kind of because I’m not from the suburbs, kind of because I don’t actually have an obsessive personality, kind of because none of the pop cultural references meant anything to me)—but I loved this interview with Jane Schoenbrun in Reverse Shot.
I found The Idea of You bland but addictive, like Milk Bar’s cereal milk soft serve.
I rewatched Perfect Days in Prague with my mom, grandma and Adam which was a pretty hilarious choice because my grandma is the type to yell “Don’t go in there!” at a movie screen, but there was nothing on earth to question in the simple routines of Perfect Days.
Repertory
In early April, Adam and I went to see a program called The Art of Benshi at BAM. In the silent film era in Japan, benshis (basically “movie talkers”) would narrate and comment along to silent films. I’m a sucker for this kind of revival of a historical form and I thought this program was really exciting even if the centerpiece film, A Page of Madness, was a bit of a slog (I kind of hate asylum/"am I insane” plots. It’s beautiful though!) compared to the shorter shorts (including a fragment of a battle scene where a guy turns into a toad and a bizarre short where a cute little toddler named Peggy thwarts some house burglars—that one was performed by the best benshi, a woman unafraid to really go for broke on kawaii-ness).
I had a great time at Alain Delon week (weeks?) at Film Forum, first with Rocco and his Brothers which is just a flat out devastating masterpiece that I loved instantly from the first scene where the Parondis descend loudly onto the Milan home of their eldest brother during his engagement party. I also went to see Le Samourai, which I liked a little less (I like big feelings! Big characters in the vein of 19th century novels!) but is undeniably one of the all-time coolest films and devastating in a quieter way.
I caught Francis Ford Coppola’s One from the Heart at Film Forum, which feels like it’s going to be great prep for Megalopolis. It reminded me a lot of New York, New York and Pennies from Heaven—nostalgic, curdled American romances that make me want to take a shower afterwards. One from the Heart is honestly one of the best looking films I have ever seen in my entire life, full of masterful shots that could only come from a genius, and it also has a distractingly horrible soundtrack of Tom Waits songs.
A much happier American romance: we caught Singin’ in the Rain at the Paris Theater, a movie I might need to watch in rep every time it ever becomes available to me. Well and truly, the best movie of all time.
Watched at Home
The only movie I feel inspired to write at length about is candy colored, star-studded, Edith Head-costumed, Shirley MacLaine vehicle What a Way to Go!
I first heard about this movie when Da’Vine Joy Randolph named it in her Letterboxd Top 4 alongside Desk Set, another perfect midcentury comedy. She said it was a movie you watch for the costumes, about Shirley MacLaine having 4 different husbands, which is all I needed to hear.
This is such a perfectly silly, playful movie. Shirley MacLaine plays Louisa May Foster Hopper Flint Anderson Benson (the four last names are courtesy of her last four husbands) who believes she is cursed—each of her husbands became suddenly, fabulously wealthy and promptly died (in increasingly absurd ways). Each husband gets a mini film, wherein Louisa images their lives together as a different film genre—a romantic silent, a bohemian French film, a lush, diamond-dripping Hollywood drama (that basically doubles as a montage of various glorious Edith Head creations) and a big studio musical. There’s also a monkey named Frieda who is a painter.
The rest:
Adam and I have been powering through the original five Planet of the Apes movies before seeing Kingdom, and I’ll be writing about those at greater length.
I’m also going to write about Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle elsewhere, suffice to say it’s one of the funniest movies I have ever seen!
Buster Keaton’s One Week, about two newlyweds in a shitty built-it-yourself house, is so sweet and romantic and would make a fabulous double header with the Dick van Dyke portion of What a Way to Go!
I’m going to be honest… I really liked Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player when I watched it last month but I struggle now to remember much about it besides the scene where Charlie goes to buy a book called “How to Stop Being Timid.”
Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom enters my personal canon of “Personally, I would have clocked this guy as creepy.” That is to say, RIP to them but I’m different.
I thought The Fifth Element was pretty awful—boring, cheap looking without feeling truly campy and sexist in a kind of ancient way.
Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation is pretty good. Great even!
I rewatched Step Brothers (actual masterpiece) (also Adam McKay is on a pretty great tear on Twitter right now? Don’t Look Up fan Adam Brown vindicated!) and Moneyball (fantastic stuff).
I watched O Brother, Where Art Thou? for the first time—not top tier Coen for me, but an extremely fun romp with Clooney in full goof mode & a welcome One Transcendent Scene that made me cry.
Mike Leigh’s Naked was an exceptionally tough sit and the people who think Thewlis is hot in this are crazy to me, but it’s beautiful that the world is full of such variety of thought.
I finally got around to Love & Mercy (shoutout to Rosie and Krista’s Beach Boys podcast) and I really do get why people love this so much (best biopic studio sequences I’ve ever seen, heartfelt romance, good Dano performance) but I don’t think I ultimately jive with the music biopic format. Walk Hard burrowed too deep into my soul for even the best of the genre to totally work for me.
On the plane, I watched Extremely Australian Horror Movie Talk to Me which has an exceptional first 40 or so minutes and then descends into the usual rote trauma routine, and William Friedkin’s The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, an inexpensive and straightforward filmed play that I nevertheless found riveting.
Television
I’ve actually been watching an enormous amount of television lately (for me). I watched another season of Girls5Eva, a show I think is consistently funny but not great, however I do want to support Sara Bareilles. I mainlined the newest season of Selling the OC (Gio forever even though he’s a little brat, Tyler and Alex Hall are ridiculous, I believed Sean until the very last episode and now I feel duped!). I watched almost the entirety of Season 10 of Curb Your Enthusiasm on the plane back from Prague—the portrait of Susie that Larry commissions is one of the funniest things I have ever seen in my life. Watching Curb for 8 hours and then getting off at an airport, one of the most annoying places in the world, felt kind of dangerous but I will never have Larry’s knack for confrontation.
Most significantly, Adam and I have embarked on a Girls rewatch (first watch for him) and we just finished season 3. Girls is somehow both better and worse than I remember. I think I’d forgotten that Girls often functioned like a pretty standard half-hour comedy and not every episode reaches the heights of something like “All Adventurous Women Do.” Adam (Sackler, not Brown) feels far less insane to me this time around—he’s quite straightforward about who he is and what he wants! Jessa has an awful season 3, just monumentally boring stuff. I’ve been playing a fun game while watching called “Is There A Single Normal Outfit Here” and so often the answer is a resounding No.
A Youtube Aside
I watched the four-hour Jenny Nicholson Star Wars hotel video and it’s brilliant of course (funny, incisive, smart about its broader point about Disney’s reckless stinginess). I’ll be straight up—if I had not already been a years-long Jenny Nicholson fan there is no way in hell I would have watched such a video from a creator I wasn’t familiar with, but luckily I AM already a Jenny fan and in fact it’s been fun and validating for me that everyone’s spent 2 weeks talking about someone I usually only talk to Rosie about.
Theater
Danielle and I went to see The Lonely Few at MCC and did very little research beyond “Damon Daunno is in this!”3 and “what are the cheapest seats?” so we were surprised and a little horrified to be SEATED ON STAGE, AT A BAR, THAT IS PART OF A BAR SET FOR THE PLAY, with an entire audience looking at us. Anyway, besides an uneasy self consciousness and a few moments where a performer was singing directly above me and I didn’t want to stare right at them, I had a good time! The story was relatively generic (a lesbian musician in a small Southern town must choose between leaving with her new, rock star girlfriend or staying to tend to her alcoholic brother at home) but I thought the songs were surprisingly good, always a relief when you’re watching a story about musicians. It’s so embarrassing if their songs suck! This sounds crueler than I mean it, but there’s something homespun about The Lonely Few that feels like a friend made it and made me feel warm and fuzzy about smaller scale theater.
I also saw the Lincoln Center Theater adaptation of Uncle Vanya with Steve Carrell and William Jackson Harper and Alfred Molina and Anika Noni Rose, etc. etc. and realized I don’t know jack shit about Chekhov, having forgotten what little I’d gained from seeing Drive My Car. That said, I’m pretty sure this was a bad translation? I don’t like when a translation tries to get too casual and chummy with me. Steve Carrell was doing a lot, but I thought Alison Pill was really moving. WJH was also great.
Books
Here’s where having signed myself up to do this gets humiliating—I only read one book this month and it wasn’t a particularly long one!
At least the one book was very good—my friend Summer Farah’s wonderful poetry chapbook i could die today and live again, from Game Over Books. The poems are inspired by The Legend of Zelda, and even though I don’t play video games and have never played anything larger scale than Nintendogs, I was really moved by the idea of regeneration in video games, and also the resonances between the world of Zelda (which I only learned about through the poems) and Palestine. I also love how structurally playful these poems are. Also, I can’t for the life of me find it but I saw a tweet some time ago to the effect of “that one friend who doesn’t play about the moon” which reminds me of these poems.
Inaugural Music Corner
I’m continuing a weeks long Chappell Roan kick!!!!! It started with “Good Luck Babe” and now I’ve shifted into “Pink Pony Club.” However the line “get it hot like Papa John” is also rattling incessantly in my head.
that’s that me espresso :(
On the recommendation of er0b email, I listened to Cindy Lee’s wonderful album Diamond Jubilee (Cindy Lee promptly performed in NY the exact week I was away on vacation).
In the summertime, all I want to listen to is bratty girly pop and the whiniest boys ever so I’ve been listening to Weezer and the Violent Femmes. Any recs in this general vein welcome!
I walk like a goddamn maniac when I put on the Challengers score!!!!!! I am bobbing and weaving through crowds I am unstoppable!!!!!!!!!
New word to describe the fact that I don’t really care how Furiosa lost her arm, whatever.
My other Civil War take is that for a thoughtfully fleshed out (without being over-explaining or distracting from the story) vision of civil war in the United States, I highly recommend Catherine Lacey’s The Biography of X!
I famously went to see Sexy Oklahoma! and he was NOT ON THAT DAY and I have never quite gotten over it, even though I got to see Patrick Vaill and Rebecca Naomi Jones and I ate chili and it was amazing and Damon’s understudy was perfectly good too.
✅ Nintendogs mentioned