#20: June Round-Up
Horizon: An American Saga, the Kit Kat Club, and recommendations from No Bug-Bite Summer.
With the genocide continuing unabated and the border closed to evacuations, I’m hoping you might consider giving money to this fund for 2 young children and their family in Gaza, to sustain their basic living costs. I’ve shared a few different donation links, but I think I’ll focus on this one going forward, although you can still find other families’ campaigns here & you can continue to put money toward eSims here.
I am trying to remember what I even did in June and it’s because I started July off with such a bang: visiting Philly for the first time in a legitimately dangerous heatwave. The biggest thing in June was that I had my second ever tap recital for my adult beginner tap dancing class and a bunch of my friends came and it was really sweet. We messed the timing up pretty colossally, but my friends insist they didn’t notice and afterwards we went to Cowgirl for mason jar margaritas.
Philly was great! It WAS so hot we couldn’t really walk around much, but despite the risk of heatstroke Adam and I managed to have so much fun: my first Philly cheesesteak (I think..), an Amish apple dumpling and the best pancake I’ve ever had at Reading Terminal Market, fish dumplings shaped like birds at Kalaya, famed National Treasure locations Independence Hall & the Liberty Bell, museums, fireworks, hanging out on the Spruce Street Harbor Park hammocks. I would love to go back when it’s not RealFeel 103 degrees and humid!
Movies
A note on Donald Sutherland
The great actor Donald Sutherland died on June 20th. I probably first saw him in Joe Wright’s Pride & Prejudice as Mr. Bennett. I love this performance so much—people (myself included!) always talk about his incredible warmth, how giggly and happy he is for his favorite daughter. Something that’s really grown on me in recent years is that he also infuses Mr.Bennet with a light callousness and humorous remove that makes Mrs. Bennett’s ridiculous fretting feel a bit more justified. It’s easy to be Good Cop/Funny Dad when someone else is running around worrying about the money. It’s a really smart, subtle layer on Sutherland’s part!
I probably saw JFK shortly after, and then The Hunger Games movies. It’s only in recent years that I’ve caught up on some of his great 70s roles (Klute, Don’t Look Now, recent new all-time favorite Invasion of the Body Snatchers) and god, he just had so much charisma and depth and humanity and also he was really, really, really hot. His hands in Body Snatchers? Awooga! He was hot in P&P too. Rest in peace, I love you!
New Releases
Richard Linklater’s Hit Man finally came out last month!! I went to see it in theaters again but it’s on Netflix now for all to enjoy. I still find this movie as fun and sexy and inspiring as I did last year (it was also my #5 movie).1 Wider audience seemed bothered by the movie’s lack of visual flair and it’s jarringly amoral ending which I get… but I also personally could not give two shits.
Speaking of NYFF movies, I finally saw Annie Baker’s Janet Planet which I was excited about after last year’s raves. I guess I did think it was going to be perfect and it was instead very good. I like that it’s about a weird kid who loves her mom because I was that kid. I never threatened suicide to get out of summer camp, but I did cry my way out of day camp so I could stay home and read (sorry mom).
I talked myself out of being too excited about The Bikeriders (Mike Faist!!! Austin Butler!!!!!) when the reviews were lukewarm. It is, unfortunately, not very good, a kind of motorcycle club Goodfellas with none of that film’s energy or clarity BUT I did think it was cool that Nichols was most interested in making a movie about a bunch of bored guys who watched one too many Marlon Brando movies and really needed a hobby/friends, and how they let that devolve into something darker.
My actually most anticipated movie of the month was Kevin Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1. By the time of this writing, I’ve been emotionally walloped by the news that Chapter 2’s August release has been indefinitely delayed because New Line is trying to personally RUIN MY LIFE.
I didn’t walk in with the expectation that Horizon would be good exactly, I thought it would be something far more interesting: a vast, foolhardy, old-fashioned Western epic in the vein of my beloved How the West Was Won and his own Dances with Wolves, with a dash of Heaven’s Gate. Dances with Wolves is pretty bad, not just for its clumsy white savior narrative but also because the third act is downright boring. However it is frequently majestic. That buffalo hunt scene is kind of what I believe movies are for!
The weird thing about Horizon is that it is both weirdly incompetent and pretty captivating. Horizon introduces 5-8 plot lines depending on how you want to count them (some intersect), each of them a kind of mini classic Western: a lone gunslinger and a prostitute on the run, a struggling wagon trail, a beautiful blond lady who escapes an Apache raid and falls in love with a Civil War officer, the Apaches themselves who have splintered into two groups with differing resistance tactics, a band of rogue scalp hunters. Costner balances these stories pretty awkwardly. Whole scenes occur untethered to any grander scheme and the action is often straight up confusing. The whole thing looks too clean and television-y. Sienna Miller maintains a beautiful blowout, no matter the frontier hardships she faces. And yet? I was entertained and fascinated by how Costner seems to be building to a potentially very cynical vision of the American West. He pairs swelling music with the grotesqueries of white scalp hunters admiring their spoils. He repeatedly points out when white settlers are where they shouldn’t be, even by the low standards of the U.S. government in the 1860s. I cannot wait for Chapter 2, and I am begging New Line for an immediate update. As Charlotte said on SATC, set the date!!!!
Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s latest Evil Does Not Exist is characteristically slow but absorbing, with a perplexing ending. The town hall sequence where two inept talent agency employees try to tell the villagers that it’s fine and medically safe that a proposed glamping site will introduce literal shit into their drinking water is one of the best scenes of the year.
Robot Dreams is a very sweet and wonderfully detailed New York movie that I thought was going to be about best friends and was, in a welcome twist, a bittersweet romance! I’m excited to go to the beach…
Claire and I went to see Firebrand, the Alicia Vikander movie where she plays Catherine Parr, the last wife of Henry VIII. I liked how gross it was (gout is nasty!) and I didn’t like the extremely stupid girlboss-Tarantino twist at the end, as if the rest of the movie’s “she was actually a reformer!” bent wasn’t interesting enough. It was interesting to me! Anyway, CP’s always been my 3rd favorite Henry wife.
Repertory
Adam and I went to see John Waters’ Polyester at Film Forum, largely motivated by the fact that they had Odorama cards, a William Castle style scratch-and-sniff gimmick which was great and totally foul. Like a fart in a fog machine, with notes of car crash tires. I made the mistake of dropping the cards in my Baggu for a bit and I had to air it out for three days. Anyway, Polyester rocks—a madcap send-up of Douglas Sirk starring Divine as God-fearing housewife Francine Fishpaw (all the names in this movie are perfect) whose dream of a respectable life is crushed by her pornographer husband and delinquent children (my favorite was her daughter Lu-Lu who dances just like Kristen Wiig in the “Ann-Margret Tries to Throw Away a Wad of Paper Into a Trashcan”2 sketch).
We were at the Paris a few days later to watch Ball of Fire which is the kind of movie I always believe I can sell people on synopsis alone: Bertram Potts (Gary Cooper as the hottest “nerd” ever put to screen) is a grammar scholar working on an encyclopedia who takes in a showgirl on the run from the law named SUGARPUSS O’SHEA (Barbara Stanwyck, history’s most charming screen presence) because he wants to study her slang. She sings a song called “Drum Boogie” and Bertram just has to know what those words mean. He writes down “boogie woogie” in his little notebook so he can try to define it later. This movie is the best.
I could not pass up the opportunity to see The Last of the Mohicans when it popped up at MOMI. This is my favorite Michael Mann movie actually! It’s gorgeous and swooningly romantic (as is Miami Vice…). Daniel Day-Lewis looks like a romance novel paperback cover model with his beautiful long curls and deep, billowy v-neck blouse. This movie’s already good, but transcends to masterpiece for me easily because of this all-timer 10-minute sequence.
On Father’s Day, we went to see Hardcore at the Paris with a Q&A with Paul Schrader, which is about a midwestern Calvinist dad who travels to California to search for his missing daughter who has turned up in a porno. Hardcore is oddly conventional and unthreatening (although it’s better than Schrader gives it credit for), but George C. Scott is so fabulously exasperated in this. I also like when Schrader engages with his Calvinism. A really crazy religion! Of course it birthed one of our great minds!
Stuff I Watched At Home
I had a lot of fun with Criterion’s Shirley MacLaine series! I thought I was going to love Bob Fosse’s Sweet Charity but I actually thought it was pretty bad. It just also happens to have some of the greatest musical sequences ever committed to screen.
From the McLaine series, I also watched Terms of Endearment, a smart, warm, adult movie about two fully-drawn women. What a concept!
Adam and I watched From Here to Eternity for the first time which (spoilers….?) we knew absolutely nothing about so when Pearl Harbor started happening we started screaming our heads off about this being a “Remember Me.”
I do not know what was wrong with me but I had an impossible time trying to give Mad Max 2 my undivided attention??
I watched a LOT of Jacques Tati (Jour de Fete, Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, Trafic) for a piece and then didn’t end up writing about any of these, but more on that later…
Television
We’re nearly done with Girls, and my take is that Season 5 is pretty fantastic and the Season 6 bottle episode “American Bitch” where Matthew Rhys plays a cancelled writer is awful. Stupid stuff, and the kind of thoughtless navel-gazing Girls was frequently wrongfully accused of.
For some reason I watch House of the Dragon, a mediocre show whose hesitance to make its leads truly unlikeable or to dig into the horror of some of its most awful moments feels like the same kind of trauma response that’s made Julian Fellowes so conflict averse. I don’t really care though. I’m having fun! I watched the last episode on my phone on the Amtrak back from Philly, who gives a shit.
Lastly, my boyfriend’s been throwing on episodes of How To With John Wilson. I knew this show would simply happen to me organically at some point. I thought its tender essay form would be gratingly Nice Television but actually it’s fantastic. Yes I cried, yes it was earned. I get it!
Book (I read one book)
I finally finished Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast after holding a library copy hostage for 6 weeks. I thought it would be an elegy/love letter to the miraculous convergence of artists in Paris in the 1920s and it IS that of course, but it was mostly a book about how much Hemingway loved his first wife Hadley and their youthful, broke days together and how shitty he felt that he eventually cheated and left? It’s not terribly effective as an act of contrition—he skims over his wrongdoing, but to me it read as if he still felt so horrible about it that he couldn’t bear the introspection. It’s so much about her! The last few pages made me cry.
I also liked learning that Hemingway had a cat named F. Puss and that Gertrude Stein held a grudge against Ezra Pound for coming over to her house and breaking a chair that he sat on, and that her insistence that he was a bad poet was totally personal.
Theater
I saw Rachel McAdams in Mary Jane (thank you 35 under 35 deal!) and she is giving such a warm, deft, heartbreaking performance as a single mother of a chronically ill son. It’s a smart, structurally solid play that ends right where it should. I thought the character Mary Jane was so welcoming and chatty in a way I want to be and then I read a review that said “Rachel McAdams is playing a bit of a flibbertigibbet.” Okay!
On another 35 & under deal, I went to see Titanic at New York City Center. What a joy to see a banger cast perform a lush score in a minimally staged concert format with a full orchestra! They don’t write them like this anymore! It’s not the greatest score from a lyrical perspective, but the music’s so pretty. Judy Kuhn & Chip Zien as Ida & Isidor Straus are a) great/heartbreaking/icons and b) reminded me I’m obsessed with the Strauses. They made MACY’S and then DIE IN EACH OTHER’S ARMS ON THE TITANIC after giving their lifeboat spots up. Their great-great-grandchildren are King Princess & the wife of the OceanGate CEO who died in the submersible. What a lineage.
Okay so I also saw the now infamous Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club, origin of the Eddie Redmayne clip you may have seen everyone calling their “sleep paralysis demon.”3 There was no world where I didn’t go see a production of Cabaret, but I didn’t have high hopes. Cabaret is a basically perfect musical that for some reason everyone is constantly trying to reinterpret and reinvent, even though it’s all IN THE TEXT. Enough! The performance of “Cabaret” at the Olivier Awards (this production transferred from the West End) didn’t inspire much hope, as it introduced me to their vision of Sally Bowles as an angry and charmless woman scream-singing while wearing a David Byrne style Big Suit.
With these low expectations, I arrived at “The Kit Kat Club” about an hour early. The gimmick is that you come early for an extensive “immersive” pre-show that eases you into the excess of Weimar Republic Berlin before the show begins. And you know what? It was awesome. They give you a shot of Schnapps at the door, slap a sticker on your phone camera and usher you into a club space with one large and two small stages where dancers in modern-with-a-vintage-feel neutral outfits dance. A guy came out with an accordion to perform Klezmer. The dancers left the stage to do some crowd work and I had a cocktail I can’t remember the name of. By the time I sat down, I was tipsy and in a party mood, from which I sobered up some 40 minutes in when the seriousness begins to set in.
What did I think? Eddie Redmayne does sing like Kermit the Frog and he’s so bizarre out the gate that he undermines any arc of “charming, if a little off” to “scary performer of antisemitic numbers” but I also think people are being way too mean to the guy. Bebe Neuwirth and Steven Skybell provide the beating heart and dramatic anchor of the show as a doomed interfaith couple. The couple who SHOULD be the center of proceedings are respectively too boring (Ato Blankson-Wood’s Cliff) and bizarre/unformed (Gayle Rankin’s Sally Bowles, too mean to be particularly beguiling). I blame the direction. What the hell is going on here! I don’t know what’s wrong with Sally Bowles as an unreliable charisma bomb who is also tragically insecure. Why change that?? I thought maybe I’d like their iteration of “Cabaret” better in context but I did not. Still, it’s Cabaret, sumptuously done, and I love Cabaret. I guess the free shot sold me. I’d go back if I had the cash.
No Bug-Bite Summer
On the first humid day of the summer, I immediately got about 20 bug bites, a situation which prompted me to wage all-out war on mosquitoes. I ordered sprays and soaps and tools that promised to prevent bites and soothe the ones I already had. Here’s my review of what did & did not work:
Repellent bracelets - Somehow these dumb essential oil infused bracelets that look a bit like plastic hair ties WORK. I put one on one wrist and another on the opposite ankle and this has seen me through multiple prolonged park hangs without a bite. There was one night when I got 2 bites with this combo on, but it hasn’t happened since. I wouldn’t rely on this solely for a heavy duty, but they’ve been great for park picnics or unexpectedly long days out!
Picardin clear gel - I wanted a real, toxic, chemical-y bug spray that was easy to apply, didn’t smell, and didn’t spray in such a way that it got in my mouth and on everything around me and this gel does ALL OF THAT. A miracle gel!
Mosquito Guard repellent incense - I honestly have no clue if this works because whenever I put one in while I’m hanging on the terrace, I also have my repellent bracelets on. I like the idea of them though! Easy and relatively pleasant smelling.
Citronella soap - I don’t think this does anything much, but it smells nice.
Bug Bite Thing - I read sooo many reviews raving about this little doodad that supposedly suctioned the bug saliva out of your bite to soothe itching. No it does not!!! This did not do jack shit for me. Tiger Balm to distract and normal Cortizone has ultimately been the better combination for me. Also, ice!
Last year I also wrote about Glen Powell’s persistent almost-stardom, which didn’t age very well. How could I have known that an unwatchable rom-com called Anyone But You would come along and make Glen the level of famous he should’ve been for Everybody Wants Some!
I feel like I am always talking about this…. It’s my favorite SNL sketch.
I find this joke unfunny sorry. Retire it!
In days of old, when studios and exhibitors were bold, a three hour film would have an intermission at around the 1 hour 45 minute mark in honor and respect of human physiological needs. With both of those qualities now absent, we endure…and endure…and endure…and old codgers like myself buy aisle seats for quick getaways, either for the bog or, if not pleased by the film, the exits. Seeing HORIZON today here in Prague, and the seat location is reserved for either purpose! Hope to make it through, possibly with a degree of pleasure.
i think this is your best yet!! but the public might be wondering who the "we" you saw Hardcore with is. just a thought.