#22: July Round-Up
New logo (!), Twisters cast ranking and having a Mildred Pierce summer.
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I have a logo!
Nearly 10 months into having a newsletter, I realized I didn’t have any kind of logo, but I DO have a very talented sister who likes to do the cutest illustrations so, I’m delighted to announce that courtesy of Kimi Singer, Hoots and Hollers now has official art:
I am very charmed that Kimi illustrated me yapping in my Nathan’s Hot Dogs t-shirt and what I know to be my pull-on fake jeans (I don’t have another kind). Lately Kimi has been creating these amazing capsule restaurant reviews on Instagram with Claymation text, cartoons & collages, if you want to check out more of her work!
She also made me transition art for my round-up posts, so without further ado…
Movies
New Releases
I think I was among the most excited people in the world for Twisters, Lee Isaac Chung’s legacy sequel to the great Twister (1996). Twisters delivered just fine on the promise of big tornadoes destroying stuff & Glen Powell looking hot, and now-famously failed to deliver on a Kiss. I also think the human story here—run of the mill brunette faces her trauma—falls short of the original’s vastly more compelling “two crazy exes get back together.” Nevertheless, I’ve now seen Twisters twice, once in 4DX, which felt exactly like riding Indiana Jones Adventure at Disneyland down to the neck crick it gave me (worth it). Twisters is satisfyingly stupid summer fare in IMAX and it’s PERFECT stupid fun in 4DX. I screamed, I laughed! But I think I will say more on this when they re-release in 4DX alongside Twister in late August… In the meantime, here is my ranking of Twisters performances:
Wet white t-shirt
Glen Powell
Maura Tierney
Bill Paxton’s son James Paxton’s cameo
Tunde Adebimpe of TV on the Radio fame
Harry Hadden-Paton as the Me stand-in (terrified writer)
Daryl McCormack, hot enough to make Kate’s tragedy resonate
Brandon Perea (should’ve done more celebratory flips)
Surprise Paul Scheer (why!)
Daisy Edgar-Jones (she is no Adria Arjona let me tell you that….)
Sasha Lane
David Corenswet, having a good time evil frowning.. made me laugh..
Katy O’Brian
Kiernan Shipka
Nik Dodani
Anthony Ramos. I loved him so dearly, I believed in him so much but what the hell is this? Utterly charmless! Weird! Maybe he needs to sing again?
On a smaller scale, I saw two immaculately acted indies starring people who should have Oscars in hand by now. The first was Erica Tremblay’s Fancy Dance, about a woman named Jax (Lily Gladstone, a quiet genius as always) who goes on the run with her 13 year old niece Roki who she’s been caring for since her sister disappeared and who she promised to take to the powwow. It’s a movie that thrives on its lived-in characterizations and its unsentimental but affectionate depiction of life on the res. The second was Sing Sing which stars Colman Domingo as Divine G, an inmate heavily involved in RTA (Rehabilitation Through the Arts), a prison theater program. Sing Sing has about as many meaningful monologues as you’d expect (a lot) but where it really (forgive me) sings is when we get to see the RTA guys perform an original play, the sublimely, heartbreakingly silly Breakin’ the Mummy’s Code (they wanted a comedy that included mummies, gladiators, Hamlet and Freddy Krueger). Both films follow familiar beats but end with moments of cathartic performance, which I am an endless sucker for!
The best new film I saw this month was Levan Akin’s Crossing.1 Is this movie great, or does it just have a soundtrack of Anatolian folk rock that I can’t stop listening to? It’s definitely both, but I am heavily swayed by movie music. Crossing follows a retired Georgian teacher, Lia, who journeys to Istanbul in search of her estranged trans niece, with a young man named Achi in tow who has tagged along in hopes of getting out of their small village. Akin’s camera is lively and roving, the city is chaotic but there are pockets of community everywhere, and two meaningful but not-corny dance scenes. Also, lots of ferry trips and many, many Istanbul cats.
Speaking of cats, A Quiet Place: Day One has a lot of pet cat and is the best Quiet Place movie so far. I like that it opens with a puppet show.
Also a cat movie—Fly Me to the Moon, the charmingly braindead space race ScarJo/Channing Tatum romcom (they have zero chemistry. My audience cheered when they kissed). There’s a plot important cat here that just kind of roams around NASA which…. would not be allowed… but we’re just having fun…
I hated Longlegs! One of the more infuriating examples of coasting off of borrowed vibes, good looking cinematography and a needlessly showy assortment of aspect ratios. Nicolas Cage is in Peggy Sue Got Married mode (derogatory) and the microfiche scene is unforgivably boring and weightless.
Repertory
Film at Lincoln Center had an outdoor screening of the ridiculously delightful baby Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams comedy Dick, which was pitched at the time as a kind of Clueless meets All the President’s Men. Dunst and Williams are among our best American actresses and it’s sort of crazy how damn GOOD they were 20 years ago. They totally inhabit the illogical, all-in, exaggerated crushes (on Richard Nixon…), confident idealism, and giddy joy of teen girl friendship.
For Show and Tell Club, Brad (of Montage/Film Fest/being my friend fame!) picked a screening of Speed Racer at the Museum of the Moving Image. I’d seen Speed Racer once during lockdown and I didn’t get it. I admired its heart and anticapitalist sentiment but the movie mostly felt loud and confusing to me. I felt bad about this and assumed someday the movie would click for me. Well today is that day! Or 7/28 was, anyway. I had the kind of rewatch where I couldn’t understand what possibly didn’t click last time. What a thrill to watch a movie with such confident style, from the Mario Kart production design to the disembodied head transitions. What I really love about Speed Racer is it elides a boring “I accepted a glitzy racing deal only to find out they were evil all along!” plot in favor of the far better “I declined the glitzy racing deal because my family raised me properly and now the machine is trying its best to crush me” plot. This one’s a hoot and holler to the highest degree, with an ending that makes you want to stand up and scream, like for a real sport.
Stuff I Watched in Philly
While in Philly, Adam and I wanted to watch Philly themed movies at the hotel. I wasn’t in the mood for Blow Out (great movie!), so we settled on National Treasure (great movie!) and In Her Shoes, which I thought was going to be a frothy early aughts comedy (possibly with body swap shenanigans?) and turned out to be a James L. Brooks style heartfelt drama about sisters, with a surprise illiteracy subplot. It was a good Philly watch ultimately, despite Cameron Diaz absconding to Florida for most of the movie—Toni Colette lives in Rittenhouse Square and walks dogs on the Rocky steps.
Mildred Pierce Summer
I wish you all the best with Brat summer, but I am having a Mildred Pierce summer (watching both the 1946 and 2011 versions of Mildred Pierce with my boyfriend). Mildred Pierce is about a 1930s housewife and single-ish mother who starts a successful restaurant chain while trying to gain the approval of her increasingly snobby and eventually evil daughter. The ‘45 version adds a murder that I kept waiting for in the 2011 version until I realized it was a studio system fabrication. I love both versions! The ‘45 is a deeply entertaining, twisty noir and the ‘11 is a patient, faithful adaptation which lands a more devastating emotional blow.
Stuff I Watched At Home
While Adam was in LA, I watched three basically perfect movies:
Peter Bogdanovich’s debut Targets about an actor “Byron Orlok” (a Boris Karloff type played by Boris Karloff) and a chilly, motiveless sniper serial killer who cross paths. Orlok is an old and increasingly irrelevant man who comes face to face with the empty, unsatisfying, unimpressive future (and kicks its ass?).
Jonathan Wacks’ Powwow Highway is a funny, angry, mystical road movie about two Cheyenne men—Buddy Red Bow, a cynical activist, and Philbert Bono, an easygoing spiritual guy who calls his shitty new car his “war pony”—traveling from Montana to Santa Fe to bail out Buddy’s sister. Buddy’s fury and Philbert’s medicine man aspirations are often the subject of ribbing but neither are strictly wrong, although in the end it’s Philbert’s near-delusional faith that leads to the thrilling, fuck-you-to-Santa-Fe-police climax.
I put on Costa-Gavras’ Missing, with little knowledge of the plot, mainly because I wanted to hear the synth score that earned its place on Criterion’s Synth Soundtracks collection (the main theme is so-so, but “Curfew” is brilliant), and found myself completely engrossed. Missing is based on the disappearance of American journalist Charles Horman during the 1973 Chilean coup and the film mostly chronicles his wife and father’s efforts to find him (Sissy Spacek and Jack Lemmon—both terrific. Lemmon is particularly moving as a Decent American who loves but didn’t quite understand his leftist son and whose faith in the system shatters bit by bit as he searches for his only child). I am almost never bored by film-as-history-lesson, but that’s not really what Missing. It’s a tense, infuriating, relentless, crushing thriller about the impossibility of putting faith in the U.S. government. And lo and behold, we are still letting Americans and journalists (and both) die to “maintain our interests”.
I rewatched Twister before Twisters. Glen/Daisy don’t have an inch on Bill Paxton/Helen Hunt, I’m afraid.
I also rewatched Sweet Smell of Success and Adam said “wait is this about publicists? No wonder you and your dad love it.”
Out of Sight is so sexy and fun! It’s kind of tragic that Jennifer Lopez is a good and charismatic actress but wants to be a C-tier pop star instead. Hailee Steinfeld is also pursuing this path I fear…
I don’t understand the mass vitriol leveled against The Big Chill, a very watchable movie about shitty people. I like Motown! I like “white people problems”! I want to be in a big house with all my college friends so bad, but I don’t want anything to go down like this.
I wanted to love Born Yesterday, but really I just loved the Judy Holliday performance. Funniest voice ever. What a funny, perfect lady.
Television
[Girls spoilers!] Adam and I finished our Girls watch/rewatch. I never did finish the last season, so that was all new to me. I think going in, I was hoping for something revelatory and unimpeachably good and really its a show that is generally very, very well written and also pretty flawed. I knew we were barreling toward “Hannah has Riz Ahmed’s baby” and, like Jessa/Adam, I thought it would make more sense when it happened but I’m not sure it does! I am 29 now in a Roe-less country, slightly older than Hannah when she has her baby (right? she’s like, 28?) and it’s just really, really hard for me to understand this decision because I still feel so ferociously selfish. I can’t imagine being that tired yet. I would get that abortion and go to the club (and by the club I mean, Twisters in 4DX again).
Theater
Cole Escola’s deliriously dumb Oh, Mary! joins my slim pantheon of absolutely perfect theater experiences.2 I laughed nonstop for the entire 80 minutes and emerged onto 45th Street breathless and a little bit in pain. In Oh, Mary!, Cole Escola plays Mary Todd Lincoln as a dust devil of a woman, an alcoholic, stifled ex-cabaret star and indifferent mother to offstage children who spends her days wreaking havoc on her husband (a beleaguered, gay Abraham Lincoln). The joy of Oh, Mary! is that it is stuffed to the brim with real jokes—not references, not snark—but real, crafted, classless, silly jokes with a perfect button to end each scene. Escola’s magic trick is making Mary Todd’s dream of returning to the cabaret and her “madcap medleys” a genuinely touching dramatic catalyst while never, ever, ever taking their foot off the pedal and submitting to a moment of seriousness. You just find yourself, between laughs, rooting for Mary Todd to finally sing again.
Cats: The Jellicle Ball is another work of gleeful queer theater—a reimagining of Cats as a Ballroom (like Paris is Burning, not Strictly Ballroom) in which cats (not cats now, just people who sometimes slink around or wear leopard print) compete in categories to become the “Jellicle choice” and ascend to the Heaviside Layer. Look, original Cats is weird (and I love it..) and is never going to make “sense” but this is the most sense Cats can possibly make. Ballroom gives form to each cat performing a song describing themselves, it explains the formation of a singular, internal language, it brings depth to the idea of a “tribe” of alley cats at the margins of society, and it also allows for 2+ hours of death drops, voguing, and comic book colored costumes. I love how the show builds a party atmosphere unlike traditional theater by encouraging the audience to shout, cheer, call out. Someone across from me screamed like the girls in Elvis when Rum Tum Tugger came out swinging his hips. I screamed when Mistoffelees fell into a split and scooted seamlessly down the entire runway in that same split.
The Who’s Tommy has the benefit of staging a perfect album that everyone wants to hear loud, so it can only go so wrong. I liked the laser lights and Ali Louis Bourzgui’s deep, swaggering rock star voice, but this stage version brings the wonderfully bizarre metaphor of the original rock opera to life in a way that’s rather awkward. Nobody wants to see Uncle Ernie actually fiddle about, no matter how tastefully it is only implied. Two more things I disliked: 1) The album and the Ken Russell film actually diverge in this I think, but I much prefer that in Russell version, it’s the new boyfriend who kills the father. That’s so much worse! 2) Having Tommy embrace Sally Simpson and turn on his fans because they’re getting weird (rather than vice versa) sucks. Let Tommy be evil!
Concert
Adam and I went to see Joe Hisaishi live at Madison Square Garden for a night of Studio Ghibli music. Even in shitty cheap seats beside a bright hallway and even with the absence of certain pieces I really wanted to hear (The Boy and the Heron score! “The Dragon Boy” and “Sootballs” and “Procession of the Spirits” instead of the snoozy “One Summer Day” from Spirited Away!) Hisaishi’s music is undeniable and the man himself is so energetic! I burst into tears pretty immediately when Kiki and Totoro hit, but the most jubilant part of the whole night was Hisaishi leading a choir in a round of the Ponyo song, which features some of the great lyrics: “Ponyo, Ponyo, Ponyo, fishy in the sea.”
Book (One Book Again)
Claire got me Lauren Groff’s Matrix for my birthday and I finally got around to it. The ending of this book is so, so, so thrilling. Like yes, I did just want to read a novel about this huge, powerful abbess building and building power in her labyrinth protected matriarchy! I often despise when a historical novel tries to introduce a kind of anachronistic feminism, but I think Groff’s writing threads that needle just fine. Also, I can’t quite explain this feeling but Matrix reminds me of online video games that are basically just accumulation based—like you make your money, buy your eggs, make food, buy a house. Satisfying!
Akin directed one of my favorite movies, 2019’s And Then We Danced about the romance between two male dancers in a traditional Georgian dance troupe. It has ABBA! Robyn! Giddy crushing! The mother of all cathartic dance endings!
Other entries include: original Broadway cast Spring Awakening, original Broadway cast Next to Normal, Sexy Oklahoma!, Merrily We Roll Along.