#24: August Round-Up
Parents trapped, aliens and goodbye to Evil.
Please consider giving to this fund for 2 young children and their family in Gaza, to sustain their basic living costs as the border remains closed amidst ongoing genocide.
First off, this is a September thing but I’m just going to say it now because otherwise I’ll leave it so long: I read a piece I wrote about Jacques Tati’s Playtime at the first ever Wig-Wag Live on a chilly and gorgeous Bushwick rooftop alongside a bunch of other wonderful writers, PLUS the premiere of Sarah Jae Leiber’s River Phoenix Fugue (which you can see yourself at The Tank!!! I’m going next Saturday). A few weeks ago I tweeted that my dream as a kid was to live in a big city and have cool friends to have dinner with (true) but my other dream, especially since moving to New York, has been to commit myself to creative projects AND to go see the art my friends make. If you have a show or a concert or a reading, please tell me I want to be there!
Mildred Pierce summer1 is coming to an end and Natalie Merchant fall2 begins… This year I’ve been feeling surprisingly melancholy about the summer ending. I don’t historically like summer very much (sweaty! awful!) but I feel like I had a lot of plans that never came together (I’m trying to fit one last beach day into September!). Here’s what I did (and didn’t) do: I got a haircut, I didn’t read a single book, I went free kayaking at Pier 26 which is nice because it’s free and because 20 minutes is exactly as much time as I care to spend on a kayak, and I went to LA for my mom’s birthday, which I already wrote about.
Movies
New Releases
Trap was my most anticipated summer release. It’s not a novel position these days, but I love M. Night Shyamalan! His films are entertaining, sincere, funny on purpose, and sometimes wonderfully nasty/gross. In the last few years along, he’s cast Gael Garcia Bernal and Vicky Krieps as a couple (one of the great on-screen height differences) who must reconcile on an evil beach and put Dave Bautista back in glasses. Trap, about a serial killer who takes his daughter to a pop concert which turns out to be an FBI trap set to catch him, is really a movie about how M. Night Shyamalan loves his daughters more than anything in the world but his compulsion to make movies has forced him to be less present then he’d like in their lives. Hayley Mills of the original The Parent Trap plays the FBI profiler who has trapped the parent in question—see! He’s funny!
I’ll confess something—I was not exactly looking forward to Sean Wang’s Didi. I mean, I was. For weeks, I was telling friends “oh, I want to see that” and meaning it, but when it finally came out I dragged my feet. I thought I was in for a meandering, excruciatingly painful time and I worried its references would feel played out. Didi is often painful to watch but crucially the movie is so, so, so laugh out loud funny. I also forgot it feels amazing to have my life directly reflected in cinema (California Asian, MySpace to early Facebook migration, beautiful and artsy Asian mom who truly just wants me to be happy).
To my surprise, my favorite new release of the month was Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast which I watched on the Criterion Channel. I find it difficult to even articulate what I liked so much about it but since I’m supposed to be writing about movies here I’ll try—I guess first of all, I’m a real sucker for connected stories spanning centuries? I like seeing multiple periods of time in the same movie? I sometimes have a 2-for-1 bargain hunters brain when it comes to art. If you come within sneezing distance of Cloud Atlas, I’m going to have a good time. The Beast takes place in three different timelines—a woman in 2044 trying to purify her DNA by examining past lives so she can compete against A.I. for decent jobs, a pianist who has an affair in 1910 France, and a model/actress in 2014 Los Angeles who crosses paths with an incel. I like the Age of Innocence-meets-Titanic 1910 timeline best because I am who I am. I found this film romantic, bleak and strangely entrancing and it all builds up to maybe the best (horrible?) movie ending of the year.
Alien: Romulus starts off fun (expansion of the Weyland Yutani universe, dumb teens, cool David Jonsson role as an android who experiences a sharp personality shift) and then becoming the worst kind of slavish retread.
Kneecap, in which the republican Belfast hip-hop trio Kneecap, play themselves is extremely fun!!!!! Brits out!!!! You can catch some Palestinian flags and keffiyehs in this movie—gotta love the Irish.
Every time I thought “surely they can’t sustain this any longer” while watching the instantly cult classic-y silent comedy Hundreds of Beavers, about an applejack maker at war with the wilderness/beavers, the movie took an exciting and engaging turn. I still found it a little overlong and exhausting but it’s impossible not to admire this!
Repertory
I went to see Bridge on the River Kwai with my dad at the Egyptian Theater in Los Angeles at 11am on a Saturday (we got Mexican food with my mom afterwards and I had mole enchiladas and a big pink horchata), which is to my mind the perfect way to spend a day. Alec Guiness plays a stubborn British commander hell bent on maintaining order and civility at a Japanese POW camp deep in the jungle (he does this by building the enemy a wonderful and sturdy bridge). I don’t relate to this guy at all. I do relate deeply to William Holden’s character, an American prisoner hell bent on bribing his way into as much relaxation time as possible and making his way out of the jungle, never to return.
I wish I’d caught more of Film at Lincoln Center’s series on Mexican popular cinema but only Corner Stop!, a 1948 comedy about competing bus companies and labor unions (the plot is convoluted…), worked with my schedule. It has a very fun opening scene where a mariachi band gets on the bus and sings a song about how much commutes suck.
Went to see Lawrence of Arabia again at a completely full screening at the Museum of the Moving Image and this time it felt much more like a tragic romance than ever before. They are boyfriends but they can’t be together! I was so excited for whoever it was that gasped when the Gasim reveal happened.
Adam and I got Popeye’s (chicken) before seeing Popeye (movie) with Brad at the IFC Center. The movie’s ultimately too loose and mumbly for my taste, but I am obviously completely enchanted by Shelley Duvall’s performance and wardrobe as Olive Oyl. RIP Shelley.
We Watched A Bunch (But Not All) of the Aliens Movies
In the lead up to Romulus (I was so excited…lol) I rewatched Aliens (the military squad and increased number of xenomorphs may never truly hit for me, but it’s so fun! Bill Paxton is a delight!) and Alien (Ridley’s best). I also rewatched Prometheus, which I was hoping to love after all this time and which I in fact… hated. I love David though. Which leads me to the real surprise of this run—I kind of love Alien: Covenant! Alien: Covenant drops most of the miserable bald alien god ponderousness3 of Prometheus but retains its core existential terror and David the Lawrence-of-Arabia-obsessed android, who I love with all my heart. Covenant strikes the right balance between new ideas and slasher basics and is easily my third favorite of these movies.
Movies at Home (Mine, My Parents’, My Friend’s)
At home in LA, my mom showed me the charmingly deadpan Japanese-Finnish comedy Kamome Diner, about a Japanese woman who opens a little diner in Helsinki. For a time, she has zero patrons but eventually an anime nerd, two lonely Japanese tourists and a Finnish woman whose husband has recently left her begin to frequent her shop and to varying degrees, become her friend. Everyone in this film is lonely, sad and strange and the director Naoko Ogigami approaches this with an unsentimental comic frankness that reminded me a bit of Aki Kaurismaki.
Adam and I watched Open Range (sort of for Blank Check, sort of out of post-Horizon curiosity) and it was bad. Miles worse than Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1.
We also watched 24 Hour Party People, about Manchester’s music scene from the 70s-90s. “Blue Monday” by New Order is so good. This is one of the few music biopics that I think manages to match the energy of the music it depicts stylistically (this movie and Baz’s Elvis?). This was a surprisingly useful and prophetic watch for me as I knew vanishingly little about the Manchester scene before this and then the Oasis stuff happened right after.
Michelle’s birthday party was a screening of the greatest film of all time, Top Gun: Maverick.
I actually rewatched Bring It On on an airplane. Perfect movie!
Television
For years I’ve been quietly mainlining the work of Robert and Michelle King, the husband-wife co-creators of The Good Wife, its spin-off The Good Fight, BrainDead (evil alien bugs infect the brains of Washington D.C. politicians—this was 2015, long before RFK’s brain worms), and most importantly, Evil the supernatural case-a-week series about a priest, skeptic psychologist and skeptic tech/science guy employed by the Catholic church to investigate possessions, hauntings, covens, etc. which ended this August.
I am always looking for something to fill the The X Files shaped hole in my heart (often filled by simply rewatching The X Files) and Evil did a great job of this the last few years—fun weekly cases, (forbidden!) sexual chemistry, overarching conspiracies (I’m actually less into this. In my heart of hearts I want all my procedurals to be SVU level uninterested in larger narrative). The Kings are unabashed about their left-liberal politics, and they had a good time labeling all manner of modern woes as elemental evil—incels, doomscrolling, deepfakes, ICE, prison, glass ceilings. As with all good supernatural shows, there was usually a rational explanation for what was going on but just enough mystery to leave the door open—this is The X Files’ bread and butter but also felt like the earnest result of Robert’s Catholicism and Michelle’s secular Judaism. Evil was great, for one, but also doing solid numbers so its sudden cancellation feels like the usual shitty, arbitrary fuckery of streamers/studios not knowing what they’re doing ever. Its final season was the usual fun (especially Andrea Martin, as a nun who can see demons) but also pretty abrupt and unsatisfying so I’m sort of holding out hope we haven’t seen the last of this show.
Concerts
Adam and I went to see Green Day at Citi Field for their Saviors Tour where they played Dookie and American Idiot through, plus a sprinkle of additional songs. Good albums!! Billie Joe Armstrong is so wildly energetic? I couldn’t even match his energy, just 2+ hours of straights screaming with no break at all. It did feel weird for a band that was so angry about the Iraq War to have nothing to say about the current moment besides “vote” but I’ve got to be stupid to expect too much from 50 year old millionaires. It was crazy to realize in that sea of mostly seated, contented, tattooed millenials that the things I loved and that felt so new as a kid can be 20 years old now (and Dookie is THIRTY) and can go on legacy tour.
Everyone was having this, not just me and Adam specifically who watched both Mildred Pierces over the summer and then said “Mildred Pierce summer.”
Adam texted me 2 weeks ago and said “we should have a Natalie Merchant fall” and I said sure even though to be honest, I’ve never independently listened to a Natalie Merchant song in my life.
I like this on paper I do!!!! It’s just really boring in practice!!!!
Natalie Merchant fall