#36: March Round-Up
Parents in town, Swing Girls night & bad vibes at the AMC.
In March, I cut my bangs shorter, started a 6-week Theater Jazz workshop, showed my visiting parents around the city for the first time since I moved here, spent a day as the world’s worst AD on Adam’s short, and gave up Twitter for Lent which has had no noticeable positive effect on my life. I missed the One Battle After Another trailer drop for what? I spent a lot of time on the Twitter-ish Substack feed because I needed something to look at while eating my morning desk yogurt and no offense, but beyond the writers I already like this is a very stupid website. Of course I’m writing this in April, where so far all I’ve done is develop a mysterious abdominal pain that two blood work panels, an ultrasound and a CT scan couldn’t diagnose, which has got me feeling very sickly Victorian (I’m fine!).
Movies
New Releases
The first week of March marked the first big release of the new year I was excited about, though it’s hard to remember that now—Bong Joon-Ho’s Mickey 17. Unfortunately I thought Mickey 17 was quite bad (boring, overlong, ditches the philosophically interesting clone premise for a less biting Starship Troopers thing with roly polies that do nothing for me1, Mark Ruffalo plays “Donald Trump with big teeth” in a bit of political satire woefully mismatched to the moment) but at least we got a very charming press tour out of it featuring Robert Pattinson and Bong Joon-Ho enjoying Korean noodles together and doing the finger heart thing.
I was happy to catch Eephus, a wonderfully laid back dudes-hanging-out movie about the last game of an amateur baseball league before their field is demolished, taking place over the course of a long, beautiful fall day in New England. I liked how often people fell down in this movie and how well it captures the feeling of sitting around in a park so long that it gets dark and a little weird. It’s so funny that the great romance of baseball is that it takes forever and is frequently unsatisfying, which gives deeper meaning to its occasional triumphs. I would find this more annoying if I didn’t like baseball movies and Citi Field so much.
The Day the Earth Blew Up, the first feature length Looney Tunes animation, was charmingly gooey. It’s nice! It’s good to teach babies about Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I will say this screening is the only time in my whole life I heard people (adult men) boo the Nicole Kidman AMC ad. I’m not a Nicole Kidman ad clapper but maybe I’ll become one because that booing was so frightening… so unsafe… I never want to hear that shit again in my life.
I already talked about how awesome Steven Soderbergh’s second film of the year, Black Bag, was here:
Repertory
When my parents were in town, we walked through the park and I took them to the Paris—one of the few theaters still standing from my dad’s childhood in the city—and we watched City Lights in the balcony and then we had a very nice light lunch at the Church of Sweden. A perfect day!
On the other end of the rep enjoyment spectrum, Claire and I wanted to hang out and the only thing playing around 3pm on the Sunday we had free was Hideaki Anno’s Love & Pop, a torturous lo-fi picture about teenage girls hanging out (fun) and then being subjected to the many terrifying perverts of Tokyo (unpleasant). Anyway we bailed about 20 minutes before the end which is not something I usually do but when Claire asked “do you want to stay for the rest of this?” when one of said perverts pulled a Fuzzball-from-Captain-EO plush out of his backpack my answer was the easiest no of my life. The extra half hour to chat in the park was so much better than whatever this movie had to offer us.
Swing Girls Night
Swing Girls is a 2004 Japanese comedy about a group of delinquent high school girls in summer school who accidentally poison the school brass brand and are forced to replace them and learn to play big band jazz. It has, in my opinion, everything you could want in a movie—girls hanging out, a training montage, increasingly ridiculous money-making schemes, a triumphant final concert, an important mouse. It is one of my favorite movies of all time, it’s very unavailable on streaming (you might be able to dig up a rip on Youtube or Internet Archive), and I bought a Blu-ray for my birthday from YesAsia.com because I want to watch it whenever I want but also because I wanted to show it to my friends. I promise if you get your hands on this movie, you will be charmed.2
The itinerary for the evening was: Japanese snacks and the movie at my house followed by live big band jazz at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Dizzy’s Club, a cozy club overlooking Columbus Circle where they let you in for $15 and the cost of a drink at 11pm on the weekend. The very young looking band that night was being led by a 23 (?) year old which was a little personally demoralizing but definitely in theme having watched a movie about a high school band.
Everything Else I Watched, in Order of When I Watched Them
Thirty Day Princess is a sweet and silly 30s Princess Diaries/Princess Switch-y comedy where Sylvia Sidney plays both the princess of “Taronia” and a down-on-her-luck American actress who looks exactly like the princess and must replace her on a press tour when the princess gets sick. Perfect, frothy fun with a baby Cary Grant as a royal-skeptic journalist/love interest.
Red River features the most cows you will ever see in one place (this is much cooler than it sounds) and also Montgomery Clift, the prettiest person who ever lived. Thought this was fun with an odd, jokey shrug of an ending that’s growing on me the more I think on it for the way it lets the air out of this movie’s Battle of Male Wills finale.
I was led to believe by many trusted sources that Uptown Girls is an underrated gem and I am here to say that this movie is a boring, poorly paced slog with two phenomenal lead performances. Dakota Fanning is miraculous.
sex, lies, and videotape is well made and well acted and I can’t say I cared very much for their troubles. I prefer my Soderbergh in Pure Fun mode.
Speaking of pure fun, A Fish Called Wanda is a hoot. 100+ minutes of screaming. A screenplay crammed with twists and jokes—the kind nobody ever seems to want to write even though everyone likes it. It’s stupid for me to tell you Kevin Kline, who won an Academy Award for this role, is good but he’s really very good.
I rewatched Down with Love which actually does follow the A Fish Called Wanda-mold by delivering a goofy, batshit, twisty romantic comedy with a stellar four-person cast. It’s 2003 Ewan McGregor and Renee Zellweger doing Rock Hudson and Doris Day! Which is the exact right use of those two, except they don’t get to sing until the credits.
The Bad and the Beautiful has, for me, a perfect movie premise: a director, screenwriter, and movie star each tell the story of how they were wronged by the same once successful and now disgraced film producer and why they refuse to work with him on a new project. This is awesome to me. This movie strongly implies that any evil can be forgiven if the result is a good movie, which in itself is kind of an evil position that I don’t exactly agree with but I definitely understand…
Oklahoma! is a gloriously colorful, indifferently directed, objectively bad adaptation of a great show that gets away with it because a) the songs are so good and b) its stiff cheeriness is so, so bone-chillingly scary by the end that it almost feels like Zinnemann was making a statement. Oklahoma! is a weird show that’s long had a reputation as saccharine Americana and then got a “dark and gritty” Broadway revival in 20193 that simply played the show straight and reminded everyone that it’s actually pretty horrifying for the town hot guy to murder the town loner and get away with it via a sham trial because everyone agreed the victim had bad vibes. This act ruptures this world of sweethearts and picnics and box socials and golden, hazy meadows in a way that could be excavated and examined fully, as Daniel Fish did in 2019, or it could remain an unsettling and extremely American undercurrent. I read this Frank Rich piece that I’m a little obsessed with, which points out that Oklahoma isn’t just the site of the usual American crimes but some of the very worst acts of violence this country’s ever seen.
I only half-watched It’s My Turn while spring cleaning (my apologies to the great Claudia Weill)—a pleasant movie about Jill Clayburgh as a math professor choosing between two jobs (Chicago professor or New York administrator) and two men (funny but passionless Charles Grodin in Normal mode or Michael Douglas in the only role I’ve ever truly thought he was hot in).
Television
As previously threatened, I did start Industry for Marisa Abela of Black Bag-fame but I watch it exclusively on my phone while cooking or washing dishes or folding laundry and I basically listen to it like a podcast while doing those chores. This is not what anybody intended and I feel bad to treat the artists involved like this but I’m not going to change my behavior in the slightest.
The show is fine. I genuinely can’t tell the blonde guys in season 1 apart, which is not a problem I usually have. I’m normally fantastic at telling white men apart. The first time I started Industry and turned it off 45 minutes into the pilot, my take was that it was a whole lot of finance jargon to take in during my me-time and I still feel that way, but I throw it on while chopping carrots anyway because it’s basically smarter Suits, a highly watchable and horrendously written show I’m embarrassed to admit I totally binged 2 seasons of last year until I honestly could not take it anymore.
We’re also still chugging along with our 30 Rock rewatch, but we hit season 7 and I always forget that the trade-off for gaining James Marsden is the introduction of Hazel, one of my least favorite characters ever written.
Theater
My parents did what I would do (because I do what they would do) and took their short trip to New York as an opportunity to see a bunch of theater. They caught Audra’s Gypsy without me, and then we went to see Sunset Boulevard and Oh, Mary! (second round for me) together.
Sunset Boulevard is not an Andrew Lloyd Webber property I’m particularly familiar with (which is kind of insane because I’m fan enough to have a soft spot for Whistle Down the Wind… lol) and I really hate screens on stage so this was working at an immediate disadvantage for me.
I realized pretty quickly that “everyone’s running around a smoky, empty stage in athleisure” was indeed not my bag. The conceit where the actors are occasionally followed around with handheld cameras, projecting close-ups of their faces on a massive screen, was a little more 50/50—there were moments when it felt engaged with the text (Norma Desmond is a silent screen actress! They had faces!) and as many more where it felt entirely random. Nicole Scherzinger is often astonishing—tiny and raw and powerful—when she’s allowed to just sing and be emotional but the production lacks the confidence to simply tell the story and falls back repeatedly on winking jokes. In the production’s big gimmick, Tom Francis (great!) as Joe Gillis sings the title number while walking outside the theater on West 44th St and then storms inside through the backstage where we’re greeted by a series of jokes—an ALW cardboard cut-out, a photo of the Pussycat Dolls, cast members goofing off—and it’s exciting in the moment but I couldn’t stop thinking—why? Anyway, that’s still Audra’s Tony to me.
Oh Mary! is an absolutely perfect play (relentlessly funny yet kind of touching without ever visibly trying to be) and Betty Gilpin was an entirely capable and appropriately bratty successor to Cole Escola. If she can’t quite match Escola’s Tasmanian Devil energy, she makes up for it easily with a colossal pout and an evil glint in her eyes. I wish I was exactly wealthy enough to see every new Mary they bring in forever.
Books
’s debut book of poetry True Mistakes arrived exactly when I needed it to—a slim, gut punch of a volume about being 30 or in your 30s, about living so much in your head you’re not really living, about the way all our possible futures begin to narrow as we grow up, about being in a body that’s beginning to falter (I’m writing this with that bizarro abdominal pain my doctor’s can’t figure out so… I get it!), about the ways we try to capture the moment in the age of social media and about choosing anxiety or choosing joy. It’s one of those books that made me think “oh thank god, me too” over and over and over. For book club, we went with one of my picks this go around: James Baldwin’s Another Country. I’ve read perilously little Baldwin and I want to read more New York novels while I’m here. I found out that James Baldwin once lived down my block. Something that came up when book club convened was that Another Country is basically—once you emerge from a misleading initial 90 pages—about a group of artist friends in 1950s New York wandering the streets and grieving and fucking each other and being horrible. They spend a lot of time having sex and being jealous of each other’s artistic successes and very little time on the page making art. It is an intensely internal novel and there’s a lot of telling, not showing. It’s a novel that could suck in anybody else’s hands except that Baldwin is a really, really, really smart writer who manages to infuse a novel about miserable people with a fragile kernel of hope and true romance. The last 50ish pages are kind of a roller coaster of new friend group sexual permutations in a way that is, no joke, very Gossip Girl.
RIP everywhere I liked to eat in Los Angeles
In March, I found out that three perfect LA institutions had closed or would be closing:
the Original Pantry Cafe, a Mildred Pierce-y diner which first opened in 1924 and always commanded long lines around the block in Downtown Los Angeles
Papa Cristo’s, a combination Greek market and casual restaurant where I used to see Papa Cristo himself (tiny and possessing a massive mustache like a real life cartoon) sitting in an alcove above the deli counter and where the deli guys used to give my sister and I free cookies when we were little and where you could sit around chatting over a plate of grilled octopus for hours
Papa himself. credit: Eater La Cevicheria, a tiny spot with a bright blue exterior where I got generous bowls of Jonathan Gold-approved bloody clam ceviche and my favorite fried fish tacos and grilled fish in a tomato-y coconut milk sauce every single time I was in town from the time I left for college because it was probably my favorite restaurant in the entire world. The owners, Carolina and Julio, would sometimes drop by the table to say hello and bring tequila shots. Unlike the other two, which were victims of real estate bullshit, Carolina and Julio seem to have simply retired (fair!) but I’m still so sad.
In order: The Old Pantry Cafe, Papa Cristo's which I have no great photos of readily on hand, and my beloved La Cevicheria <3
They’re no Porgs.
If we’re friends in real life and you’re like, wait why wasn’t I invited the first time around, the answer is that my living room is really small. Text me for a round 2!
This was maybe the best show I’ve ever seen in my life. Easy top 5.