Alright. You’ve read the headline. You get what’s happening here: I went through a breakup; I watch a lot of movies; now, I’m looking back and attempting to confer upon them some sort of rhyme and reason to distinguish the ones that helped from the ones that hurt and all that jazz. Movies are a super cool window into universal experience, and there’s a lot that they can do in helping you take steps towards feeling better. But even the most hardcore cinephile will tell you that there are limits to the healing powers of movies.
Many dismissed Emerald Fennell’s second film Saltburn as being “boring” and “empty.” My response to these comments: If this was your take on Saltburn, I don’t think you were paying close enough attention. Saltburn is filled with precise details, many of which I didn’t even appreciate until I had watched the movie a second time. Fennell first takes us to Oxford University in the early 2000s. Oliver Quick (played by Barry Keoghan) is a new student at Oxford at the time, struggling to fit in with his peers. Felix Catton (played by Jacob Elordi) becomes the object of Oliver’s attention, and the object of the film’s eye.
I took my mom to see All of Us Strangers over the break, after American Fiction had sold out and Poor Things had seemed a bit explicit for a family viewing. She liked the movie but noted that the conclusion had confused her: Why wasn’t Adam sadder in the end? After all, the final “twist” of the film is unambiguously devastating, and he does seem to take it fairly well. I found it less frustrating from a narrative perspective, but nonetheless troubling for the film’s conclusion. Sold as this year’s “most likely to make you cry” film, All of Us Strangers does not simply tug at the heartstrings or offer a moment of cathartic melancholy, but rather renders in its viewer a sense of unshakeable loneliness, as necessary to the human condition as is its denial to a peaceful existence.
Warning: this article contains spoilers as well as discussion of sexual assault
Cat Person, a movie which recently showed at Cornell Cinema, is based off of a short story written in The New Yorker by Kristen Roupinian. This thriller perfectly represents what it feels like to be a college girl dating in the smartphone era. The movie opens with a quote from Margaret Atwood across the screen: “Men are scared that women will laugh at them. Women are scared that men will kill them.” This sentiment bleeds through the whole film as the main character, 20-year old Margot, questions the intentions of an older man she meets while working at a movie theater. They see each other in person a few times, but their relationship exists mainly over text.
Look what we made her do. With the release of her album Midnights just under a year ago, the announcement of The Eras Tour soon after, nine months of touring and the release of the rerecorded Speak Now (Taylor’s Version), Taylor Swift has accomplished more in a year than most of us could dream to do in a lifetime. And she didn’t stop there — Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour Movie was released on Oct. 13 and has quickly shattered records.
This article spoils Killers of the Flower Moon, though it should be noted that the nature of the film renders the spoilers somewhat benign.
TW: Genocide
I’ve spent the weekend caught between two entirely contradictory thoughts, each reflected in a piece of media from the week before. The first is the conclusion to Arielle Angel’s article on the Hamas attacks and Israel’s genocidal response, articulating in a moment of truly devastating hopelessness a vision of possibility to hold close. There has never been a period in U.S. history of greater solidarity with Palestine, nor of greater Jewish participation in that solidarity. The other is the concluding moments of Martin Scorsese’s new masterpiece Killers of the Flower Moon: Both bitterly satirical and somehow earnest, a vision not just of evil’s inevitability, but of the function of art as a commodity to fetishize it, and all spoken by a man who’s dedicated his life to the rejection of evil and embrace of art. Scorsese’s exclamation point of bleakness comes at the end of perhaps his deepest felt tragedy to date, an indictment absent of nearly any reprieve.
Killers of the Flower Moon adapts David Grann’s nonfiction book of the same name and follows a string of murders perpetrated against members of the oil-wealthy Osage Nation by white capitalists and their manipulated lieutenants.
It is impossible in these times to sit down quietly and write about a piece of media, pretending nothing is ever political. What does film say about history? Vice versa, what does history say about film? Are movies doomed to be an art medium purely for aesthetic enjoyment, or is there space for political engagement? These are a few of the questions that ran through my head as I watched I Am Cuba (1964), an epic film about pre-revolutionary Cuba told in four vignettes.
Although often left unspoken, there are acceptable and unacceptable paths to fame in Hollywood. Often actors who work with explicit content are regarded as lesser than. In its satirical fashion, X challenges this long held prejudice.
TW: Genocide, Anti-semitism, Islamaphobia, Sexual Violence
Getting on the bus for a weekend out-of-town on Thursday, I was already thinking about Israel. I’d stumbled upon a Jacobin article about Ken Loach (the socialist filmmaker who comes up a lot in English-speaking Europe) defending the director against longstanding claims of antisemitism as he releases his final film. I’d only seen one Loach film, and can’t speak too deeply about him, though his subjects and labor focus are to me unambiguously commendable. As for the anti-semitism, I remained unconvinced by the specific allegations refuted either in the Jacobin article or in my due diligence “both sides” readings of his accusers. I watched The Old Oak yesterday.
How to react. Going to listen to vaguely defined live music in Dublin only to experience an American accent, complete with a Southern Twang and frat house classics. The artists are Irish, but their vocal patterns are spot on: The accents are part of the performance, it is all imitation.
The complaints here are twofold. On one hand, there’s that surface level frustration at a failure to experience authentic Irish music, an unfair expectation and frankly silly desire that still manages to worm its way into one’s head every time it remains either unfulfilled or fulfilled only in the most touristy context (that is to say, for Americans and Americans only). Legitimately pernicious though, and perhaps a more valid complaint, is that presentation of American music devoid of any cultural context.
