Arts & Culture

Travelog: Stuck at the Airport

By |

I’m obsessed with these Onion News Network YouTube videos that were released in the late 2000s/early 2010s. All two or three minutes long, they pretty expertly ape cable news personalities while still infusing that biting Onion satire. There are more recent ones, and in fact they still make some video content today, but as internet news has become more prevalent, and that cable imitation less fashionable, the form of the videos has altered, and no longer features that same charm. 

Anyway, there’s one of these videos that strikes me in a “how did the Simpsons predict X ” kind of way (or perhaps just rubs me the wrong way as a satire that isn’t quite so funny as frustrating at the moment). From how many times I’ve seen it, I’ve almost memorized “Prague’s Kafka International Named Most Alienating Airport.” My Squid and the Whale-esque pseudo-pretentious streak mixed with a love of in-your-face absurdist sense of humor makes it worthy to me of constant rewatches. I even showed it to my partner, way too early in our relationship, and watched her react stonefacedly as I cackled awkwardly. 

I just rewatched the video again, at an airport for the second day in a row, having had my flight canceled and being unable to reach anyone with my airline or get my flight rebooked or figure out how to get my new hotel stay compensated, and, maybe I’m biased, but the video isn’t *that* funny, at least in the way it originally was.

Arts & Culture

Travelog: Lunches, Finks and Recalls 

By |

I’ve found myself in a bit of a tourist funk… or maybe I’ve found myself thinking that it’s near impossible to escape a tourist funk. After all, vacation takes on an impossible role in contemporary life. Vacation is (at least functionally) a coping device for the relatively privileged that takes on all the weight and challenge of one’s perpetual monotonous labor: A faint light at the end of a tunnel that one can point to during any workplace hardship or grueling week. As a reward for that labor, privileged in its compensation but nonetheless inevitably miserably capitalistic, one may get a chance to briefly experience a wonderful sedentary artwork, striking natural feature, oasis of relaxation or distinctly bustling metropolis. The lifetime of same-old same-old interrupted by the once-in-a-lifetime brush with eternity.

Arts & Culture

Notes on a Summer Movie Season

By |

After a long and cold two semesters in Ithaca, where the closest non-arthouse theater is a semi-abandoned mall Regal that always felt just a couple bus stops too far away, I arrived home ready, more than anything else, for the summer movie season. And from the vantage point of a return to campus life (albeit a non-Ithaca campus due to study abroad), the season and its hits didn’t disappoint. Granted, I skipped the digitally de-aged grotesqueries of the new Indiana Jones and the child-purchasing sting operation grotesqueries of Sound of Freedom, but I still managed to keep a weekly AMC Lincoln Square appointment and enjoy more than my fair share of blockbusters. And so, here goes my flash thoughts on a whole host of summer releases: 

Asteroid City

For many film fans, myself included, Wes Anderson is how we learned about auterism: The man whose visual, narrative and comedic stamp is so distinctive that it’s impossible not to feel his hands on every single frame. Thus, it becomes a bit funny when, as has been happening recently, Anderson turns his eyes to the artifice and the authorship within his films. The Grand Budapest Hotel contained within its nesting doll structure a story of an author with writer’s block hearing a true story, and The French Dispatch framed its sequences around long-form magazine pieces, each written by characters whose relationships to the story became clear as the sequence went on.

Arts & Culture

‘Oppenheimer’

By |

This is the incoherency of a noncommittal Nolan who juggles ideas with little concern for where they land. He abuses Göransson’s score to foster some mirage of thematic cohesion. 

Arts & Culture

On Spiderverses and Neoliberal Folly

By |

It’s pretty difficult for a film to live up to the reputation of being the number one rated film ever on Letterboxd, a title which, however fleeting and however idiotic, indicates at least some profound level of widespread resonance. It happened last year to eventual best picture winner Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, a pretty good film that probably didn’t deserve either its instant canonization or its inevitable toxic backlash. Now it has happened to Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse, the sequel to 2018’s Into the Spiderverse and (importantly) prequel to the impending Beyond the Spiderverse due next year. The already slightly tired avenue of multiverse storytelling seems a key way to inspire extreme reactions, allowing for “justified” maximalism while simultaneously awakening that same pseudoscientific fervor that tends to unite brands of filmbro as disparate as Rick and Morty stan and Christopher Nolanite. Being a multiverse skeptic myself, Across the Spiderverse appeared primed to ignite at least one man’s backlash: my own.

Arts & Culture

John Mulaney is Funny, Still

By |

I can’t say I often find myself fully invested in celebrity gossip, and I certainly can’t say I enjoy it, but for whatever reason the tragicomic exploits of John Mulaney over the past three or so years have completely gripped my consciousness to an inappropriate extent. Perhaps it was a pandemic environment that minimized my exposure to the high school drama that had previously satiated my need for gossip, or perhaps it was the fact that I really liked John Mulaney, found him funny, and (owing to his role as a stand-up comedian) felt more personal affinity for him than I did any actor or director mired in similar controversy. For those who haven’t been following, Mulaney checked himself into rehab right in the middle of the pandemic, announced he was leaving his wife (relevant because of his comedic persona as a self-styled “wife guy”) and got into a relationship with Olivia Munn with whom he now has a son. Only the first detail is relevant to his latest special, “Baby J,” which was released on Netflix last week, but all of them feel kind of important for a comedian whose decade of earned goodwill had been completely recontextualized before he set foot on the Boston stage where the special was performed. 

“Baby J” is a special of the moment, more specifically John Mulaney’s moment. In it, he meticulously and non-sequentially details his trials of addiction, his experience with rehab and his more recent recovery process.

Arts & Culture

‘Cocaine Bear’: Exactly What it Sounds Like

By |

There have not been many movie trailers as of late that have excited me as much as Cocaine Bear’s did. Cocaine Bear has a simple premise: A bear who ingests cocaine goes on a wild massacre, eating anything and everything it encounters while running amok. One aspect that drew me and many others to this story is the fact that this movie is based on true events. 

There was, in fact, a bear that ate cocaine and was dropped into the Georgia forest by a drug smuggler in 1985. However, the movie contains  quite a bit of embellishment of details, which makes it more entertaining, since a movie about a bear eating cocaine and dying peacefully in its sleep would make for a pretty boring watch. 

The movie features several intertwining plotlines that are based around the lost cocaine and the bear, all of which I found myself invested in. The first is that of Dee Dee (Brooklyn Price) and Henry (Christian Convery), two elementary schoolers who decide to skip school and go to Chattahoochee for the day.

Arts & Culture

Did You Fall in Love or Limerence?

By |

Apart from enjoying the content, an incredible feature of movies and books is being able to learn from the characters’ experiences and reflect on your own by applying any knowledge you’ve gained to analyze what interests you the most. In this article, I want to discuss the term “limerence” to help you understand whether you’re going through limerence, thinking that you fell in love, by using the movie Ruby Sparks as an example. The main character Calvin is a famous writer who struggles with social anxiety. He has a peculiar dog, and he can’t get used to its behavior. His only friend is his brother, and besides attending book presentations, he occasionally visits his therapist.

Arts & Culture

‘Ride Lonesome’ at the Cornell Cinema

By |

Content Warning: This review contains discussion of violence and anti-Indigenous racism. 

Last weekend, the Cornell Cinema presented the 1958 low-budget Western Ride Lonesome on a tattered, well-loved 35 mm print, both a fitting visual experience for a genre which has largely fallen out of fashion with contemporary audiences and an ironic one, given the genre’s depiction of a lifestyle that, even in the genre’s hay day, remained a wistful reflection of a time since passed. Ride Lonesome, appearing as part of the Cinema’s Cinemascope series, is the most famous of the so-called Ranown cycle, a series of B-Westerns directed by Budd Boetticher and starring Randolph Scott at the tail end of a period of non-revisionist Westerns before Italian Spaghetti Westerns reimagined the genre in the 1960s. Underrated in their day, the films were quickly reappraised by French Critics and have since received wider acclaim stateside, being hailed by Martin Scorsese and awaiting canonization in the Criterion Collection this July. 

Ride Lonesome opens with a quintessential Western image: a lone figure on a horse riding through the dusty hills of an unknown, and perhaps unnamed, territory. Ben Brigade, played reservedly by Randolph Scott, is a mysterious bounty hunter, pursuing and capturing the murderer Billy John, who is to be hanged once the two get to town. As they go on, they are joined by a woman and two men who are themselves hunting after Billy John, all while fleeing from the looming threats of Native Americans and Billy John’s brother Frank, who is chasing the crew with his own gang of bandits. 

The West of Ride Lonesome is sparse, populated not by towns with saloons, railroads or ranches, but by isolated ruins, minimal structures and miles and miles of blank landscape.

Arts & Culture

The Un-Understandability of ‘Last Year at Marienbad’

By |

Cornell Cinema recently showed the 1961 film Last Year at Marienbad, a French film about an old hotel populated by wealthy guests. It focuses on an unnamed man, the narrator, who aggressively insists that he had met the female protagonist, an unnamed woman, one year ago and she promised to give him an answer as to whether or not they could be in a relationship. She, however, has no memory of ever meeting him. Most of the movie consists of the man trying to convince her that his memory is accurate and hers is inaccurate. He wants her to leave the second unnamed male character who may or may not be her husband, which, at the end of the movie, she does.