Arts & Culture

‘Guts Spilled’: It’s Not For You (It’s For Me)

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Way back last October, Olivia Rodrigo’s GUTS released, captivating me to the point that it led to a brief foray into amateur music criticism and to the eventual position of Rodrigo at the top of my Spotify Wrapped. I didn’t really precisely understand what I found so undeniable about the album: It’s odd to be a person so skeptical of popular cinema only to have the milquetoast music taste of an AI-generated character from a Netflix high school sitcom. But besides the obvious earworm-y quality of the songs and palpable angst of the vocals, Rodrigo managed to so perfectly and bluntly hit a specific familiar stream of consciousness that resonated with me and society more broadly. She’s popular — I’m just describing pop music. 

Anyway, GUTS (spilled) — the album’s deluxe edition — released last Friday, featuring five new songs and a slight cover variant with very tiny text. As an avid fan nevertheless trying to avoid a Spotify Wrapped repeat, I did eagerly listen to the new tracks, but only after being reminded of the album’s existence by a friend texting me with (probably) a bit of derision.

Arts & Culture

‘Fear and Loathing’ in Ithaca: Sober and (Less) Sober Reflections on Gonzo Journalism and Turning 21

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I picked up a copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas on Friday, 12 hours away from an essay deadline I desperately wanted to avoid and thinking about the book’s long-standing place on my must-read list because of the Criterion Collection’s announcement of the 4k release of the — allegedly — inferior adaptation. I convinced myself, in a further effort to stave off the inevitable essay writing and editing, that it’d help me as a journalist and an editor. I still cringe at my attribution as a journalist — put a gun to my head and maybe I’d invoke Marat as a hero — but I must admit it fits the job description. I now spend enough of my time laying out pages, emailing potential interviews or sources, and copy editing for Oxford commas to make the position undeniable. It’ll help with my journalism, I told myself; I’ve accidentally found myself as a student journalist, and I now need help with my journalism. 

On Sunday I turned 21: that last fun birthday before they begin to blur together and race unfortunately and unexpectedly to the grisly end.

Arts & Culture

‘Drive-Away D**es,’ Sibling Rivalries and Having Fun 

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“The greatest films of all time were never made… the greatest loves of all time are over now.” 

Taylor Swift’s discourse on romance tracks surprisingly well onto the recent history of the great Gen X directing duos: The last couple of years have brought about the divorces of the Safdie brothers, Wachowski sisters and — most tragically — the Coen brothers. Creative partnerships tend to be tenuous, and most historic examples (Martin and Lewis, Nichols and May, Powell and Pressburger, to name a few) end with one or both attempting to stake their own claim — or perhaps needing to after the death of one half. Still, this recent crop of breakups, and particularly the first individual projects from Joel and Ethan Coen, represent at once a great tragedy and fascinating subject for interrogation. A duo best marked for their juxtaposition of brilliant wit with bleak subject matter have split up and demonstrated that they each brought something incredibly different to their collaboration. Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth brought the filmmaker’s trademark visual excellence but stripped the exercise of any humor, and the new film from Ethan Coen, Drive-Away Dolls (or D**es, as the final title card and filmmakers call it), cares about little more than getting a laugh out of its audience.

Arts & Culture

The Oscar Nominees: The Ones I Liked Less

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Well, it can’t all be great. As good as this year’s Oscars slate is in comparison to say, 2021, it still isn’t quite able to escape the inadequacies or odd choices befitting any body of wealthy West Coast liberals and reactionary octogenarians. There isn’t a Green Book this year, or any other film whose victory might call into question the value of the exercise itself, but (unless you suffer from the same brand of brain rot as me) watching all the nominees is never a necessity to cover the best of this year in movies. Here are the ones you can skip: 

The Holdovers 

I hate to be the curmudgeon unable to find much of the joy in this film about a curmudgeonly old man finding joy, but — alas — The Holdovers was not for me. I’m incredibly sympathetic to its warm nostalgia for ’70s aesthetics, even if the specific genre its cribbing from has never particularly appealed to me.

Arts & Culture

The Oscar Nominees: The Ones I Liked*

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I may have aged another year, but I remain in the same state of arrested development that holds dear a decade-long obsession with the Academy Awards. This year, at least, has been an uncharacteristically good year for the kind of prestige awards fodder that ends up nominated, and though (as always) I didn’t like everything, I found a lot of really enjoyable bits in almost all the best picture nominees, even the bad ones. I’ve already reviewed Killers of the Flower Moon, The Zone of Interest and Barbie/Oppenheimer for The Sun (not to mention the excellent reviews of the last two from other Staff Writers), but there are six more Best Picture nominees that are worth talking about. Although the distinction is arbitrary, I’ve split them into two articles, one covering the ones I liked (or reservedly recommend) and another the ones I liked less (or think might merit a skip). Without further ado, here are the ones I liked: 

American Fiction 

Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction, adapted from the 2001 novel Erasure, attempts to simultaneously satire the current state of Black literature and backdoor a compelling family drama in the space of two hours.

Arts & Culture

‘The Zone of Interest’ and Creeping Desensitization

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Content Warning: Genocide

Adapted from a Martin Amis novel, Jonathon Glazer’s The Zone of Interest follows the inner lives of Auschwitz Commandant Rudolph Höss and his wife Hedwig, focusing its attention on family strife and workplace politics rather than the unspeakable horrors happening on the opposite side of the camp’s walls. Constantly breaking the 180-degree rule, diverting into avant-garde infrared sequences and displaying long, would-be boring depictions of domestic life, the film sets out to put off its own audience, confronting both the ability of cinema to narrativize evil and the startling comfort of an audience in engaging with it. Nearly every scene is set against a vomit-inducing soundscape that combines the machinery of death with the human reactions that it inspires (and the subsequent gunfire and dog barks part and parcel to the repression). It’s one of last years’ most difficult films but also one of its most essential, a treatise on the ease with which horror is tuned out just as its modern analogue is more visible than ever. 

The obvious comparator text for The Zone of Interest is Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, possibly the definitive visual document of the Holocaust and a film most notable for its refusal to show a second of archival footage. Glazer, who isn’t painting with a documentary canvas, must represent Auschwitz as an operating camp, but he too restrains his camera from ever actually depicting images either of genocide or those doomed to it.

Arts & Culture

I LOVE IT | Ode to Long Movies

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Not every film can be enjoyed in a single evening. As you get into cinephilia, downloading Letterboxd and looking at their Top 250 (or perhaps those of Sight and Sound or AFI), you may come across those select few movies with runtimes that look like mistakes: Jesus Christ, how many hours even is 317 minutes? Some people end up shutting those movies out, excluding them from any potential watchlist for the obscene commitment they ask of audiences. Others, like me, set them aside as projects on a bucket list… I knew I couldn’t avoid Jacques Rivette my whole life. Earlier this month, I made that bucket list a whole lot shorter, watching a dozen or so of these ultralong “project” movies over break.