Arts & Culture

British “Paw Patrol” Review

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On the first or second night of staying with some family in England, a young second cousin twice removed (or something of that sort) asked me to name a movie… one she’d know of. I responded: “Barbie.” After asking me if I’d seen or liked the film (I’d apparently picked one that had been on her mind), she got to her question: “so, when they show… Barbie in your country do they have to have the actors re-record some of the lines?”, alluding to the fact that some of the actors don’t naturally speak English with an American accent. I chuckled a bit and responded, “No. Actually, I think part of the movie takes place where I’m from,” pointing out that some of the non-Barbieland scenes in the film were shot blocks away from my childhood home. It remained funny to me, though, that my accent (or something about me) had been silly enough that my cousin believed I couldn’t possibly be engaged in the same cultural ecosystem as her (even in the case of a movie where numerous British and Australian actors were putting on American accents). 

A week or so later, I relayed the story to my partner.

Arts & Culture

Notes on a Summer Movie Season

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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.