111: air fare
THIS WEEK: action movies, good art, the end of merch and more from the edge of jet lag
COMMUNITY BOARD
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I downloaded nine movies for my flight to London (travel diaries coming soon…) but I only ended up watching one: Christopher Nolan’s Inception. Post Tenet rewatch, I felt I had to revisit Inception, which I had seen 50% of in 2011 before my dad made me go to bed. I remember thinking it was really really really good. But I’ve become such a Christopher Nolan anti lately that I wasn’t convinced that I would feel the same way. Friends, I was humbled. Inception is kind of incredible. Like most Nolan movies, you do have to get over the writing which is, in the words of RAFTM Allison Picurro1, “goofy, goofy, goofy.” When it comes to the action, however, it’s so enthralling. Watching it, I understood why people drool over Nolan. Nothing he has made after Inception (that I’ve seen at least) is better than Inception. It keeps a tighter hold on its narrative thread than Tenet and is more sensible than Oppenheimer. It also makes a really good case for the need for a strong leading man. There’s a lot of moving parts of this movie and it’s Leonardo DiCaprio’s Dominic Cobb that holds it all together. That particular Leo charm, the reason that he’s still famous despite his personal life being a little joke, is on full blast here. Everyone in the movie is “good” but you can almost sense that they’re stepping it up to match Leo’s dynamism.
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on Inception:I closed the action movie loop by entering into the Mad Max universe. RAFTM Hannah Ziegler and I saw Mad Max: Furiosa at the Rio Cinema on my last night in London, then I watched Mad Max: Fury Road on the plane home. My experience watching both movies proved that I’m not becoming an action girlie any time soon, though I found Fury Road to be a lot more compelling. Furiosa was almost unwatchable and it was ugly! Why was it edited like that? It really felt like a trailer for something and as much as I spent a good part of the movie being like, I’m ready for this to be over, I equally spent a good part of the movie waiting for it to really start. I know I said the thing I liked about Challengers was that it left room for imagination, but in Furiosa there was maybe a bit too much room. The only thing that really had heat for me was the love story, which is partially due to my sensibility (I’m always here for a little tenderness) and partially because it was the only bit where it felt like the characters had real stakes. Otherwise, I’m not really convinced by the revenge plot of it all and Anya Taylor-Joy never sells Furiosa’s rage, even in the penultimate moment when she could have let it all out.
I stopped in Paris for two days in the middle of my London trip and went to the Palais de Tokyo to see the Loewe Foundation Craft Show with RAFTM Tia Glista. After our quick loop around the show—very good—Tia convinced me to buy a ticket to see the other exhibitions at the museum. I’m glad I did because I got to experience the Mohamed Bourouissa retrospective, Signal, which was just breathtaking. It’s an immersive and multilayered exhibition that plays with sound (I was surprised several times by the sudden gasping emanating from above me), a plant garden, and video installations. Although there are lots of different works from throughout his career, they all work together as one piece. The museum program refers to the exhibition as “a score made up of sounds, drawings, photographs, films, sculptures, watercolours, plants, experimental music and collective energies.” I was also really moved by Bourouissa’s emphasis on care and collectivity, and the ways that emerged in the way things were displayed as well as who was recognized as collaborators. You could sense the intimacy he had formed with his subjects and so things that could easily seem exploitative never felt that way.
Open Tabs
Michelle Santiago Cortés, “Rot all over” (Dirt): “Rot might be the end, the pause, the road to nothingness and death, but it never stops moving. In this sense, the Bed Rotters make a compelling point: While they might be in bed all day, online all day, not doing anything of calculable value, in the end, they are the agents of rot.”
Samuel Hine, “The End of Merch“ (GQ): For the first time in recent memory, I couldn’t wait to wear a T-shirt that tied together a bunch of threads I found meaningful: menswear history, Anderson’s work, and the sweaty tennis ménage à trois movie that makes me want to wear plaid shorts all summer. The feeling didn’t last long. The first time I threw mine on, I was barely out of my front door when I saw another guy wearing one just like it.” (Anyone making a fuss about this should actually read it!)
B.D. McClay, “Anne Elliot Is Twenty-Seven” (The Paris Review): “Age isn’t just a number and a biological fact, though it is both of those things. Age also represents how far we’ve come from the things that seemed like they would last forever—and that, in lingering alongside us, do last forever as memories and as scars, even if we wish they wouldn’t. We lose everything to the devouring past eventually. But we keep it all, too.” (I wasn’t always keyed into this but I did keep reading over this part!)
Jessica Pressler’s Andy Cohen profile, “The Last Inappropriate Man on Television,” is one of the best I’ve read in a while!
RAFTM = Reader and Friend to Me; coined by Rachel Tashjian!
thank you for reminding me i could truly watch inception again RIGHT NOW. dom cobb!!!!!!!