How I'm Living Now: Sept 13

My weekly media diary featuring lots of hot guys

Hello friends and enemies,

This past week has been light on movie-watching and light on reading, as well. I’m busy working on my feature film so, depending on how the day went, my evenings can go any number of ways. Lately it has been watching Real Housewives of Dubai which is awful. But if I don’t put it on, I have to be alone with my thoughts while I make dinner, and that’s a frightening prospect.

This weekend, I went to Palm Springs to visit my family; last Christmas, my sister gifted our mom tickets to Earth, Wind & Fire and Chicago in concert, and I went with the two of them and my sister’s boyfriend. It was really fun and the graphics were just killing me, alternating between generic psychedelia and literal stock photos of couples engaged in fun things like sitting on bench or laughing aside boulder. A treat! I love when my sister pays for tickets for me to attend concerts, which happens not infrequently.

Television

Slow Horses (new episodes Wednesdays on Apple TV+)

Slow Horses is one of the few series currently on television that I really cannot recommend highly enough. This week, Saoirse Ronan’s boyfriend Jack Lowden ran about rural France huffing and puffing in his skinny jeans after pretending he was killed. But everyone knows he is alive so I don’t know why he bothered to do that. If you’re uninitiated, Slow Horses is a serialized procedural drama about the rejects of MI5—the agents who have messed up bad but not enough to be fired. It’s fun!

Industry (new episodes Sundays on HBO)

I can become very hard on pieces of audiovisual media when a rabid internet fanbase develops around it. When the praise becomes universal and effusive, I like to ensure everyone knows, this thing that is universally beloved, I enjoy it but I have caveats.¹ Industry has fit into this bucket. I find the show to be very compelling, sexy pop nonsense but ultimately a bit too slight both in terms of narrative and character to laud it the way many on the internet do, it feels like many elements are not yet fully cooked. But the most recent episode, primarily focusing on Robert Spearing, was the best single episode of the entire series thus far, an episode that didn’t feel like we were skirting around the heart of the matter, as many do. It would be too convoluted to explain, so just get caught up.

Movies

Unhook the Stars (Nick Cassavetes, 1997)

In honor of the late Gena Rowlands, I decided to watch her son’s directorial debut, in which she stars (what a lucky get!). Rowlands plays Mildred, a widow and empty nester, and Marisa Tomei plays Monica who lives across the street. Monica’s husband abuses her, and at one point she kicks him out, so Mildred offers to help watch their son. If this sounds boring to you, it is! In fact, it is so boring that I reached out to Daniel, because I knew he rented it the week before, and he said the second hour is so much better as to be like night and day. So I stuck it out. For the first hour, they stay inside these well trodden tropes, but in the second our, they let Gena become glamorous (thank GOD; I was dying with her in pleated chinos) and she says to Gérard Depardieu in a bar “I don’t listen to bedroom music.”

Beetlejuice (Tim Burton, 1988)

A classic; a film I have basically memorized. Rewatched not because of the sequel, which I still plan to see someday, but because Clare wrote so beautifully about it.

like who is she btw. always been fascinated with her. i’m gay

It Ends with Us (2024, Blake Lively & Ryan Reynolds Justin Baldoni)

I thought this movie was amazing. This does not, in this case, equate to good. It is not good; it is amazing. I can’t remember any specific examples for some reason (marijuana) but every time any character waxes poetic on the nature of life or their history of trauma, it sounds like dialogue written by someone who is extremely well versed in narrative and dramatic fiction but has no idea how human beings think or speak. I would make the low-hanging fruit joke that “it feels like it’s written by AI” but it doesn’t. It is much weirder and scarier than that. Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds wrote those monologues, for sure. That’s exactly what I expect from their brains. I’ve always been fascinated by Lively’s screen presence, because she is not a talented actor but there are these fleeting moments of life that she occasionally brings to the fore that almost resemble good acting—kind of like when I say something to my cat and she responds in such a way that I’m convinced she speaks English. I’m always like “now what is she going to do next” when I watch a Blake Lively. I’ve never thought that while watching Brie Larson.

Bitter Moon (1992, R*m*n P*l*nski)

Look, I’m really sorry, but this is sincerely one of the best movies I’ve seen in several years. The film stars Hugh Grant as Nigel and Kristin Scott Thomas as Fiona, a married couple on a cruise to India, where they meet paraplegic Oscar (Peter Coyote) and his drop dead gorgeous wife Mimi (Emmanuelle Seigner {real-life wife of censored director}). Oscar tells Nigel the story of their relationship and how he came to be paralyzed over the course of the film. It took me a moment to get on the film’s wavelength; I was riveted by the story within the story, which rivals Showgirls in its anti-sexual depiction of sexuality, a stylization that makes sex feel simultaneously urgent and embarrassing in its potency. But I didn’t care for the framing device of the cruise. But by the time we got to the end, my jaw was on the floor for the final 45 minutes, and the characters of Nigel and Fiona proved their necessity. A stunner on the level of Possession and Phantom Thread in its truth about the nature of relationships.

Lilo & Stitch (2002, Chris Sanders & Dean DeBlois)

Rewatched for the second time ever because Fran wrote so beautifully about it.² I thought it was fine. I loved Stitch and his emotional arc, but couldn’t begin to care about Lilo or any of the other humans. It was fine!

The Drowning Pool (1975, Stuart Rosenberg)

Really enjoyed this. A slow burn detective thriller on the New Orleans bayou starring Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, and teenage Melanie Griffith. There is a casual effortlessness to everything about this picture which made it quite an intoxicating experience. And for almost all of the third act, Newman is in his boxers soaking wet, slinging dong with every step.

These photos of Cillian Murphy are also cinema to me

These dropped this morning. They speak for themselves.

1. “Universally beloved” in this case means, of course, by the one third of a million people who know what it is.

2. Believe it’s behind paywall, sorry… just subscribe to Fran Magazine.