Links Friday: Not So Much

Again a pretty light Friday but at least it’s actually a Friday this time!
The Kentucky Derby is tomorrow and I went to the beach twice this week, as it’s the only reasonable place to be when the weather is over 80 degrees.  And I finished Middlemarch this morning.  Very exciting.

And say to my new beluga desktop background.

• Vacation inspiration from the ever-fabulous Tracee Ellis Ross.
• There’s a Reformation store coming to Boston!
• From Crystals to Horoscopes: The Rise of Spirituality in a Skeptical World.  The intersections of wellness, spirituality, and woowoo stuff always fascinates me.
• This film looks super cute.
• Need some self-care reminders? @tinycarebot has you covered.
• On DwtS, Adam Rippon cha chas to RuPaul’s Sissy that Walk. It’s pretty good (although their connection could be better ;P )
  And Mirai’s salsa.
  No, I don’t actually watch Dancing with the Stars.
• I’m a fan of this style of girl names. What would you pick for this couple?

Friday Links 1/19

Happy Friday! I have the day off, which is many kinds of wonderful (not least because I get to go out and buy a pastry and check some travel guide out from the library and maybe find a waterproof pair of boots.)
(You know, the real problem is that I just want these ten year old riding boots to be new again, or to find a pair of Chelsea boots that are pretty similar. But the Vogue right now seems to be for combat boots or boots that are combat-adjacent so I’m having some trouble).

Anyway, links!

• Collider (one of my favorite youtube channels on the film industry, frequently mentioned on the blog) doesn’t usually discuss anime, but Emma’s here to decode some common visual tropes and gags.
• More things I’ve learned from my amazing and diverse ISIPCA classmates? Dan from Australia taught me about ‘Firehawk’ raptors, which spread bushfires to flush out their prey.
• There’s a Star Wars-themed Creperie in Paris. The dishes are named after the planets by which they were inspired.  Not at all vegan-friendly, but I’m so amused.
• I know I hate on GP’s goop, but this is actually a pretty good article about how our negativity is in many ways an adaptive strategy, a self-defense mechanism to protect us from past threats- and so a lot of negativity may no longer really be necessary (and may actually be counterproductive) to leading happy lives.  I know I sound super woo woo so I’ll stop, but it does resonate with a lot of what I’ve observed and thought re: my own negativity and cynicism.
  But yeah, no, I only skimmed the article.
• What do I really want? Continuing to love Mari Andrew’s illustrations.
• Also Poorly Drawn Lines’s send up of this classic Lion King scene.
• Screen Junkies (another favorite youtube channel on the film industry) presents their annual Screens awards for the best and worst in movies and television.
• Unforgettable movie style moments. Some (Keira Knightley’s green Atonement dress) would definitely be on my own list (which, hey, will maybe happen someday).
• I hope you made it through Blue Monday (the most depressing day of the year, apparently) okay. If you’re still feeling a bit of residual down-ness, here are some lovely feel-good movie dance scenes. I still always listen to Dancing Queen when I need a boost. I have to say I think Moses Supposes from Singin’ in the Rain is actually more feel good than the title song, but whatever. Again, maybe this is a moment when a personal list is needed.
• You’ve heard of the KonMari Method. Maybe you’ve even partaken in some Swedish death cleaning (I’m only 22 and I know I have. One needs to be prepared)- now t’s time for the hot decluttering trend of 2018: American Apocalypse Purging.
• Another anticipated 2018 film (see earlier post): Love, Simon.
• I watched I, Tonya and thought it was pretty good (Blades of Glory is still the best figure skating film), but you know what I’d love to see? A film about figure skating legend Surya Bonaly. Because a backflip is almost as difficult as the Iron Lotus.
• The mindset of men and women re: sex and during sex itself, and how this influences the way women write about sex.  A really interesting read.
• A very cogently written account of the issues with Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water. It’s always brilliant when you find an article that explains your gut feelings. Beautiful film, serious problems.
• There’s a Colette film coming! Keira Knightley’s going to star! I’m not sure those two go together! But I love both separately!
• On Aziz Ansari and sexual assault vs sexual coercion: I don’t believe sexual coercion is sexual assault. But it’s not exactly enthusiastic consent either.  I don’t think it’s too much to ask men to interpret mixed signals, particularly when sexual violence against women is so common and fear of the consequences of refusal is so real.
• If becoming a perfumer doesn’t work out, maybe I can go into gourmet ice cream.

New to Me: Best Movies Watched in 2017

Most of my movie watching is not new releases, so much as catching up on films that were once new releases but haven’t been from somewhere between a year to a century.
And they’re none the worse for that.

To be eligible for this list, the film must be one of my favorites that I watched in 2017 but NOT released this year.

• Shall We Dance (1937)
  I can’t say enough about this film- one of the most beautiful Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers vehicles that I’ve ever seen.  Highlights: Slap That Bass and Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off (roller-skates!)
• Kingsman: The Secret Service (2014)
  I’ve already talked tons about Kingsman so I’ll keep this short. You’ll never think of Free Bird the same way again.
• 3:10 to Yuma (1957)
  While the more recent version is good (particularly for a modern remake, that most justly maligned of categories) it still doesn’t really hold a candle to the absolutely masterful original- the frustrating but heroic town drunk (completely cut from the modern version), Van Heflin’s scrappy portrayal of Dan Evans, and above all Glenn Ford’s suave outlaw Ben Wade. Plus the song.
• Django Unchained (2012)
  Tarantino’s films are very hit or miss for me, but Django Unchained was very much a hit.  The cast is excellent, the plot is fun and exciting. Tarantino does his fun soundtrack thing.
• The Piano Teacher/ La Pianiste (2001)
  This movie is beautifully repulsive. Basically a piano teacher (Heyyy Isabelle Huppert) conducts and affair with one of her students who believes that she is falling in love with him, essentially misreading the symptoms of her rapidly deteriorating sanity as signs of romantic obsession.
• The Hurt Locker (2008)
  I had pretty much decided not to watch this because it looked a bit testosterone-heavy for me, but a confluence of circumstances led to me watching it and discovering that it is in fact a thoughtful and well-paced film with interesting characters and developments.
• La Piscine/ The Swimming Pool (1969)
  Alain Delon is beautiful. So is Romy Schneider. So is Jane Birkin. So is summer.
• Les Enfants du Paradis/ Children of Paradise (1945)
  This film had me absolutely spellbound for all 3+ hours of runtime.  A theater mime is in love with a courtesan who is also beloved by three other, very different men- a pretentious actor, a conniving thief, and a rich count.
• Contracorriente/ Undertow (2009)
  Contracorriente is my most recent addition to this list, having just watched it I think the day before yesterday. It’s a surreal and poignant ghost story in which a married fisherman has to find a way to reconcile two aspects of his life: his more conventional family life with his pregnant wife and his devotion to his male lover, a painter and town outcast.

Here’s to another year of good films!

Sunday Links 10/29

Lily and I are in the north of France!

• Pierre Dinand, the man behind some of the world’s most iconic perfume bottles.
• I really relate to this illustration.
• Favorite vanilla perfumes? I’d like to add Memoirs of a Trespasser by Imaginary Authors.
• Perfumer Christophe Laudamiel is offering an interactive experience in NYC inspired by Suskind’s book “Perfume: The Story of a Murderer”. Sounds super cool. Also super cool? I met Christophe a few weeks ago. He’s great and he has a great dog.
• I want to see this ballet but I can’t figure out yet how to buy tickets. It also looks like Giselle and Coppelia are coming next year, both of which I’m super interested on.
• Sex and love on the streets of New York- introducing the Love Map project.
• The economics of consent: “Weinstein was a gatekeeper who could give actresses a career that would sustain their lives and the livelihood of their families. He could also give them fame, which is one of few ways for women to gain some semblance of power and voice inside a patriarchal world. They knew it. He knew it. Weinstein could also ensure that these women would never work again if they humiliated him.”
• Super into the trailer for Phantom Thread. Daniel Day-Lewis is the bomb dot com.
• The joy of not wearing a bra.
• Reading Jane Eyre while black.
• Teen Vogue on #FreeMelecio. So glad to see the Yale student body uniting behind this.
• Today is the end of Asexual Awareness Week.
• Harvey Weinstein, Hollywood Beauty Standards, and Abuse: “We need also to recognize that many wealthy and powerful moguls who dehumanize women in private, treating them like consumable goods to be used for their pleasure — like products — are the very same people responsible for the commodified images of womanhood that bombard us everywhere.”
• Seeing (and smelling) a blooming corpse flower is on my bucket list.
• Have you heard about this popular new Amazon service?

Friday Links 10/20

It may not be Friday where you are- hell, it’s hardly Friday here- but I’m starting a new (and long) day and will try to get this out of the gate before it becomes impossible. And if this is posted on Saturday, then you will know it was, actually, impossible.

• “It’s time for their to be roles in the ballet where two men can fall in love”. YES!
• Still trying to scrounge up and SNL skits I can find. Here’s Kellyanne Conway as Pennywise the Clown.
• A friend of mine who is also a Yale professor but who was not my professor and who is an amazing, lovely, inspiring woman wrote about her experience at a ten-day silent Vispassana meditation retreat.
• You already know my (very long and involved) feelings on the #MeToo campaign. From Reductress: Woman posts another Facebook status in hopes that men will learn to be human beings.
• A bunch of exhibitions coming up in Paris! What should I go to?
• Are box stalls really the best option for your horse’s health and happiness, or are they designed to reflect what human beings would want, were they horses?
• Is this feminist poem really by a third grader? “I am a church bell, gonging out wrongs and rights and normal nights.”
• A whole new way for me to be antisocial: Are you an introvert, an extrovert, or a Victorian ghost with unfinished business?
• This is so well-written and so funny: Will pumpkin spice destroy us all?
• Instead of saying, “Do not go around lighting people on fire,” we are telling women, “Don’t be flammable.” Men of the world, you are not the weather.

Friday Links 10/13

I have a lot of links and not a lot of time to think about more interesting and profound posts. So here’s what’s happening on my laptop!

• SNL’s youtube doesn’t upload videos that are watchable in this country (I cry) but I did find Woke Levis.
• Courtesy of Cut Video: I love this couple.
• Ballet and geometry combined. So beautiful.
• Stinky cheese, the science of disgust, and “getting past the smell”.
• A Joan Didion documentary is coming and I’m so excited.
• Expectations vs Reality of perfume hunting: adcopy vs consumer experience.
• What a wonderful world: Blue Planet II.
• There’s a new Last Jedi trailer and I’m so pumped.
• I knew there was a reason I like Eminem.
• On Sexual Harassment.

Much love!

Late For Links: The Last of August

Having missed my scheduled Friday links post yesterday, today’s post will be your belated links installment.

Featuring a lot of politics and a studious neglect of any Taylor Swift-related news.

Playlist: Long Sultry Summer

The first of my anemone flowers started blooming yesterday, which means summer is drawing to a close. Or more accurately, that the end of summer is drawing to a beginning.

Summer isn’t really saying goodbye until the asters and goldenrod are in full swing.

My plane tickets have been bought- my ticket, really, because as of yet there is no return trip.  A one way trip to Charles de Gaulle.

And I may have watched the last film that I will watch that takes place in my city- the last one before I go. It was Gone Baby Gone.  I love it when films make detours to my hometown to find unsavory people, murder victims, and other desperate characters. My favorite movie trope.
And I’ve decided that Jared Leto and Casey Affleck share a category in my head- creepy and lanky white boy actors who seem to take themselves too artistically seriously and who I don’t want to meet.  Much as I admire Jared Leto’s ability to wear way too much Gucci at once. And much as I admire Casey Affleck’s… nothing really, never mind.

Saturday Links July 22

It’s a Saturday edition of the regular Friday links post, which you could look at as a very exciting new development or just sad evidence of my disorganization.
Truthfully, it’s neither: I’m visiting Lily this weekend and we were very wrapped up in seeing each other again (it’s been two whole months, which is a lot when you’ve just been living with someone for four years!) and the rediscovery of the film, A Bug’s Life.

A Bug’s Life was the first movie I ever saw in a theater, but watching it as an adult (for the first time!) has had a lot of unanticipated results. 1) I can’t help but recognize how far computer animation has come. It’s much more detailed now. 2)A Bug’s Life is basically a mashup of Aesop’s Fable (The Ant and the Grasshopper) and the classic film The Seven Samurai. Who knew? (Not three year old me).

Can I Just Talk About Movies For a Minute (or Twenty)?

Firstly, a brief apology that my posting has fallen off (that said, one a day is a bit tricky to maintain- which is the same reason I haven’t taken my vitamins for maybe two months). I blame my “moving to France” preparations. And also I am so tickled that that’s a thing- the best kind of preparations to be making and complications to be having.
But it really does make me annoyed with the government- both governments, America’s and France’s. Anarchy!!!

Okay, I’m done.
You may remember that I did a post some not very long distance of time ago about the movies that were coming out this year, they’re various release dates, what I was excited to see and what not. Well, I foolishly assumed that that would cover my new and unseen film enthusiasm at least for a few months- until the films started popping up that I hadn’t yet heard much about.

It doesn’t seem to have even tided me over for a week.