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We’re living in a post-Insidious: The Red Door Brianna’s Digest this week (although, we are not living in a post-Insidious: The Red Door world, if you’ve looked at the facts and figures from this past weekend; congratulations to my good friend, Patrick Wilson, by the way). This week is a very nothing lull for me in anticipation of Barbie/Oppenheimer next week, since I’m not interested in the new Mission Impossible movie. I’ve seen Fallout at the insistence of my ex (it was fine, I think?), and while I do plan to get to all the other MI films, I have no interest in seeing the new one before I’ve seen the other ones since no one is making me. Since I began this draft on Tuesday, I have actually now seen the first MI (more on that soon), but otherwise I’m not going to see the new installment in a franchise I care about quite yet. Sorry if this offends!
Speaking of Barbenheimer, I will be having some friends in town next week to go see the double feature, so there’s a chance that next week’s Digest and Sunny review will have to be delayed a little, depending on how much I’m able to get done before they arrive. I also ended up writing a little micro-essay to coincide with Barbie release week that I plan to publish here on Monday. Depending on how many posts I end up putting out next week, I might delay the AMA post until the following week so as to not overload things. The AMA Q’s are still due by Sunday this weekend, so this is your first reminder, but I’ll be sending out a separate email post reminder tomorrow as well. Thank you to everyone who has sent questions so far :)
Cinema
As I mentioned two paragraphs ago, I have now seen the first Mission: Impossible. My thoughts are that: it was very fun, and very good, and I had a good time, and I’ll go ahead and I’ll see the rest of the movies. I did have a couple other thoughts while watching, the first of which was that it’s crazy that at one point you could have a director like fucking Brian De Palma direct a film in your action franchise, and not only that but it would feel like a real movie. I was thinking about this after a tweet I saw lamenting how the MI film franchise has gone on to make bazillions of dollars, and yet the director who kicked off the entire thing now struggles to get even one movie made. As much as I adore the King of Movies, Tom Cruise, and his quest to save the film industry one theatrical screening and bucket of popcorn at a time, it really is such a depressing thought that one of the greatest American film directors is left to languish in obscurity, and a far less stylistically competent director is now in charge of the whole horse and pony show. It’s like, if Mr. Cruise wants to save movies, maybe he should extend some of his earnings so we can get one more De Palma film before the guy dies. That seems a bit more important, no?
My second thought was, I frequently forget about how beautiful Tom Cruise is. Many have pointed out that age is finally catching up to him, and it kinda looks like his cheeks are melting off his face now. But I think it’s nice that he finally looks like an old-er guy (he is 61!!!!!!). Anyway, Tom Cruise has always just kind of been Mr. Handsome Celebrity Who’s Everywhere to me, and so the real, unique handsomeness of his face starts to wash over you, because he’s just a face you see all the time, constantly, like a fast food or erectile dysfunction ad, and the potency of the face loses its effect — if that makes sense. But I snap back to reality every time I watch a movie with him as a younger man, and I am like “Oh yeah, wow, he is so beautiful and gorgeous — this is why he’s Mr. Movies.” Although, and I forget exactly what gossip rag I was reading as a teenager that pointed this out, but Cruise’s teeth are crooked, and I am always looking for it whenever I see him. Basically, your two big front teeth are supposed to perfectly center your smile, but his teeth are lopsided, and only one tooth really sits in the front. If you didn’t already notice this, I hope you always do now!
Last week, I watched a movie called Ghost Ship, which is a five-star film for the first 10-15 minutes and a one-star film for the remaining 80. Spoilers, but let me set the scene for you. The horror picture, about a haunted, abandoned cruise ship from the 1960s, starts off with charming opening credits that mimic a classic Hollywood film. Ultimately, what happens after is that, while guests are dancing to live music on the ship’s ballroom floor, a Rube Goldberg-esque scheme causes a strong, metal wire to break free and bisect the entire roomful of people, except for one little girl, who then has to watch as the adults around her slowly detach from their own bodies. It’s a brilliant, gruesome way to introduce your film, and yet it was clearly too high of a height for the rest of the film to reach. It’s honestly so baffling that I feel physically irritated by it — no horrific ghosts missing limbs and heads and torsos to torment the salvage crew led by Gabriel Byrne, who want to bring the ship to shore and reap its untapped riches (I have to stress that this movie was rated R).
It’s overall a great premise; as we saw with the, uh, recent Titanic incident, people are completely obsessed with abandoned, wrecked ships, and the ocean is already basically the scariest place on earth. There’s so much material to work with for a horror film, yet Ghost Ship is nominally comprised of boring conversations and various random things in the ship going awry because of the ghosts, none of whom you can see. The only ghost you do get to see is the pure and innocent ghost of the little girl from the opening, who looks like a completely unblemished, if slightly pale child, and Julianna Margulies is able to fully see her and converse with her. It sucks so much shit it is unbearable for me to keep writing about it, but I will say that in addition to the opener, another positive is that we do get some sweet, sweet, nu-metal in the soundtrack. I have written about this so many times at this point, but movies in the 2000s could legally not hit theaters without at least one nu-metal song, and they were all the better for it.
I would also just like to add — even though it’s somewhat of a moot point by now — that the trailer for Wonka is one of the worst things I’ve ever seen in my life. I’m gonna start off by coming clean and admitting I do not think Timmy C is a very good actor. He is a fine performer for one specific type of role — angsty guy who is a bit sad and sensitive, too (Dune, Bones and All, Little Women, CMBYN, Beautiful Boy, etc.). Beyond that, Tim doesn’t have much range, and when he attempts to flex it (The French Dispatch, Don’t Look Up), I’d argue that it’s not really pushed enough to prove that he can go the distance. Enter Wonka, where the actor known for playing sad angsty boys is now in the role of “goofy little guy,” finally forced to really stretch his acting skills beyond his comfort zone.
And the results are fucking dire; I’ve watched him in the “quiet down, listen up” scene on repeat because I find it addictive just how brutal it is to watch. It’s clear from the trailer that Timothée has no whimsy, no weirdness; his sad eyes do not spark joy, his face strains to emote. He’s a charisma-void and cannot evoke any genuine personality, so I can’t understand why he was picked for a role that an actor like Gene Wilder made iconic (which genuinely feels like such cruel onus to put on young Timothée; but he can’t be worse than Johnnny Depp…right?). Obviously, he was cast because he’s the hot boy of the moment, but imagine Nicholas Hoult — an actor who has proven himself on multiple occasions that he’s adept at playing silly — in the role instead. I’m sure the movie would still suck, but at least we wouldn’t have to watch Chalamet debase himself by forcing the muscles in his face to move in ways he’s never used them, for a Willy Wonka origin story that I cannot see making more than $2.
Literature
Per two Digests ago, I am still working my way through Steve Brusatte’s The Rise and Reign of the Mammals — though, by now, I’m very close to being done. I’ve got about 60 pages left, and this is probably the quickest I have ever read a 400-page book in my entire life. I thought I’d offer my Digest readers a fun new factoid that I’ve learned in my recent reading that really blew me away. In the previous chapter on mammals and changing climates, Brusatte details how the earth has flip-flopped through periods of intense warming and intense cooling across its multi-billion-year lifespan, and how the creatures of the planet either adapted or died — and all new creatures were made. In the next chapter on Ice Age mammals, he reveals something I found incredibly shocking: we are, in fact, still living through the same Ice Age as made famous by Blue Sky Studios’ Ice Age the movie.
The thing is, this famed period of global freezing began about 130,000 years ago, with its coldest peak at around 26,000 years ago, and altogether it was only one phase of the Ice Age: “one of dozens of cycles of glacial advances and retreats over the past 2.7 million years (mostly during a time called the Pleistocene) that, added together, make up what we call the Ice Age.” This period is comprised of shifting glacial and interglacial periods, where glaciers either move onto the continents or melt back down. So, the fact is, we are currently in one such interglacial phase, and Brusatte even notes that, because of man-made climate change, it’s likely that we will suppress a glacial period that would otherwise bury major American cities in ice. Science is cool! Thank you, Steve.
And while I’m far passed the most intense periods of “climate anxiety” (in retrospect, a concept I find incredibly embarrassing), this book has offered quite a bit of comfort, and maybe it can comfort you, too. It’s not just that the world has experienced it’s fair share of inhospitable warming (because what’s happening at the moment is faster warming than ever before), and it’s not like the author himself is overly optimistic of what’s going to happen to the earth and its creatures. Nobody can predict exactly what’s going to happen, not even scientists. And I’m not a scientist, obviously, so you don’t have to take whatever I’m saying with any grain of salt. But the fact is that, whether or not humankind persists, the earth will. We’re not killing the planet (even if we are killing many, many species), we are just moving it into a new phase, one it will eventually shake off, move on from and start anew — perhaps, into an even better version.
But even still, as the book details, and as Brusatte plainly admits, mammals are particularly resilient creatures; in some form or another, we have outlived every major period of extreme climate change, including the dinosaur-killing asteroid, to get us to where we are today. And now, we exist as the first creatures with the brain power and consciousness to actually do something about the climate change that’s happening around us. Even if we’re the ones causing it, I think that has to count for something.
Television
I’m fully addicted to my first reality TV show (please clap). I don’t really know why I don’t watch reality TV; I love stupid trash and I’ve had a lot of people urge me to watch shows like Love Island and Real Housewives of Wherever. I think it has to be some sort of holdover from disavowing anything lowbrow, similar to how I felt about Adam Sandler, when I was younger (even though I literally watched Jersey Shore?). In any case, I’ve started watching that Claim to Fame show, after the clip of Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson’s niece having a full-blown meltdowm when she got eliminated in the first episode was circulating on Twitter. I think the premise of the show is fun — I love finding out that people are related to celebrities, I love watching the lesser Jonas brothers do painful skits with one another, and it’s illuminating just how silly and stupid and insane the normie relatives of celebrities can be (even though, thus far, there are two revealed children of major celebrities, which is definitely far from normie).
Additionally, sometime last year, my mom recommended I watch an Australian sitcom called Kath & Kim (Fun fact: there was a failed American remake starring Molly Shannon and Selma Blair during the 2000s, that I had watched as a kid who just wanted to watch whatever was on TV, and I found out only after it was cancelled that my cousin was a script supervisor on it). My mom and I diverge more often than not on the media we consume, and I was planning on taking her up on the offer at some point. But. nevertheless, I put off for as long as I could. After finishing up my rewatch of 30 Rock last week and finding that I’d pretty much exhausted all the rewatches of my favorite shows, I thought, why not. Let’s just do it. Let’s just throw this stupid thing on; I need something on my TV while I play Sudoku and crochet before bed.
The show — about a mom and her adult faildaughter — is not actually that funny to me at all. In fact, I pretty much never laugh when I watch it. But I’ve been working my way through it (despite the fact that I have to hook my laptop to my TV with my HDMI cord because Netflix just crashes my Roku now) because I find the ridiculousness of the Australian accent to be a soothing form of ASMR. So, if you, like me, need something calming on your TV while you do your little tasks and hobbies before bed, I highly recommend Kath & Kim. If you want to laugh, however, I do not recommend it. Please don’t tell my mom I said this.
your writing on The Rise and Reign of the Mammals made me buy the book lol. especially loved the last 2 paragraphs here