#29: Holding space for giving thanks
Death By Consumption
11/19/24 - 11/25/24
Because of procrastination, I didn’t get tickets to see either of the sold-out huge movies over the weekend. Instead, I saw a movie everyone stopped talking about a couple weeks ago. You are witnessing a marketing and SEO genius at work, people! I am in Wisconsin for Thanksgiving week, though, so I am hoping I can see both of the movies here — they don’t seem to be as sold-out as they were in NYC, probably thanks to a gay-person-population-density thing.
This week, I watched Hugh Grant play an evil mansplainer, girded my loins for Gladiator 2, gave into the insane Wicked promo machine, was once again let down by Robert Moses, and was disgusted by various foods.
“Holding space for the lyrics” — on the website formerly known as Twitter
Whether you haven’t seen this clip until now, or, like me, you’ve watched it 300 times, you really should watch it. I’m writing this nearly a week into the meme cycle, so the jokes are already starting to get old (by the time I’ve published this I’m sure we’ll have reached the point of the meme industry where, like, Exxon has tweeted something like, “We’re holding space for green energy”), but the original clip still hits just as hard as the first time I saw it.
The way they are speaking and behaving in this video is everything that typically annoys me — overwhelming self-seriousness, buzzword soup, theater people — but, when all of that is combined into a single perfect clip, it all transcends its annoying parts and becomes something greater. This video feels almost holy. Watching it acts for my brain exactly like those DDoS attacks where bots swarm a website to shut it down. When I watch this video, time slows around me. I can feel my synapses powering down in real-time as the seconds tick by. By the time the interviewer announces with importance that she is, in fact, in queer media, I have reached nirvana. I’m firing my therapist; all I need now is this video.
Heretic (2024) — at Nitehawk Prospect Park Theater
Hugh Grant had a lot of fun making this movie, and I had fun watching it. The end!
This film wasn’t anything groundbreaking, but it was a well-constructed thriller that kept you wondering, and the bar is low these days, so this counts as a rave review. The premise — two Mormon missionaries knock on a door and are invited into Hugh Grant’s house, only to find they can’t leave easily — is very clever, and while Hugh Grant’s character can get extremely, annoyingly mansplainy, Hugh is at his most charming throughout, so I never felt too annoyed with how much of the film is just talking. Because boy is it a lot of talking! The dialogue is also vaguely Ricky Gervaisian in subject, a lot of profound-in-high-school musings on the origins of world religions and whether it’s all bullshit, but, I don’t know, it all kind of worked! The ending, however, reinforces my belief that the art of wrapping up a thriller or horror film seems to have been lost to humanity about 15 years ago. All movies know how to do anymore is set up an unnecessary sequel or just fizzle out!
The Deer Hunter (1978) — on Netflix
I don’t know if this is, like, a kosher opinion, but I thought this was just okay. The performances were great, and I liked a lot of the choices made throughout, but it certainly did not need to be three hours long. Once upon a time a three-hour film was a rare thing, one that signified you were watching an Important Story. But now that every Marvel movie is three hours’ worth of Buzzfeed Millennial Dad humor, I’m primed to watch most movies with an editor’s eye, making mental cuts along the way, and The Deer Hunter definitely had some fat to be trimmed. But there is a lot of the film to love: a baby-faced Meryl (and yet still looking like herself in 2024), equally youthful Christopher Walken and De Niro, some stunningly tense sequences in Vietnam, the gorgeous Cascade mountain range attempting to stand in for Pennsylvania(????), many scenes of Russian roulette if that’s your thing. I can see why this movie got so much prestige, but I can’t say I’d ever watch it again. But really, Meryl Streep’s face has not aged since she was 29, and I just think that’s unfair!
Gladiator (2000) — on Apple Movies
In anticipation of watching Paul Mescal prancing around in a leather skirt this week, we had to watch the original, which I don’t think I‘ve seen since it first came out. It mostly holds up! We were all distracted, however, by learning about actor Oliver Reed’s death while filming this — the “alcoholism” and “death” sections of his Wikipedia are wild and sad.
“Robert Caro’s The Power Broker at 50” — at the New York Historical Society
Robert Moses August has bled into the fall, I guess! I’m never going to be free from this man. This exhibit on the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Power Broker has been heavily promoted around the city, so I was surprised to discover it was essentially… some papers put behind glass in a hallway. In retrospect, I don’t know what I was expecting. A guy wrote a book 50 years ago — what more is there to say? I didn’t really need to see random pages with sentences scribbled out to understand that, yes, books are edited! To write a book, you write a bunch of words, and then you and your editor cross out a lot of those words. The more you know!
The best part of the museum, actually, was the separate exhibit on pets in New York over the centuries, with lots of fun paintings and photos of people posing with their strange pets:
And their “Pride & Protest” exhibit is also full of fun photos and stories, including this old Village Voice headline:
“The Case Against Deli Meat” by Lane Brown — in NYMag
Don’t read this article over lunch. It’s a nauseating look at the Boar’s Head recall that killed several people, and the larger issues in our food industry. I’m sure it’ll all be sorted out soon, once Elon decides food inspections are a waste of money! There are some descriptions of meat factories that haven’t made me this ill since I read The Jungle in high school:
“I’ve worked with all the big-name meat companies. Most meat plants are bad, and some are really despicable and shouldn’t be processing.” He tells me about one filthy fresh-meat plant that, blessedly, burned down and another in the same state that’s probably still full of “black mold and big cockroaches.” He also sends me the USDA inspection records for a Perdue fresh-poultry slaughter-and-processing factory in Lewiston, North Carolina, that produces meat for Trader Joe’s and Wegmans. According to those documents, USDA agents found 115 noncompliance violations in the plant — including “foul odor,” “carcasses with fecal material,” and “live roaches too numerous to count” — in just June and July 2022.
Does this make me want to be a vegetarian? Kind of! But the more likely response I’ll have is to simply reassure myself that my body is healthy enough to survive any parasites the meat industry feeds me — and maybe the parasites will even make me stronger? This is how I get RFK brain worms.
Honeynut squash cappelletti — at Foul Witch in Manhattan
Foul Witch bills itself as a “spooky Italian” restaurant, which… sure! I will admit that bit of marketing worked on making me curious enough to want to go, but of course the concept meant almost nothing when you’re actually there. (The only “spooky” moment was the roast guinea hen leg arriving at the table with the claw intact, hanging off the plate, which, to be fair, I’m sure kills on Instagram.)
If this were a Top Chef challenge, Tom would have savaged them for not actually doing the challenge — what makes this food spooky? Please, someone explain it to me! What would have saved them from elimination, however, was the quality of the dishes themselves, which were great. Almost everything we ordered was pretty spectacular, most notably the extremely fresh squash pasta, little packets of luscious filling in a delicate butter sauce. But boy were these plates tiny and EXPENSIVE. We were advised to order 5 dishes to share between 2 people, but after going overboard with 7 dishes we were still left hungry, and our bill had already gone well over $300. $300! This was such extreme sticker shock to the point where I felt like I had been tricked, like a Trump voter trying to purchase eggs next year.
The scallop appetizer, while absolutely delicious, was something like $20, and when it arrived what did you get for your 20 bucks? 2 scallops. Two! Look, I’m not opposed to paying more for higher quality products, or for supporting the waitstaff getting health insurance or whatever racks up your restaurant bills these days, but $20 for two scallops on a tiny little plate, no matter how well prepared, was just rude. At least sprinkle caviar on it or some shit! Make me at least feel like I’m paying for it for a real reason, you know? No matter how good the food is, after paying hundreds of dollars for minuscule pasta dishes, I now understand why they call their food spooky. That was the scariest check I’ve seen in a while.