#41: The Oscar-nominated live action shorts almost killed me
Death By Consumption
2/11/25 - 2/17/25
It's one thing that we're constantly bombarded by news stories involving Elon Musk, but is it too much to ask to not also get frequent updates on his penis? First we're forced to hear about all the various women he's impregnated, but then over the weekend Azealia Banks casually tweeted that Grimes once told her that Elon has a botched penis implant, which, you know what they say: believe women! But still, I do not know why that is any of my business (or why I'm making it yours now, sorry). This man is, if not an outright Nazi, definitely Nazi-curious, let's call it, and beyond that he is just so unpleasant on a visual level. I'm anti-body shaming but with him we can make an exception. He looks like he was rendered by 1990s CGI. He looks like if someone did surgery to try to put Liberace's face on a fish. The gall of this man, to complain about government bloat, when he's the most bloated person in America. Between him and Trump, can you imagine how awful the Oval Office must smell these days? Elon is terrible to look at, horrible to hear about, and I've had enough! Thank you for letting me get that off my chest.
This week was a lighter consumption week, thanks to having friends in town as well as my dear friends' wedding over the weekend. But still, I managed to watch all the Oscar-nominated live action shorts (a deeply harrowing experience), I tried to catch up on the new bleak season of "Love Is Blind", I loved the premiere of "The White Lotus" season 3, and I mourned the death of writer Tom Robbins.
The Oscar-Nominated Live Action Short Films — at the Brooklyn Academy of Music
The four of us who sat down at BAM Cinemas to watch the 5 Oscar-nominated live action short films were not the same four people who left that theater. What we endured was unspeakable, a brutal cinematic assault that left us shaken and, truly, nearly sent me to the hospital.
These films, while short, are not for the faint of heart. Throughout the five 20-minute films, we've got, to name a few key themes: the rise of fascism, anti-Muslim bias, Indian street orphans, the misery of factory servitude, violence against women, migrant family separation, institutionalized child abuse, gun violence, environmental devastation, covid, and a rhino slowly bleeding to death. What I'm saying is: these films are very fun.
Sitting through all five shorts in a row was a little like sitting through a Saw film set in the Schindler's List universe. "Harrowing" doesn't even begin to describe the experience — in fact, we all agreed that it was actually more devastating than sitting through a nearly 2-hour Holocaust film, because in those movies you at least know what you're signing up for; with these five films, we had no clue what was in store for us, so every 20 minutes when a new film started, we were full of hope that maybe, just maybe, we'd get a chance to watch something fun for a little while. But, nope: more horrors.
The third film in the program — Netherland's I'm Not A Robot — gave us some much-needed laughs at the start, when the hero character, sitting at her desk job, slowly discovers she may, in fact, be a robot when she continuously fails the Captcha "I am not a robot" test. But even that funny premise, by the end, spirals into a story of the subjugation of women's bodies, and ends with a shot of a woman bleeding out on the street. Fun!
After that, the final two films were where the true gauntlet of nightmares began. The fourth film, from the US, walks you through the horrific, suffocating minutes in which an American woman’s Central American husband and their young daughter are arrested by ICE agents at their required green card interview (an evil Kafka-esque practice that ICE regularly performs). The film slowly ratchets up the tension until you want to scream, as you witness this mother helplessly watching her young daughter shoved into an unmarked vehicle by government thugs with guns who don't really care if the girl is an American.
By the time that film had finished and the final film started, we were completely beaten down, exhausted. "I don't think I can take another one," my friend Hannah whispered. The last film — South Africa's The Last Ranger — started with gorgeous shots of the South African wilderness. Maybe this was going to be a fun little safari story, perhaps a White Lotus-esque exploration of entitled tourists? Instead, within a matter of minutes we were watching a man use a chainsaw to hack off the horn of a living rhino — with actual, real-life footage spliced in of a real rhino attacked by poachers and left to bleed out. This was when people started to walk out of the theater, and, watching through my fingers, I nearly joined them. This miserable film ends miserably, of course, and as the lights finally, mercifully came up in the theater, we all scattered like cockroaches, in desperate need of a drink.
Once we got to a restaurant and got a table, I realized I was extremely light-headed. A cold sweat started to break out, and within minutes I was soaked, with wet spots appearing all over my sweatshirt. I felt my vision begin to blur, and I struggled to follow my friends' conversation. "Are you okay?" my friend Nora asked, and I assured her I was, though I definitely did not feel okay. We joked about how stressful that experience was, and I tried to write it off as my body coming down from 2 hours of unbearable tension, but in the back of my mind I worried something else was happening.
"I had some minor heart surgery 2 weeks ago," I explained to a new friend at the table, someone I've only hung out with a handful of times so far. I had planned on explaining that that's why I was acting a little more nervous than usual, since I wasn't sure if what was happening to me was related to the heart, but I found that I was unable to keep talking, so I just ended my statement on that ominous note. "That's... not what I expected you to say..." she said, rightfully unsure how to respond to such a needlessly dramatic statement.
Finally, because I'm an idiot, I realized that I had completely forgotten to eat lunch that day, so Nora ran to the bodega next door and bought a Snickers. Literally seconds after eating the candy bar, I stopped sweating and my head cleared up. (This is not an ad, but I'm happy to accept sponsorship from the fine people at Mars Inc.) I spent the next 30 minutes shoveling food into my mouth, and we enjoyed quite the laugh over the fact that those films were so harrowing they genuinely almost sent me to the hospital.
But now I'm worried about the fragile celebrities in the Academy who might watch these films in one sitting like we did. Someone needs to warn Gwyneth Paltrow! I genuinely fear these films could kill her.
And finally: if you're betting on the Oscars, my opinion on the Live Short race is it'll come down to two picks: either India's Anuja (cute child actors who are real-life orphans + Netflix money) or the USA's A Lien (it's the only film in English, and its relevance to our current political nightmare will make Oscar voters feel like they're making a difference by voting for it).
"Love Is Blind" season 8 — on Netflix
This Minneapolis-based season is not Midwestern excellence. My fellow Midwesterners: every day they are LAUGHING at us on the coasts, and this season of "Love Is Blind" is not helping!!!! The cast, for one, is horrifically white — there are a few POC, but I truly do not think I ever saw a white person even go on a single date with a person of color; the races remain completely self-segregated. And, several episodes in, I still cannot tell these men apart. They all sport the same shirts, the same Clarks boots, the same bad pants, the same Jared Kushner haircuts. All the women say, "You have the same name as my dad!" and all the men say, "I love my sisters." All the men work office jobs and love football, and all the women are oncology nurses and also love football.
"It's like watching high schoolers date," my friend said, accurately. I'm going to need someone to start acting crazy ASAP, because I'm not sure I can do a full season of this. I don't know what city is next to get the "Love Is Blind" treatment, but let me suggest my idea: a Salt Lake City season, in which all the women are related to each other, and so are all the men. What this show needs to revive it is a Mormon man who cheats on his fiancee with her own cousin!
"The White Lotus" season 3 premiere – on MAX/HBO
I feel like there's going to be a lot of obnoxiously reactive "Is the White Lotus even that good?" takes this season, after all the built-up acclaim for the past couple years. And, based on the premiere, I don't expect the show to deviate too much from its core formula. But I think that's a massive strength of the show — Mike White figured out a perfect narrative formula that gives himself a fun little sandbox in which to play around with as many fucked-up characters and storylines as he can pack into one week at a hotel. (I know the comparison has been made before, but it's very similar to what makes Survivor work — the show's formula is relatively fool-proof and fairly similar from season to season, so the show is made or broken by the strength of the characters, and what they do within that framework.)
Already, I'm excited by a lot of what we saw: Parker Posey inventing a new accent loosely inspired by a southern accent! Jason Isaacs playing the most attractive dad in human history! Carrie Coon getting angrily wine drunk in every scene! Gay incest? Mike White truly never misses. Sunday nights are SAVED, and just when we needed it most.
Skinny Legs and All, by Tom Robbins (1990) — paperback
When Tom Robbins died last Sunday, I immediately went to my bookshelves, pulled out one of his books, and started reading. I first discovered him — as I'm sure many people did — in high school, after I had finished reading everything Vonnegut had written. Tom Robbins was the logical next step. My bookshelf in Brooklyn now has 7 of his novels on it, the very same books I've dragged around from living place to living place since I was 16.
I worried I had outgrown him, and in some ways I had — there are more than a few AIDS jokes that did not age well, for example — but on the whole I was pleasantly surprised. As with all of his novels, Skinny Legs and All contains a lot of ideas that would probably be described as "bohemian" at the time he was writing. His books are swirls of mysticism and anti-establishment beliefs, with off-kilter characters who tend to deliver lengthy monologues in which they expound on the connections between, say, ancient Biblical figures and fish sticks. One of the major narrators of Skinny Legs and All is a talking, eternally wise can of beans (10 years before a similarly wise and talking can of vegetables showed up in the movie Wet Hot American Summer, for the record). This is a very strange book, one that I'm sure many people would hate.
But for a certain person — for example, a 16-year-old boy trying to figure out his sexuality and where he fit on the gender spectrum in a patriarchal society — this shit hit fucking hard:
“Life still begins in the womb, cocky erections still collapse and lie useless when woman’s superior sexuality is finished with them, but men control the divine channels now, and while that control may be largely a illusion, their laws, institutions, and elaborate weaponry exist primarily to maintain it.”
This was, at the time, the most mind-blowing and revolutionary celebration of feminism I had ever heard — from a man, no less! I felt like I was being let in on a secret that I discovered I already knew.
Or, imagine you're a left-wing teenager watching a neocon president, who stole the election, lead the entire world into a holy war for petroleum by lying to an entirely complacent media, and then you read this:
“Conservatives understand Halloween, liberals only understand Christmas. If you want to control a population, don't give it social services, give it a scary adversary.”
Or just imagine you're a culturally starved Midwestern kid with a lot of feelings you don't know what to do with, and then you read this:
“In the haunted house of life, art is the only stair that doesn’t creak.”
What I'm saying is: to the right person, at the right time, this shit can genuinely knock you completely off course if you let it. (And we wonder why certain people are so fixated on banning books.) And sure, it would be easy now, as a man with hair turning salt-and-pepper and a salary and arches that are in danger of collapsing, to write this all off as corny LSD-inspired pie-in-the-sky fluff, but I don't care, I still love it.
And I do earnestly and genuinely believe that, if we could just get more young American men to smoke some weed and read some Tom Robbins rather than smoking weed and listening to Joe Rogan, nearly every single corner of the world would gradually get better for everyone. RIP Tom Robbins, and thank you for fucking me up exactly when I needed you to.