#50: Cate Blanchett should be James Bond
Death By Consumption
4/8/25 - 4/14/25
Did you love paying your taxes today??? I have a visceral memory of being outraged during the Bush era that my taxes were going towards racist government torture prisons, an anger that was only somewhat lessened by the knowledge that the only taxes collected from me personally were on my Cold Stone Creamery paychecks. I probably sent Bush $150 in taxes, but I knew those fuckers had figured out how to maximize their evils-per-dollar accounting. Welllllll turns out that was only a taste of what was to come! Everything has gotten so bad so fast — I knew we'd get to concentration camps eventually, but to get to them by the end of Q1 is especially chilling. All my hatred has been focused on Elon Musk, but now that he's fading into the background because even the other Nazis find him annoying, I'm freed up to refocus my hatred on Stephen Miller, a grotesque worm whose face could singlehandedly convince me the "lizard people control the government" conspiracy theory might have made some good points. And I know this isn't the most pressing issue right now, but I can't believe these psychos are making me root for Harvard. When, uh, is this all going to end? Ha ha, no rush!
This week, amongst the horrors, I watched the new Soderbergh sexy spy caper, plus a lovely little film about being a hypocritical, insecure Jewish person living in New York City (my biopic!). I also did some reading, as always, because at least when someone else's words are in your head it kind of stops all the screaming for a little bit. Anyway, happy Passover and Easter!
(On a more technical note, it seems Gmail relocated these emails to the Promotions tab for a lot of you last week, which I have to say feels extremely shady. If that happened, I think you can just drag it to your regular inbox or whatever and Google's shitty algorithm should hopefully figure out that these are NOT to be buried between emails from a restaurant you ate at 8 years ago and Hakeem Jeffries on hands and knees begging for your cash for no reason.)
Black Bag (2025) — on streaming
It feels like so long since I’ve seen a good sexy spy movie, so this was extremely welcome. Also: it’s only 90 minutes! Honestly, if a movie is under 2 hours long, they should lead their advertising with that info. I genuinely think it would help a movie double its box office. This felt like a tight, efficient, thrilling extra-long TV episode, which I mean as a compliment. There’s nothing revolutionary about this film, but I’d argue that’s one of its strengths.
It takes a done-before plot (husband-and-wife spy duo become suspicious of each other) and makes it feel new again, largely thanks to Cate Blanchett, who slinks around in sexy silken outfits and a dramatic wig. Marisa Abela (who plays my absolute GIRL Yasmin on Industry) basically plays Yasmin on Industry but if she were a spy — a bratty rich girl who hates her husband and wants to cheat on him but also can’t stand it if he cheats on her — which is, to me, gay catnip. And Michael Fassbender is there, too (allegations of domestic violence aside, he could easily have been replaced by any other British man who looks good in a suit and glasses).
I know the 90s are back in music and fashion, but they’re definitely back in movies as well — we’ve had a slew of recent high-profile films that wouldn’t be out of place on Blockbuster shelves 30 years ago, most notably Conclave, Juror #2, and now Black Bag, and I welcome this trend. I know Amazon is about to murder the James Bond franchise with some Marvel-type universe-expanding corporate bullshit, but they should really think about handing the franchise over to Soderbergh. The man makes a good, sleek little spy thriller! Let Cate Blanchett be James Bond, you cowards!
Crossing Delancey (1988) — on Criterion
Jewish excellence. There’s so much to love in this quiet, simple movie. Amy Irving — rocking some iconic hair — stars as Izzy, a spinster at the tragic age of 33 (I was laughing at this until I did the math and realized my parents were 28 and already had 2 kids at the time this came out), who loves her glamorous life among the literati in NYC, but wants a partner. At first, she’s charmed by a rather grotesque author who does a reading at her bookstore (I think we’re actually supposed to find him handsome, but I felt towards him the way I feel towards 75% of the men in Sex and the City: this is who you’re fawning over? The 80s and 90s were so tragic when it came to male love interests). But her love life takes a turn when her Jewish bubbe on the LES (an absolutely iconic performance by Reizl Bozyk, a Polish star of Yiddish theater, in her only film role) arranges for a matchmaker to set her up.
The matchmaker arranges a date with Sam, played by Peter Riegert (which gave me an enormous “oh, that guy!” moment when he first showed up), who owns a pickle shop on the LES, which, hilariously, disgusts Izzy. He’s too low-class for her, so she turns him down, but, would you be shocked to learn that she possibly reconsiders, and even learns things about herself along the way? It’s a very simple plot, but this is such a textually rich film, so deeply immersed in the subculture of Jewish New York, that I found it irresistible.
This is like if Sex and the City had 50% more Yiddish, just a really fun sliver of some really specific ways people live in New York City. And, unfortunately, a lot of it rang true today. Who hasn't put their career before their relationship at times? And who wouldn't be turned off by a man whose hands smelled like pickles?! If this movie came out in 2025 I'd probably loathe its schmaltzy, familiar story beats, but 40 years later I couldn't have been more charmed.
"The Case of the Missing Elvis" by Zach Helfand — in The New Yorker
This article is a nice, relatively stress-free snapshot of the best and worst parts of New York. It's full of the kind of eccentrics that can really only exist here, who are regretfully a dying breed, and it made me realize I've been living here so much longer than I ever really think about. The way they write about the Great Jones Cafe as if it were ancient history, and the fact that I used to regularly enjoy gumbo and a Red Stripe there, made a chill pass through my aching joints.
The story is also — without ever explicitly saying it, thank god — a perfect synecdoche of the past few decades in the city: the last vestiges of the true punk downtown scene, into the Bloomberg years of big money gutting the soul of everything you love, right into the Adams/Hochul/Trump/Cuomo(ugh) era of everyone absolutely drooling to have a reason to call the cops on someone who committed a minor inconvenience to them. Not only do people not want to have fun anymore, but if they see you having fun, they'll call the cops. A nation of tattletales!
Beautyland, by Marie-Helene Bertino (2024) — library ebook
Of the two books I read this week, I expected to dislike this one and love the next one, but Beautyland surprised me. It has all the hallmarks of a book I would hate — it's mostly told from the perspective of a quirky, awkward child, who genuinely believes she's an alien sent to Earth on a secret mission to report on humanity — and yet, against all odds, it completely worked for me. It's been described as "funny," a word I am absolutely begging reviewers to stop using when they mean "clever." I suppose if you found Jesse Eisenberg's nightmare film A Real Pain funny, then maybe you'd get a chuckle out of the light, wry observational humor in this book, but what I said about that film applies to this book: this is New Yorker cartoon humor, at best.
(An example of the book's humor: “When it was time to decide the official food of movie-watching, human beings did not go for Fig Newtons or caramel, foods that are silent, but popcorn, the loudest sound on Earth.” That is some real 1970s Woody Allen humor, the kind of line that could be funny if it came out of George Costanza's mouth, but if said by a Jesse Eisenberg character would send me into a violent rage.)
Still, I won't hold that against it, as I found the book genuinely sweet and surprisingly emotional by the end. The quirkiness of our main character, who faxes reports on human behavior to her alien superiors, takes a bit to get used to — especially when others learn of that behavior and, instead of mocking her, turn her into a cult literary success — but the mechanism somehow worked as a way to comment on the utter strangeness of being alive.
Someone Like Us, by Dinaw Mengestu (2024) — library ebook
This book, which tells the story of a journalist semi-passively attempting to unravel the secrets of his Ethiopian father's life, made a big splash last year, but I hate to say it did not connect with me. The story has the pacing of a mystery novel, but it's one where nothing much is uncovered. Ultimately, it's a sad, slow reflection on death and immigration and loss.
Unreliable narrators can be fun, but not this one. Our narrator puts us through a lot of quiet self-loathing and “flashbacks” that may have been actual delusions. Occasionally you'd get a really lovely or funny or heartbreaking insight about the immigrant experience (like the dad’s comment that, when he was younger, if he had died in America it would have made the news back in Ethiopia, but now he’s just another Ethiopian-American; a perfect encapsulation of the bitterness with which some immigrants want to pull up the ladder after themselves) but those were few and far between. The book is, mostly, just a guy drinking and being sad for vague reasons in various hotel bars around America.
If I'm being cynical, this felt like a book designed solely to end up on Obama's end-of-year book list. If so, a genuine congrats to Dinaw Mengestu for pulling it off! I can't and won't shame any authors successfully scheming to sell more copies in this day and age. It's tough out there!