Fran Magazine: Sunday Dispatch, Apr. 21-27

Here's a free (but sparse) dispatch for everyone

This is the Fran Magazine Sunday Dispatch, a weekly culture diary usually for paid subscribers only (but this one is free). The Sunday Dispatch details what I’m watching, reading, playing, and listening to. Paid subscriptions help stabilize my career in culture writing full-time, but all readers — paid & not — are appreciated. Feel free to follow me on Instagram or Letterboxd (for free!). Thanks for reading!

Not me on vacation again….

I didn’t mean to go on vacation twice in one month, but sometimes life has a way. “Fran is always traveling,” I hear you say. Well, again, I’ll remind you the contours of me having a “real job” are few and far between, and I am writing my Substack while ostensibly otherwise “OOO” so it’s not really a vacation though I am definitely eating too much and sleeping in.

I am in Northern New Mexico with my friends Cameron and Lucy, with whom I’ve traveled to Iceland and to St. Louis and up the California coast. We all know each other from early days in Chicago, and I think we share similar travel sensibilities (prioritizing oddities, nature, restaurants, and driving around a lot to an ongoing, multi-hundred song playlist that Cameron made a decade ago).

We’ve been talking about coming to New Mexico for years, and I’ve never really spent any time in the southwest of the United States (I’d basically never been anywhere south besides Florida until I went to New Orleans last March). It’s nuts, it’s beautiful, the driving is a ton of fun. It’s been nice to finally make good on a trip that’s probably been four or five years in the works — I think the initial seeds were planted in 2019 — and the fact that it happened the same month as the London trip were insane but manageable (though I am more tired than I’ve been in a minute). I am looking forward to going nowhere by plane for the foreseeable future, I’ll say that much.

I was initially going to be running the Brooklyn half-marathon this weekend — today, actually — which I signed up for last summer after the high of running the Jersey City half-marathon last year. I was really looking forward to the race (great route! from Greenpoint down to Prospect Park) and I have a handful of friends running it, but my hip injury from last year is still too big a pain in the ass. I’m more mobile than I was, say, in the fall (doing yoga 3-4 times a week is definitely helping with flexibility and division of weight), but I am still not in good running shape which is frustrating. Getting out of town this weekend, in turn, felt a little like traveling for my birthday, which is to say, avoiding the obvious in lieu of the pleasurable.

It has also just been an egregiously busy week: I am in the thick of thesis paper grading for school¹ and reporting out a few stories right now as well as working on a huge flowchart about the pop music that’s on the horizon for the summer. The one thing I wrote and published this week was a blog about the Challengers score, which of course I love. I am behind on my reading (still revisiting The Line of Beauty ahead of Mervyn May) and my gaming (I still want to accomplish more in Hades but I haven’t played in almost a month now!) and my television viewing (you have to believe that we still have just one more episode of Fosse/Verdon we’re not watching). Anyway, things here are a little barebones, but I will include some pictures from our roadtrip up to Abiquiu and the Ghost Ranch and the Georgia O’Keeffe museum today down after my non-reviews of the two movies I watched this week, and I promise a lot more to come soon.

Abigail, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett (2024)

Watched at Regal Essex. I like Ready Or Not more than a lot of people I know — a film that was definitely enhanced by the fact that I watched it at 6:30 in the morning on a flight from New York to Chicago — but not enough to justify this movie doing all the same tricks² at what felt like twice the runtime. As a fan of The Guest (2014), it pains me to see Dan Stevens do whatever he’s doing here. I get that maybe he has more fun in schlock mode but this was incoherent and, worse, annoying. I am so annoyed at the current state of vampire movies — this, Last Voyage of the Demeter³, something else probably — that I’ll really need the Robert Eggers Nosferatu movie to hit or I’m going to get pissed. Making a vampire movie should be the easiest thing in the world, like I really believe some of the dumbest people are capable of making a good vampire movie. They are such a flexible type of monster — sexy! scary! yucky! chaste! they can do it all! Anyway, for all the fun this movie should be, it’s mostly tedious and gross. Only Kathryn Newton is on the wavelength of the movie, and I always think she’s actually Olivia Cooke. I think it’s because they both look like this to me: O_O

Game 3, Nuggets v Lakers

I watched this on the plane to New Mexico while the girl next to me fell asleep three different times trying to watch After Yang.⁴

Challengers, Luca Guadagnino (2024)

Rewatched at Violet Crown in Santa Fe. Read Matt on the movie itself; read Clare on Patrick Zweig. You can read me (again) on the score of the film. I plan to write more about the movie for this week’s issue of Fran Magazine.

How about some photos

1. After learning that my current contract probably won’t be renewed for the ‘24-25 school year… haha… awesome…

2. What’s more fun than a body exploding?

3. Which, okay, I never saw, but only because everyone I knew who saw was like, they could have done this way better.

4. Been there!