She got stuck on that dumb make-'em-up (i.e. fantasy) Amazon show. It even derailed her side job as one of the best celebrity audiobook readers. She hasn't narrated a real novel in years; just these fantasy books that are all inexplicably 40+ hours long (double your average Dickens).
Edit: I think she even moved to whatever Eastern Bloc country the show is filmed in.
wheel of time which Celine Song worked on season 1 of!
Materialists seems so polarizing that (guy who directed one of her plays voice) I am bound to love it? will the ten friends I'm going with on Discount Tuesday agree? perhaps not!
woah I missed there's a new Susan Choi! I somehow found myself pleasantly baffled at Materialists. I have read the play she wrote that she has Evans perform in this (which I like a lot) and couldn't stop laughing when it started. not convinced the movie isn't a prank (see Her 2013).
we've watched a lot of really funny stuff lately. ocean's twelve, dick tracy, true grit. I thought for a while I didn't like Matt Damon, but I actually was just annoyed at The Martian. he's such a little freak.
Great twerp in Interstellar! McConaughey's "You fucking coward" might be Nolan's only F-bomb in a PG-13 film. (That's everything in the two decades between Insomnia and Oppenheimer.) Not even the Joker could provoke bad words from the genteel folks of Gotham!
(Technically there's another "fuck," also in Interstellar, revealed only by the closed captions. Another bit of audio effectively bleeps it out. I forget how it's used but it's not as entertaining.)
yes lol the play that Evans is in is her own play and it's my favorite play and I directed it, my friends lost it when Evans started doing the lines. rest of the movie I fear I loved as well- it's cynical and mean! There's no romance or sex at all it's all about business transactions! I don't really care about the last ten minutes and I don't think I'm supposed to idk
The Birdcage is part of my family lore. I think we rented it from Blockbuster to watch together, it was probably my first real exposure to both gay people/drag culture and Gene Hackman (not Nathan Lane, I listened to the Guys & Dolls soundtrack over & over & watched the PBS making of the soundtrack show so many times). My mom & I still say “but wait… the shrimps” every time we eat shrimp. “I pierced the toast” is also in heavy rotation. I love that movie so much.
I was saying on Friday that I think The Birdcage was probably my introduction to gay people and that truthfully, I don't remember a part of my life without it!
Playing a souls game I am relaxed. I am learning, I know exactly what I should be doing at any time, I am constantly making progress. Playing stardew valley I am literally so stressed out. I can always be more optimized, I am never sure if I am doing the right thing, I could also be better. Basically I did like twelve hours of research before my last run just to know exactly how best to min-max it. Only then did I have fun
My big thing with both stardew and animal crossing is I get so self-conscious about like, how ugly my layout is. But I don’t have any of the instincts to make it cut. But mostly also I just like hanging in the mines.
IM LITERALLY THE SAME WAY😭 i cannot play stardew valley bc the ticking clock and the possible failures stress me out too damn bad. meanwhile i’m playing lies of p like lalalallaaaa
Had a similar feeling about The Phoenician Scheme, Michael Cera!! This period of Wes is really interesting I'm curious what the next few are going to be like. Asteroid City cleared this one for me but definitely worth watching
got my dad a Storyworth subscription for Father's Day and a copy of Lonesome Dove for his retirement, thank you Fran Magazine.
had a particularly weird weekend of movies: Batman Forever at the Music Box on Friday at midnight, Secretary last night, and half of Southland Tales yesterday afternoon. [s/o Alex Grelle's drag Nicole Kidman who opened the show and answered pre-recorded "crowd Qs" like "happy Pride to you and your lesbian wife Keith Urban."] really soaking up the psychosexual anxieties of the turn of the millennium that I'd missed as a child.
My dad is so good at his Storyworth, I hope you get a lot out of it!!! Almost watched Secretary last night but instead went for Citizenfour?? Needed to get the taste of texting about Materialists out of my mouth.
Secretary's good! Spader and Gylenhaal are well-matched. it's sexy but not overbearingly so, and not at the expense of the characters. aesthetically and thematically feels very mid-90s despite coming out in '02.
I do want to see Materialists, it’s rare my friends are so united in distaste for a movie and I like looking at Dakota
Been prepping a piece about Mountainhead and I think no one who reviewed it negatively has more of a right to be mad at Armstrong than I, someone who listened to David Sacks’s podcast for research
i am loving your review of the materialists, a movie it is almost impossible that I would ever have watched anyway. in some ways your hatred of it makes it sound interesting lol
To the film's credit, I tell anyone who asks me if they "should" see it that yes, they should!!! (I say this for most movies that aren't like, IP slop, but this one has fueled some interesting discussion in my life!!)
I also found Materialists very disappointing. Dakota Johnson looked luminous but her character was so plastic that it was hard to believe she was supposed to be a real person. I guess they had the leg lengthening thing so Pedro Pascal’s character has some kind of flaw (besides being a private equity ghoul) but it seemed dumb. And Chris Evan’s character was a genuine loser and had zero (negative?) chemistry with DJ which made the final part of the movie literally unbelievable.
I agree that Johnson was luminous - the most beautiful an elder millennial has looked on the big screen? The Evans character makes no sense to me. Even beyond the negative chemistry, his altruistic (but value-less?) sensibilities did not really align with his lifestyle. There exists a reality that he's a "socialist" or whatever in name only, but that would make that character a different type of guy!
> I agree that Johnson was luminous - the most beautiful an elder millennial has looked on the big screen?
That is a BOLD statement. I'm a self-proclaimed aesthete par excellence, so I must engage.
Can we get an approx. age range? I'm a youngest-possible Gen Xer; to us everyone is just plain younger, full stop.
I'm guessing Margot Robbie in Amsterdam (31-32 when filmed) is too young to be "eld"? (I'm not a "Margot Robbie truther.") Because it's Amsterdam, hardly anyone knows that brunette Margot Robbie is her ultimate form. Lubezki is Lubezki for a reason.
Zoe Saldana also looks incredible in it; maybe her best as well. I've seen Amsterdam TWICE (world record?) just to marvel at them.
We know Lubezki can shoot reds: see Jessica Chastain, The Tree of Life. Is it possible he doesn't know what to do with blondes? He somehow WHIFFS on Anya Taylor-Joy, and Taylor Swift must have pissed him off or something: you've never seen her plainer.
I might have stumbled onto a possible essay that no one will ever read.
hey fran!! i’m currently reading Sacrificial Animals by Kailee Pederson. it is weird! i am not sure if i like it! i love gothic horror and she writes like cormac mccarthy. when i’m in it i love it but when im not actively reading it im like blah.
seth and i watched Ocean with David Attenborough on disney plus last night. i was kind of tipsy. i cried. i love him i love fishies i feel the need to blow up a commercial fishing boat. etc.
I always request all the Attenborough stuff at my dentist where they have the TVs on the ceiling because it's deeply soothing for me to sit with him and what he says about the way the world functions. You can blow up a commercial fishing boat and I'll blow up a cruise ship.
Materialists pissed me off so bad, even more so after seeing that damn list!!!! Like the understanding that the economic frameworks of many of those films no longer applies is so surface level. And don’t get me started on the caveman bullshit!!!! Dakota is so beautiful that I don’t even really care that she’s not giving (screenplay’s fault), which speaks to her considerable charm. The twist, if you call it that, was somehow not undersold by all the people talking about how insane it is.
i wonder what’s wrong with rosamund pike’s agent
She got stuck on that dumb make-'em-up (i.e. fantasy) Amazon show. It even derailed her side job as one of the best celebrity audiobook readers. She hasn't narrated a real novel in years; just these fantasy books that are all inexplicably 40+ hours long (double your average Dickens).
Edit: I think she even moved to whatever Eastern Bloc country the show is filmed in.
omg right I forgot she's on Wheel of Time... someone needs to fix that
wheel of time which Celine Song worked on season 1 of!
Materialists seems so polarizing that (guy who directed one of her plays voice) I am bound to love it? will the ten friends I'm going with on Discount Tuesday agree? perhaps not!
I *think* it's over but the damage is done. Actor-years are a precious, finite resource!
Yeah :( they should put her on the Keira Netflix show that is apparently so popular that I don't watch but will in six years
didn’t know about this. i’ll be getting to the bottom of it
Black Doves, ftr. It was a hit over Christmas break (and set during Christmas). They greenlighted (not 'greenlit') season 2 before season 1 premiered.
she and Ben Whishaw are spies (?)
oh yeah i guess i knew they did something together because wasn’t it keira who was like “is paddington gay”
exactly
woah I missed there's a new Susan Choi! I somehow found myself pleasantly baffled at Materialists. I have read the play she wrote that she has Evans perform in this (which I like a lot) and couldn't stop laughing when it started. not convinced the movie isn't a prank (see Her 2013).
we've watched a lot of really funny stuff lately. ocean's twelve, dick tracy, true grit. I thought for a while I didn't like Matt Damon, but I actually was just annoyed at The Martian. he's such a little freak.
I love when Matt Damon plays a twerp - he is at his best when bratty (this is also true of Jude Law).
Great twerp in Interstellar! McConaughey's "You fucking coward" might be Nolan's only F-bomb in a PG-13 film. (That's everything in the two decades between Insomnia and Oppenheimer.) Not even the Joker could provoke bad words from the genteel folks of Gotham!
(Technically there's another "fuck," also in Interstellar, revealed only by the closed captions. Another bit of audio effectively bleeps it out. I forget how it's used but it's not as entertaining.)
wait... you can yes/no me on this... does Evans perform as Tom?? does he turn into the oyster???
I don’t know the play well enough to answer :(
yes lol the play that Evans is in is her own play and it's my favorite play and I directed it, my friends lost it when Evans started doing the lines. rest of the movie I fear I loved as well- it's cynical and mean! There's no romance or sex at all it's all about business transactions! I don't really care about the last ten minutes and I don't think I'm supposed to idk
The Birdcage is part of my family lore. I think we rented it from Blockbuster to watch together, it was probably my first real exposure to both gay people/drag culture and Gene Hackman (not Nathan Lane, I listened to the Guys & Dolls soundtrack over & over & watched the PBS making of the soundtrack show so many times). My mom & I still say “but wait… the shrimps” every time we eat shrimp. “I pierced the toast” is also in heavy rotation. I love that movie so much.
I was saying on Friday that I think The Birdcage was probably my introduction to gay people and that truthfully, I don't remember a part of my life without it!
Same! Also unprompted my mom said “I pierced the toast” today when she made a hole in a piece of aluminum foil. 😂 The Birdcage is part of our dna!
Just now putting together I was classmates with your brother. Small world!
What!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! You and also a blank check acquaintance….
And congrats to you as well!!
Thank you!
Playing a souls game I am relaxed. I am learning, I know exactly what I should be doing at any time, I am constantly making progress. Playing stardew valley I am literally so stressed out. I can always be more optimized, I am never sure if I am doing the right thing, I could also be better. Basically I did like twelve hours of research before my last run just to know exactly how best to min-max it. Only then did I have fun
My big thing with both stardew and animal crossing is I get so self-conscious about like, how ugly my layout is. But I don’t have any of the instincts to make it cut. But mostly also I just like hanging in the mines.
IM LITERALLY THE SAME WAY😭 i cannot play stardew valley bc the ticking clock and the possible failures stress me out too damn bad. meanwhile i’m playing lies of p like lalalallaaaa
Had a similar feeling about The Phoenician Scheme, Michael Cera!! This period of Wes is really interesting I'm curious what the next few are going to be like. Asteroid City cleared this one for me but definitely worth watching
Asteroid City made me cry :(
got my dad a Storyworth subscription for Father's Day and a copy of Lonesome Dove for his retirement, thank you Fran Magazine.
had a particularly weird weekend of movies: Batman Forever at the Music Box on Friday at midnight, Secretary last night, and half of Southland Tales yesterday afternoon. [s/o Alex Grelle's drag Nicole Kidman who opened the show and answered pre-recorded "crowd Qs" like "happy Pride to you and your lesbian wife Keith Urban."] really soaking up the psychosexual anxieties of the turn of the millennium that I'd missed as a child.
My dad is so good at his Storyworth, I hope you get a lot out of it!!! Almost watched Secretary last night but instead went for Citizenfour?? Needed to get the taste of texting about Materialists out of my mouth.
that's great to hear! any advice for selecting / ordering the prompts each week?
Nah I just go with my heart and skip all the military ones lol
Secretary's good! Spader and Gylenhaal are well-matched. it's sexy but not overbearingly so, and not at the expense of the characters. aesthetically and thematically feels very mid-90s despite coming out in '02.
"There's no chemistry, just restaurants" is killing me
I do want to see Materialists, it’s rare my friends are so united in distaste for a movie and I like looking at Dakota
Been prepping a piece about Mountainhead and I think no one who reviewed it negatively has more of a right to be mad at Armstrong than I, someone who listened to David Sacks’s podcast for research
Dakota looks beautiful in the movie!!!!!!!!! And hell, also generally!
I DNFed Mountainhead :( but I also made the mistake of starting too late at night
When will Fran play nightreign with me readers are dying to know
I still need to download :(
i am loving your review of the materialists, a movie it is almost impossible that I would ever have watched anyway. in some ways your hatred of it makes it sound interesting lol
To the film's credit, I tell anyone who asks me if they "should" see it that yes, they should!!! (I say this for most movies that aren't like, IP slop, but this one has fueled some interesting discussion in my life!!)
I also found Materialists very disappointing. Dakota Johnson looked luminous but her character was so plastic that it was hard to believe she was supposed to be a real person. I guess they had the leg lengthening thing so Pedro Pascal’s character has some kind of flaw (besides being a private equity ghoul) but it seemed dumb. And Chris Evan’s character was a genuine loser and had zero (negative?) chemistry with DJ which made the final part of the movie literally unbelievable.
I agree that Johnson was luminous - the most beautiful an elder millennial has looked on the big screen? The Evans character makes no sense to me. Even beyond the negative chemistry, his altruistic (but value-less?) sensibilities did not really align with his lifestyle. There exists a reality that he's a "socialist" or whatever in name only, but that would make that character a different type of guy!
> I agree that Johnson was luminous - the most beautiful an elder millennial has looked on the big screen?
That is a BOLD statement. I'm a self-proclaimed aesthete par excellence, so I must engage.
Can we get an approx. age range? I'm a youngest-possible Gen Xer; to us everyone is just plain younger, full stop.
I'm guessing Margot Robbie in Amsterdam (31-32 when filmed) is too young to be "eld"? (I'm not a "Margot Robbie truther.") Because it's Amsterdam, hardly anyone knows that brunette Margot Robbie is her ultimate form. Lubezki is Lubezki for a reason.
Zoe Saldana also looks incredible in it; maybe her best as well. I've seen Amsterdam TWICE (world record?) just to marvel at them.
We know Lubezki can shoot reds: see Jessica Chastain, The Tree of Life. Is it possible he doesn't know what to do with blondes? He somehow WHIFFS on Anya Taylor-Joy, and Taylor Swift must have pissed him off or something: you've never seen her plainer.
I might have stumbled onto a possible essay that no one will ever read.
Orlando rips, can’t wait to hear what you think.
Also found Phoenician scheme really fun and enjoy his new crop of actors—fun to see Hanks in a different but equally Anderson-y mode in this one!
Bummed about Materialists…
I loved Materialists, fwiw! I think it’s one people will run hot or cold on for sure
^^ Yes agree I have several friends who have been deeply moved/amused by it
hey fran!! i’m currently reading Sacrificial Animals by Kailee Pederson. it is weird! i am not sure if i like it! i love gothic horror and she writes like cormac mccarthy. when i’m in it i love it but when im not actively reading it im like blah.
seth and i watched Ocean with David Attenborough on disney plus last night. i was kind of tipsy. i cried. i love him i love fishies i feel the need to blow up a commercial fishing boat. etc.
I always request all the Attenborough stuff at my dentist where they have the TVs on the ceiling because it's deeply soothing for me to sit with him and what he says about the way the world functions. You can blow up a commercial fishing boat and I'll blow up a cruise ship.
Materialists pissed me off so bad, even more so after seeing that damn list!!!! Like the understanding that the economic frameworks of many of those films no longer applies is so surface level. And don’t get me started on the caveman bullshit!!!! Dakota is so beautiful that I don’t even really care that she’s not giving (screenplay’s fault), which speaks to her considerable charm. The twist, if you call it that, was somehow not undersold by all the people talking about how insane it is.