Fran Magazine: Sunday Dispatch, January edition

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You too can go to Utah

the view from the balcony

I think I slept in my own bed for less than half of the days in January, the rest spent on vacation or with family or — most recent — out in Park City for Sundance. The festival was crazy and a lot of fun. I am sorry (?) if you got a sponsored reel from Vulture with me in conversation with Alison Brie.¹ I [dating app voice] like to travel, but I much prefer to be home. It’s been a few days since getting back and my routines are still all over the place. Clothes everywhere, suitcase half-unpacked, still dehydrated. I keep insisting this month will be “normal February” with the hopes that everything that feels chaotic and misplaced will eventually settle in time. Because it’s been so long since I last wrote a Sunday Dispatch, there’s no real way to go into everything I’ve kept up with the past few weeks. But! I am eager to provide some highlights.

The three best movies I saw at Sundance

I was in Park City with Vulture’s film critic Bilge Ebiri, and we broke down our time at the festival in detail here. Of the almost ten films I saw during that week — I am still playing some half-hearted catchup on the online platform — the three best films (in loose order) were:

1. Peter Hujar’s Day, Ira Sachs

2. Train Dreams, Clint Bentley

3. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, Mary Bronstein

(Honorable mention goes to James Sweeney’s Twinless, which I saw on the first night and don’t think totally works. Every day after seeing Twinless, however, I saw some so much worse than Twinless such that it rose in my estimation tenfold.)

At a Q&A after a movie I did not list above, one of the film’s cast members said that one of the most thrilling parts of seeing the movie live was that there was something for any single kind of viewer to enjoy, that they were proud to have made something that anyone could like. That’s fine — the movie in question is likable, to a fault, probably — but it is not really why I seek out art. I’m curious for point of view, specifics, craft, etc. — I don’t need to be pandered to unless it’s Patrick Zweig fancams on X The Everything App.

I have seen a few notes and reviews and comments that “nothing happens” in Peter Hujar’s Day, that it’s “too niche,” “too specific,” etc. Descriptors like that are catnip to me. I would rather risk being alienated by something not for me than to be blandly pandered to by a marketing department. In turn, Peter Hujar’s Day may not be “for you”: it is a seventy-five minute film with two people talking in and just outside an apartment. Based on Linda Rosenkrantz’s book of the same name, Sachs’s film is the literal transcript of a conversation between photographer Peter Hujar and his friend Linda about how he spent a day. There are some flourishes — day turns to night, costume changes, hair adjustments — but otherwise it’s just talking, gossiping, eating. I love to do all of those things. I love to hear and do these things in real life, and I love to see it in the movie. Like Sachs, I am moved by and curious about “New York in the 1970s,” and the work of Peter Hujar (and his protégé-ish David Wojnarowicz) has often brought me to tears.

Train Dreams is based on Denis Johnson’s novella of the same name, which sharp-eyed Fran Magazine readers will remember I read last year (or in late 2023 — I am not even a sharp-eyed Fran Magazine reader). Can a movie live up to the work of Denis Johnson? No, not really, but what emerges on screen is still quite decadent and moving, an assured take on material too ephemeral to really capture. Joel Edgerton is an actor I feel like never really gets his due — he’s incredible in it.

I only just saw Mary Bronstein’s first feature Yeast a few weeks ago in prep for Sundance. That movie is an acerbic 80-minute comedy that plays like the tonal opposite of something like Old Joy: two female friends go camping and are so mean to each other the whole time. The film stars Bronstein, as well as then-New York regulars Greta Gerwig, Josh and Benny Safdie, and Addison Rae music video director Sean Price Williams. Bronstein’s sophomore feature will undoubtedly get Safdie comparisons because it is long-winded and unpleasant and remarkably tense, but she’s doing something that feels much more metaphysical and existential than those filmmakers. Legs — as Bronstein and its cast refer to it — is about a therapist and mother named Linda whose life is going horribly awry: her daughter is sick, both psychologically and physically, her husband is on a work trip for two months, the ceiling caved in in her apartment, she’s living in a motel, one of her patients is spiraling out, etc. etc. It is a movie about how when one thing is going wrong, everything is going around. During the screening, the woman next to me groaned at one point and said, “This needs to stop.” I couldn’t agree more; what an awesome time.

The best holiday rewatches

Phantom Thread at the Denver Alamo Drafthouse… eating fried pickles… thinking about how awesome it is to be in love… little is better than this! It’d been a few years since I watched Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which gets more and more chic and sad with each subsequent rewatch. With Phil’s family, we watched Spirited Away 1.8 times. I probably hadn’t seen it in ten years. That film came out when I was ten and my brother was seven. He was much braver than me; I couldn’t really get through it until I was thirteen or fourteen — too scary. Phil’s niece — who was not yet three during these viewings — was completely rapt, only scared of Yubaba, but completely charmed by No Face and all the various slimes and oozes. Even the big baby and the three juggling heads amuse her. Bravest person on earth? Very possible… She can quote the movie as it plays, whispering the lines to herself a few seconds before the character say them on screen. She’s a genius, is what I’m trying to say.

Widow Clicquot, Thomas Napper (2024)

On the flight back from Utah, I watched Widow Clicquot, a movie I have been passively obsessed with since I ever saw those two words paired together along with this trailer still.

you either get it or you don’t

I slept through about a third of the movie and ostensibly missed nothing. Widow Clicquot uses STEM to make champagne and falls in love with her dead husband’s gay best friend who isn’t gay. BTW, the Widow Clicquot’s first name is “Barbe-Nicole.” We need to get Barbe-Nicoles back in the mix!!!

Books

I read one book in the month of January — my focus otherwise completely shot to shit. The book I read was Lola Kirke’s new memoir about not being like her sisters Jemima or Domino. I reviewed it for Vulture. YMMV.

I am halfway through a handful of other books and furthest along in Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake which I put down for a week and a half. I’m not disliking it — I usually like Kushner — but I do feel a little…

Television

We are hooked on The Traitors Season 3 — a great watch for two people who don’t really watch any reality television. (They should make Paul Hollywood go on this.) I have no concept of most people on the show except for Boston Rob (I have watched about eight seasons of Survivor, which will sound like a lot to people who don’t watch Survivor and like nothing to people who do watch Survivor) and Gabby Windey (I am bisexual). “Chrishell” “Bob the Drag Queen” “Dorinda Medley²” — I know these names from the ether, but they mean relatively little to me. I have no idea what The Challenge is. I have no idea what Summer House is. I understand from what little I know of Bravo programming that Tom Sandoval is someone everyone hates, but his involvement in The Traitors is nothing short of hilarious. He is the most dejected and shameless man of all time; he is always acting like we are supposed to know that he is a genius, but no one likes him and he’s also done nothing wrong minus behave like a person having a panic attack because no one is taking him seriously. There is nothing else fun on television right now, so I am grateful to have Peacock.

Balatro

Olivia Colman in the Babaa for Jimpa press is kind of giving “Odd Todd,” no?

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How’s everyone doing? What are you watching? What are you reading? What are you listening to? Does anyone even care about the Grammys anymore (I don’t)? Should I buy an e-reader and which kind should I buy? Reddit is talking me into a “Kobo” but all I know is that I would love to not buy a Kindle.

1. Harrowing to arrive at a birthday party and hear “I saw you on Reels…”

2. Her last name is MEDLEY??? Like legally???