Fran Magazine: Sunday Dispatch, Mar. 16-22
Adolescence, Stranger by the Lake, Sorry Baby, Split Fiction, and more!
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Rare snack
Last Sunday,
made us dinner and Lindsey brought a rare, new snack item: the Smarties-“flavored” Ritter Sport. How would the kooks at Ritter Sport (aka Nestle) find a way to incorporate chalky “fruit”-flavored candy with chocolate? There was only one way to find out. The bar had a white chocolate base — controversial Fran opinion: I like white chocolate! Not more than other kinds, but certainly on par with — and what can only be described as funfetti-esque punctuation throughout. Did it taste like Smarties? No, not at all. It tasted like white chocolate colors in it.Fran Easter Candy Corner
Easter is a month out but I’m seeing the candy out on display at Walgreens. I DON’T like Peeps — I don’t really like marshmallow generally — but I do like Brachs malted milk eggs. My go-to Easter candy is the Starburst brand jellybeans which I think have an amazing texture, better than most other jellybeans on the market.
Sorry, Baby, Eva Victor (2025)
Watched at the Crosby Hotel with a talkback after with Eva Victor and Lucas Hedges. This will be out later in the year so I don’t want to say too much here. Sorry, Baby was the big feature I missed at Sundance this January, the one that people who attend the festival ask me about the most. I found myself a little cooler than some. It’s a competent debut and basically a nice movie — I’m definitely not mad.
wrote beautifully on it here. For my money, it’s great to see Lucas Hedges in a movie again, one of our great regular-ish guys.Snow White, Marc Webb (2025)
Watched at AMC Lincoln Square. Blogged on Rachel Zegler (good) and the film’s lore (bad, but funny). I hadn’t seen one of the Disney live action remakes since Beauty and the Beast, and though Snow White has less celebs in the mix, I think it’s a more worthwhile outing if only because of the way in which it feels like a dozen once-good-in-abstract ideas at smashing into each other at the same time. The disaster of it all does not faze me: I don’t think this is a harbinger of anything we don’t already know about. Zegler carries this the film more than she has any right to, and I think more than, say, gin influencer Emma Watson, knows how to pitch an adult performance for children. Sorry to compare women. And whatever Gal Gadot is doing is totally magnetic if not some of the worst acting ever committed to film. It’s not camp… but it is… something… a vacuum, a void. I keep muttering this aloud to myself.
Stranger by the Lake, Alain Guiraudie (2013)
Watched at IFC with George Civeris in convo with Guiraudie after. I have more to write on this film and Misericordia (out now in NY/LA! great movie!), but I thought this was quite good and amazing to look at. I didn’t put two and two together until after the film that this film and Misericordia were both shot by Claire Mathon, who also shot Portrait of a Lady on Fire and Petite Maman, as well as Atlantics. Talk about five great-looking movies! I knew that Stranger by the Lake had kind of a cult classic following, but I assumed — only somewhat correctly — that like Misericordia, this would be a movie about a gay guy in over his head. That’s not wrong, but I didn’t realize the extent to which most of this movie is just unsimulated gay sex, the excess of which is both inherent to its beauty and baked into the social comedy of it all. (Misericordia, on the other hand, is pretty tame!) At the Q&A after, Guiraudie speculated on why the film became so beloved in America, specifically, more than in France, and he rambled on about universality and desire before going, “and there’s also just a lot of hot guys in it that people are happy to look at.” Shoutout Fran Magazine reader Emily who came to say what’s up ahead of the film. Dying to know what you made of this one…
Punch-Drunk Love, Paul Thomas Anderson (2002)
Rewatched at Syndicated. I’d actually never been to Syndicated, a bar that runs second-run new releases and does private events, prior to Sasha’s birthday, but what a good space. Might try to catch Universal Language over there in the coming weeks. In light of the One Battle After Another (they didn’t wanna do a second pass on the title?) teaser, I’m taking a moment to say that I have one of the most normal relationships to Anderson’s films: there are some I love, some I like, and some I loathe. He is a great filmmaker with obvious and apparent flaws. I did not care for Licorice Pizza much though I liked the central performances along with a handful of the supporting players.1 Anyway: Punch-Drunk Love was maybe the last Anderson film I saw with I completed the filmography a few years ago, and I watched it on my laptop, interrupted, during the summer of 2020. I liked what it was gesturing towards but never really got on its rhythms. Upon rewatch, with a big screen and big sound, I felt much more warmly towards it. (“PTA hits different when you’re in love, also,” Phil said as I was on my way out.) I still don’t totally ever sync up with the cadence of the film, but I was able to see it much more simply and wonderfully. I’ve been on a big Sandler kick since watching his latest special last year — which made me cry — and seeing him at SNL50 — also made me cry. When I was taking comedy classes in Chicago, I briefly learned about classical clownwork, all of which is rooted in the most baseline toddler-esque emotions. What I admire so much about Sandler, both as a comedian and a dramatic actor, is the extent to which he wears every single emotion completely. On first watch, I wasn’t sure what the film wanted us to believe Emily Watson’s Lena saw in Barry. This past week, it was all there.
Grand Tour, Miguel Gomes (2025)
Rewatched at the Soho House screening room2. Out this Friday! I love Gomes’s work — this one… admittedly… a little less than some others, but it’s still lovely and better-looking (shot, in part, by Mukdeeprom!) than 99.8% of movies out right now and the music is phenomenal. This song isn’t in Grand Tour, but it’s in Tsugua Diaries and when I think of Gomes I have to listen to it.
Adolescence, Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham (2025)
Wrote a bit about this Netflix limited series that’s done in four one-take episodes. I’ll admit a personal fatigue with the form, but I almost felt like the miserable tone of the show allowed that gimmick to contract on itself in new ways. I also just love Stephen Graham. Jack Thorne… you are still in trouble at Fran Headquarters for ruining the His Dark Materials miniseries.
Stone Yard Devotional, Charlotte Wood (2024)
A lovely newish release I read on the strength of Lauren Christensen’s review. Though, of course, about the funny Agatha of Little Neon by Claire Luchette and The Corner That Held Them by Sylvia Townsend Warner, but this book is much less funny (though occasionally wry). I’ll admit, having dealt with enough of them in the past, “plague of mice” was kind of my sole reason to pick up the novel, but I found the book plaintive, enthralling, and gentle.
Elden Ring
Hoarah Loux = defeated. Loretta the Knight = defeated, one try, easy. Malenia and Radagon are kicking my ass. I don’t even really care about beating the former, but I almost feel I’m better at fighting her at this point than him. I need to be done!!!!
Split Fiction
Phil and I started playing this very corny two-player game last night about two writers (triggering) who get sucked into an evil AI that they think is a publishing house (real?) and have to run through their genre-inspired worlds in order to escape. It is deeply stupid but the gameplay is so fun. It’s scratching the AstroBot itch.
AstroBot
I gave up trying to rescue the guys, who are mostly all stuck in one-shot levels and I only have so many hours in a day. Sorry to the guys.
That’s all from me. The plan for the rest of the day is repotting my plants and starting my crops — “my crops” -me — for the summer growing season. This year I’m doing hot peppers and herbs. No more tomatoes… I’m over it!! What are you reading, thinking, watching, playing, doing? There’s more sunlight but it’s still forty degrees. What gives?
Contrary to what you might wonder, I think Bradley Cooper is awful in it.
Feels important to clarify that British/european smarties are different than American smarties if you didn’t know. They’re basically m& ms.
happy to see you at the end of a truly god awful week for me. seth and i did manage to see the looney tunes movie before it got pulled, though! it’s truly classical in its form i enjoyed it immensely, though i was let down by the lack of bugs bunny…seth’s been on a WoW kick, i’m playing death stranding. we’ve also begun a harry potter rewatch (he’s only seen like two of them and that when he was a kid) which is fun and raises a lot of complicated feelings for me. i still know all of their names.