Fran Magazine: Sunday Dispatch, Mar. 9-15
Mickey 17, "Red v. Wade," Swedish academics being horny, and more.
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Double standard
Last week after watching Mickey 17, I wandered around Soho after picking up some film photos from late last year. I popped into Sephora because I wanted new concealer (mine, nearly empty, fell on the floor… product side DOWN). A lip gloss briefly caught my eye from a brand I wasn’t familiar with, and in the few seconds it took me to look at the other shades, I clocked the names of the other shades and really had a laugh. “Red v. Wade” — it’s giving Lingua Franca sweater.
Just to palate cleanse, here’s one of those film photos I picked up last week:
It was a good week minus the return of the mouse (a mouse) in the apartment. Sometimes a person just wants to play AstroBot without the sound of a little guy knocking over chili crisp on the counter top — it’s not a lot to ask. I’ve been reading and writing more again, hitting a far reasonable bedtime, and enjoying the extra sunlight as best I can. Was the Doctor Odyssey orca episode a disappointment? Yes, but we’ll get into that later. I saw a handful of friends in from out of town — three, in fact — which is always a rare treat. This was a good week to be in New York because the weather dipped above sixty degrees and suddenly it feels refreshing to have a salad for lunch again. Last night, fog fell over Manhattan as I left Lincoln Center and it felt, briefly, like walking through a movie. Speaking of…
Mickey 17, Bong Joon Ho (2025)
Watched at Regal Essex. I have a pretty low tolerance for the English-language Bong films, though I maybe prefer Okja to Snowpiercer because I just like the titular Okja. I found Mickey 17 tedious, unfunny, and bleak, with zero characters making any sense but the women especially being, like, profoundly randomista in all forms. It’s obviously the kind of project that is not done any favors by what’s been happening in the world over the past few months, but I don’t think it would have been any better if it came out last fall.
Moi Aussi, Judith Godrèche (2024)
Watched at Lincoln Center. I went to see Godrèche’s short for work because she was doing a talkback with Cynthia Nixon afterwards about the state of the Me Too movement in France. Compared to the United States, where Me Too happened approximately eight years ago but we talk about it as though it is happening constantly even though it is definitely over, it feels like Me Too happens in France every eighteen months as though it never happened the first time. Godrèche, who is an actor and a director, staged a protest and filmed her daughter doing an interpretative dance throughout the proceedings. I have to admit the whole thing was giving “actor brain,” though I found her as a figure much more interesting in the talkback than the work on the screen. Something happened during the audience Q&A I’d never seen before, which is someone stood and said, “I have four questions,” and then asked them all very quickly in succession so no one could cut her off after one. The gall of some audience members is kind of astounding — this, to me, is a stupid and enviable type of bravery.
Misericordia, Alain Guiraudie (2025)
Watched at the Criterion screening room. There’s always one more at NYFF that I skip because I am in a “weird mood” and am convinced I won’t have the patience for: this past year, that was Misericordia. Upon arriving at the festival the next day, everyone I spoke to had Misericordia fever. It was funny! It was uncomfortable! It was under two hours — what do you mean you skipped it? I’ve been waiting since then for the opportunity to see it, and Guiraudie’s film did not disappoint. I was completely enthralled and bemused, the whole thing rich with a Coens brothers-esque sense of fate and obligation, but gayer and meaner. It’s out next week (in NY/LA, tbd Chicago and the rest of the country), which makes it the second good movie to come out this year besides Black Bag.
Willful Disregard, Lena Andersson (2013)
Possibly the first book I’ve read this year that I’ve unabashedly loved. Not unlike Vigdis Hjorth’s If Only, this novel is also about an academic — a philosopher — blowing up her life to have sex with another academic who behaves insane towards her. Both Hjorth and Andersson are Scandinavian, but Andersson is Swedish and Hjorth is Norwegian. This type of plot is catnip for me, the wackier the narrator the better. This was short, funny, relatable, and wonderfully crafted. I didn’t realize that there’s a sequel but I’ll get to that in time.
Jack Reidy’s album Raw Deal
I’ve known Jack — a Chicago musician and writer — since my early twenties: his dad taught at my high school and sometimes it felt like we were in the only people in the suburbs of Chicago who cared about art and movies to the degree that most people I hang out with now do. I listened through his debut album during the back half of this week when I wanted something that felt sparky, new, and energetic — all of which is delivered by Raw Deal (great title!).
FUFN, JADE
I can’t get over how ugly her dress is in the music video, but the song is yay.
New
Fear is very boring to hear about, because there really isn’t much to say about it. That someone has convinced themselves that everyone had a knife or a disease that they would deploy on anyone walking their way is not something you need to hear about more than a few times. The desire to hear about anything else - a feud with whoever stocks the stone fruit at Key Food, a poet who ruined a dinner party by bringing a banker, the situation happening with that new building down the street which has been building itself for far too long - was palpable. Instead, what we got was acquiescing these fears, affirming them. Specifically, those fears on the subway, for which our mayor and governor raced to find the most wasteful and useless solution. In the end, we got both thousands of cops and the National Guard, two groups which are notoriously useless and unnecessary, and also totally inept in urban environments. Whereas anyone who had listened to a specific, highly detailed complaint about the subway could see that what it needed was more trains which run more frequently and therefore decrease the time spent sitting alone in the station or being on the train itself - neither of which feels particularly perilous but are clearly places where people allow their minds to wander - would work better than whatever it is cops and the National Guard do. But it was the replacement of specific complaints with blanket, stupid fear that pointed Hochul and Adams to these solutions, and considering I don’t think either of them have stepped foot on the subway in years outside of promotional videos, I would assume they believe all that fear very deeply.
Elden Ring
Ben and I spent two hours trying and failing to fight Maliketh and then giving up so we could try and fail to fight Mogh (which went better than Maliketh, but only just). We gave up, frustrated and annoyed — the Elden Ring promise — and when Ben left to go to bed, I said to myself, I’m gonna try Maliketh three more times with my Mimic Tear and see what happens. Lo and behold, on attempt three, with my health all the way down at the bottom and no more flasks, I beat Maliketh. What a truly insane feeling — I could hardly get to sleep after. Now I have the honor of getting my ass beat by Godfrey/Hoarah Loux. I’m sorry to type out all this gibberish to people who don’t gave here, but I promise the end is in sight.
Moby Dick at the Met
came to town and we went to go see Moby Dick at the Metropolitan Opera. I’d never been to the Metropolitan Opera — my last remaining Lincoln Center building — though I saw the opera a handful of times at the Lyric in Chicago. I’d also never seen an opera in English! I love Moby Dick, and one wonders, obviously, how a book like that gets transposed into something for the stage, as massive and existential as it is, and the answer is, well, mostly it’s just the “plot” of Moby Dick with little time for vibes. The stage show does a good and appropriate job de-centering Ishmael, who is simply not a dynamic enough character to hang a show onto, and instead gives way to a lot of the other guys, with Ahab as the ostensible lead. I don’t love the way English opera sounds, though at its best it was definitely a bit Les Miz-esque, but I thought the stage design was totally genius. The boat is depicted as a half-vertical production, with guys climbing up the back side of the stage on little ladder rungs on an incline, and sliding down the walls when the men are cascading off the boat. I’m not selling this well — but you get it. The language, most of which is drawn from Melville, works for the production, and I was never once bored. One of my issues with opera as an artform is that I feel like the notion of a stage picture and blocking are often an afterthought. Opera doesn’t lend itself to dance, so you do just get a lot of standing around. While this wasn’t an especially choreographed show either, I felt like Moby Dick was really keen on showing a dynamic image to go along with the story in a way that was always entrancing — it really did feel like they were on a boat, pulling and yanking and teetering over the edge. It’s playing for a little while longer this month and I recommend it to anyone.The Sunday Dispatch can come at 11am if I want it to — sometimes a person has to sleep in a little. Have you ever seen an opera in English? Should people who bought Cuomosexual sweatshirts be allowed to get them re-embroidered for no fee or should they have to live with them for the rest of their lives? Have you donated to Zohran Mamdani? What are you watching, reading, listening to, thinking about, playing, gardening?
Fran! Thank you for the lovely review!
I have also never seen an opera in English but I'd probably rush to see a production of Moby-Dick in any form. One of the lines of criticism that sticks in my head is Kenneth Tynan's review of Orson Welles' Moby-Dick play, where he zeroed in on the prosthetic schnozz he wore for he character and called him, a la Hamlet, "a man who could not make up his nose."
I saw the current Steppenwolf production of Fool for Love on Friday, which was my first time seeing Sam Shepard performed and it was basically everything I wanted out of a Shepard production, the most satisfying show I have seen at Steppenwolf. The direction really harnessed the visual sense of Shepard's writing, including the extended bit with a lasso that complements the constant re-arrangement of the actors' bodies into painterly configurations. And it was funny and moody and had that Shepard sense of a self-contained apocalypse that may or may not be really happening. I stood and applauded in full sincerity.
Must regrettably agree that the orca ep of DO did not "serve the house down boots mama". It did leave me with a hospital hankering so I made some more progress on The Pitt at the gym this weekend. The issues I had with it from the jump have not dissipated - the writing is programmatic without the best of ER's predictable unpredictability, the young cast is not all that compelling and seem to have been assigned a maximum of two character traits each - but each hour makes me appreciate more the work that Fiona Dourif is doing. I haven't followed her career much - not a Chucky person - but it's moving to realize that she is a great actor too, and has inherited her dad's face in all its emotional translucence.