Fran Magazine: Sunday Dispatch, May 19-25

The Sunday Dispatch is three hours late and FREE <3

This is the Fran Magazine Sunday Dispatch, a weekly culture diary usually for paid subscribers only. The Sunday Dispatch details what I’ve been watching, reading, playing, and listening to over the past week. Paid subscriptions help stabilize my writing career, but all readers — paid & not — are appreciated. You can also follow me on Instagram or Letterboxd (for free!). Thanks for reading!

Free horse

she could be yours!

The weather changed almost on a dime: warm days, humid, a little, but mostly breezy and sunny. The shorts came out of the drawer. I’m trying to find my sunscreen. It’s like everything feels a bit brighter and lighter. It helps that school is out for the summer and the pace of the day is starting to feel a bit slower and easier. I spent the week wrapping up work around three in the afternoon and being like, wait, that’s it?

I like having something to do that I’m a little bit bad at. For a number of years, this was running. Don’t get me wrong, I did eventually get kind of good at running, but not 10-minute mile good at running. Just not getting shin splints good at running. I tried to pick up running after my hip injury in the fall, and then in the winter, and recently two weeks ago, and even though my hip is (knock wood) much better, the whole sport feels painful now. Where I’ve replaced running with yoga (which I am “good enough” at—being “bad at yoga” sort of feels like a myth… it’s an endlessly adjustable practice, I’ve found), my nascent bad hobby is art. For the past month I’ve been taking a fundamentals in figure drawing and painting class at the Art Students League. I was in a class at 92Y late last year, but found their increasingly stupid politics difficult to justify a continued art education there. I also frankly hated going through a metal detector every time I went in there.

The Art Students League class is more of an atelier-style class where we are not doing lecture-based learning but getting a lot of workshop time to do… whatever, basically, with a live model. I am the second-youngest person in the class (the youngest is, no joke, half my age), and everyone else is quite advanced, compared to me, but we all just do our own thing and work in relative quiet with the teacher going around and giving individualized feedback as we work. I’m doing a mix of learning some basic classical anatomy drawing in pencil (which I am awful at), and expanding on my watercolor practice (at which I am steadily improving). I’m taking June off from classes for reasons we’ll get into on Wednesday, but here was my final piece for the past four weeks, which I’m quite proud of.

I published two pieces of note this week, the first of which was my review of The Idea of You for Bright Wall/Dark Room, a movie I ultimately did not like but unfortunately cannot stop thinking about and might have made me insane. I also got a chance to talk to Furiosa (and The Souvenir <3 and saying “Mank… it’s Orson Welles” in the Mank trailer) star Tom Burke about his big blockbuster summer moment for Vulture. Longtime Fran Magazine readers know that I am a huge fan of the Souvenir films and a Joanna Hogg fan in general (“Hogghead”? “Hogginista”…?) so this was a “big get” all considered. It was a great chat — I found him insightful and modest and interesting, e.g. “normal guy vibes.” We talked a bit of Souvenir and the new Soderbergh (!) at the end which did not make it into the piece itself, but the biggest unpublished takeaway I got was that all these people he’s worked with post-Souvenir have come to him because of Souvenir, which is quite special. I wish I asked about “Mank… it’s Orson Welles…” but I was too shy.

La Chimera, Alice Rohrwacher (2023)

Rewatched at IFC. Sometimes instead of seeing Challengers again, you have to go see La Chimera again. If this is going to bounce between New York rep theaters for the next few weeks, I am going to be forced to continue to see it every two months. That’s just how it is!

Dressed to Kill, Brian De Palma (1980)

Watched at Film Forum. Discussed in this past week’s Fran Magazine, if you can believe it. I liked aspects of this — Nancy Allen, in particular, and her relationship with the son, are pretty spectacular — and it’s not that the Caine of it all hasn’t aged well — like, lol, obviously… — so much as I felt there were long stretches of the film that felt tonally disparate and almost tedious. But as I wrote in this past week’s mag, when I see Dennis Franz I clap my hands like a dumb little seal.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, Wes Ball (2024)

Watched at Regal Essex. I know and love many people in my life who like the Apes movies and especially like these recent Apes movies. I really like the one with Jason Clarke and Keri Russell (which I believe, off-hand, is “Rise of the”… but I am willing to be wrong). This new Apes put me to literal sleep. I’m sorry — I just don’t care. I recently spoke to someone who didn’t like Challengers and when I asked why, they said, “I didn’t care about whatever was going on with those three people,” and I was like, “wow, so the whole thing of it, noted.” This was basically me with the new Apes. I got like twelve minutes into the film and my whole body rejected what was happening. I like the orangutans who are grad school-coded but that’s about it for me here.

Mad Max: Fury Road, George Miller (2015)

Rewatched on MAX. Does it ever get better than the Soderbergh quote?

Bait, Mark Jenkin (2019)

Watched on blu-ray. Phil loves Mark Jenkin and I had a great time with Enys Men last year, a movie we saw at Village East where everyone in the audience was hating the experience watching Enys Men except us. Bait feels like a more succinct execution of similar ideas, and it reminded me a lot of Evil Does Not Exist, a movie that baffled me a little when watching last year that many friends of mine are now seeing and loving. Both are searing indictments of a kind of gentrification and bastardization of land, furious at the NIMBY class of middle managers and how they use the environment around them.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, George Miller (2024)

Rewatched at Regal Essex (in RPX). First and foremost: if you are the Fran Magazine reader who said hi at the movie… please identify yourself in the comments. Imagine if I was like, “And by the way, this happens all the time” (it doesn’t!). What a nice surprise. I wanted to see this again both with Phil and with better, bigger sound. I like this film. I like its weird structure, I like some of the lore extensions, I really like all three leads. There was no way it was going to live up to its predecessor, but by the time Furiosa hits its massive, mid-movie set piece, it’s hard not to be won over — that thing is really nuts! And it just keeps going! I tend not to like Anya Taylor-Joy… she works fine for me in The VVitch (little dialogue) and in Queen’s Gambit (movie I watched when I either had COVID/the flu, I can’t remember, it all blurs into one thing) and in Emma., but The Menu, The Northman, One Night in Soho, Season 6 of Peaky Blinders… ay yi yi. You might say: Those are all bad. Wrong: The Northman is great, and when I was really enjoying Furiosa, it was reminding me of The Northman. Increasingly some movies have taken on what feels like video game-like structure and dramatic storytelling elements. A lot of Furiosa feels like a cut-scene at times, but I like video game cut-scenes, and I like video games in general. Did this “have to exist”? Who cares — not a good question. I’m glad we have someone like George Miller and his crazy brain making films.

The Stars at Noon, Denis Johnson (1986)

Having flown through Train Dreams the other weekend, I finally picked up The Stars at Noon which Phil got me for Christmas. As one of approximately twelve people who enjoy the Claire Denis adaptation of this film — maligned at Cannes, and by 90% of my friends who saw it and got pissed off at me for liking it — I am loving the book, which has the exact same tone and annoying quality of the film. Nowhere near as lush and moving as Train Dreams, The Stars at Noon purports: what if bad things happened to two infuriating people? Well, I like when idiots are in over their heads. This is a great read, funny and suspenseful and the right amount of mean.

Animal Well, continued.

I don’t want to spoil this game, which I don’t think is THAT spoilable, but suffice it to say, I am in hell (but enjoying, still).

Anyway

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