01+2: Monthly Spew and Media Review
Media review of February...and January because February dragged, January felt like it was a week-long, so I just mashed them together because I can do what I want and time is a social construct.
It’s officially no longer socially acceptable to make New Year jokes, the sun is setting later in the evening, and everyone’s kind of got the gist of all the resolutions they’ll actually be able to keep and which ones were ambitious at best, down-right impossible at worst. One of my New Year’s resolutions was to post here twice a month. Clearly… that didn’t happen in February… but when at first you don’t succeed, you dust yourself off and try again! So, here’s the January and February Monthly Spew and Media Review.
FILMS
Babylon (2022) dir. Damien Chazelle
Rating: ★★★★☆
When the nominations for this year’s upcoming Oscars dropped, I was confused when I saw that this movie was sprinkled very sparingly across the nominee list. Damien Chazelle, the mastermind behind Whiplash (2014), joined a star-studded cast to create a movie promoted to be a tale of the ambition and excessive decadence of early Hollywood—surely the Best Picture nomination would just fall into their laps, right? Surprisingly, it didn’t. That’s why I decided to give it a watch.
I think this movie’s strength lies in the fact that it is a lot. A lot. Just look at this snippet from the opening sequence…
The entire movie takes the melting-pot feel of the party and imbues it into the very marrow of its narrative. We follow an ensemble cast, each of them representing different players and areas in the industry: Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt) is a White established silent film star, Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie) is a White aspiring actress, Manuel Torres (Diego Calva) is a Mexican immigrant desperate to get his foot in the door to kick-start his own film career, Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo) is a Black jazz-trumpeter and rising star, and Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun-Li) is a famous cabaret performer of Chinese descent who is, also, openly lesbian.
Despite Manuel Torres owning most of the screen-time, the movie follows the careers of the whole cast to varying degrees, from the beginning of the Golden Age of Hollywood in the 1920s right into the early 1950s. For most of the film, their differing storylines run parallel to one another, only to then overlap in the most satisfying of ways. This was a nice way to highlight how Hollywood was (and still is) all about who you know and who knows you, about the reactions your name evokes in rooms that you might never even step foot in.
I mention the races and ethnicities of the cast/characters because it matters. While engaging with media set in the past, I often wait anxiously for something racist to happen. It’s not exactly a fun way to engage with said media but… alas. Given that this movie is centred around the treatment of different individuals within the film industry, it’s not at all far-fetched to expect some on-screen discrimination. I was ready for it, and it was there. However, the way this was shown in Babylon was interesting. The characters of colour experienced a quiet sort of violence throughout their arcs, an unspoken lack of privilege that was rarely (if ever) directly addressed but always noticeable enough to dictate what they chose to do and not do, noticeable enough to dictate what their White peers felt confident enough to ask of them.
Did you ever stop to think why, when there’s a house fire, the people all die but the cockroaches survive? You thought the house needed you, but it doesn’t. It doesn’t need you any more than it needs the roaches, and the roaches, knowing this, crawl back into the dark, lay low, and make it through. You… You held the spotlight. It’s those of us in the dark, the ones who just watch, who survive.
Babylon (2022)
The Fabelmans (2022) dir. Steven Spielberg
Rating: ★★★★☆
It was only right to watch The Fabelmans after watching Babylon. From all the formal and informal promotional work surrounding the two movies, I was under the impression that they were both newly-released love letters to cinema. Despite this apparent similarity, one movie received a grand total of seven Academy nominations and the other only received three. So… I pressed play, curious why one was loved more than the other.
Funnily enough, I didn’t really feel like I was reading a love letter to cinema while watching either of the movies, Spielberg’s movie-memoir included. Sure, the main character, Sammy Fableman (Gabriel LaBelle), becomes obsessed with film after attending the pictures for the first time in the 1950s, but The Fabelmans uses this as less of a theme and more of a vehicle to explore a layered coming-of-age story. Instead, the movie is centred around the complexities of family and the effect of familial secrets, the war between personal passion and parental expectation, and the way in which film can be used to expose the truth and paint an entirely new reality for our voyeuristic pleasure.
Where Babylon was fast and drug-infused, Spielberg’s The Fabelmans presents a quieter, more intimate story that’s less about film as an industry and more about film as an art-form. If I had to guess why the Academy was more willing to give nominations to the latter over the former, I’d argue that it’s this difference that swayed that decision. It’s just a little harder to smile at a reflection that exaggerates your very best features and your very worst flaws, simultaneously.
Art will give you crowns in Heaven and laurels on Earth but, also, it will tear your heart apart and leave you lonely.
The Fabelmans (2022)
Thoroughbreds (2017) dir. Cory Finley
Rating: ★★★★★
When someone goes out of their way to promote a movie as being the love-child of American Psycho (2000) and Heathers (1988), they’re doing it because they want to seduce a particular person into watching it. That person is me.
Thoroughbreds follows former childhood friends Lily (Anya Taylor-Joy) and Amanda (Olivia Cooke) as they try to reconnect. However, after weeks of tutoring sessions where these reconnection attempts fail, both girls come to the conclusion that a murder might be the only real way for them to reach common ground again.
I wasn’t surprised when I found out that this film was initially written as a play with Cory Finley being a playwright-turned-director. The movie is contained to a handful of locations that the viewer is actually able to see—not dissimilar to the way a play is limited to its stage and set. There were moments while watching Thoroughbreds where one would expect the camera to pan, to reveal more of the space, but the camera would, instead, stay still. Shadows, corners or entire walls would hide characters or shroud parts of their form, creating an element of tension in otherwise mundane scenes. In one of the last sequences of the movie, the audience is forced to watch Amanda sleep for approximately six minutes straight, left to only hear the events occuring in the room upstairs. This use of offscreen space and sound design worked to make it the most jarring yet powerful scene in the film.
This movie took the concept of the detached “sociopathic killer” and analysed it. I’ve often thought that it’s easy (almost lazy) to make the person who feels nothing the prime wrong-doer, but Finley made me raise an eyebrow at the person who, instead, feels too much. This movie explores what happens when the emotional person finally stops restraining themselves and decides to act on their emotions–no matter how intense they may be. I left the movie wondering if it’s better to be sociopathically rational or fervently erratic.
You cannot hesitate. The only thing worse than being incompetent or being unkind or being evil is being indecisive.
Thoroughbreds (2017)
The Darjeeling Limited (2007) dir. Wes Anderson
Rating: ★★☆☆☆
You’re probably looking at that rating and thinking, “that’s low.” And, yes. Yes, it is. At first I was thinking that I would use these monthly media reviews as a space for gushing over things I loved, but I left this movie with so many thoughts that I just had to talk about it outside of my Letterboxd review. And, to be honest with you, I did love this movie. I loved this movie a whole lot. Then, a character died and my whole opinion shifted and I realised that I might’ve been giving Wes Anderson more credit than he deserved.
The downside of being annoying and enjoying the process of (over)analysing the media I consume, is the fact that sometimes… sometimes I will apply meaning where there simply is none. It’s like that one running joke about the English Literature teacher asking her students, “why did the author make the curtains red and not, say, white?” It’s possible that the author wanted to evoke a certain emotion, wanted to connote feelings of aggression and passion and [insert all the other things I’m sure the colour red represents]. It’s equally possible that the dude just liked the colour red. Maybe they didn’t even like it all that much, maybe they just penned down the first colour they could think of, unknowing that readers for years to come would be made to sit exams on why that random choice held enough weight to impact the story.
I’m bringing this up to say that while watching The Darjeeling Limited, I thought, “oh wow, this movie is about Orientalism!” But, I ended the movie thinking, “oh… wow, this movie is just another example of it.”
The Darjeeling Limited (2007) follows three American (read: White) brothers as they voyage on a train across India with the plan to bond with each other and become close like they used to be when they were kids.
At first I was thinking that all the Orientalism was the point. That, by having the brothers ignoring their issues to, instead, superficially interact with India and undergo a “spiritual” journey, they’d eventually be forced to accept that this trip was not only foolishly optimistic but also a failed attempt at ignoring reality. A reality where their father is still dead, their mother has still abandoned them, and the three of them need to do more than engage in cultural practices they don’t believe in if they actually want to fix their relationship.
With this in mind, I happily spent about 75% of the movie accepting the assumption that Anderson was poking fun at the way Western media flattens South Asian culture into something “exotic” and “quirky” for White consumption… but then a young Indian boy died and Anderson used the event as a turning point, as the true catalyst of the brothers’ “enlightenment”, which somehow led to a happy ending for the three of them. An innocent brown body for the fixing of their brotherly relations… sigh. It was like having a bucket of freezing cold water splashed on my face and a picture of Wes Anderson shoved into it afterwards because, yes, he’s a good director, The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) is legendary, but he’s also still White and The Darjeeling Limited—no matter how strong the script, good the acting, or beautiful the colour-grading—regurgitates the modern Orientalist view of South Asia and adds to the region’s gross misrepresentation in media.
Would I recommend the movie to you? Honestly, I’m not sure, but if curiosity gets the best of you and you end up pressing play, I do recommend that you give this article a read immediately afterwards: Modern Orientalism and the Ethics of Representation in Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited.
BOOKS
At Night All Blood is Black (2018) — David Diop, Anna Moshchovakis (Translator)
Rating: ★★★★★
CW/ war, violence, death, sexual assault, racism.
This book follows a Senegalese man named Alfa Ndiaye as he fights in the French army during the conflict of WWI. When his close childhood friend, Mademba Diop, gets mutilated during a battle, Diop uses his last moments to beg Alfa to kill him quickly, sparing him a painful, drawn-out death. Alfa, unfortunately, is unable to commit the mercy killing and the book follows how this decision affects Alfa’s mental state and his remaining time in the army. If you want to read a book that’ll make you feel good by the end of it, um, skip this one. Don’t even open it to the first page, babe.
This book may be short but it’s searing; it tackles the themes of race, war, toxic masculinity, and looks at how these things aggravate one another, coming together to create a layered discussion on humanity, and the loss thereof.
Despite how bleak this read is, I’m obsessed with its form and how successful David Diop was in writing a first-person narrative that’s intense, uncomfortable, and ultimately immersive. I felt that I was dragged into the mind of the narrator and forced to accompany him during his descent into madness. I was so drawn into the narrative that I read all 145 pages of the book in a single sitting. The prose is poetic in the way that it is non-linear and full of repetition, reusing themes and specific phrases throughout the text. I’ve read other reviews and seen how some people really didn’t like this aspect of the novel but I disagree with them. They just don’t get it! The repetition and the, at times, confusing timeline work in tandem to highlight how much of an unreliable narrator Alfa Ndiaye is. It forces you to keep up with him as his mind bounces between the past and the present, reality and delusion.
I waited until silence fell, until they had relaxed, and I extracted one like you’d extract a tiny baby from its mother’s belly, with a violent tenderness to minimise the shock, to minimise the sound.
At Night All Blood is Black (2018)
Silver Under Nightfall (2022) — Rin Chupeco
Rating: ★★★★☆
What better way to turn off your brain than to read about polyamorous vampires and vampire hunters, who are just as horny as they are bad-ass?
I say that I read this book for the chance to turn off my brain but, still, alongside the vampiric fun and games, the book explored themes of belonging and the difficulty of figuring out who is and isn’t worthy of your love and loyalty. I’m not going to say too much about the plot of this book (to avoid spoiling anything) but if you adored Netflix’s Castlevania even half as much as I did… you’ll love it.
TV SHOWS/ANIME
Vinland Saga (2019, 2023)
Rating: ★★★★☆
MAPPA and Netflix’s Vinland Saga is an anime adaptation of the Japanese historical manga series which shares the same title, written and illustrated by Makoto Yukimura. Rather than the action-packed, fast-paced stories that you usually find in shounen, Vinland Saga presents a character study, a coming-of-age story that follows Thorfinn as he grows away from being a boy defined by revenge, towards a man now searching for another reason to keep on living. It’s this different pace and overall tone of story-telling that moved the manga to a seinen magazine, despite it being originally published in the Weekly Shonen Magazine. It’s this differing pace and tone that makes it so easy for me to appreciate the story—both on screen and on the page. Season 2 has honoured the manga really well so far. I definitely recommend it!
“Without hatred, I’m empty.”
“If you want to be reborn, then it’s in your best interest to be empty. If you’re empty, then you can take in anything.”
Vinland Saga (S2 E8)
MUSIC
Let’s do full albums first…
My 21st Century Blues by RAYE (2023)
Rating: ★★★★☆
Shoutout to TikTok! Yes. I know. Very crazy statement. But, believe it or not, Raye probably agrees…
I’ve had an ear open for Raye for what feels like years—you would’ve needed some serious, heavy-duty chain to drag me way from streaming Decline (ft Mr Eazi) back in 2017—and as a result of my prolonged stan-hood, I remember watching her Instagram live-stream back in 2021, where she openly complained about her music label, Polydor, refusing to let her put out an album despite her being under them for seven whole years. So, she took back her artistic freedom, left the music label, independently released “Escapism” back in October, and the rest is history. I’m sure there’s no sweeter revenge than going No.1 on the U.K. Official Singles Chart. I press play on the album almost giddy, imagining her old manager sitting somewhere, fuming. So… I repeat… Shoutout to TikTok!
God, I love an album with a theme and My 21st Century Blues offers that. The introductory track places the album in a setting that perfectly fits its title: a jazz-bar, where the MC announces Raye as the main performance of the evening. Between the themed introduction and afterword, Raye “performs” songs centred around several issues, including (but not limited to) her struggle with addiction, the high highs and the all-consuming lows of youth, and her experience navigating the patriarchal music industry.
My favourite song out of the whole album has to be “Buss It Down.” For a body of work that deals with such heavy topics, this song offers a fun, light-hearted piano ballad where Raye sings about “back[ing] it up” and “break[ing] it down,” with a gospel choir harmonising in her adlibs and… agreeing with her. The juxtaposition between the two creates a track that is equal-parts hilarious, hopeful and heart-warming.
All in all, My 21st Century Blues is a great album made even more charming when I remember that each and every track released, Raye was passionate enough to fight for.
This Is Why by Paramore (2023)
Rating: ★★★★★
Here’s another artist (well, artists) that has starved me for years and finally decided to fill my plate with new music. After a five year long wait, Hayley Williams reunited with her bandmates, Taylor York and Zac Farro, to create an album that has, honestly, not let me go since I first pressed play upon its release. This Is Why is stocked full with lyrics that reek of relatability, providing ten tracks infused with the universal feelings of anger, confusion and frustration that grew from a life under a pandemic.
It wasn’t easy for me to pick a favourite track but after sitting with the album on loop while drafting this post, I think I can comfortably say the label belongs to “You First.”
The song explores the dichotomy of good versus evil, suggesting that despite all our attempts, each and everyone of us will play the villainous role in someone’s story…whether we acknowledge it or not. Through using the extended metaphor of stray animal, Hayley sings about welcoming the devil on her shoulder by feeding it scraps of her energy, her anger, of her resentment and her need for revenge. I think this quote from Hayley best embodies the meaning behind this track, and I'm sure it’ll resonate with you as much as it resonated with me.
You’re somebody’s hero, and they come up to you and tell you about all these things you’ve helped them with, but in the back of your mind, you’re thinking, ‘But I’m an asshole’ about something you did or a mistake you made. Like, this person has no idea, right? But I think that’s just the paradoxical nature of being human.
— Hayley Williams, The Line of Best Fit
Alright… now some randoms songs…
The first two months of this year have passed by and whether they’ve gone great for you or not, they now sit in the past. I hope March treats you all well, and I hope 2023 only gets better for you. Thank you for reading! I would also love to know about anything you loved this month, so feel free to comment!
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you said time is a social construct, which it is, so felt compelled to drop this essay here because it’s the best explanation i’ve found on why this is is the case --> https://www.noemamag.com/the-tyranny-of-time/ and i haven’t seen vinland saga but surely adding it to my list but recently finished parasyte and got my whole life, 10/10