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I Got Engaged!!!

I got engaged at the Met last Wednesday in front of the Temple of Dendur and it was very perfect!! Adam insisted I meet him for a long lunch break to go to the Met because he knew someone who worked there and could show us around the empty museum. I complained the whole walk over about not having enough time and being busy at work. I also was very excited to tell him they put in nicer toilet paper in the work bathroom. I did not suspect anything at all. Thank god I was wearing a marginally nice outfit. After it happened, I went back to work for 2 hours and all my friends made fun of me for that.

This video has audio because Adam mic’d himself up under his sweater. And yes, the location was inspired in part by the When Harry Met Sally paprikash scene. Of course it was.

Oscars 2025

Stuff I Texted Friends, Said Out Loud, or Wanted to Tweet About the Awards Ceremony:

• Conan O’Brien was such a wonderfully normal host!!!!

• I really liked stars coming out to talk up the craftspeople they worked with to present Best Costume Design—this is SUCH a good use of the Fab Five format!! Similarly, I loved that the In Memoriam included actual clips of each person’s work (with apologies to “Shrek’s publicist” Fumi Kitihara… although who knows, maybe she’s the type of person who would’ve liked the jokes!) because I’ve been saying for years they should do this!!! I want to know what these people made possible!!

• That said, “Lacrimosa” was a crazy ass music choice. It’s so WILDLY dramatic it ends up feeling comedic, like Johnny Knoxville’s about to get smacked in the balls. What’s wrong with a jazz standard or simply “Over the Rainbow” again?

• So little Lynch???

• Every time Kieran Culkin loses me for being too glib and being in a movie I thought was mediocre, he gets me back by being funny and loving his wife “Jazzy.”

• On the flip side, every time I think “Adrien Brody’s so handsome” he does something insane (6 minute nothing speech where he’s on the verge of tears about his “ups and downs,” aka 2 Oscars and a stint on Succession).

• Adam has a list on Letterboxd called “IWRGSBWPGTST (I Would Rather Get Shot in the Butthole With a Paintball Gun Than See This)” and that’s how I feel about the animated feature Flow.

• Once again affirming my stance that the Emilia Perez songwriters singing their stupid song during their acceptance speech and thus barring Jacques Audiard from getting a word in during his only win of the night was VERY FUNNY.

• I was really happy for Anora, my favorite of the feasible Best Picture winners, but more specifically for Mikey Madison who gives a screwball leading lady performance as good as any of the true greats of the genre.

The Viewing Party Menu

This year I took it easy with a lot of Zabar’s pre-mades and salads I could prep ahead of time and generally not throwing a BIG party and it was really nice! I was still sweaty and disheveled from boiling pelmeni when my friends started to arrive.

Everybody Looked Boring

Everyone was dressed boring1 at the Oscars, except for Timothee Chalamet who came dressed like Curious George’s hot dad in a butter yellow suit, just one of many reasons he should have received the Academy Award.

I did love Da’Vine Joy Randolph’s Old Hollywood Barbie Doll black dress with a long sheer scarf and Andrew Garfield’s Jeremy Strong-ass brown suit and Halle Berry’s Art Deco disco ball mosaic-y gown and randomly, Raffey Cassidy’s silky white 30s starlet gown with a big dumb bow on the shoulder (sorry to Raffey Cassidy for the fact that I still think of her as “the robot girl from Tomorrowland”).

MOVIES

New Releases

I tend to believe having low expectations is a smart way to stroll into a movie because you’re basically guaranteed to have a good time or at least the time you expected. I realize this is big talk from the woman who believed that Blitz and Gladiator II were going to be masterpieces. In any case, I was prepared for Paddington in Peru to be mostly bad. All signs pointed toward it being bad! We lost Paul King, we lost Sally Hawkins, we lost London as a setting, the early reviews were tepid. I also don’t necessarily love jungle treks and waterfall misadventures, but I’m thrilled to report that Paddington in Peru is super charming! Why shouldn’t my boy (bear) Paddington Brown have an Indiana Jones of his own. All the bits here really worked for me—Olivia Colman as a very suspicious nun, Antonio Banderas’ ghost ancestors, a brief Hayley Atwell cameo as a risk-taking girlboss. The joke that I keep laughing about is (SPOILER ALERT FOR ADAM BROWN!!! DO NOT READ) the one about the El Dorado chicken shop. This is still a London story!!! The chicken shop is so London, like ACTUAL London! I love this bear and I hope I get to hang out with him forever.

Do I want to hang out with another beloved Londoner, Bridget Jones forever? I took a big edible before buying a month of Peacock specifically to watch Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy and I wept and wept but then I got bored and depressed. I think there is a ton of value in following Bridget Jones into middle age after her happy ending (you can REALLY tell this was written by actual moms), in theory, but the practical effect of making a “what happens if after you get the boy, you lose him and have to keep living” film with such lackluster new suitors and giving Bridget all the same old insecurities is… really bleak!

I had a lot more fun with One of Them Days, a miraculously breezy, summer ???? LA buddy comedy with Keke Palmer (great as ever) and Sza. What if I said One of Them Days is A Real Pain but good (practical person tethered emotionally to a beautiful and charming agent of chaos)? Just an idea. There’s an ease to how funny and fun One of Them Days is that I think is so deceptive. If it was so simple to make movies that watchable, more movies would be that watchable!

I also caught up with I’m Still Here before the Oscars, and it was exactly the kind of sturdy, generations-spanning, historical drama I like. Fernanda Torres is incredible!!

It’s a 50s-ish Fairy Tale and Willem Dafoe is Here (and Evil)

I watched three movies with this through line in the span of a week and I thought that was funny. First was Streets of Fire at Anthology Film Archive (college co-op ass space), about a motorcycle gang that kidnaps a rock and roll singer named Ellen Aim and her ex-bf has to go save her. This movie is beloved online in a way that made me surprised the movie was sort of bad. The story is ridiculous, the acting stilted. I wondered if this was somehow subversive… meta-textual… a joke beyond my grasp? but when I read up on it it was clear that Walter Hill was honest to god trying to make an awesome movie that was failed by a thin story and a deadeningly bad lead performance. Its saving grace is that it begins and ends with the coolest musical performances I’ve ever seen and whenever you’re left too long with these nothing characters, the music kicks in loud and engines roar and also I like neon, so I basically loved this. True camp!

I was trying to get through as much of the Criterion John Waters series as possible this month and watched Cry-Baby which is not as good as Hairspray and also lacks the raw, nasty, scream-y power of Waters’ Trash Trilogy, but it’s good! It’s cute! It’s sicko-Grease without the great songs! Dafoe shows up for like, 3 minutes as a cop who makes everyone repeat “God bless my probation officer. God bless the draft board.”

The best of the bunch is David Lynch’s Wild at Heart which I rewatched at the Roxy. I’m just a sucker for a love story! Nobody is better than Nicolas Cage at conveying a wild and all-consuming love that feels completely real and lived in instantaneously. Obviously love the centrality of “Love Me Tender” here. Sailor and Lula are such cool names.

Also in Repertory

I went to see It Happened One Night at Film Forum, preceded by the Bugs Bunny cartoon Little Red Riding Rabbit. I don’t think there’s a better morning in New York City than a diner breakfast with friends followed by an eternally perfect comedy at 11am at Film Forum.

I also went to see Carmen Jones at the Museum of the Moving Image, based on the Oscar Hammerstein musical which reimagines the opera Carmen as a musical set in a WWII parachute factory with an all-black cast. It’s a weird musical in a lot of ways—setting iconic tunes to Hammerstein’s simple lyrics, dubbing everybody’s singing voice (insane thing to do to HARRY BELAFONTE2)—but I was so totally mesmerized by Dorothy Danridge’s Carmen. I believe this is an addition of the musical, but here Carmen is sure she is doomed to die early (she’s like.. an astrologer sometimes?) which is why she’s so brazen about pursuing the men she likes and doing whatever she wants and maintaining her freedom to do as she likes. Danridge is so beautiful and alive, and you fall in love with her as much as much as every other sorry, twisted man here.

Claudette Colbert-A-Thon

I burned my way through a good chunk of Criterion’s Claudette Colbert collection because she’s one of my absolute favorite stars—so funny and cute and plucky and mischievous! Quick ranking:

1. It Happened One Night, if we’re counting that (wasn’t from the Criterion run, but it is her best!)

2. Midnight (a rewatch) in which Colbert is a starving American showgirl in Paris who pretends to be Hungarian royalty, begins a fake affair with a rich guy who just wants to make his wife jealous, and is pursued by a cab driver who loves her (and who she loves too). LOTS of hijinks ensue. Colbert pulls a Rose-in-Titanic and gives the cab driver’s last name as her own when she has to make up a fake name. :)

3. Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (another rewatch) in which Colbert marries a multi-millionaire who’s been married 7 times before and basically schemes to destroy his spirit so he won’t leave her too. Basically Jane Eyre.

4. No Time For Love, in which Colbert plays a photojournalist who develops a crush on gruff, unrefined subway tunnel worker Fred MacMurray and decides to knock herself out of it by hanging out with him a bunch—I don’t love MacMurray as a romantic lead, but the film around them is so fizzy and it ends with a perfect one-liner.

5. Skylark, in which Colbert is unhappily married to a jackass who ignores her so she pursues a divorce and takes up with a handsome lawyer. This starts really fun with Colbert playing little tricks on her husband, but then begins to barrel its way toward a painfully old fashioned ending.

6. The Gilded Lily, in which Colbert falls in love with a British aristocrat but when she finds out he’s already engaged, her journalist best friend (who is in love with her) cooks up a story about her rejecting the aristocrat first and making her a sensation as the famous “No-Girl.” Colbert capitalizes on her 15 minutes and does a cabaret act that I would pay a clean $217 to see in person.

Light John Waters-A-Thon

• Kathleen Turner in Serial Mom as—you guessed it!—a housewife turned serial killer should have won an award. The Nobel Peace Prize for Having a Cool Voice.

• I rewatched Female Trouble which is so loud and gross. Women should scream all the time. Wonderful stuff.

Everything Else!

• Watched The Music Man which is great. A musical about how conmen are good if they make everyone smile is so elementally American.

• I’m so excited they put up all that Joan Micklin Silver on Criterion! We started with Bernice Bobs Her Hair, a perfect short about Shelley Duvall getting a flapper bob. Lots of funny dancing in this.

• Also showed Adam Crossing Delancey, the underrated rom-com about a Jewish woman/book marketer/busy woman about town named Izzie whose grandma hires a matchmaker who sets her up with a sweet pickle man. Izzie acts crazy for an hour and a half until she realizes the pickle man is SO nice and handsome and way better than dating a writer and the whole movie is perfect. This is what I wrote on Letterboxd:

i love how lived in and textured and busy izzie’s life is— her job and her coworkers, her many friends, her sometimes bf & her crush, her beloved grandma, her solo nights with salad bar food and tv in her little apartment with the monet poster—before sam walks into it with his pickles & his hat. i love that each minor character is a complete person. and of course the “some enchanted evening” scene is one of the very best new york scenes. sometimes a person can come swinging into a restaurant or a subway car at any time and command hesitant but total attention, sometimes that can be magic and sometimes the simple lyrics of a song you’ve heard & hardly registered a million times before can mean everything when you’re falling in love.

Television

Adam went home to LA for a week so I spent the week sleeping diagonal on the bed, building an IKEA bookcase slightly wrong, texting “I MISS YOU” 9,000 times a day, and most crucially, binging my old favorite, the 2004 BBC miniseries North and South.

North and South is a Pride and Prejudice knock-off3 about a prideful and passionate young Southern woman named Margaret Hale whose dad moves her up North to a horribly, smoky, dirty, industrial town where she meets a harsh but handsome factory owner named John Thornton. Whatever will happen next! In the miniseries, Thornton is played by Richard Armitage who is one of the best brooding, dark haired, big nosed, tortured, leaning-on-mantles-in-distress male love interests in BBC history.

There’s a lot of side plot where Margaret befriends a factory worker and her family and is sympathetic toward their strike but all of this is ultimately really boring filler between moments where Margaret and John look at each other, accidentally hold hands, misinterpret each other, sigh heavily when the other leaves the room. There’s a failed proposal and a whole thing where John thinks Margaret has a secret boyfriend and a big, distinctly un-1855 kiss at a train station. They also attend the Great Exhibition of 1851 (love). I rewatch this whole show once every 2-3 years.

Ballet

Adam and I went to see the New York City Ballet where they performed two plotless Balanchine pieces (a really lovely, fluid piece to Mozart and an energetic, all jumps and turns Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux) and Christopher Wheeldon’s Carnival of the Animals which I wanted to see because it’s set in the American Museum of Natural History. Carnival of the Animals is a naked attempt to make a new Nutcracker—a little boy falls asleep in the museum4 and he dreams that all the people in his life are different animals. I liked the haunting, storybook design of the ballet (at its best it reminded me of The Phantom Tollbooth, Maira Kalman, Maurice Sendak) but there was more animal-ish pantomime than pure dancing for my taste. The best was the danciest—the little boy’s librarian transformed from meek kangaroo to a beautiful mermaid during the ever-haunting and childlike Saint-Saen’s “Aquarium.” I found myself much more taken with the non-narrative ballets that night which surprised me because I usually only ever go for narrative ballets. I guess I’m growing???

Books

I finished East of Eden. Loved!!!!!!!!! Every 10 pages something insane happened, which is how a novel should be. Lee and Cathy are the most exciting characters I’ve ever encountered, for very different reasons. If you’ve read this book, text me!

FMK: F Charles (curiosity), M Lee, K Joe (only bad part of the book)