A nostalgic newsletter
This week's Marginalia: a grab bag, similar to my grab bag of a week — a summer movie, looking ahead to fall, and pondering what pop culture nostalgia means.
NOW PLAYING
"Landline"
"It's 'emotional cheating.'"
"You watch too much Oprah."
If you, like me, enjoyed the romantic comedy "Obvious Child," you will also like this movie, as it's another collaboration between writer-director Gillian Robespierre and comedian Jenny Slate. "Landline" is similar tonally, but a bit more ambitious in its character development and plot. It follows a dysfunctional family (played by Slate, Abby Quinn, Edie Falco, and John Turturro, all wonderful), each member unraveling in both individual and shared ways. Slate in particular is fabulous at physical comedy. The film is funny, witty, and winning, and I recommend it if you need a pick-me-up, which I really did after this whirlwind week.
My one gripe with it is that it takes its motif of paying homage to the '90s a bit too far: landline telephones, floppy disks, mixtapes, aforementioned Oprah jokes, topical references, et al. We get it, you're establishing that it's the '90s. On my way out of the theater, I overheard someone debating whether to refer to the film as "a period piece, because I guess the '90s are old enough now to be a period piece." If that is true, I am old.
Supplemental listening: a "mixtape" (digital version, obviously) of songs from the movie and other '90s classics, including a lot of Fiona Apple and Alanis Morissette.
COMING ATTRACTIONS
We are inching toward fall movie season (the best time of the year!), which unofficially begins with a couple of big film festivals. The Toronto Film Festival announced its lineup last week, and almost everything I've been vaguely keeping an eye on for the fall will be playing there, which made me feel a bit sad to not be going this year.
I would definitely recommend the film festival experience. When I went last year, I met a lot of interesting people (all of whom wanted to talk to me about the election) and had a lot of good food and drink when I wasn't seeing movies. Plus, September in Toronto is gorgeous.
For NYC/DC/Amtrak's Northeast Corridor pals: the New York Film Festival is a solid option. The movies are similarly high profile, and everything is at night or on weekends. Last year, I caught two movies back to back on a Sunday (which I do not recommend — a lot of emotional whiplash). For California denizens: I've heard the Mill Valley Film Festival also features some big movies each year.
BRICOLAGE
(Photos via Getty)
Pop culture nostalgia feels a bit like its own industry these days. There are entire podcasts devoted to recapping old TV shows. Cast reunions (exhibits A and B above, relevant to my personal interests, are both from this past week) are always cause for much celebration on the Internet. It makes sense: Nostalgia is a powerful thing. (This is starting to sound like Don Draper's "nostalgia" ad pitch. Incidentally, the 10th anniversary of the premiere of "Mad Men" was earlier this month, which spawned a lot of think pieces.)
What counts as a cast reunion, I think, is up for debate. In Exhibit B, do we count every time Kate/Leo show up together on an award show red carpet as a "reunion"? I also feel like the rules need to be different for notable people who are actually friends in real life.
Maybe pop culture nostalgia is only good for sending me down Internet rabbit holes. Aforementioned Titanic reunion also featured Billy Zane, utterer of what I think is one of the most unintentionally funny lines in cinema history ("I put the diamond in the coat — and the coat on HER!!!!!"). That sent me to his IMDb page to figure out what he has been doing for the last two decades. Among his more than 100 screen credits, most of which don't ring any bells, he already has multiple movies in the can for next year, so at least he is busy. Must be weird to be the only person in this photo who has not won an Academy Award (harsh, but fair).
On that note (before this verges into a tangent), I am genuinely curious about the 20th anniversary of Titanic later this year. What do critics make of its legacy? What even is its legacy? I have a lot of ideas of my own that I am batting around, which may or may not turn into think pieces, depending on my motivation to write them.
In personal and professional interests colliding, a frequent series, two recommendations from the week:
New Yorker TV critic Emily Nussbaum on rewatching "The Apprentice" to understand Donald Trump.
This interview with the New York Times' Maggie Haberman is as revealing as you would expect, but in typical fashion, one of my favorite parts was when she briefly mentions "Broadcast News," one of my favorite movies, and probably my favorite journalism movie.
