The great escape
This week's Marginalia: Oscar nominees that you can watch from your couch, a reappraisal of pop culture as escapism, and the usual odds and ends. (Apologies for the unexpected hiatus last week — I was battling a bit of a monstrous cold.)
NOW STREAMING
The Oscar nominations came out Tuesday (an eternity ago, given that there have probably been 10 more news cycles since then). Several of you have asked about which nominated movies you can watch from your couch. The immediate answer is "Mudbound" (on Netflix), which I highly, highly recommend. But don't take it from me — take it from Babs.
This tweet was from directly after the Golden Globes, but it still sort of applies.
Other major feature film nominees already on the various renting/on demand platforms (streaming availability in parentheses):
Get Out (HBO Go)
Dunkirk
The Big Sick (Amazon Prime)
Logan (HBO Go)
Documentaries:
Strong Island (Netflix)
Abacus: Small Enough To Jail (PBS - Frontline)
Icarus (Netflix)
Last Men in Aleppo (Netflix)
POP CULTURE AS ESCAPISM?
As the maelstrom of news cycles can be mentally draining, I've found that I increasingly turn to pop culture as an escape, and my thinking about pop culture has changed. I've written about this before, but I thought about it again last week, in light of the first anniversary of Trump's inauguration. I used to have an aversion to considering culture as escapism because I always felt that "escapist" implied something pejorative. There's a great David Fincher quote: “I don’t know how much movies should entertain. To me, I’m always interested in movies that scar.” I considered it almost as a mantra.
But particularly in the last two years, I've realized that it's OK to read or watch something more dishy or breezy, and that kind of pop culture, whatever that description even means or however ill-defined, can still be intellectually stimulating. Case in point: my reading habits, I have pretty much sworn off reading anything dense, and instead have been enjoying a lot more of what I guess you could consider middlebrow fiction.
Readers, have your pop culture habits changed because of circumstances in the world? Where do you fall on culture as escapism? Do you see it as a continuum, a case-by-case consideration? Does it even matter? Am I overthinking this? (Answer: probably yes.)
BRICOLAGE
Speaking of culture that is escapist but can still be intellectually stimulating, I don't watch The Bachelor, but I know a surprising number of people who do — and who often have surprisingly insightful points to make about it. This was an interesting discussion of this week's episode, from two of my HuffPost colleagues who also co-host a popular Bachelor podcast.
While the rest of us are still processing 2017's movies because of Oscar season, my very cool colleagues Matt Jacobs and Leigh Blickley went to Sundance and already saw some of what could become 2018's best movies.
Fellow "Call Me By Your Name" fans: what do you think about a possible sequel? Director Luca Guadagnino recently hinted at this. The part that reaaaaally piqued my interest, as a superfan of the "Before..." movies: he apparently wants to make "a decades-long Before Sunrise-like series."
In my opinion, "Call Me..." can be the first chapter of the chronicles of the life of these people that we met in this movie, and if the first one is a story of coming of age and becoming a young man, maybe the next chapter will be, what is the position of the young man in the world, what does he want — and what is left a few years later of such an emotional punch that made him who he is?
Maybe my favorite quote of the week: at 89, the legendary French New Wave director Agnès Varda just became the oldest Oscar nominee ever. Asked to comment on this achievement, she said: "I’m just saying, I’m not dead yet."