I Found It at the Movies (Holiday Swoons)
Every year I spend the holiday season watching old films on the biggest screens possible, and every year this delights me as few activities in cities ever do. Alone in the dark shoulder to shoulder with rapt strangers, I feel connected to the human condition in a way that is more pleasurably than painfully melancholy. Yesterday, in a green, absinthe-infused hangover I watched 1936’s My Man Godfrey–the Carole Lombard and William Powell vehicle that’s as much smoke as it is fire–long-lashed and heavy-lidded and soaked in a satiny, Depression-era fuck-you politique. I loved it. The day before, I poured vermouth and sherry and watched 2008’s A Christmas Tale, Arnaud Desplechin’s neurotic, erotic paean to love lost and barely found. Its deep skepticism of blood bonds enthralls me almost as much as Deneuve’s red-lipped what-the-fuckery. This is to say: quite a lot.
Today at Metrograph, I ogled The Apartment, one of my favorite Billy Wilder films of all time, which means it’s one of my favorite films, period. Featuring midcentury, midtown New York at is its most woebegone and most sharp-toothed (most rumpled and stylish, too), this 1960 love story lampoons corporate America’s immorality while not-so-secretly upholding underdogs of every walk of life. Not only is it the most Jewish Christmas movie Hollywood ever made, it’s the baseline for all NYC-based romcoms since–all romcoms worth their salt, really. As clever as it is melancholy, New York’s grabby, glamorous melting pot presides as a central character, and its lonelyhearts
discover each other via a Manhattan scavenger hunt of great flourishes and rueful afterthoughts. Neither Jack Lemmon nor Shirley MacLaine were ever so sweethearted again, and that’s saying a mouthful. Movie love to you all tonight. Any light in the dark deserves to be honored in this holy terror of a year.
‘Wag the Dog’ Still Wags the Dog
When “Wag the Dog” hit theaters on Christmas 1997, nothing could have seemed more cleverly prescient. About a fake war staged to draw focus from a first-term U.S. president’s sex scandal, the film was released a month before then-President Clinton was accused of having sex with intern Monica Lewinsky and an Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan was subsequently bombed by the U.S. Viewed ten years later, this dark comedy seemed even more relevant. Though the world was verging on an economic meltdown after the collapse of the subprime mortgage market, the media was distracted by Britney Spears’ nervous breakdown and Brangelina’s growing brood. Only today does this adaptation of Larry Beinhart’s novel American Hero read as depressingly dated — if only because we have entered a new era of fake news and governmental deception. Continue Reading →
Mercury Retrograde Casualty
I was so into this Mercury Retrograde. Delightful! I crowed. It’s a trickster, engineering sparkly run-ins, bewitching us with time-travel adventures! Then tough-love Saturn entered big-daddy Capricorn on December 19 and it’s been a shite show, not a star shower.
Website hacked, wages garnished for unpaid taxes that in fact I paid, transportation black holes, clusterfuck communications, unseemly encounters applying exclamation points to long-simmering emotional run-on sentences. Then there’s the U.S. Plutocracy taking its reality-TV larceny to new let-em-eat cake levels: Climate change denial. Orwellian language control. The destruction of national monuments and healthcare for millions. Emboldened Nazis. Stolen Supreme Court seat. Crushed net neutrality. Cabinet departments handed to people bent on destroying them. Tax welfare for corporations.*
Am I learning? Yes, motherrrrrr, I am. But these lessons are proving as charmless as a Masshole when the Sox are losing. The good news: today’s winter solstice is sure to puncture this overarching darkness. In the meantime you can find me cowering with Gracie beneath the covers with champagne, hot sauce, and oranges from 
Rachel, laughing like a hyena with (not at) the brilliant sorceressery of Broad City and trying valiantly not to check my phone. Bright light to you, loved ones.
*Hat tip to Shawn Levy for breaking it down.