The Substance, I'm Still Here, and Emilia Perez.

Week 224.

Hello hello! This week I found out my favorite movie theater is closing and I am UPSET. The way that independent movie theaters have struggled post pandemic is so depressing to me. I love this place, a cool underground movie theater that shows movies I usually can’t find anywhere else. I have had so many memorable experiences here over the past several years. I saw Past Lives here and sobbed. I saw Aftersun here and SOBBED. I saw Women Talking and Gods Creatures and Origin and Tar here. I saw so many good movies here. I’m going to try to go one last time before it closes. I am SAD. Here’s a recap of my week:

Things I Read

Books

If you’re looking for a book to read, try this list of contemporary romance recs, this list of other fiction recs, or this list of non-fiction recs. I also track everything I read on Goodreads.

The first week this year I haven’t finished a book! After the entire of 2024 being a reading slump for me I feel good about this. I’ll be on a plane this weekend and will hopefully finish a book.

Articles

• Inside the Kitchen of New York City’s Rikers Island: Rikers Island is one of the most problematic, violent carceral institutions in the country. It houses 6500+ people and is a jail, meaning everyone inside is either being held pretrial or serving a sentence of less than a year (as opposed to a prison, which is where people go to serve lengthy sentences of incarceration). People sit here for years, and a not insignificant number of them die before they ever get to a trial date. There have been efforts to close Rikers for years, and to replace it with several other smaller jails in the city. The deadline for this to happen right now is 2027, and the city is unlikely to meet it. This was a really interesting look into the kitchen at Rikers and some of the people who have worked there for decades. I learned from this article that they are reworking the menu to add in more plant based meals! I think the food is one of the most inhumane things about most jails. I once had an incarcerated person tell me it took over a month for them to start getting vegetarian meals despite making multiple requests, and they lost 20 pounds in three weeks because they kept getting food they couldn’t eat. The only explanation for carceral institutions feeding their residents horrible food is that it is expensive to feed this many people decent food. Free idea: let them out, then.

Things I Watched

TV

If you’re looking for a show to watch, try this list.

• Devil in the Family: the Fall of Ruby Franke (Hulu): Oops I’m talking about Ruby Franke again! This is the only thing the family has participated in/cooperated fully with, so it is the only thing I plan to watch. This is a three part docuseries that tells the story of Ruby starting a family vlogging channel and goes all the way up through her arrest and subsequent guilty plea for multiple counts of child abuse. This has a lot of unseen footage and new details, and it is so harrowing. This goes out of it’s way to protect the privacy of the younger kids involved, blurring their faces and never using their names, which I appreciated. If you are curious about this story I thought this was well done, and you should also read Shari Franke’s memoir. For me, the thing I can’t stop thinking about in all of this is that Ruby’s three sisters and her parents all continue to post their families’ lives on the internet to this day. I think that is insane. And, as I always do when I talk about true crime stuff here, I just have to say that you should never, under any circumstances, talk to the cops. Do NOT talk to the cops.

Movies

• The Substance (Mubi): I don’t think I ever would have watched this if it had not gotten a Best Picture nom, and honestly? I would have been fine with that. There are some things to like about this, but it is very gross and I thought it was too long. Demi Moore stars as an aging Hollywood star who is being pushed out by her terrible boss (Dennis Quaid being absolutely repulsive), so she voluntarily takes a black market drug that produces a younger version of herself. Things start to go wrong when her younger persona starts to misuse the drug, and what happens next is just 2 hours of truly disgusting body horror nastiness!! EW. I appreciate the themes this movie is trying to explore, but it truly just feels like being hit in the face with the point over and over again and by the end I was like ok I GOT IT. I wish this had been 30 minutes shorter. It is wild to me that this got a Best Picture nom, I think that’s a reflection of the fact that The Academy has made a real effort to diversify and add a bunch of younger people to the voting body. I also am never mad when there is a woman in the Best Director category. This was simply not for me but I understand why, if you are a person who likes a body horror movie, you would enjoy this. I do think Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley (a top tier nepotism) are both very good in this.

• Emilia Perez (Netflix): Disrespectfully, I HATED this movie. I had seen a lot of bad reviews of this so I went in with already very low expectations, and somehow it was worse than I expected. This is about an attorney (Zoe Saldana) who gets hired to help a notorious Mexican cartel leader (Karla Sofia-Gascon) fake their death and transition to live life as a woman. It is also, do not ask me why I truly have no clue, a musical? This is a mess in every way something can be a mess. It has songs but it doesn’t commit to being a musical in the way that is necessary for a musical to be good. The way it portrays Mexican people is just based in rude stereotypes, everyone is either a member of a cartel or someone whose loved one is lost/dead because they are in a cartel. Its portrayal of transness, as something used to deceive people or to run from a former life, is dangerous, particularly at this moment in time where transgender people are being targeted more than ever. It’s as if a white, cisgender, French guy should not have made a film about these communities??? Who could have predicted this?? It does not look good, it does not sound good, I truly hated everything about this film. No depth, no point, an over 2 hour slog with the most lackluster ending. And this does not even get into the fact that the film’s star, Karla Sofia-Gascon, has since been exposed as someone who has terrible views about basically every group of people that exists. This is a MESS. I am so annoyed that this is the most nominated film of the year, because that means people are going to watch it. I am so annoyed that this got a Best Picture nom instead of Sing Sing, or A Real Pain, or CHALLENGERS. Literally, pick any other nominated movie instead. Any of them. Not this!!

• I’m Still Here (theaters): The last Best Picture nom I needed to watch, and a really astonishing movie. This tells the true story of a family in Brazil in the 1970s, and what happened when the patriarch was taken by the military dictatorial regime running the country at that time. The way this story plays out in this film is so emotionally effective, the first 30 minutes are so joyful and full of love that it makes the rest of the story so heartbreaking to watch. This is a movie about military violence, but it is also intimate and insular and really beautiful. Fernanda Torres is incredible in this, her performance made me cry several times. I knew almost nothing about this time in Brazil’s history and it is really horrific. I thought this showcased this story in such an engaging way. A sad, enraging, beautiful move.

Things I Bought

You can read about my full skincare routine and favorite products here. If you need a sunscreen recommendation, try this list.

• One/Size setting spray: I caved to the hype and bought this and it WORKS. The worst part of this is the 10 seconds it takes to apply it feel a bit suffocating because this smells terrible and legitimately feels like what I imagine it would feel like to spray actual hairspray all over your face. I cannot emphasize enough, this does not smell good!! But once that’s over it dries down super fast and it really locks my makeup in for the entire day. So I think it’s worth it.

One Last Thing…

Oscars on Sunday!! It feels like there are many more categories than usual that are truly up in the air, I am excited to see what wins! If Emilia Perez wins anything (other than Zoe winning, which I expect to happen) I’m throwing tomatoes at my tv screen!! As I do every year, I really liked the Pop Culture Happy Hour Will Win/Should Win episode. If I could force all of you to watch one, and only one, movie from this season, my answer is Sing Sing. I ranked all the Best Picture noms, based only on how much I enjoyed watching them and nothing else, here.

That’s it for me! I hope you all have a good week.

TTYL,

Emily