Happy Taylor Swift Weekend—It's the Wag!The Award Squad Looks at the Success of Original Pictures. Plus, BookWag Intrudes with New Reads, Cillian Murphy, Tyra Banks, Taylor Swift, Jane Goodall, Patricia Routledge, and More...
Dear Wags, A sometimes reputable outlet asks, “Is One Battle After Another the best movie of the year?” Stop with the silly questions. A smarter line of inquiry might be what can be gleaned from a qualified success. On its first weekend, Paul Thomas Anderson’s nearly three-hour, loosey-goosey take on Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland earned around $48 million worldwide—the director’s biggest opening ever. That’s a strong launch for a highbrow film from an auteur, and even better, a sign that at least part of the theatrical audience is still hungry for ambitious, high-quality filmmaking. Mix in glowing reviews, and you get breathless Oscar chatter. Anderson has 11 Academy Award nominations and no wins. And a movie about authoritarianism, xenophobia, and political violence couldn’t be timelier. It’s a strong Best Picture contender. Ah, but it’s early. This weekend is the test of One Battle’s staying power, with Taylor Swift’s promotional extravaganza The Life of a Showgirl predicted to obliterate all comers, and another awards hopeful, The Smashing Machine, headed to theaters. Still, word-of-mouth should sustain Anderson’s movie. Later this season, powerhouses like Hamnet and House of Dynamite will shake things up. The good news for Warner Bros. is that it has backed two acclaimed contenders right out of the gate—One Battle and Ryan Coogler’s Sinners. Both are daring and original works, built for the big screen (no matter how luxe your media room, neither will look as good at home). And both manage the high-low routine that once made Hollywood globally dominant. That experience is increasingly rare: movies that are smart, but not too smart to be fun. One Battle hasn’t yet recouped the more than $100 million it took to make and promote, but its buzz makes us feel strangely optimistic about the future of non-franchised cinema. Ditch the capes and give us more of this. Yours Ever,
Heart the Lover by Lily King Until lately, many Americans referred to college as the best years of their lives. Even that experience seems to have been robbed from us; modern youth doesn’t even get four years to play at being carefree. King (Writers & Lovers) sets this university romance in the 1980s, an era with its own anxieties, but one that still left room for first love. The narrator arrives on campus with a golf scholarship, hence her nickname—“Jordan,” after Daisy Buchanan’s sporty friend in The Great Gatsby (we don’t learn her real name until the book’s end). An aspiring writer, she becomes close with Sam and Yash, two brilliant students in her 17th-century literature class. The boys are best friends, house-sitting for a professor who is away at Oxford, and soon the three are spending all their time together. Jordan dates volatile Sam, but then falls for Yash; the triangle adds a feverish intensity to their intertwined friendships. Looking back, the narrator realizes that what she shared with both men was beautiful and doomed. But it also reads like it was great, giddy fun. Among the many charms of King’s latest is that her view of university life is refreshingly unjaded. No—romantic. —Laura Conroy
Cat on the Road to Findout by Yusuf/Cat Stevens 107 Days by Kamala Harris Memoirs from rock stars and politicians share at least one trait: they tend to be self-justifying. Fame is not all that unites the former Cat Stevens and the former Vice President of the United States. Both feel the need to set the record straight—though one let his story simmer for sixty years, while the other dashed hers off in a hurry... Continue reading this post for free in the Substack app
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