ICYMI: “The Content Corner Guide to…Sean Connery as James Bond” went live this week. To mark the publication of this four-month long mini project, get ready for a 007-themed edition of “Sunday Snippets.”

Let’s get into it:

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“The Sean Connery Art-Heist Movie — Starring Dolly Parton! — That Never Was” — This Air Mail piece — penned by writer, actor, and director Michael Elias — recounts a run-in with Sean Connery at Spago’s original Los Angeles location. Elias enters the Wolfgang Puck restaurant alongside Eve Babitz sometime after its 1982 opening, struck with the sight of Connery at a nearby table. The narrative then loops backward as Elias recounts a shelved Creative Artists Agency (CAA) collaboration.

In the 1970s, at the height of New Hollywood, CAA became one of Hollywood’s biggest power players thanks to its head, Michael Ovitz. Ovitz coupled stars with his slate of writers, encouraging co-creation at a time when actors largely waited for studio scripts. One such pairing? Elias and his writing partner, Rich Eustis, with Connery circa 1977 (Ovitz: “I positioned you guys to meet Sean Connery. He wants to make a movie about the art world. I want you guys to write that screenplay. MGM put him in a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel while Micheline [his wife] redecorates their condo. Be sure to park on Crescent.”).

In the piece, Elias recalls the waning intimidation of writing alongside 007, earning an endearing ending (“As Eve and I approached Sean’s table, he stood up, threw his arms around me in a mighty hug, and lifted me off the floor. ‘Michael, laddie, it’s so lovely to see you.’ I introduced him to Eve. She stared.”).

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Goldfinger (1964, dir. Guy Hamilton) — The third James Bond movie, to me, marks the crucial moment when the spy series finds its stride. Where the first two films — Dr. No (1962) and From Russia with Love (1963) — adopt a more serious tone and tenor, Goldfinger (1964) introduces the critical element of camp. (These movies are best approached as deeply unserious.) As Roger Ebert writes in a 1999 review: “Of all the Bonds, Goldfinger is the best, and can stand as a surrogate for the others. If it is not a great film, it is a great entertainment, and contains all the elements of the Bond formula that would work again and again.”

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Vesper Martini — Ian Fleming, the author behind the books spurred the film series, introduces this cocktail recipe in Casino Royale (1953). In the novel, James Bond “invents” the drink by telling a bartender: “Three measures of Gordon’s, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it’s ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon peel. Got it?”

That’s all for now!

xo,
Najet

Let’s get into it:

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Aria Aber’s “Night Knowledge: What I Learned at the Club” (2026) — This piece from Good Girl (2025) author Aria Aber operates as an ode to the art of nightlife.

Aber, once “a college dropout in a silver bikini and black mesh overalls, dancing in a starlit meadow on the outskirts of Berlin,” reflects on the sociopolitical dimension of partying, a notion interwoven throughout her debut novel. She delineates knowledge into categories defined by day and night, her current life engulfed in the former, her early years dominated by the latter. She writes: “Some of my friends in Berlin worked at Berghain, the legendary nightclub, and it became the nucleus around which I organized my life…The people — with their dedication to hedonism, subversion, and niche art, with their genuine curiosity about the world — taught me for the first time what I would later practice as an artist: a way of thinking with other people, not alone, hunched over a book in my teenage bed, or in the clinical, fluorescent classroom.”

The piece positions the club as an essential third space, “an outlet for creativity or hedonism, an ersatz family” through a blend of personal reflection and political observation. Aber traces the history of techno — its sound reminiscent of “the mathematical precision and sweep of Rachmaninoff, and the pulsing drumbeat of the Attan” — and underground party culture, nexuses of resistance with roots winding through the aftermath of Reagan administration, toward contemporary Palestine. She writes: “At a party, knowledge matters less; it’s a space governed by impulses, not thoughts. And yet the club can also be a site of discovery, where you step onto the electric wires of epiphany”

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The Last Days of Disco (1998, dir. Whit Stillman) — The Last Days of Disco (1998) deals in a preening kind of partying, upper crust postgrad kids populating New York’s then-coolest downtown clubs at the onset of the 80s. As I write in the September 2023 Movie Review: “The soundtrack dips between disco classics like Alicia Bridges’s ‘I Love the Nightlife,’ Cheryl Lynn’s ‘Got to be Real,’ and Diana Ross’s ‘I’m Coming Out,’ capturing the background noise of a bygone era. The film’s fictional club appears strikingly similar to archival images of Studio 54, an aesthetic molded partially from writer and director Whit Stillman’s memories of the stumbling into the space at 2:00 AM after getting off his early-days job at a New York newspaper.” The dialogue distills the immaturity and pretentiousness, soaked in all the wrong kinds of self awareness, that shapes the newly minted, twenty-something New Yorker.

Snack

Midori Sour — Midori made its stateside debut at Studio 54 when the famed club hosted the Saturday Night Fever (1977) premiere party. The verdant Japanese melon liqueur maintained popularity throughout the 80s and 90s, then fell out of favor until the 2010s-era craft cocktail boom.

Mix up a Midori Sour for your The Last Days of Disco viewing, combining one ounce each of Midori and vodka to an iced Collins glass. Then, add a half an ounce each of freshly-squeezed lemon and lime, topped with a splash of soda and garnished with a lemon wheel. Cheers!

Until next week!

xo,
Najet

Let’s get into it:

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Hilma Wolitzer’s “Today, a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket” (1966) — As the title implies, “Today, a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket” recounts a nervous breakdown [“Perhaps for the glory of the retelling, I might say that she was a great beauty, that her beauty was marred (or enhanced) only by her wild expression. In truth, she was pretty in a common sort of way, with conventional hair and eyes and nose.”]. It adopts the perspective of a woman pregnant with her first child, rife with the anxiety of expectant motherhood. An observed incident strikes her nerves, awakening a dormant sense of helplessness.

Carefully designed detail architects each description; for instance, the narrator recalls store manager Mr. A’s “milky breath…his nose…running onto a crusty sore right under it.” Among “painted oranges, threatening to burst at the navel…formations of cans, armored with labels and prices and weights,” she finds a woman “transfixed, as if caught in some great thought…blocking the aisle…the two small children clinging to her skirt.”

First published in The Saturday Evening Post, this piece later leant its title to Wolitzer’s 2021 short story collection. Today, a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket (2021) reprints the 96-year-old American author’s pieces from the 1960s and 1970s, with one new addition. Its themes circle marriage and motherhood. Characters recur, culminating with “The Great Escape,” a chilling semi-autobiographical story set during the dark depths of New York’s first COVID lockdown.

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Mildred Pierce (1945, dir. Michael Curtiz) — The ultimate mother-daughter melodrama, the noir that netted an Oscar for Joan Crawford, Mildred Pierce (1945) opens with a murder. Much like the structure of Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), its narrative then shifts backward to fill in key details best described by Ben Mankiewicz in my all-time favorite TCM social post.

Snack

LA-Style Chili Cheeseburger — Mildred Pierce’s titular character works in a restaurant, then builds her own mini empire of five in four years across Los Angeles. The film shot one such spot at Dolores’s, a long-dead and once-beloved local chain.

The menu included “Dolores’s hamburger (ugly burger-stand yellow-paper wrapper not withstanding)…terrific chili, fresh Suzy Q potatoes (you know the on-going spiraly kind you can wire a house with), assorted grilled fish plate that came with a soup or salad, two gorgeous homemade soft dinner rolls, an eggplant patty without the wheat bun, a hot fudge sundae, and hot deep-dish apple pie with vanilla ice cream,” according to The LA Times. Sharon Tate famously loved the chili burger, and you can create something similar courtesy of America’s Test Kitchen.

That’s all for now!

xo,
Najet

Now, the Met Gala has, indeed, inspired this week’s “Sunday Snippets.”

Let’s get into it:

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“The Magazine as Museum: 21 Vogue Editorials Inspired by Art” — So, what exactly is the Met Gala? The annual event operates as a star-studded fundraiser for The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, a department renamed for Vogue Editor-in-Chief Anna Wintour back in 2014. Essentially, Wintour transformed a local museum benefit into a global spectacle. She has chaired the event since 1995, with her overall fundraising efforts drawing in north of $125 million dollars, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Each year, the gala has a unique theme tied to the Costume Institute’s annual exhibition, with past examples including “Camp” for Camp: Notes on Fashion, “Sunday Best” for Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination, and “Tailored for You” for Superfine: Tailoring Black Style. Each designer styles a select sampling of celebrities, who arrive with and sit with them. Wintour and Vogue design the pairings, taking input from the various designers. On Monday, you can livestream red carpet arrivals starting at 6:00 PM ET on Vogue’s platforms, including YouTube and TikTok. Afterward, everyone heads inside for an exhibition tour, dinner and entertainment, with a strict social media ban in place.

This year’s annual exhibition, Costume Art, “explores depictions of the dressed body across The Met’s vast collection, pairing garments with artworks to reveal the inherent relationship between clothing and the body,” per the museum. I imagine that the accompanying dress code, “Fashion is Art,” will bring looks from certain iconic paintings to life. In anticipation, Vogue looks back on 18 editorials inspired by art in this week’s recommended story.

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The Thomas Crown Affair (1999, dir. John McTiernan) — A remake of the eponymous 1968 heist film starring Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway (which still sits on my to-watch list), The Thomas Crown Affair (1999) stars Pierce Brosnan circa his James Bond run as billionaire Thomas Crown. He orchestrates an elaborate theft at The Met, a distraction that enables him to steal Claude Monet’s San Giorgio Maggiore at Dusk (1908-1912) in broad daylight. NYPD Detective Michael McCann (played by Denis Leary) and insurance investigator Catherine Banning (played by Rene Russo) arrive to investigate the incident, spurring a sexual tête-à-tête between Crown and Banning.

Snack

Sant Ambroeus Principessa Cake — This beloved Milanese restaurant and coffee bar has a location around the corner from The Met! If you’re in New York, grab a slice of Principessa cake from any Sant Ambreous across the city for a snack as you scroll through Met Gala looks. You can also try to recreate the recipe at home!

That’s all for now!

xo,
Najet

Let’s get into it:

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Lena Dunham on Leaving New York — Lena Dunham recently made CULTURED Mag’s 2026 CULT 100, a list designed to celebrate influential figures across the creative spectrum. The accompanying feature provides a snapshot of Dunham’s past, a look into her future. A string of sentences wedged in at the halfway point outlines a laundry list of life changes. Writer Delia Cai explains: “Dunham got a hysterectomy, broke things off with her first great love, ended the creative partnership (with writer-director Jenni Konner) that practically raised her, and moved to London. There, she found love again, got married, and kept working.” Basically, Dunham lived Bridget Jones’s Chaka Khan montage, with the added — and crucial — element of relocation. As part of a 2024 interview with The New Yorker, long-time staff writer Rachel Syme explains: “She didn’t flee New York, exactly; it was work that first brought her to the U.K. But being in London ultimately offered Dunham the freedom of a place where ‘you don’t feel that you are being in any way hemmed in by other people’s perceptions.’”

Dunham details her feelings on leaving New York, a rite of passage for its writers, in The New Yorker. The personal essay provides a peek into how the city, an ever-present source of anxiety, constrained her as a child. She writes: “At that stage of life, my chosen realm was the world of Eloise, Kay Thompson’s iconic book about a six-year-old girl — a quixotic creation with unbrushed hair and a potbelly, a.k.a. my celebrity look-alike — who lives essentially unsupervised in the Plaza. On the book’s second page, Eloise declares, ‘I am a city child / I live at The Plaza.’ But this city child never seems to set foot outside: everything and everyone she needs exists within the walls of the hotel.” Dunham unpacks her layered relationship with the place that raised her, the other side of “the most mature sort of breakup — the sort where we can still have coffee sometimes.”

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Girlfriends (1978, dir. Claudia Weill) — One of Dunham’s Criterion Closet picks, a spiritual predecessor to Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha (2012), and a long-time personal favorite film, Girlfriends (1978) distills the distinctive ennui of the twenty-something friend breakup, the kind where nothing quite happens. You know the feeling; in place of some big blow-up, small choices shapeshift you into new versions of yourselves until, suddenly, you’re crammed in a bathroom at an engagement party with a sisterhood of strangers.

In Girlfriends, Melanie Mayron stars as Susan Weinblatt, a wedding, baby, and bar mitzvah photographer living with her best friend, aspiring writer Anne Munroe (played by Anita Skinner), on the Upper West Side. When Anne moves out to live with her boyfriend, Martin (played by Robert Balaban), Susan loses the coddled comfort of shared artistic aspirations. The episodic hangout film follows Susan as she strives to break into the art world, languishes in the loneliness of watching Anne pursue an alternate path.

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A Wine Pick Courtesy of The Four Horsemen — If you lived in New York during Girls’s generational run, you’ll recall the absolute chokehold LCD Soundsystem had on the city’s soundtrack. In 2015, the band’s frontman, James Murphy, opened The Four Horsemen, a Michelin star restaurant and wine bar that still stands today, having survived Williamsburg’s transformation from hipster haven to tech bro Mecca. Pick a bottle of wine for your Girlfriends screening off the Brooklyn staple’s latest list, or, if you’re in New York, pregame with a glass or three at the bar.

I did, indeed, pick up a copy of Dunham’s new memoir, Famesick (2026), during Three Lives and Company’s Independent Bookstore Day festivities yesterday. Don’t forget to ~like and subscribe~ for thoughts in the April Book Review!

xo,
Najet

Now, in honor of Earth Day this Wednesday and ahead of The Center for Fiction’s novella discussion group this Thursday, we are once again talking about Train Dreams (2025). Then, I promise I will move on from this year’s Oscar-nominated films.

In the meantime though, let’s get into it:

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Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams (2002) — The Paris Review recently unlocked the source material that shaped Clint Bentley’s Oscar-nominated film adaptation from its vault. Told from an omniscient third-person perspective, the novella follows the life of railroad worker and logger Robert Grainier, a man who relishes in “the grand size of things in the woods, the feeling of being lost and far away, and the sense he had that with so many trees as wardens, no danger could find him.” Like its cinematic counterpart, Train Dreams (2002) teems with a particular kind of tension, the fusion of frustration and respect that tethers man to nature (“All his life Robert Grainier would remember vividly the burned valley at sundown, the most dreamlike business he’d ever witnessed waking — the brilliant pastels of the last light overhead, some clouds high and white, catching daylight from beyond the valley, others ribbed and gray and pink, the lowest of them rubbing the peaks of Bussard and Queen mountains; and beneath this wondrous sky the black valley, utterly still, the train moving through it making a great noise but unable to wake this dead world.”).

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Train Dreams (2025, dir. Clint Bentley) — A faithful adaptation, Train Dreams (2025) meditates on nature’s perennial pendulum swing between beauty and destruction. As I write in “The Content Corner Guide to…the 2026 Oscars”:

Filmmaker Clint Bentley takes an aesthetic and thematic page from the book of New Hollywood auteur Terrence Malick. In a recent piece for The Yale Review, film critic Bilge Ebiri writes: “Malick has sought to reconnect American cinema to a lost spirituality, earnestly tackling questions about faith and the design of the world at a time when most mainstream cinema has avoided such topics…He doesn’t use religion as a cudgel or a doctrinaire superstructure with which to explain the world. Rather, he sees it as an inner light in people.” Bentley architects an analogous visual and ideological order. Both directors partner with their respective cinematographers to capture the subtle grandeur of nature, nuances as small as a shared shot of foxtail grass bathed in natural light. In Train Dreams, Robert grapples with its nebulous power pitted against the minute magnitude of man.

Snack

Huckleberry Jam — Much of Train Dreams takes place in Idaho, part of a region known for its huckleberries. Order a jar of huckleberry jam for the perfect cheese plate punch. This sweet snack also pairs perfectly with toasted whole wheat sourdough!

That’s all for now!

xo,
Najet

Let’s get into it:

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“The Queen is Dead” — This 1995 Texas Monthly piece from writer Joe Nick Patoski dives into the particular popularity of Selena Quintanilla, the “Queen of Tejano Music.” Selena began her career performing alongside her siblings as Selena y los Dinos, then evolved into a solo act that garnered worldwide recognition and a Grammy win. Approachability became her greatest asset, with Patoski noting how Selena “disarmed everyone at Los Dinos’ first Mexican press conference by walking in and hugging every single journalist,” and ultimate downfall. Selena launched a boutique and beauty salon in her hometown of Corpus Christi, Texas, hiring rabid fan Yolanda Saldívar to manage both properties. Saldívar embezzled from the beloved singer, then shot her to death at age 23. Published mere weeks after the murder, “The Queen is Dead” traces Selena’s cultural impact within and beyond Latinx communities in South Texas, underscoring the cyclicality of gun violence in America through its chilling close.

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Selena (1997, dir. Gregory Nava) — This biopic, which I adored growing up, stars Jennifer Lopez as Selena, tracing the meteoric rise of her too brief career. Praised by The Hollywood Reporter’s Duane Byrge as an “intelligent, reverential film” upon its premiere, Selena (1997) focuses on the titular singer’s life more than her death. It distills her effervescent spirit with a precision that prefigures Margot Robbie’s portrayal of Sharon Tate in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood (2019), drawing the viewer into the intimacy of her dream.

Snack

Pepperoni Pizza — Ideally a medium.

That’s all for now!

xo,
Najet

It feels remiss to discuss Iran without acknowledging the broader sociopolitical climate. Last month, Vox aggregated a list of donation resources that can reach civilians suffering within and beyond Iran as U.S. and Israeli missiles strike their homeland. For anyone looking to help, I’d encourage you to look into some of the included organizations, like The World Food Program.

Now, let’s get into it:

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Jafar Panahi for Paper Magazine — Conducted by critic Sam Bodrojan, this arresting interview delves into the personal experiences that Iranian auteur Jafar Panahi projects onto a fictional plane through his work. In Iran, filmmakers must apply for a permit from the Iranian Ministry of Culture, with heavy censorship impacting cinema. Since 2000, Panahi has skirted that official process and borne the consequences. Per Paper Magazine: “In 2010, Panahi was jailed and banned from making films for 20 years after Iranian authorities accused him of making propaganda against the Islamic state. He continued to make films in secret, filming and distributing them illicitly for twelve years. Between 2022 and 2023, he was imprisoned once again.”

Panahi’s most recent picture, It Was Just an Accident (2025), its set raided multiple times by Iranian authorities, draws on his experiences in and out of prison (“So if the regime puts me in prison, I will clearly both be influenced but also be inspired by that experience, by that place. Because I’ve lived with those prisoners, I’ve listened to them. We’ve confided our sorrows, our hopes to one another. The end result of all of this became It Was Just An Accident.”). The 2025 Palme d’Or winner crystallizes the connection between vision and power. Sound magnifies and envelops once-blindfolded former prisoners, its potency failing to compensate for crippled memories. Meanwhile, their captors wield uninhibited sight like a sword. This tension propels the power struggle at the core of the film.

Toward the end of the conversation, Panahi reflects on his unique position, the imprisonment awaiting him on the other side of awards season. He tells Bodrojan: “When you work in a country like Iran, you know that not submitting to censorship comes with a certain cost. In a way, that solves the problem. I tell myself, ‘It’s my country. My mother’s there, my sister’s there. My brothers are there, my relatives are there. My colleagues are there, my fellow Iranians are there. Why should I not be there? Why should they be there and not me?’ You know, if they want to put me back in prison, I’ll go. I’ll go to prison and I’ll come out with a new script.”

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It Was Just an Accident (2025, dir. Jafar Panahi) — Best seen with as few spoilers as possible! My personal favorite new picture of 2025, It Was Just an Accident (2025) opens with a twist of fate, a seemingly insignificant hiccup that spirals into a seriocomic revenge story submerged in the social world of contemporary Iran.

Snack

Dates — A simple, snackable staple across the Middle East and my own ancestral homeland of North Africa! Personally, I love these California-grown ones from Rancho Meladuco Date Farm and often chop them into pancakes.

See you next Sunday!

xo,
Najet

Let’s get into it:

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Emma Cline’s “Marion” (2013) — This short story from Emma Cline — first published in The Paris Review, then in her short story collection, Daddy (2021) — serves as the basis for her debut novel, The Girls (2016). In the first-person piece, the narrator recalls a flash of her life at age 11 — lazing around a Spahn Ranch-coded weed farm in Northern California where everyone “blood or otherwise…[gets] called…brother or sister” — with 13-year-old Marion. The duo joins one such “brother,” Bobby, on a drive down the 5 to Burbank, carting a triple-bagged delivery bound for a Japanese temple and cementing the establishment of their friendship. The ensuing story functions as a meditation on girlhood, a specific dialect suffused in sapphic undertones.

Throughout “Marion,” the girls grasp at an emptied understanding of adulthood, romanticizing Roman Polanski’s rape case and longing to look like the women of Playboy. Cline’s narrator finds a nuanced novelty in her new friend, a sparkling sense of safety amidst adolescent uncertainty (“Marion was my first best friend. I never had the framed photos that girls like to give each other. I had never worn friendship bracelets, or even hated anyone else with another girl. My life seemed like something new and unasked for, Marion smiling at me in the sunshine, letting me wear her woven ankle bracelet for days at a time, braiding my hair that had grown colorless and thick, full of dust and the peculiar smell of heat.”). This seed of prepubescent best friendship flourishes in The Girls, “Marion” serving as a narrative and thematic precursor.

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Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood (2019, dir. Quentin Tarantino) — Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, and Margot Robbie, Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood (2019) reanimates Los Angeles on the last leg of the 1960s. A blend of fictional characters and real-life figures — including my long-standing style icon, the inimitable Sharon Tate; legendary martial artist and actor Bruce Lee; and, of course, the misanthropes that form the Manson family — fill out the cast, offering a nostalgia-laced look at an alternate timeline to the Cielo Drive murders that shook Southern California.

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Casa Vega’s Classic Margarita — Toward tail end of Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood (2019), Sharon Tate (played by Margot Robbie) and her friends dine at El Coyote on Beverly Boulevard, just hours before the Manson family’s arrival on Cielo Drive. Meanwhile, fading actor Rick Dalton (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stuntman, Cliff Booth (played by Brad Pitt), drink margaritas in the back booth at Casa Vega in the Valley.

For the past 70 years, Casa Vega has held court on Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks. First opened by Ray Vega in 1956, then passed down to his daughter in Christy in 1999, the restaurant has emerged as a local staple for authentic Mexican food. Enjoy its classic margarita a la Rick and Cliff for your Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood screening.

First, prepare the serving glass. Rim its mouth with a lime wedge, then dip it in kosher salt. Separately, combine one and a half ounces of Anejo Tequila, three quarters an ounce of Cointreau, and one ounce of fresh lime juice in a cocktail shaker over ice. Shake well, and strain the mixture into the salt-rimmed class over ice. Before you enjoy, mix cranberry, pineapple, and orange juice together in a separate glass. Add a splash of the juice mixture to your margarita, and garnish the final cocktail with the fruit of your choice. Cheers!

See you on Wednesday for the April newsletter!

xo,
Najet

Let’s get into it:

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“The Inside Story of John F. Kennedy Jr.’s George Magazine” — Love Story (2026) shows the development and launch of John F. Kennedy Jr.’s political magazine, George, including how Carolyn Bessette’s background as a publicist propelled its pop cultural emphasis amidst the mid-90s media boom.

A 2019 Esquire piece from Kate Storey architects an oral history of George. It recounts the iconic September 1996 cover, Drew Barrymore dressed up as a “Happy Birthday, Mr. President”-era Marilyn Monroe to mark Bill Clinton’s birthday. Storey writes: “An irreverent play on politics and pop culture with a dash of Kennedy intrigue, the Barrymore/Monroe cover accurately sums up George, the magazine Kennedy launched in September 1995. His concept, in today’s terms at least, seems relatively straightforward: ‘a lifestyle magazine with politics at its core.’ Back then, however, George was revolutionary; there had never been anything quite like it. Nor had there ever been a magazine editor quite like John F. Kennedy Jr., a lawyer by training.”

The article goes on to examine how George — like Kennedy — died prematurely, the publication prescient to the political dumpster fire of the past decade, “politics and pop culture…[now] so intertwined that candidates now spend nearly as much time courting voters on late-night shows as they do on the Sunday talk circuit.”

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Jackie (2016, dir. Pablo Larraín) — Jackie (2016) opens with a journalist arriving at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, MA for the famed LIFE Magazine interview that coined the concept of Camelot. The narrative then loops backward, zeroing in on how Jackie Kennedy (played brilliantly by Natalie Portman) handled the immediate aftermath of her husband’s assassination. Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín deploys a dizzying aesthetic — his signature that similarly shapes Spencer (2021) and Maria (2024), the other two films in his trilogy of iconic 20th century women — to cultivate an intimate portrait of an American icon.

Snack

The Odeon Cosmo — Memorialized in Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City (1984), The Odeon has held court on the corner of Broadway and Thomas Street since its 1980 opening. The Keith McNally cafe immediately emerged as a nexus for downtown writers, creatives, and celebrities, from Jean-Michel Basquiat to Diane von Furstenberg to John Belushi, who would sit with the waitresses while they counted their cash at closing time. (Today, you can still get a killer ahi tuna burger there, but I digress.)

Once a regular stop for Tribeca locals John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette, The Odeon reanimates the essence of 90s New York through its presence in an early episode of Love Story (2026). Recreate the hotspot’s Cosmo, a slight variation on the original drink of the decade, at home. Pour half an ounce each of fresh-squeezed lime juice and cranberry juice, followed by three quarters of an ounce of Cointreau and one and a half ounces of Absolut Citron, into an iced cocktail shaker. Shake well, serve into a chilled cocktail glass, and enjoy!

That’s all for now!

xo,
Najet

Anyway! ICYMI, last October, NYC Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment (MOME) and Art House New York (AHNY) announced the city’s inaugural Art House Cinema Week, happening this Friday (3.20) through the following Thursday (3.26). Over 30 independent cinemas — including Content Corner favorites Film Forum, IFC Center, Metrograph, and more — are participating with special programming, as well as discounted tickets and concessions.

Joel Coen and Frances McDormand’s introduction to The Same River Twice (1978) at Film Forum already sold out, but my other top pick comes in the form of a Catherine O’Hara festival at IFC Center. The Paris Theater also plans to screen its own 70mm prints of Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). You can check out the full list of participating cinemas here; annoyingly, you need to go to each individual site to find specific programming and promotions.

Now, let’s get into it:

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“The Content Corner Guide to…the Oscars” — ICYMI: The third annual Content Corner Oscars Guide is live! Read through reviews of all ten Best Picture nominees ahead of tonight’s show. As a bonus, you can find thoughts on Best International Feature Film nominee and Best Picture winner in my heart It Was Just an Accident (2025), as well as Ethan Hawke’s Best Actor-nominated performance in Blue Moon (2025), as part of the November Movie Review.

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The 98th Academy Awards — Watch or stream tonight on ABC! You can check out my picks and predictions for winners here.

Snack

Red Carpet Kickoff — Mix up March’s cocktail of the month! Combine one ounce each of No. 3 London Dry Gin, Tempus Fugit Alessio Vermouth Di Torino, and Luxardo Bitters in a shaker over ice. Shake well, and serve in a coupe class. Cheers!

Happy viewing!

xo,
Najet

Let’s get into it:

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Rhian Sasseen’s “Stupid Girls” (2023) — This short story, published in Granta three years ago, explores celebrity culture partially from the close third-person perspective of a 25-year-old paparazzo named Alex. He pursues a pop star in the dredges of a downward spiral, tension teeming from the strange distribution of power between the two parties (“Ordinarily, she was game for this; of all of the overexposed blondes of her generation, the pop star was known for playing along with the paparazzi, for exhibiting a pliant sort of willingness to please. Tonight, though, she looked up at them sharply. ‘Space, please,’ she said. They did not grant it…The public liked to see her distraught, and the men with the cameras were only doing their jobs.”). The piece peels back the parts that turn the machine of tabloid culture, culminating in a deterred détente that proves the unyielding power of profit.

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The Bling Ring (2013, dir. Sofia Coppola) — Is The Bling Ring (2013) a cinematic masterpiece? Not in the traditional sense. Is it an entertaining watch with extended scenes shot in Paris Hilton’s hot pink closet? Absolutely. As I write in the February Movie Review:

A surreal look at the dark side of celebrity obsession, The Bling Ring enlivens the dawn of TMZ, the golden age of Kitson, through a blend of fact and fiction. The A24 film focuses on a string of robberies that bled out from the Hollywood Hills between 2008 and 2009, a crew of Calabasas teenagers who burglarized the homes of celebrities from Paris Hilton to Rachel Bilson to Lindsay Lohan. A period piece, it inhabits the attitudinal markers of its era...Coppola has built a career out of sympathetic looks into controversial or overlooked figures, from Marie Antoinette to Priscilla Presley to suburban girls with suicidal tendencies. The Bling Ring prods the celebrity obsession at the core of its case, but reserves overt judgment…Speaking with IndieWire, Coppola concludes: “I try to make it fun, but by the end, for the audience to experience that and then think about what’s important to them and how they feel about it.”

Snack

Sprinkles Red Velvet Cupcake Dupe — RIP to the source of the ultimate aughts snack, Sprinkles Cupcakes, which shuttered all its locations at the start of this year. (Thanks a lot, private equity.) You can still recreate the chain’s iconic red velvet cupcake using this recipe though!

That’s all for now! Stay tuned for Oscars content coming this week.

xo,
Najet

Let’s get into it:

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Sam Wasson on The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast (2023) — If you’ve been here a while, you know that I am always talking about the batshit making of Apocalypse Now (1979). (An on-set heart attack! A typhoon! Marlon Brando being Marlon Brando!!) This hyperfixation started before I saw the film, after I listened to Hollywood historian Sam Wasson on The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast. Chaotic king Francis Ford Coppola heavily cooperated with Wasson for his latest book, The Path to Paradise: A Francis Ford Coppola Story (2023). As a result, Coppola’s candid reflections to Wasson on his personal and professional failures emerge over the course of the episodes, linked here and here. (Alternatively, you can check out this much shorter Collider article.)

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Apocalypse Now (1979, dir. Francis Ford Coppola) — Coppola’s Vietnam War epic reimagines Joseph Conrad’s novella, Heart of Darkness (1899), as a portal to the then-recent past. As I write in the September 2025 Movie Review: “The original text follows European river steamboat captain Charles Marlow on an expedition into Africa. His mission? Find Kurtz, an ivory trader who has ingratiated himself into local life. It weaves a complex critique of colonialism, emerging as ‘an essential starting point for discussions of modernism, imperialism, the hypocrisies and glories of the West, and the ambiguities of ‘civilization,’’ per David Denby in a 1995 piece for The New Yorker. In Francis Ford Coppola’s film adaptation, Charles Marlow becomes Captain Willard (played by Martin Sheen), a U.S. Army officer on a covert mission to murder Kurtz (played by Marlon Brando), now a rogue colonel.” More morality tale than battle epic, Apocalypse Now follows the particularities of life for everyday Americans fighting in Vietnam through the framework of Willard’s pursuit.

The late Robert Duvall appears on screen for a mere ten minutes as Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore, the impact of his presence pulling in an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. In a retrospective piece for The Hollywood Reporter, film critic Jordan Mintzer reflects: “Duvall did plenty of research to build the Kilgore character, basing his performance on officers he served under at Fort Bragg and choosing a cowboy hat to mimic how members of the air calvary in Vietnam sometimes wore mementos from the American West. But it’s the actor’s delivery that everyone remembers, brilliantly going from hot to cold as he lambasts his troops during a bombing campaign, then kneels beside them to calmly state: ‘I love the smell of napalm in the morning’ — a sinister line considering the mass death happening all around them, but also perfectly true to character.”

(Please don’t ask me what version to watch! I don’t know! I wish I did!! There are so many that I simply cannot keep track, but I personally saw the original theatrical cut from 1979.)

Snack

Mango Sorbet — One of the most famous scenes in Apocalypse Now shows Willard and Chef (played by Frederic Forrest) getting out of their boat to pick mangos. Mix up mango sorbet for your screening, no ice cream maker required, using this recipe! Or, you can buy a carton of Talenti’s Alphonso Mango Sorbetto at your local grocery store.

That’s all for now! Come back next week for another Coppola family pick, and keep an eye on your inbox for the March newsletter later this morning.

xo,
Najet

Let’s get into it:

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Madeline Cash’s “Mold and Melancholia” (2026) — This nonfiction piece in The Paris Review details much-discussed Lost Lambs (2026) author Madeline Cash’s move to London. In it, Cash reflects on following her boyfriend to a new continent, dealing with a deluge of new domestic details a la Daphne du Maurier’s unnamed narrator in Rebecca (1938). The best bits of this brief story, to me, brim from observations around how time seems to slow in the UK, its structures set to the pace of an earlier era (“On our second or third date, my boyfriend asked me, ‘If you could live in any period in history, what would it be?’ Without thinking I said, ‘This one.’ He agreed that he wouldn’t rather live in any other time. And then we went back in time, to London.”).

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Rebecca (1940, dir. Alfred Hitchcock) — An ideal book-to-film adaptation, Rebecca (1940) envisions Daphne du Maurier’s eponymous 1938 novel for the big screen with perfect performances from Laurence Olivier, Joan Fontaine, and Judith Anderson as Maxim, the second Mrs. de Winter, and Mrs. Danvers, respectively. ICYMI: the narrative inhabits the first-person perspective of the second Mrs. de Winter, an inexperienced young woman who joins her new husband, Maxim, at his country estate, Manderley. Upon arrival, his widow’s chokehold on the household — especially head housekeeper Mrs. Danvers — crystallizes.

The film maintains the first-person focus of its source material; as it opens, a shot of Manderley in the moonlight melds with the second Mrs. de Winter’s narration. A feeling of foreboding arises and fuels the forthcoming two plus hours. Rebecca (1940) marks Hitchcock’s first full-scale Hollywood feature, his only film to ever take home a Best Picture Oscar. His direction dances in and around the Hays Code, slipping sexual promiscuity, suicide, and sapphic subtext into a censored production. In his original 1940 review for The New York Times, Frank Nugent writes: “Hitch was fortunate to find himself in such good company but we feel they [the actors] were doubly so in finding themselves in his.”

Snack

Harney & Sons Paris Tea — The characters in Rebecca (1940) are simply always drinking tea. While watching the movie, channel the chill of Cash’s chilly Clapham flat and brew a pot of my favorite: Harney & Sons’s Paris. Infused with black currant, this black tea has a subtle fruity flavor with notes of vanilla, caramel, and bergamot.

Talk later this week!

xo,
Najet

Speaking of dearly departed actresses, Film at Lincoln Center has announced Looking for Ms. Keaton, a one-week, 15-film tribute to Diane Keaton. I am begging you to catch her criminally underrated performance in Shoot the Moon (1982), playing tomorrow (2.16) and Thursday (2.19), but pick your poison here. Anyway, I digress.

Now, let’s get into it:

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The New Yorker: “Catherine O’Hara’s Unforgettable Delivery” — In this piece for The New Yorker’s “Postscript” column, staff writer Rachel Syme honors how Catherine O’Hara expanded the constrictive category of “character actress,” making the pseudo-pejorative term synonymous with leading lady material. O’Hara placed emphasis on listening to herself and others. She prodded the world around her with precision, and her insights steeped each role in specificity. Syme writes: “If her death feels like a compounded loss, it is because she takes with her the dozens of offbeat women (and sometimes men) whom she coaxed out of her person and into existence…Like the best sketch comedians, O’Hara was possessed of an impeccable internal tuning fork, and much of her best work came out of an almost musical sense of delivery…Her instincts, she knew, were her greatest tool, and she relied on them, hilariously, until the end.”

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After Hours (1985, dir. Martin Scorsese) — Rightly described by Cinephilia & Beyond as a “Kafka-Inspired New York Odyssey,” After Hours (1985) forged a blueprint for the contemporary canon of films that blend comedy with anxiety, for the likes of Uncut Gems (2019), Anora (2024), and Marty Supreme (2025). Martin Scorsese’s black comedy follows Paul Hackett (played by Griffin Dunne), a white collar office worker entrapped in an all-night series of unfortunate events. Paul hits it off with mysterious stranger Marcy Franklin (played by Rosanna Arquette) at a cafe near his uptown apartment, a chance encounter that draws him into the underworld of mid-80s SoHo, a rigged rat race toward home.

Without spoiling specifics, the late, great Catherine O’Hara appears at the one-hour mark as Mister Softee driver Gail in one of her more underrated roles. Per Rolling Stone: “Gail is self-absorbed, destabilizing, and hilarious. It’s a classic Catherine O’Hara performance…O’Hara isn’t onscreen for long, but she makes the most of every moment. And in a film with few plot machinations, she believably sets the final beat of the story in motion…Quite simply, the movie doesn’t work without her…’It wasn’t easy,’ O’Hara once remembered, ‘but I was driving in an ice cream truck in a Martin Scorsese movie, so I was not complaining.’”

Snack

Black Coffee — One of the most iconic scenes in After Hours shows Paul and Marcy flirting across tables at an uptown cafe, a chance encounter spurred by Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (1934) that precipitates Paul’s all-night Odyssey. Both characters sip on cups of black coffee, an image that later recurs at a downtown diner, making it the perfect accompaniment to a screening of the Scorsese cult classic. (Also, this film is stressful and consequently ideal for an afternoon versus evening watch IMO.) Personally, I’ve been really into Deli Dark, the house dark roast from Beacon-based Big Mouth Coffee Roasters, lately.

Until next week!

xo,
Najet

But first, three things:

published an interview with Bench Pressed, the Minneapolis-based community letterpress mobilizing against ICE, this week. Read it here! The Q&A also links to these mutual aid resources at the end.

American Cinematheque kicked off a Timothée Chalamet festival yesterday (2.6). LA-based folks can check out his eight latest films on the big screen, featuring Q&As with not only the actor himself, but also Elle Fanning, Edward Norton, and Denis Villeneuve. Head here for tickets!

This Thursday (2.12), Albertine, the New York-based French bookstore, will hold its 2026 Translation Prize Ceremony. I went last year and had a great time! You can RSVP for free here.

Now, let’s get into it:

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Laurie Colwin’s “Evensong” (2023) — In my book, nothing says Valentine’s Day week like Laurie Colwin, the Nora Ephron-coded novelist and food writer who published two recipe books, five novels, and two short story collections before her untimely death of an aortic aneurysm in 1992 at age 48. Her work captures the romantic preoccupations of upper-crust East Coast culture in the 70s and 80s with what The New York Times rightly characterizes as a “sneaky subversiveness.”

As I write in the August 2023 Book Review: “Reading Colwin feels like sipping hot soup on a cold day — but not just any old soup. Beef, leek, and barley soup with an added spice you can’t quite identify. On the surface, her work seems simple, straightforward. Colwin’s heroines hail from upper middle class backgrounds and very much reflect the context of their eras, primarily preoccupied with relationships, child-rearing, and, above all, building and maintaining happy homes. This description might make her writing sound dated, which, in some aspects, it is. But, at the same time, Colwin considers female pleasure and what constitutes happiness in marriage with a depth, a defiance against societal constructs, many contemporary writers have yet to explore.”

A few years ago, Colwin’s now-adult child, R.F., came across a forgotten short story manuscript, “Evensong,” now posthumously published in The New Yorker. You can check it out here! For a more fulsome foray into Colwin, I recommend starting with Family Happiness (1984) or Home Cooking (1988). Talking about their mother’s work, R.F. reflects: “The notion of the Colwin happy ending is one I’ve thought a lot about, actually. Laurie didn’t like the simple answer, and the simple answer is that her books all have happy endings. But what Laurie created was an ostensibly happy ending, an ending with a resolution that did feel complete — for the moment. There was always the impression that something could change, that it would change, but not then, not in the final scene.”

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When Harry Met Sally (1989, dir. Rob Reiner) — What comedian Charles McBee said.

Snack

Laurie Colwin’s Gingerbread — Laurie Colwin contributed to Gourmet Magazine for years, with The James Beard Foundation inducting her into its Cookbook Hall of Fame in 2012. Her food essays, later aggregated into Home Cooking (1988) and More Home Cooking (1993), infuse recipes into personal anecdotes with an accessibility geared toward the home chef. Their crown jewel? Her gingerbread, available to readily recreate courtesy of The New York Times. I went through a phase in early 2023 where I made the recipe weekly, and it quickly emerged as my extremely non-food-motivated cat’s favorite food. 10/10 recommend!

See you next week!

xo,
Najet

Let’s get into it:

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The Yale Review: “Terrence Malick’s Disciples” — In this piece for The Yale Review, film critic Bilge Ebiri traces the aesthetic and thematic influence of filmmaker Terrence Malick on contemporary cinema, from RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys (2024) to Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet (2025) to Clint Bentley’s Train Dream (2025). For those of you unfamiliar, Malick rose to fame for his filmic reflections on the American heartland and penchant for shooting in the narrow sliver of golden hour. His early work includes Badlands (1973), a crime drama starring Martin Sheen and a pre-Carrie (1976) Sissy Spacek, and Days of Heaven (1978), a personal favorite period romance led by Richard Gere, Brooke Adams, and Sam Shepard.

Ebiri traces how the New Hollywood icon and his spiritual successors see the beauty in the unremarkable, shaping their films through “a steady cadence that suggests that the mysteries, tragedies, and glories of life are all part of the same thing.” He writes: “Malick has sought to reconnect American cinema to a lost spirituality, earnestly tackling questions about faith and the design of the world at a time when most mainstream cinema has avoided such topics. Malick is a devout Episcopalian. But the spirituality in his films is rarely illustrative or prescriptive. He doesn’t use religion as a cudgel or a doctrinaire superstructure with which to explain the world. Rather, he sees it as an inner light in people.”

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Days of Heaven (1978, dir. Terrence Malick) — Lowkey for highbrow fans of Desperate Housewives (2004-2012)! A visual feast, Days of Heaven (1978) projects the nihilistic sensibilities of New Hollywood [think: Bonnie and Clyde (1967)] and the melodrama of an aughts ABC show through the prism of Little House on the Prairie problems paired with Edward Hopper aesthetics.

Richard Gere and Brooke Adams star as Bill and Abby, a pair of lovers who flee Chicago for the Texas panhandle alongside Bill’s little sister, Linda (played by Linda Manz). The pair pose as siblings instead of lovers, spurring a strange set of circumstances when their wealthy boss, an unnamed farmer played by Sam Shepard, starts to take an interest in Abby. As I write in my review: “Malick partnered with cinematographer Néstor Almendros to capture the visual specificity of the Texas panhandle, drawing on the silent film practice of using natural lighting. The pair frequently scheduled shooting around dusk at Malick’s behest, confined to ‘20 useful minutes a day,’ as Almendros describes in an interview with AFI Movie Club…The film rightfully went on to win the 1979 Academy Award for Best Cinematography.”

Snack

Artisan Bread — Lots of shots of wheat fields in Days of Heaven (1978)! Snack on some homemade bread during your screening with this four-ingredient artisan recipe courtesy of Sally’s Baking Addiction, no starter required.

Keep an eye on your inboxes for the February newsletter later this morning!

xo,
Najet

Inspired by Sunset Boulevard (1950)’s recent run at Film Forum, we’re nestling into the world of midcentury LA noir this week. But first, for anyone looking for donation options to help Minnesota, I’d encourage you to check out Stand with Minnesota, which linked in her newsletter this week, and The Minnesota Star-Tribune Local News Fund, which Dirt has plugged on Instagram.

Now, let’s get into it:

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Raymond Chandler’s “I’ll Be Waiting” (1939) — In 1932, at the height of the Great Depression, Raymond Chandler lost his job in the oil industry. He turned to writing at age 44, emerging as one of the most celebrated mystery writers of the 20th Century. Chandler’s first novel, The Big Sleep (1939), introduced Philip Marlowe, the hard-boiled detective later memorialized by the likes of Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, and Elliott Gould, the author and his signature character evolving into signatures of noir as a genre and Los Angeles as a city.

First published in The Saturday Evening Post on October 14, 1939, “I’ll Be Waiting” marks one of Chandler’s shortest stories. It details the dealings of LA detective Tony Reseck at The Windermere Hotel, interweaving genre archetypes from the femme fatale to the bribable bystander (“She was curled up with her feet under her on a davenport which seemed to contain most of the cushions in the room. She was tucked among them carefully, like a corsage in the florist’s tissue paper”). Sense of place shapes the story, the hotel and its surrounding city operating as inanimate characters. Read it here!

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Double Indemnity (1944, dir. Billy Wilder) — Billy Wilder’s romantic comedies — from Sabrina (1954) to Some Like It Hot (1959) to The Apartment (1960) — rank among his most recognized works. But his early days hits, namely Double Indemnity (1944) and Sunset Boulevard (1950), inhabit a darker genre, shaping midcentury conceptions of Los Angeles noir. As writer, editor, and professor David L. Ulin writes in a 2017 piece for the Library of America: “We must learn to live without illusions, noir insists, in a world where existence is not so much to be directed as it is to be endured. The best noir offers a howl of desolation in the face of an apathetic universe, a tarnished elegy for the soul.”

Based on the eponymous 1943 novel by James M. Cain with a script co-written by Wilder and Raymond Chandler, Double Indemnity follows a structure analogous to that of Sunset Boulevard, on-par performances from Barbara Stanwyck and Gloria Swanson. Where Sunset Boulevard opens with the dead body of screenwriter Joe Gillis (played by William Holden) floating face down in a Beverly Hills swimming pool, Wilder’s earlier feature shows gunshot-wounded insurance salesman Walter Neff (played by Fred MacMurray) staggering into his office to record a dictaphone confession. Both men emerge as the narrators of their respective stories, “howl[s] of desolation” that loop backward to reveal the eerie events that lead to each ill-fated outcome.

Snack

Gloria Swanson’s Butterless Devil’s Food Cake — Whip up a sweet treat favored by Sunset Boulevard (1950) star Gloria Swanson! A relentless health nut, Swanson’s recipe, of course, contains no butter. (She was known to take thermoses of soup to dinner parties and keep avocados in her purse. RIP Gloria, you would have loved Goop Kitchen.) Learn how to make it here and above!

Sending you all so much love!

xo,
Najet

Let’s get into it:

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Pauline Kael’s Review of Shampoo (1975) — Known for her acerbic wit and unpredictable taste, the late, great film critic Pauline Kael — described by Roger Ebert as “the most powerful, loved, and hated film critic of her time” — famously loved Shampoo (1975). For those subscribers unfamiliar with her game, Kael wrote for The New Yorker from 1967 until her retirement in 1991.

“Beverly Hills as a Big Bed” (lol) marks my favorite of her reviews. In it, she writes: “The balletic, patterned confusion of Shampoo is theatrical, and Los Angeles — more particularly, Beverly Hills, the swankest part of it, a city within a city — is, indisputably, a stylized, theatrical setting…Los Angeles itself, the sprawl-city, opens the movie up, and the L.A. sense of freedom makes its own comment on the scrambling characters. Besides, when you play musical chairs in the bedrooms of Beverly Hills, the distances you have to cover impose their own comic frenzy.”

You can check out a digitized version here via The New Yorker archive! Feel free to DM me for a PDF if needed.

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Shampoo (1975, dir. Hal Ashby) — A movie from Warren Beatty starring Warren Beatty about the difficulties of being…Warren Beatty. Shampoo (1975) operates in the grand tradition of French farce, the spirit of Molière molded into the sprawling shell of Los Angeles at the height of its hippie era.

The narrative follows George Roundy (played by Beatty), a hairdresser who, despite living with his girlfriend, actress Jill Haynes (played by Goldie Hawn), maintains an affair with married customer Felicia Karpf (played by Lee Grant). A gross misinterpretation of sexual orientation leads Felicia’s husband, Lester (played by Jack Warden), to offer George a business loan. When George’s ex and Jill’s best friend, Jackie (played by Julie Christie) emerges as Lester’s mistress, the established order of illusions starts to shift. Kael writes: “The whirring pleasures of carnal farce require our awareness of the mechanics, and the director, Hal Ashby, has the deftness to keep us conscious of the structure and yet to give it free play…The mixed pairs of lovers don’t get snarled at the same parties by coincidence; they go knowing who else is going to be there, wanting the danger of collisions.”

Profound sadness, perennial awareness of the passage of time, permeates Shampoo, imbuing a seemingly unserious plot with surprising depth. As I describe in my review, “screenwriter [Robert] Towne and Beatty approach the past from a position that bears similarities to Whit Stillman’s screenplay for The Last Days of Disco (1998). Where Stillman examines the final days of Studio 54 from the vantage point of the late 90s, Towne and Beatty satirize the sexual freedom of the late 1960s during the dusk of Watergate, at the dawn of Gerald Ford’s America.”

New Yorkers can catch a screening tomorrow night (1.19) at 7:00 PM at The Paris! If you’re based elsewhere, you can rent the film on Amazon Prime Video ($3.59), Apple TV ($3.99), or YouTube ($3.99).

Snack

The Bistro Garden’s Chocolate Soufflé — Shampoo (1975) comes to its climax during a watch party for the 1968 U.S. Presidential Election, a scene filmed at The Bistro in Beverly Hills. A favorite of Billy Wilder and Elizabeth Taylor, the upscale restaurant reigned on Canon Drive until Wolfgang Puck bought the space for Spago ahead of the then-Sunset Strip “see and be seen” spot’s 1997 relocation.

In 1979, The Bistro got a more informal sister restaurant: Bistro Garden. Jackie Collins, author of Hollywood Wives (1983) who held a fascination with its ladies who lunch set, told The LA Times in 1990: “There’s a story at every table. It’s almost like Le Cirque in New York: a place to see and be seen, to get dressed up before you go, to wave across the room at your friends when you arrive.”

A third spot, The Bistro Garden at Coldwater, followed in 1990. Max Jacobson, The LA Times’s food critic from 1983 to 2003, considered the restaurant among the most beautiful he had dined in. Modeled after a European winter garden, it had 30-foot ceilings, glass latticework and skylights, and a mahogany bar, with its Fireside room featuring a 19th Century Scottish marble mantle, crystal chandeliers, and a baby grand piano. The Bistro Garden at Coldwater held court on the corner of Ventura and Coldwater Canyon in Studio City until its COVID-induced closure. (The space is now a Barry’s Bootcamp. :/ )

Thankfully, The Bistro Garden at Coldwater’s chocolate soufflé, a fan-favorite dish, got memorialized with permission back in 2011. Learn how to make it for an at-home screening of Shampoo here!

See you next week!

xo,
Najet

I originally had something else planned for this week, then found myself more emotionally affected by the one-year anniversary of the LA fires than anticipated. So, I decided to switch gears.

Let’s get into it:

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The New Yorker’s Dana Goodyear on The LA Fires — In September, The New Yorker’s Dana Goodyear published a personal account titled “My House Burned in the L.A. Fires. What Happens Now?” Best absorbed via audio, Goodyear primarily focuses on the Palisades, her neighborhood that “in a forgetful, self-erasing city like Los Angeles…prized its history and its sense of place.” Palisades families famously stayed put for generations, resulting in a different demographic composition than the remainder of the city, a population “more than twice as white as the rest of L.A., and older, with a quarter of its residents over the age of sixty-five.” Goodyear explains the area’s distinctively suburban sensibility, writing: “The first time I went grocery shopping there, I was amazed to see a lady out of Cheever, in a thin quilted vest and narrow Belgian loafers, putting cottage cheese and club soda in her cart.”

Firsthand accounts from Palisades locals — Getty Villa worker Josephine Carter, neighbors Caleb and Mary Jo Deschanel — cultivate a chilling tapestry of unsuspected destruction. Carter, still struck by flashbacks, recalls flames “surg[ing] around the buildings, igniting Italian cypresses, the tapered trees that insurance agents call Roman candles, for their propensity to burn.” Describing the Deschanels’ destroyed family home of four decades, Goodyear writes: “In the living room, high ceilings were supported by wooden beams, and a Gothic arch led to a sunroom, where the girls liked to put on plays. Zooey remembers that she was hosting a slumber party when the Northridge earthquake struck. A single pitcher broke. ‘It felt like the safest house in the world,’ she told me.” (This first sentence strikes me, its description equally applicable to my aunt and uncle’s living room. Wooden rafters thrust to the top of a towering ceiling, shielding a sunken living room padded in pillowy carpet, the apparent epitome of infrastructural strength. Like the Deschanels’ house, it burned to the ground last January.)

Each description illuminates the play of light that colors California in and out of crisis. For Goodyear, an “annunciatory orange-gold light so full and present that it…[feels] three-dimensional” floods her son’s room in the afternoons, and the burning houses “across the street flare…as if possessed” through her ring camera. The piece substantiates the connection people have to their homes, reframing possessions as mnemonic memory triggers rather than mere markers of materialism (“At the beginning of March, we went back to the house as a family for the first time. With its animating force leaked out, it was corpse-like, caving. There was a dead crow in the street. My son stood alone and looked up at the sky where his room had been.”). Inherent superstition arises from inanimate loss (“Losing things, it turned out, didn’t make you want more things.”). For example, Goodyear describes her daughter’s refusal to unpack in their temporary housing for fear of forthcoming evacuation.

Allusions to ancient cities, from Pompeii and Herculaneum, accentuate local fears of an analogous fate (“The school where my son attended kindergarten was destroyed, as was the elementary school next to it, whose burned carcass loomed over its welcome sign: ‘This Is Childhood.’”). But the story ends on a hopeful, cyclical note. Poppies grow. People rebuild. Historian Randy Young tells Goodyear: “It’s spooky…I can tell you the exact date the Palisades is right now. It’s 1925.”

For anyone interested in donation resources, you can find a list of GoFundMes still below their donation goals over a year from the Eaton and Palisades fires here.

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Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003, dir. Thom Andersen) — To me, recent releases that, while flawed, just feel like the LA I know and love include Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood (2019) and Licorice Pizza (2021). Both films distill the hazy sense of happenstance that shapes my own family stories. But, this week, we’re opting for a deeper cut with Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003).

This three-hour documentary disentangles Los Angeles from Hollywood. It explores the city’s history through the prism of the motion picture machine, interweaving clips from nearly a century of cinema. Critic, professor, and filmmaker Thom Andersen applies a critical lens to the industry that ushered LA onto the global stage, then overshadowed its individuated sense of place. He examines the city as metal versus alloy — its on-screen portrayals as itself versus small-town America stand-in. [Think: South Pasadena masquerading as Haddonfield, Illinois in John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978).]

In a 2022 review for The New Yorker, film critic Richard Brody lauds Andersen’s kaleidoscopic examination of Los Angeles. He writes: “Andersen traces the falsification of the city’s geography and history in Hollywood movies to the shoddy narrative and ideological conventions in run-of-the-mill productions…He gets beneath the surfaces of dramas to reveal the realities that they reflect — including racial prejudice, police brutality, real-estate depredations, and economic inequities — spotlighting their insidious endorsement of such political perversions.”

Snack

Milk Jar Cookies’s Chocolate Chip Cookie — Until its closure in January of 2024, Milk Jar Cookies on Wilshire Boulevard remained my favorite cookie in LA, and possibly anywhere? Founded by Courtney Cowan in 2013, the millennial optimism-era shop boasted an array of unique flavors, from banana split to salted butterscotch, all memorialized in a cookbook, thank God.

You can make the classic chocolate chip sans bakebook using this recipe! If you want to take it to the next level, recreate the Milk Jar Mocha, aka: a glass filled with equal parts cold brew and chocolate milk, to enjoy with your sweet treat.

See you next week!

xo,
Najet