FtttG
User ID: 1175
On Wednesday evening I went to see Celine Song's new film Materialists, her follow-up to 2023's critically acclaimed and Best Picture-nominated Past Lives, which I adored. The film concerns Lucy Mason (Dakota Johnson), a successful New York-based matchmaker who mostly caters to clients in their thirties and forties. While attending one of her client's weddings, she gets to talking to Harry (played by the omnipresent Pedro Pascal; seriously, he starred in like 1/3 of the movies being screened in that cinema that day), the wealthy brother of the groom whom she attempts to recruit as a client (but he has other ideas). She also runs into John (Chris Evans), an ex-boyfriend and aspiring actor she dumped years prior, and yet who visibly still holds a candle for her.
Right off the bat, let's manage expectations: it's not much like Past Lives, and it's nowhere near as good, but it's still worth a watch.
Past Lives was an intimate, semi-autobiographical character drama about romantic love and Song's own experiences as a Korean immigrant to the West. Here, Song attempts (not entirely successfully) to wed two wholly unlike genres. On the one hand, it's a cold, glassy-eyed and cynical dissection of the economics of modern dating and marriage, in which women marry purely to spite their younger sisters; in which successful career women in their thirties are passed over by their male peers in favour of gorgeous dullards fifteen or twenty years their junior (about whom they have the audacity to complain that they're "immature"); in which Lucy's prospective clients present her with laundry lists of traits their partner must have (no men under 5'11", no women with BMIs over 20). On the other hand, it's a conventional romantic fantasy, in which the female lead has to choose between a wealthy finance bro who's safe but makes her feel nothing, and a starving artist who sends her heart all a-flutter. (No prizes for guessing how she picks.) At times, the dialogue is just as intimate and piercing as anything in Past Lives; at other times, you feel like the characters are reading out choice quotes from /r/femaledatingstrategy. If you've spent enough time in redpill and PUA circles, some of the talking points are sure to inspire a shock of recognition: it's practically a femcel manifesto in cinematic form.
Sadly, Johnson and Evans have very little chemistry with one another. Part of this might just be because of the usual reasons actors don't have chemistry with one another, but I suspect a major contributing factor might be Evans himself. At the time of filming he was a 43-year-old playing a 37-year-old character: looking at his face, I got the distinct impression that he's undergone a lot of Botox and/or cosmetic surgery to maintain a youthful appearance. (No need to do this in his most famous role, for which he mostly wore a mask.) He hasn't gone full Bogdanoff by any means, but whatever procedures he has undergone make it very difficult for him to emote: his skin is simply stretched too tautly across his skull. It was hard for me to believe his character is going through the emotional torpor the screenplay wants me to believe he is when nothing below his cheekbones is conveying this. The fact that men undergoing painful and expensive cosmetic procedures to improve their status in the dating and jobs market is actually a plot point in the film makes me wonder if Evans's casting was intended as some kind of meta-joke.* Johnson's character admits to having had work done on her nose and breasts: I'm dying to know if this is also true of Johnson herself. Nose, perhaps; breasts, probably not.
Johnson and Pascal do have some chemistry with one another, but as my girlfriend pointed out, it's the chemistry you expect between a girl and her gay best friend, or perhaps a girl and her cool uncle. It was hard for me to believe they were romantically interested in one another, even if it's implied that Pascal's character is significantly older than Johnson's (although probably not quite as much as their IRL age gap of ~15 years).
A little funnier than Past Lives, but ultimately it didn't move me nearly as much, even though it was obviously meant to. While watching Past Lives I felt like I was watching real people going about their lives and having genuine conversations, a feeling I never got from Materialists, and I don't think that's just because of the increased star power Song has to work with: a lot of the aforementioned femcel dialogue felt extremely artificial and essayistic. Perhaps the most affecting part of the whole movie is when one of Lucy's clients has been sexually assaulted by a man Lucy set her up on a date with: she angrily throws Lucy's words in her face and tearily insists that she is deserving of love, no matter how much Lucy might urge her to keep her goals realistic. It was a heart-rending scene that has me tearing up a little just thinking about it now. Shame the romantic A-story couldn't inspire anything resembling that kind of raw emotion.
Another data point added to the viewing public's efforts to psychoanalyse Song and her presumably peculiar relationship with her husband, Justin Kuritzkes. Given that both Song's first movie and Kuritzkes's first screenplay (Challengers, directed by Luca Guadagnino) concerned love triangles between a woman and two men, these jokes have been ongoing for some time. Personally, I interpreted Materialists's romantic plot as a spirited defense of Song's decision to marry a sensitive, artsy boy, rather than a wealthy finance bro as her mother presumably wanted her to. At least she had the forethought to marry a successful artsy boy, instead of a loser like John.
*At one point, Lucy and Harry attend a play in which John is starring. A poster for said play mentions that it was written by Celine Song.
FtttG
4mo ago
Considering it's Ellis, I wasn't sure if that mattered.
On reflection, probably not.
I cannot recommend The Secret History highly enough, incidentally.
Coming close to a completed second draft of my NaNoWriMo project, which now sits just over 111k words (17% shorter than the first draft, which was 133k). I'm planning to print a hard copy on Friday for the missus to read.
FtttG
4mo ago
Yes, but in this particular gay bar the condoms and lube are given away for free in common areas, as opposed to being available for sale in the toilets.
FtttG
4mo ago
It's true. Most straight men's fantasies reside only in their heads, and there they shall remain.
FtttG
4mo ago
Wow, so "gooning" is like synonymous with "edging"? In that case I'm not sure if I've ever "gooned".
FtttG
4mo ago
In irl seggs is good and all but with the latest gooning technology I would argue that hardcore gooning actually gives more seggsual stimulation than the real thing.
Hard disagree. Sex has to be really bad before I would prefer to just crank my hog.
Also, why are you using algospeak? We're all friends here.
Did you read Less Than Zero before Imperial Bedrooms?
I can't say I found the characters in Glamorama any more insufferable than in any other of his novels.
Incidentally, the film adaptation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rules_of_Attraction_(film)) of his second novel The Rules of Attraction doesn't get enough attention. Director Roger Avary wisely followed Mary Harron's lead in doing what she did with American Psycho: dialling down the more extreme content and dialling up the comedy. It's much funnier and less depressing than the source material (although still quite depressing).
The Rules of Attraction, incidentally, is set at the same college as Donna Tartt's The Secret History (much-beloved in these parts).
FtttG
4mo ago
About a third of the way through Speaker of the Dead. It's much slower and more cerebral than Ender's Game, which I found both more entertaining and more emotionally resonant. I'm engaged enough that I'm certainly going to finish it, but so far it comes off as something of a step down from the first in the series.
FtttG
4mo ago
I think I have quite low argumentativeness. (There's probably a better name for this quality.)
High agreeableness?
FtttG
4mo ago
The first post I read was "The Toxoplasma of Rage", probably in 2015. I'm almost certain I came across when it was linked in a comment in the subreddit /r/TumblrInAction. I attended my first SSC meetup four years later.
FtttG
4mo ago
getting a test done at all even knowing you're clean still involves a) talking to a professional about your sexual history
In Ireland, you can send off for free STI tests in the post. They arrive in discreet packaging, you pop your blood, urine and stool samples in a postage-paid envelope, and less than a week later you log into a portal and it tells you the results. I think it's a brilliant idea and wish it was the norm everywhere. I'd love to know how much of the transmission of STIs is ultimately downstream of people being too embarrassed to discuss their sex lives with doctors.
FtttG
4mo ago
I sincerely doubt anyone ever gets charged
George Michael excepted, although it was rather a different time.
FtttG
4mo ago
The prankster would clock someone as likely gay, and then play the matching notification sound standing close to them. I think they used women in some scenes, to minimize the assumption it was them. You'd see a lot of men jump and pat their pockets. Including quite a few who definitely didn't look it to my untrained eye.
That's hilarious, do you have the link? Reminds me of this Jeopardy contestant who mispelled "Tinder".
FtttG
4mo ago
This and the IRA (who put bombs in them) are the two reasons Britain doesn’t have nearly enough public loos.
I just had a great idea for a comedy sketch.
FtttG
4mo ago
still I feel like I've had the most headway with conservatives when I explained that deep down we just want to be free to live the same lives straight people do
I think the "we" is doing a lot of work here. I don't dispute that that's how you want to live your life, but I expect your desire might be quite far removed from what the median gay man wants.
FtttG
4mo ago
they were offering to hook-up with you despite you having clearly stated you were heterosexual from the get-go
Among the gay men I've met personally, "turning" a straight man was by far the most common sexual fantasy. Many straight men have similar fantasies about "turning" lesbians.
FtttG
4mo ago
I'm grateful that no gay man has ever been this crude with me in person.
Gay Scots don't beat around the bush.
FtttG
4mo ago
In the gay bar near my apartment, the bathrooms are downstairs. At the top of the stairs is a little dispenser from which you can get free condoms and little sachets of lubricant.
FtttG
4mo ago
He also thinks gay men are unfairly blamed for both HIV and monkeypox, and claimed that heterosexuals now acquire both at higher rates while gay men are just more honest and tested more.
Have you investigated this claim?
FtttG
4mo ago
They explained that no gay man would casually open his gallery in public. Too high a risk of unexpected appearances.
The day of my city's Pride parade, I was standing on a street which hosts the city's second-biggest gay bar (and which hasn't undergone mission drift, devolving into yet another drag queen theme park ride for straight women) surrounded by hundreds of LGBT people. Me and my friends were standing in a circle drinking cans, when I glanced at the next group over. One of the men was holding his unlocked phone at about shoulder height, and I could see that he had WhatsApp open and had just sent someone else a photo of his rectum.
I couldn't help but laugh. He was making zero effort to be discreet. His friend noticed me laughing and I just shrugged and was like, come on dude, that's funny.
No, it isn't. If he hadn't bothered to get any Botox or cosmetic surgery, I think he would have been entirely believable as a 37-year-old: even if he looked a little older, it might have made sense given that his character works unsociable hours, shares a crummy apartment with two of his mates and has a bad diet. But Evans is obviously sufficiently vain and/or concerned about his career prospects that he felt medical interventions were necessary, so we're stuck with this flat, impassive uncanny valley appearance.
I would be surprised if any of the three leads were Song's first choices for their respective roles.
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