Eat Pray Love

Call Me By Your Name (2017) dir. Luca Guadagnino

“I used to have this appetite for food, for my life and it is just gone. I  wanna go someplace where I can marvel at something. Language, gelato , spaghetti something.”

"But my friend took me to the most amazing place the other day, it’s called the Augusteum. Octavian Augustus built it to house his remains. When the barbarians came, they trashed it along with everything else. The great Augustus, Rome’s first true great Emperor, how could he have imagined that Rome, the whole world as far as he was concerned, would one day be in ruins?

It’s one of the quietest and loneliest places in Rome. The city has grown up, around it over centuries, feels like a precious womb, like a heartache you won’t let go of…as it hurts too good. We all want things to stay the same, David. Settle for living in misery because we’re afraid of change, of things crumbling to ruins.

Then I looked around this place, at the chaos it’s endured, the way it’s been adapted, burnt, pillaged then found a way to build itself back up again and I was reassured. Maybe my life hasn’t been so chaotic, it’s just the world that is and the only real trap is getting attached to any of it.

Ruin is a gift. Ruin is the road to transformation.

Even in this eternal city, the Augusteum showed me that we must always be prepared for endless waves of transformation.

Both of us deserve better than staying together because we’re afraid we’ll be destroyed if we don’t."

Elizabeth Gilbert

Brooke Shields and Christopher Atkins in THE BLUE LAGOON (1980).

I remember watching this as a kid. It was panned—Brooke Shields won the inaugural Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Actress, which I think is a bit of a dickish thing to do to a 14-year-old—but it was a big hit at the box office. And it made a cultural impact. Which means it was often referenced, parodied, copied. Brooke Shields was a huge star: a face of the 80s for sure.

When you’re as young as I was though, you don’t notice Brooke Shields’ wooden acting, or the shoddy dialogue, or the cheap movements of the story. You’re there with those two characters on that island. And I was, completely—I was there. It was three people stranded on an island, not two.

When I watch a film, any film, I want to visit a world. I want to be transported. That’s what I look for in films. So naturally, stories about being stranded on an island always appealed to me. The romantic idea of being away from everything and everyone. Living along with the rhythms of nature, like a seagull gliding on the wind. Well, of course it all seems very ideal and idyllic—until you get a toothache.

Brooke Shields in Blue Lagoon is hair and life goals.