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A final observation: in anticipation of the film’s release, Fennell programmed a series at the BFI IMAX of titles that inspired her version of Wuthering Heights, including Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter, David Cronenberg’s Crash, Park Chan-Wook’s The Handmaiden, Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, Mervyn LeRoy’s Random Harvest and Catherine Breillat’s Bluebeard. A veritable bounty of great films that should have been a promising indicator of things to come, but in retrospect only serve as a warning that liking great art doesn’t necessarily result in making great art yourself. Then again, perhaps that’s never been Fennell’s intention. Great art certainly doesn’t sell H+M capsule collections or Kleenex brand collabs."

This shit slaps. I've missed Ted.

He enjoyed what now?

“Before I knew it, I saw ICE agents circling a young woman who appeared to be Hispanic, and so I approached her, and we were at that point chanting, ‘We are not afraid, we are not afraid.’”

"Following the passage of the Civil Rights Act, some universities and companies adopted “neutral” tests designed to exclude Black people. The University of Texas adopted tests that administrators hoped would simultaneously exclude Black applicants and pass constitutional muster. In Griggs vs. Duke Power, those unhinged race radicals on the 1971 Supreme Court acknowledged that Duke Power had adopted a discriminatory employment test to circumvent the anti-discrimination provision of the Civil Rights Act. To combat this, the Court recognized that neutral rules could have a racially “disparate impact” and later created a legal compliance test. Yglesias’s watered-down Rufoism would have readers believe these obvious facts are a radical betrayal of liberal principles. In fact, critical race theorists’ critique of race-neutrality was drawn from real-world experiences with racists trying to deny Black folks their constitutionally protected rights."

tfw you remember she's not draftable

"The best undistributed film of 2025, Annapurna Sriram’s debut is a micro-budget romp in the tradition of cinema’s greatest sleazeballs, weirdos, and perverts. Sriram serves as writer, director, and star; she plays a sex worker who must scrounge up a grand for a ceremony to break a curse that’s been placed on her. Alongside a revolving door of peers, psychics, exes, and clients, she cruises around Trashtown, USA on a baby blue moped, in a signature floral skirt-and-bra two-piece. Objectively, it is nice to watch a movie that treats sex work with respect, honesty, warmth. Plenty of filmmakers have attempted this type of queer camp to overwhelmingly mediocre results. Sriram, miraculously, has produced a film with more life in its pinky finger than most movies have in their entire body. From the sound design to the sets to its unpredictable tonal modulations, Fucktoys is full of boundless vision. It is trashy, electric, and extremely funny. It has an iconic soundtrack, with an envious number of killer needle-drops for a modern indie movie. Its virtues are not all pleasure-forward; the film is often devastating, terrifying, and unsettling. But Sriram’s film is so beguiling that its overall effect is one of utter warmth. I cannot imagine anybody not being head-over-heels for this."

Hortensia Mi Kafchin, “Flowers from Earth / First Contact,” 2024-25, oil on canvas, silver and gold powder, 70 ¾ x 63 ins.

Those people were also singularly devoid of empathy. Worse, it seemed that they prized cruelty as a kind of status signifier: to enjoy cruelty was a sign of belonging to the strong, the winners, while sympathising with the children in Gaza just indicated, as Trump likes to say, that there might be something Palestinian about you."

"When I asked the flight attendant if I could take a photograph of the bottle, she asked why. I told her that I’m a water sommelier, and she said, “What’s that?” and I said, “Like a wine sommelier, but for water.” “I don’t know what a wine sommelier is.” Not knowing how to answer, I walked back to my seat and continued watching Dirty Harry."

Every misanthropic humorist turns into Andy Rooney eventually.