Movies, Movies, Movies
I’ve recommended Walerian Borowczyk before, but Metrograph is currently screening a lot of his films, including some rare shorts before each feature. I haven’t seen all of them yet, but so far I most highly recommend Immoral Women (1979)—also translated to The Women of Evil (like the Baudelaire book, Le Fleurs du Mal)—a tryptic of vignettes.
People seem to forget just how big a role Hindu deities played in influencing global fashion trends of the late 90s/early 00s. Holy Smoke! (1999) by Jane Campion riffs on the typical teen girl’s obsession with Indian reawakening in a movie that kind of has everything, including Harvey Keitel.
Week-end at the Waldorf (1945) was a remake of Grand Hotel, which was set in Berlin, and so maybe New York was never even really like this: movie stars and foreign dignitaries cohabitating with reporters, live-in guests giving desperate tourists their coveted rooms, the hiring of sexy in-house stenographers for meetings, etc. Ideally, hotels realize fantasies, and movies about hotels are fantastic.