This Week, Ooh and Aah at:

• a France-approved hit
• two big dudes
• Nazi horror
• books!

Thanks to Ruck Cohlchez for helping light the fuse. Send articles throughout the next week to ploughmanplods [at] gmail, post articles from the past week below for discussion, and Have a Happy Friday!

Reverse Shot‘s A.G. Sims mulls on Sean Baker’s newly released Cannes winner Anora in the context of his other films:

Baker chases Hollywood grandeur with bright colored, frenzied, and frequently funny storytelling that could easily be flipped into Grand Theft Auto side quests. His sex work plots buzz around someone on the hunt, with a deadline creating the feeling of being strapped into a speeding car bracing for some climactic explosion. Deeper truths about America he seems to be confronting are not rooted in the personal and often feel secondary to the lurid hook. So when a washed-up adult film star tries to lure a high school student into the industry, as in Red Rocket, or a trans sex worker’s insecurity about her boyfriend sleeping with a cis woman is turned into a farce, as in Tangerine, or Ani is hogtied in an extended sequence bordering on bondage porn in Anora, the “commentary” feels like more of an afterthought, or maybe even cover, for all the demented fun. Film doesn’t have to be dogmatically political and aesthetically “real” to have impact, but if his goal is ultimately to normalize and decriminalize sex work, as he’s claimed, simply putting sex workers on screen and weaving energetic stories around the most salacious aspects of their lives doesn’t quite land.

Who do we have to thank for Cate Blanchett making a new movie with Guy Maddin? Ari Aster and the Criterion Closet, apparently. Indiewire‘s Ryan Lattanzino interview them both about Rumours:

[Aster and I] started working together, and we sent him the script of ‘Rumours’ and he loved it, and at one point, Cate’s name came up because Ari had basically her email address or something.” “I have an agent!” Blanchett interjected. [Maddin continues] “We just assume if we give something to the agent, the agent goes, ‘Nope, not doing that one,'[…] The first time I went to Hollywood, in the ‘90s, someone said, ‘Who do you see in the lead? And I went, ‘Sort of a young Buster Keaton?’ I just went home and went to bed for a long time. We reached out to Cate, and I knew she knew who I was because I saw her in the Criterion Closet pick one of my movies, and mention my name and one of my films.”

At Cracked, Brian VanHooker talks to 30 Rock‘s Dot Com and Grizz about working on the show and the real Tracy Morgan:

But I have to insert, he’s an asshole. Grizz don’t like inserting that as much as I do, but I’ve got to say it on the record: Tracy Morgan is a straight-up asshole. That said, hanging with this dude, he has a spirit that you don’t see on regular human beings. If you ever get the chance to hang with him, that few hours will be more fun that you’ve had all year.

Keith Phipps catches up with Shock Waves at The Reveal:

If a single image could make a movie, Shock Waves would be a classic. Long after I’ve forgotten everything else about the film, I’ll remember the first moment a pale, platinum blonde, undead SS officer wearing shaded goggles emerges from the ocean. Silent and expressionless, he moves as if the decades spent under the water were just a brief time out and that it was now time to resume the business of spreading fascism and killing everyone who might stand in the way. Accompanied by an eerie synth score by Richard Einhorn, a composer who’s divided his time between the worlds of classical music and low-budget filmmaking, it’s an arresting moment that takes up a few unforgettable seconds of screen time. If the 86 minutes that surround it aren’t quite as memorable, it’s still more than many films manage.

For The Guardian Sarah Manavis, writes about the younger generation’s surging interest in bookstores:

However, a resistance to algorithmic recommendations popular on BookTok (as well as online bookstores like Amazon) might be one of the most common things driving young readers into physical bookshops. Almost everyone I spoke to – both booksellers and young readers – were on the whole sceptical of giving BookTok too much credit for the popularity of shopping in physical shops. Some readers said they experienced an inverse effect, a kind of “BookTok burnout”, and have actually sought out in-person recommendations as an antidote to being pushed the same books by BookTokers ad nauseam. “The algorithm doesn’t really do much other than give you the same books within the genre,” Jack, 24, who lives in Mallaig, argues. Conversely, he says, “the art of the bookseller is almost like a DJ where, if you tell them your general reading habits, then they’ll come out with something you are almost categorically going to enjoy – even if it’s left field from your normal habits.”