Straight Outta Crouch End

A brief summary of the film, before we get into the whys and the hows and the Ryan Goslings. Barbie (Margot Robbie) is a Barbie girl in a Barbie world, where - generally speaking - life in plastic is fantastic. Barbie, like Truman Burbank in The Truman Show, lives in a simulacrum of the real world, where every day is very similar to the one before - she and gazillions of other Barbies do things like go to the beach, have dance parties, win Nobel prizes for literature, while various Kens stand around and look pretty - until thoughts of mortality spur her to leave her own world and join the 'real' world (Los Angeles). One of the Kens (Ryan Gosling) joins her on this trip. Barbie discovers that her feelings of estrangement have been caused by a pair of real-world humans, a mother and daughter (America Ferrera and Ariana Greenblatt) who are growing apart; the mother cherishes her daughter's old Barbie dolls (and also works for Mattel (?)), while her daughter is now a moody litt...

 It's been a wild few days or perhaps even weeks, who's to say, in the landmark trial opposing Gwyneth Paltrow to a man or woman alleging that something happened to do with skiing. The court case could have huge implications for [??]. A quick recap of the crazy events we simply can't get enough of is in order.  First off, the contention itself. Accounts differ as to what actually went down on that fateful morning or afternoon in Aspen, the Alps or possibly even Japan, why not. The Emma actor - during a skiing holiday with her children, at least one of whom is called Apple - was skiing, or on a chairlift maybe, when some guy alleges that, I want to say, they collided? Causing him to have pain? Paltrow, for her part, denies this version of events, counter-alleging that, I mean, what the fuck can you counter-allege to that, I dunno, that they didn't in fact bump into each other or something. At stake is, probably, the guy's hospital bill.  The actor said many funny an...

I’ve become annoyed lately with people asserting that such and such a film, or book, or television show “broke” them. Hyperbole is the internet’s shared language, of course, and we all fall victim to it: films “destroyed” or “ruined” us; we were “in pieces” at the end. Such phrases are so common as to have become practically meaningless - besides which, the fact that someone cried at a film tells me almost nothing about that film if I do not know the person well; perhaps they cry easy, who’s to say? Crying is an honest reaction, but it is not a critical one: it’s easier to point to your tears than articulate an intellectual position. It feels almost like there is indulgence there; we say that a film devastated us, because in a cultural landscape where so much washes over us, we are at pains to show that our emotions are still intact; we are relieved to find ourselves still vulnerable, and readily tell others about our weeping.  But Close, the new film by Lukas Dhont, broke me. It’s...