Issue 4 is here, and it's a scorcher 🔥
Read excerpts from our sun-soaked issue: Spring Breakers, sneaking food into the theatre, and Taipei Story. P.S. Issue 5: Horror submissions are now open!
Editor’s Letter
When Disney star Selena Gomez was asked what was special about Spring Breakers, she said “It’s real.” She meant that Harmony Korine used non-actors, researched spring break in person, and encouraged them to embrace authenticity (he reassured them that their bodies, on display throughout the film, were meant to be a little soft in the middle, these weren’t actresses with personal trainers, but college girls who drank beer and ate fast food). Cason Sharpe’s piece on Spring Breakers notes that the film is compelling because of the way it breaks down the public personas of major stars on a backdrop of genuine partiers, rappers, and cops that populate St. Petersburg, Florida.
Of course, films often feel real, they can also feel like reality. Or even worse, like a perfect form which your own real life perpetually fails to match. When we think of a perfect summer, we imagine the total freedom that we ascribe to childhood, but summers as a kid usually meant hours in the backseat listening to your parents’ radio station or toiling at a degrading job. In the gulf between what you expect and what you get is summer in your 20s. The year of Spring Breakers was also the year of “Summertime Sadness”, Lana Del Rey’s only song to ever chart, which we played off of our phones in taxi cabs and parking lots.
Although the girls profess to love money, what Spring Breakers ultimately imagines is a world where money doesn’t matter, a world without the pursuit of it. No jobs, no credit cards, no mortgage; money is acquired by guns when needed. The girls drive off into the sunset in a sunset-coloured convertible, twinning in yellow bikinis, turned indistinguishable, whittled down to their essential parts: limbs, lawlessness, liminality, subsisting, to echo Cason, on vibes alone.
Vibes abound in our summer issue: contemplating waterfalls, eating in movie theatres, sinking back into your hometown or into a teenage fantasy, dipping into pools of mood on YouTube, or diving deep into content both extreme and ambient. The pieces in this issue are even more far out on the fringes than we usually roam as if the urge towards critique were itself taking the summer off, slipping away for a swim, enjoying the view.
This year, Spring Breakers celebrates its 10th anniversary, which might be difficult to accept for those of us who were college-aged then, and who now watch the reckless teens on Euphoria before taking melatonin, turning on a meditation app, and getting to sleep before midnight.
But spring break spirit persists, if not in my own life, at least in the films I love: the low-brow transcendence of Southland Tales, the teenage bank-robbers in First Name Carmen, and in Rohmer’s The Green Ray, which also placed its protagonist among real vacationers, marooned on her towel in a sea of tourists. Maybe we stopped idolizing Harmony Korine’s “pure pop sociopaths”, but we started posting stills from Rohmer’s breezy, but no less aestheticized, summer visions: Pauline’s sexual education at the beach is as unreal in its refinement and maturity than the spring breakers are in their excesses.
And if I’m honest, no matter how old I get, I still stay up too late, eat junk food, and feel an adolescent, abstract sadness whenever the days get hotter. One that pushes girls out of their dorms, to maybe catch a bus to Florida for a shot at the best summer ever.
—Gabrielle Marceau
☀️ Read our Summer Issue here ☀️
Cason’s Casting Couch: Spring Breakers
By Cason Sharpe
Harmony Korine premiered Spring Breakers at the Venice International Film Festival in the fall of 2012, the year we wondered if the world would end as predicted by the ancient Mayans. “I wanted a film that had very little dialogue,” the director said, “that was more sensory, more of an experience you felt.” In other words, he wanted to make a movie that was just vibes. As is the case with such movies, plot is beside the point, but here’s a brief rundown anyway: eager to escape their hum-drum campus lives, a cadre of college co-eds stick up a roadside diner with squirt guns, earning themselves enough cash to bus down to Florida for spring break. Once in their promised land, the girls party themselves into increasingly nefarious situations until they find their bikini-clad asses at the centre of a feud between rival dealers. Dismissed by some as misogynist trash and uplifted by others as feminist camp, Spring Breakers is Girls Gone Wild with an arthouse twist, an elegy for innocence at the end of the world. I doubt we’d have Euphoria without it.
Korine is known to pepper his films with non-actors, a presence that destabilizes the studied affect of the professionally trained. Shot on location in St. Petersburg, Florida, Spring Breakers features hundreds of actual party-goers as background players, a casting decision that lends the film the candid air of documentary. Other non-actor cameos include the ATL Twins, a pair of party-hopping gold-toothed wanksters rumoured to share their lovers, and Gucci Mane, a rapper with so few fucks to give that he had an ice cream cone tattooed across his cheek. Throwing a string of Mardi Gras beads across the boundary between fact and fiction, Spring Breakers captures the real-life personalities and subcultures that inspired its creation and tosses them together with fantasy.
🌴 Read the full piece here →
Theatre Food Diary
By Winnie Wang
09/15/13
I was introduced to Banh Mi Boys by Nicole, who shared her sweet potato fries with me as we sat on the balcony of the Hot Docs Theatre to watch The Double. We dipped the fries in mayonnaise, another first for me. The year prior, we attempted to bring potato wedges from Pizza Pizza into Ryerson Theatre to see Imogene (now titled Girl Most Likely), our first-ever screening at the Toronto International Film Festival. Despite our best efforts to smuggle the food into my bag, a volunteer picked up the scent and asked the guilty offender to come forward.
05/28/15
After reading multiple posts on Tumblr about Mad Max: Fury Road as a subversive blockbuster, I finally asked a classmate to watch it with me at the Yonge-Dundas Cineplex Theatre. With our tickets in hand and ready to take our seats, I suddenly craved a burrito bowl from Chipotle and journeyed over to Front Street. A 21-minute walk, 15 minutes if you’re motivated. After I grabbed my meal, I speed-walked back and landed in my seat high on adrenaline, digging into my order: white rice, black beans, fajitas, mild salsa, lettuce, and guacamole. My heart pounded against my chest, first as I narrowly avoided the late arrival walk of shame, then as Charlize Theron raced across the desert in search of her homeland. Sometime later, I learned that there was a Chipotle location around the corner and wondered how I had missed it.
🍟 Read the full piece here →
Taipei Story (1985)
By Athena Scott
Taipei Story opens on a young woman walking through an empty apartment. She pauses at a window and lowers her sunglasses, oversized and dark. “I know her!” Mom calls out from beside me. “She’s a famous singer.” The opening credits run as Mom hums a few lines off-key. “Do you recognize it?”
The year after my parents met in a café in Taipei, Taipei Story was released. The smog dusts each scene in static. “Now that’s the Taipei I remember,” Dad says while Mom Googles. “Yes, Tsai Chin,” she says. “Just look at the Spotify. You’ll find her.”
In Taipei Story, Tsai Chin plays a young woman navigating a path forward as her childhood sweetheart Lung clings to his past. I asked Mom to watch the movie with me, hoping to hear more of the Taiwan she knew when she was in college and working and newly married and planning to move away to America.
“Pretty depressing,” was all she had to say about the movie. “I mostly enjoyed the background things. Did you know she was best Mandarin female artist in 1991? And she married the director?”
Mom watched for the popular singer she grew up with; for the extras in familiar-to-her school uniforms; for the background hum of motorbikes (“Is that 100cc? 150?”).
“People live like that,” Mom says as we watch Chin grab two beers from the kitchen, sipping from one before joining her father and Lung at the table. She hands the men the beers and sits, empty-handed. Chin watches as her dad knocks his spoon to the floor and, without hesitation, takes hers. “More traditional families,” Mom continues—“their furniture is very stiff. You see the chairs there? The elaborate Chinese-style carvings? We had a chair similar to that at Ama’s house. It had hardly any cushion.”
💜 Read the rest of our Film Diaries here →
Issue 5: Horror Submissions Open!
Submissions are now open for Issue 5: Horror until July 1st. Send your pitches for pop culture investigations, personal essays, reviews, fan fiction, and film diaries. Surprise us!
👻 Submission Info →
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