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Goldie Hawn charms the pants off a generation and much more! $$PLAIN_TEXT_PREVIEW$$
MY FAVOURITE THINGS
True Love Leaves No Traces
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“The only thing that will make you happy is being happy with who you are, and not who people think who you are.” — GOLDIE HAWN
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I was lucky enough to spend the first half of this week shooting the creation of a mural in the CBD to help raise awareness for domestic violence. Seeing the artist bring a child’s face to life left me feeling a shock of emotions. More importantly, it led me to donate to The Little Friends Scholarship Fund, a non-profit devoted to helping kids overcome the trauma of household abuse.
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I got hungry for some nineties blockbuster action after Daniel Boddam, my uber-talented brother from another mother, shared a link to this interview with Brian Grazer, the acclaimed Hollywood hitmaker. Growing dyspeptic after failing to track down a copy of Ransom, Grazer’s blockbuster thriller, I settled on another Mel Gibson classic and was soon feeling right as rain. It had been yonkers since I first set my eyes on Bird On A Wire and boy have the years been kind to this comic-thriller. From the outset, Goldie Hawn — the film’s leading lady — consumes the screen and with a few simple gestures had me wrapped around her little finger. The meet-cute between Hawn and Gibson, (her long lost lover that disappeared into the witness protection program a decade before) in a rain-soaked gas-station is so cleverly staged that it leaves you hungry for more. Directed by John Badham (Saturday Night Fever, WarGames), the English filmmaker infuses an organic sense of momentum that never lets up, delivering the right kind of balance between action and drama. To watch a middle-aged Hawn (she was forty-five during production) command this leading role is to understand the true nature of star power. Eleven years Gibson’s senior, she seemingly glows from scene to scene, giving off an aura that left me warm all over.
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For better or worse, natural wines have captured the imagination of my generation and have gone and turned me into a full-blown wine snob. After diving into this fascinating New Yorker profile by Rachel Monroe, I have a much clearer picture of the history behind this nascent industry. While critics are quick to deride nattys as some kind of new-age hipster hogwash, the process itself hails back to the earliest days of viniculture, a time before pesticides, filtration and commercial-grade yeasts. Ever since I started drinking these wines, I’ve found myself appreciating tastes and textures that have eluded me for most of my adult life. As Monroe correctly surmises; “In the Napa boom of the nineteen-nineties, consumers prized wines that were rich and flawless. Now they’re seeking out wines that are more expressive than correct; wines that are earthy, with visible sediment; wines that taste alive.” These wines not only come alive on the palate, they also leave you feeling a whole lot better in the morning. A direct result of the lack of commercial intervention has proven to go a long way to dissolving the incidence of hangovers (so long as you don’t get greedy!). In our newfound search for authenticity, a movement that extends from the wellness industry to organic foods and beverages, it stands to reason that natural varietals are here to stay.
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My lady and I found ourselves counting down the clock to the season three premiere of this acclaimed Netflix series last Sunday and boy was it worth the wait. When I first heard that Claire Foy was handing the baton over to Olivia Colman in bringing Queen Elizabeth’s likeness to bear I knew we were in for some hot content. Once again the British have proven that you don’t need a lot of bells and whistles in order to indulge an audience. After tucking into a Fresh Air podcast with Peter Morgan, the creator and show runner, from last year I decided to rent The Queen. Directed by Stephen Frears from a script penned by Morgan, the 2006 flick has some fascinating set-ups but really does feel like the ugly step-child when stood against the subsequent series. As we near the halfway-mark of the season, I’ve found myself continually marveling at the way each episode infuses cinematic drama into the most mundane moments. More importantly, it provides the perfect platform to allow us a window into the interior life of a woman slowly suffocating under the weight of duty and devotion. To say that The Crown is good television is an understatement. This series proves yet again that visual restraint and meditative pacing have a lot to teach us about life itself.
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After I came across this Directors Guild of America podcast on Alex Gibney’s latest documentary feature Citizen K, I couldn’t help scrolling through the filmmaker’s IMDb in search of something to enjoy that evening. In light of the recent controversy surrounding Julian Assange’s recent removal from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, I quickly settled on this 2013 doc. Gibney is the talented mind behind some of the most riveting documentary films from the 21st Century. Titles like Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room, The Armstrong Lie and Going Clear: Scientology & The Prison of Belief. The New York filmmakers delivers once again with this hard-hitting exposé into the rise and fall of Wikileaks. I have fond memories of Wikileaks’ arrival into the zeitgeist and clearly remember being blown away by the Collateral Murder video that surfaced on YouTube at the beginning of this decade. Like many of my friends, I really believed that the international non-profit signaled a tidal shift in the culture, an organization that was going to hold the untouchables to account. Watching this dream unravel through the course of this documentary was tragic in so many ways. It helped me to comprehend how easily the personal is spun into political fodder, sowing deep divisions in the process. While I’m intently curious to know what Assange’s future holds, it’s heartbreaking to acknowledge his legacy will forever be overshadowed by his character defects.
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When this LP cover found its way onto my Instagram feed, courtesy of Cara Stricker — an old directing chum who incidentally captured the album art — I got curious. Tei Shi, née Valerie Teicher Barbosa, was born in Argentina and raised in British Columbia before moving south of the border as a young adult in search of her dreams. Attending Berklee College of Music in Boston, Barbosa soon moved to the Big Apple where she devoted her early twenties to a multitude of EPs and singles in an attempt to hone her voice. La Linda, her follow up to her debut LP Crawl Space in 2017, is the realization of so many years of toil and devotion. Listening to the singles Addict, Matando or Thief brings to mind warm reveries, her voice embodying a blend of so many millennial icons from the past decade. Kali Uchis meets Solange, Tei Shi promises to soothe the nerves and serves to remind us what really matters.
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Connie Bruck’s incredible New Yorker profile found its way into my inbox a few weeks back, a captivating exposé written in the aftermath of Tupac Shakur’s premature death in 1997. After devouring the mammoth piece over a few sittings, I finally understood why the Harlem-born musician was always destined to stir the pot. Born to Afeni Shakur, a Black Panther member recently acquitted for conspiring to detonate several New York department stores, he was named in honour of the last Inca chief to be tortured to death by the invading Spanish conquistadores. It was heartbreaking to read of an adolescent Shakur, a sweet and considerate child who excelled at theatre and writing poetry, having to turn his back on his passions in order to survive. When an initial cassette demo brought him his first record deal with Jimmy Iovine’s Interscope Records in the early nineties, Shakur slowly began slipping into a more sinister world. Accused of not being hard enough, Shakur began to live the gangster life he preached, embroiling himself in a world of anger and brutality. After being signed over to Suge Knight’s Death Row Records in 1995 in order to post bail, Shakur’s fate was sealed. Less than two years later, Shakur would be gunned down in Sin City while riding in the passenger seat of Knight’s B.M.W. The gangster-rapper was only twenty-five years old. “I used to sit outside by the street lights and read the autobiography of Malcolm X. And it made it so real to me, that I didn’t have any lights at home and I was sitting outside on the benches reading this book. And it changed me, it moved me. And then of course my mother had books by people like . . . Patrice Lumumba and Stokely Carmichael, ‘Seize the Time’ by Bobby Seale and ‘Soledad Brother’ by George Jackson. And she would tell these stories of things that she did or she saw or she was involved with and it made me feel a part of something. She always raised me to think that I was the Black Prince of the revolution.”
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Thanks for tuning in. If you like this newsletter and want to support it, forward it to someone who’d like it. Until next time. Xo
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