What to Read, Watch, and Listen to This Week: September 24
House Hunters International, with its bold clients and beautiful locales, has been satisfying news editor Julia Silverman’s wanderlust.
Image: HGTV
There’s a lot going on right now. Maybe you’re protesting, maybe you’re donating to wildfire victims, maybe you’re keeping tabs on the way your representatives are responding to the present moment. Keep doing that!
Our lives are not one thing, though, and you’re also probably looking to escape, however briefly, into a show or a book or an album that might help you shut out the world or understand it a little better. To get the wheels turning, here’s the stuff filling our queues at Portland Monthly this week, from tacos to Thom Yorke.
From the Basement
House Hunters International
New York Film Festival
Every year I whine about not being able to make it to the fancy film festivals: TIFF, NYFF, Venice, Sundance. When I lived in Boston, I would just accept my little IFF Boston tickets, enjoy my advance screening of The Favourite, and act grateful. This year, though, things have changed: the 58th New York Film Festival has gone digital, because *gestures broadly*, and now I can watch the new Christian Petzold movie from my living room with a beer I found in the back of the fridge.My most anticipated title on this NYFF slate was Nomadland, the new Chloe Zhao film starring Frances McDormand that spawned this tweet from Ty Burr at the Boston Globe which felt market-tested to punch me in the face. I dawdled for a few days after tickets were released, trying to make strategic use of my funds because I did not think a digital screening could sell out. Lo and behold, Nomadland did, and now I am left with something to whine about.
Not much, though. I've already seen Steve McQueen's tactile, glowing Lovers Rock, which is set almost entirely at a reggae-infused house party in ’80s London, and Gunda, a wordless Norwegian doc that follows a pig, her piglets, a one-legged chicken, and a handful of cows for some breathtaking visual poetry (I know). At press time, I'm preparing to screen the new Sofia Coppola film, On the Rocks, with Bill Murray and Rashida Jones, and the new Almodóvar short The Human Voice starring Tilda Swinton. There's also the aforementioned Petzold movie Undine, French Exit starring Michelle Pfeifer and Lucas Hedges, a gay doc/drama hybrid, and plenty more.
The festival runs through October 11, and lots of films still have tickets available. For anyone who, like me, tears up whenever anyone says the word "movie theater," this is a pretty solid reprieve. Plenty of the films screen in limited four-hour windows, which means you're likely watching them at the same time as a bunch of other people. And it cannot be overstated how nice it is to remember that people are still making work, and that a lot of it is good—while art probably can't save us right now, it can definitely fill our tanks a little. —Conner Reed, arts & culture editor
