Sidenotes #16 - Teyana Taylor, AI for jobs and Lorde
Plus a little bit on Scoop and why laughing at Prince Andrew is too much
Hey hey hey, I’ve been enjoying this herald of spring, including a trip to Brussels that is surprisingly fun and sexy and basically Paris without the rudeness… and a walk by the river in Hammersmith that was literally overflowing. If you can stand the pollen, life is fun! I hope you’ve been having a lovely beginning of Spring/post Easter emergence into what 2024 is actually going to be… please enjoy this week’s Sidenotes, and I appreciate their irregularity…I’m toying with making them shorter so you get these more frequently :)
Feedback always welcome :)
A Thousand and One
Starring Teyana Taylor, who is so deserving of all the hyperboles, this film seems simple on the surface - ex-con snatches her son out of foster care and raises him outside of the system but still, terribly, interminably, within it. There’s something so radical about making us like her so much, for making us root for someone that so many of us don’t allow ourselves to see. File it next to Rocks, in that regard. New York is the third big character, as we see how not only this family, but the city it roots itself in changes, bit by bit. I never knew how actual properties degraded but now it makes so much more sense; deliberate mismanagement and obfuscation around the cause. It makes absolutely no sense that this film didn’t get any Oscar buzz. Maybe because the Oscars just…cannot be the measure of good films these days. Especially when films are covering issues that are, to put it bluntly, no longer as trendy as they used to be.
You can watch A Thousand and One on NOW TV with its Cinema package or on streaming platforms like YouTube, Apple TV, Google Play and Amazon Prime.
The Green Book
So here’s a film that DID win the Oscar - Best Picture, in fact, in 2019, as well as Best Original Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor for Mahershala Ali. I’m not saying he didn’t deserve it, the acting in this film is stellar. And I’m not saying this film didn’t do something. It’s a generically structured buddy movie about the straight guy and the odd guy and you’re perhaps meant to be surprised that the Italian (Tony Lip, played by Viggo Mortensen) is the savage, earthly brute while the Black guy (Don Shirley, played by Ali) is the refined, well-mannered genius. It’s an upending of our expectations, if our expectations are retrograde and nasty, and with that, the film asks us to collude with a silly conceit. It’s the early ‘60s New York and Lip, not too distant from the mafia, but keen enough to stay well out of it, needs work to play his part in his traditional family set-up. And Shirley, a concert pianist heading out on a tour to win over hearts and minds, or at least challenge hearts and minds, needs a white man to drive him around the Deep South, especially a white man who’s not afraid of a bit of roughhousing. (There’s a couple of extra characters and you do wonder; why don’t they all travel together? The obvious answer to which is, of course, Lip’s as much there for his brawn as his ability to shut up and drive.) Along the way each man learns bits from each other and it seems their individual progression is increasingly dependent on these lessons.
Lip, who never does things by the rules, begins to understand their importance, while Shirley warms up to the world, and gets a bit of soul - we’re to believe that Lip was the one who introduced him to Black music, food, and…culture? It’s clumsy at so many points and played for laughs - to be expected, when Peter Farrelly (literally from Dumb and Dumber) was co-writing and directing. I’m not sure it was right to make Lip both a racist and Shirley’s wise teacher; perhaps there was more nuance in their real life relationship than was depicted. It’s understood that while Lip’s son literally co-wrote the screenplay, Shirley’s family weren’t so happy with its story. What is so clear, though, is that both men have been memorialised in a very smooth story that’s almost so proud of itself for burying racist tropes that it continues a fair few others along the way. Worth watching if you want to see what DOES get an Oscar these days. Also, just as a little tidbit: this film did surprisingly well in China, of all places!
You can watch The Green Book on Netflix or NOW TV with its Cinema package or on streaming platforms like YouTube, Apple TV, Google Play and Amazon Prime.
As for me
In between writing articles - a lot of them long-lead features that are taking a little while to arrive - I’m also doing some research bits as well as, well, applying for jobs. Not loads of jobs, but just some jobs. As fun as freelance is, there are some really exciting parts of journalism that only get to be done by those in staff roles, and I do like being part of a team working together on collective goals - especially now that hybrid working allows for people to be part of a team AND get household chores done…nothing worse than having to sit in a room watching a man you don’t know that well eat soup slurp by slurp as he listens to loud nonsense on his headphones.
Anyway, I’ve been applying for some roles (recruiters, employers, editors, let’s chat!) and, in some instances, using AI to help me with the construction of the applications. Enough HR managers and recruiters are using it to weed out candidates, and I find it’s the best way of meeting them at their level. I wrote about it for The Times here.
Also, my god, I’ve not watched Scoop as I don’t have Netflix (don’t look at me like that!) but could we draw a line under the silly jokes about Prince Andrew…I’m not saying he’s not worthy of pillory, having constructed his own downfall. It’s just, sometimes the Pizza Express/sweat/straightforward shooting weekend jokes begin to eclipse the actual horror of which he - and the friend he was so “honourable towards”, yes, him, Jeffrey Epstein - was accused. For legal reasons, of course, he denies all allegations of wrongdoing. He also paid Epstein accuser Virginia Guiffre-Roberts (conspicuously absent from most coverage of Scoop) £12million…
Anyway, for feminist killjoy reasons, please enjoy me ranting about it over on TikTok, where I’m still wasting my life xoxo
And finally
There’s a cover album of Talking Heads songs coming out soon and Lorde’s covered Take Me To The River. Which of course was a cover of Al Green’s song. It’s the most Britney I’ve ever heard Lorde be, and that might be because she’s trying to do something sexy, which I think she does very well - have you heard Magnets, her Disclosure collab, recently? Maybe the best part of it is it’s an update of the Talking Heads version without David Byrne’s whine (sorry, I find it very irritating, I think it’s because I, long ago, worked in a shop where Psycho Killer was on the playlist every two hours or so, and my job was fingerspacing all of the clothes in empty shops…I was on zero hours and one regular shift was £8 an hour for 4 hours and by the time I’d got there and back and bought lunch locally I actually was making about £15 per shift…)
Of course, it’s not a patch on Al Green’s performance at his 1995 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, please do enjoy…