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Poor Things (2023), a Letterboxd review

#pop culture #hollywood #review #cinema #film #movie #film review #poor things #poor things 2023 #emma stone

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I did not grow up listening to the Spice Girls. I knew ‘Wannabe’ as a radio staple, but that is where it stops. The first time I realised how monstrous their cultural legacy is was the 2012 Summer Olympics, when the world when insane and started telling me how great they were. It was also when people started referencing their history as if I should know it. To cut a long story short, they entered my pop culture database about at the same level as Mandy Moore. Then I learned about the solo music.

This list is about 10 years in the making, because I truly struggled to invest myself in so much of what I had to listen to. The Spice Girls existed as extremely famous, middling musicians in the UK pop space for a long time. Their utter domination of the late 1990s meant that they had blank checks to spend on establishing themselves as solo musicians, and they definitely took advantage of that. One even bankrupted a record label, but that’s not the point of this article.

#pop culture #hollywood #substack #review #pop #spice girls #music #pop music

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Lyrically, it’s a mess of cliches and generic empowerment lines paired with subtle nods to the whole media circus surrounding Grande that fall flat. The improv-tastic title suggests a playful tone that does not carry over to the rest of the song. The Madonna samples indicates fun is just around the corner. Grande’s girlish delivery gives the impression we’re not taking things too seriously. It runs at 3 minutes and 35 seconds of underwhelming bitchiness.

The biggest crime is the sample.

For starters, I think it takes a special kind of talented producer to sample an already classic hit and create something equally undeniable. You’re fighting against not just your own potential inadequacies, but the cultural memory of the song you’re sampling. Which is why the decision to build this comeback single on the foundations of the 1991 cultural juggernaut that is ‘Vogue’ is an odd one. This is not a good enough beat to justify its own existence.

#pop culture #hollywood #substack #review #pop #music #Ariana grande #yes and #eternal sunshine #Madonna #vogue

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Denise Richards.

#Denise Richards

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Norway 🇳🇴

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C h e f c h a o u e n

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Oberhofen Castle Switzerland

© Saving Castles

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Sketching.

#art #sketch

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Winter Nights, Switzerland✨

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destiny (1921) directed by fritz lang

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It does make me giggle that Philippa Gregory is a Ricardian.

#pop culture #hollywood #history #philippa gregory #Tudor #Plantagenet #Richard iii

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Todd Haynes’ latest directorial piece is the story of one actress, one woman past middle age, and the 23-year younger husband she met and groomed while teaching his seventh-grade class. She was 36, the same age her husband is now, and he was 13. Over two decades later, they’re basically an old married couple. They met in a pet store. Their youngest children are graduating high school. Again, he’s just about 36. The age the actress playing his wife is. She’s screening for 13-year-olds to play him in the movie.

He was 13.

She was 36.

#pop culture #hollywood #substack #review #cinema #film #movie #film review #may December

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Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967), a Letterboxd review

#pop culture #hollywood #review #cinema #film #movie #pop #film review #Elizabeth Taylor #Marlon Brando #Robert Forster #Julie Harris #reflections in a golden eye #1960s #1967

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Bergen, Norway 🇳🇴

{📸:mountainsofnorway}

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Taj Falaknuma Palace, Hyderabad, India,

Courtesy: @TajFalaknuma