For this week’s installment of the Weekly Culture Menu, we have a sampling of content across a variety of mediums, lengths, and sensibilities so that you can dip in and out all week. Once you subscribe, you can expect a weekly menu delivered to your inbox every Tuesday.
💖 If you like this post, don’t forget to hit the heart to let me know and help others find my writing.
📮 Do you have any menu requests? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
Happy Tuesday! Thank you to everyone who shared their favorite Best Picture winners from years past in last week’s comment section. It’s fun to see that while many of us have some shared favorites, we also have our unique film combinations that have informed our sensibilities. I love hearing about the culture that is inspiring to you, so please continue to share! In the meantime, here’s this week’s menu:
🍤 Amuse Bouche [ -10 mins ]
📺 Louisa Harland reads Sharon Horgan’s powerful letter to all men. In celebration of International Women’s Day, Derry Girl's Louisa Harland read this Sharon Horgan letter at Royal Albert Hall. In it, Horgan acknowledges the space that’s been made for women to tell women’s stories but asks for more. I couldn’t help but think of Cord Jefferson’s standout Oscar speech from this past Sunday, in which he asked the industry to allocate funds to “take a risk” and support several smaller projects rather than consistently making one heavily funded movie (also a risk). I immensely enjoyed the 2024 movie year because of the diverse voices and stories. Keep. Making. Room (and allocating funds).
📺 Marcus Mumford’s Cannibal Music Video. In this clip from the Graham Norton show, Carey Mulligan explains how she helped her husband (Marcus Mumford) get Steven Spielberg to direct his music video with no budget and an iPhone. Watch the Graham Norton clip first, then watch the music video. You have to love the guy’s commitment to the craft. Also, here’s Carey and Marcus being cute after the Oscars (she wore my favorite dress of the night):
Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
🍟 Appetizer [ -30 mins ]
🗞️ The Palace has a serious trust problem from
. Has your feed also been blowing up with Kate Middleton conspiracy theories? If it hasn’t, we might be on different internets, but let me bring you onto mine. Kate's last public appearance was on December 23, 2023. In January 2024, the Palace announced she’d had abdominal surgery and would not be making public appearances until after Easter. Around this time, corners of the internet began surfacing various conspiracies about her whereabouts, and in the last two weeks, these theories entered the mainstream. This week, it’s all come to a head after Kate shared a photo with her children to celebrate UK Mother’s Day, only for internet sleuths to quickly realize the post was photoshopped. Today, it appears there was yet another photoshop blunder. You might be asking - Jordan, why do you care about this? And the answer is, I really don’t know. But then again, I don’t know why I care about most internet rabbit holes I go down. The best answer I can offer is that this is a mind-boggling case study of public trust erosion as a result of some pretty lousy communication blunders. Or, more simply, I’m in it for the memes.
🍽️ Main Course [ 1 Hour+ ]
🎬 Arrival. This past Sunday, I, like many people around the world, went and saw Dune: Part Two (we saw it in Regal Cinema RPX, and I think I’ve just barely started to feel like I’m on solid ground after nearly three hours of being shaken around in my seat with the affecting Dune score pulsing through my eardrums). It was a visual and auditory spectacle (not just because of the RPX). I suspect we’ll all be talking about it for the next year, so you should make a point to see it in the theater if you haven’t already. Viewing the second installment of Dune had me revisiting my favorite Denis Villeneuve movie, Arrival. If you haven’t seen it before, it’s a movie you should go into knowing very little. At a high level, the film is about a linguistics professor (Amy Adams) enlisted by the army to communicate with extraterrestrials. As far as I can claim that an “alien” movie is realistic, I’d argue that this one feels about as close to what the reality of aliens touching down on Earth would be like. It’s quiet, beautiful, and contemplative - and will surprise you in magnificent ways. If you’ve seen Dune but not Arrival, you’ll also notice visual similarities and a consistent approach to world-building. Though both installments of Dune might be sparse on dialogue, language is the beating heart of Arrival. So, I’ll be honest that I was surprised to hear Villeneuve recently quoted as saying he “hates dialogue,” though he has since clarified, and I enjoyed his explanation:
“I said that laughing. So [when] I said it, I put a lot of emphasis on ‘I hate dialogue.’ I don’t hate dialogue. I am not inspired by scene that is overwritten with dialogue — that’s the truth — and I’m talking about my own work…At its birth, there was no dialogue in cinema — there was a full exploration of the power of the images to tell the story. [Filmmakers] were using the power of the cinematic language to express stories; the direction and the drama unfolded [through] images.”
If you haven’t seen it before, treat yourself. It’s easily one of my favorite movies of all time.
📚 Heartburn by Nora Ephron. Picture this: you’re married to a famous journalist and heavily pregnant with his second child when you discover that he’s having an affair with a mutual friend. You don’t have to imagine too hard - because those circumstances led to Nora Ephron’s Heartburn. The book is an autobiographical novel based on Ephron’s marriage and divorce to Carl Bernstein (yes, Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein), and public reaction to the story at the time of publication was severe. Though praised for her writing, people viewed the book as vindictive and accused her of being a bad parent for airing family drama publicly. Bernstein even threatened to sue for defamation. As Ephron put it in the 2004 Heartburn book introduction, “One of the most fascinating things to me about the whole episode: he cheated on me, and then got to behave as if he was the one who had been wronged because I wrote about it!” I had a great time reading this hilarious and not very long book from start to finish (Meryl Streep narrates the audiobook if that’s more your thing). I will note that some of the book doesn’t hold up with a modern lens, so I’d advise listening to the previously mentioned Sentimental Garbage episode that talks about the complexities of Nora Ephron if you want to unpack that further. And, DON’T. WATCH. THE. MOVIE. Do not be tricked by the Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson casting - it is not good, and you will regret losing that hour and forty-eight minutes of your life.
🧁 Dessert [ -1 hour ]
🎧 What If? Hollywood Edition. On this week’s episode of Scriptnotes, the hosts participated in a magical thinking exercise and imagined how historical events could have changed the outcomes of the film industry. If you, like me, have never heard of Edison’s patent thugs, you are in for a treat!
And I’ll leave you with this spoiler-free recap of Dune: Part Two.
Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
💖 If you liked this post, don’t forget to hit the heart to let me know and help others find my writing.
📮 Do you have any menu requests? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
Wow, what a round up - love the idea of a cultural amuse bouche in particular. I also LOVE Arrival - easily one of my favourite movies of all time too. Also went down the K-Mid rabbit hole this week, also have no idea why. And Heartburn: another classic. Nora Ephron is up there with the greats.
Have you seen The Lives of Others? Not at all like anything else on this list 😂 but if we have similar tastes (seems like we do) then you will also love it. Thanks for finding me so I could find your work back!