THE STARS
Epstein files, Marty Supreme, cigarette crackdown
And we’re back! We’ve missed you, dear subs, and we’re excited to bring you our first STARS of the year, in which we rate things of grave and minor importance according to our quasi arbitrary five-star rubric.
We’ve also been busy planning our columns for the year ahead, which are top secret but may involve FLINTAs, state election coverage, and the pointy edge of the local AI resistance movement. As always, your Eds will be pounding the pavement in search of the city’s juiciest stories, but you can also expect some new voices to appear in the newsletter. If you’ve got tip-offs or opinions on columns or STARS, write to us—our Letters to the Editor column will run shortly. All this, for a mere $6 a month? Wow.
Finally, we have a couple of events to announce. Our Wheeler Centre night is sold out, but if you missed out on tickets, you can catch us at the Carlton Library on the evening of Wednesday 25 February, or at the Brimbank Writers & Readers Festival on the afternoon of Saturday 14 March. Tonight, we are also thrilled to be heading to the premiere of a play written by our colleague, Maki Morita, 月を見る夜 Moongazing, on for the next few weeks if you want to pop down to La Mama. Nearby Yo-Chi is giving 50% discounts for people who get their 10,000 steps in (free if you hit 25,000?!) on Sundays. The city is alive.
★★★★★ Summer movies
“Young people like Marty Supreme, but old people don’t,” said a cinema attendant to some patrons at a theatre the other night. What do you reckon? Ageist or true? Your Editors (who fall within the age range of youngish to young at heart) absolutely loved Timmy Chalamet and Josh Safdie’s ping-pong magnum opus, with its thrilling pacing, galactic score, and many GOATed cameos (Sandra Bernhard! Man with a Golden Voice!). We give it 4.5 stars. Ignore the glum haters who think it’s dudely Oscar bait. It’s actually cinematic sashimi-grade tuna, arigato gozaimasu. Nor is it, as some critics have droned, just Good Time/Uncut Gems remade, but a raised-stakes refining of the core Safdie style and themes—namely, the masculine urge to lie, lie, lie to everyone around you, then run away, fast. It canonises Josh as one of the great auteurs of our epoch. Sad but true: he won the Safdie brothers’ divorce. Obviously, we’d rather have a beer with Benny Safdie any day of the week, but we also watched The Smashing Machine over the holidays, the younger bro’s Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson wrestling movie, and it was… undeniably operating in 3 star territory. We only deducted 0.5 stars from Marty due to the distracting hustle-culture promotional hype surrounding it. (A Naarm micro-market has already popped up around the merch: someone is trying to sell a Marty Supreme ping-pong ball set, acquired for free at the Astor’s 70mm screening, for $100. Dream big, we guess.) This season’s movies are not all Safdie, though. It’s also the summer of Hamnet (2.75 stars), If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (3 stars), Sentimental Value (the worse your daddy issues, the higher your rating will be—though everyone should add 0.5 for the Scandi-minimalist real estate listing video jumpscare). We did not have a 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple summer (looks way too scary, but we’ve heard whispers in the range of 4 stars) or a Die My Love summer (the rule is one maternal trauma flick per season, and we chose Our Rose Byrne’s). We have not yet seen the Palme D’Or winner It Was Just an Accident or the film with the season’s best poster and worst director, Wuthering Heights, but we will. And we are very excited to round out the binge with Pillion, which looks like the perfect biker dom-com (domination comedy) for Valentine’s Day. No stars for that yet, just chains and whips. When’s the marketing team sending us the complimentary Lucrezia and De Sade leathers?
