A review of recent news items of interest to me
In no particular order
A review of recent news items of interest to me
Method dressing, bad memoirs and a problem with strawberries.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice press tour fashion
RE: my last post on Blake Lively’s press tour fashion for This Ends With Us, the method dressing approach to film promo continues apace. On the Beetlejuice Beetlejuice press tour, Jenna Ortega has worn a direct copy of one of Winona Ryder’s costumes from the original, plus a custom shrunken head dress, pinstriped suits, and a red tulle dress that wishes it was the original.
These looks are fun, but it does feel like maybe we’ve overcommitted to the bit here. Also, with Ortega wearing all the looks Ryder originated, what is Winona supposed to wear? (A lot of black, apparently.) I’m beginning to agree with this writer that between the Margot Robbie’s Barbie looks (delightful), Zendaya’s Dune outfits (when else were we going to see the Mugler body armor on a person again?) and Zendaya’s Challenger’s styling (a little too on-the-nose), the method dressing approach might be getting stale.
The evolution of red carpet fashion has gone from studio costume designers dressing movie stars for events, to post-studio system movie stars doing their best with whatever designer dresses they can get their hands on, to movie stars working with stylists, to movie stars signing on to restrictive fashion ambassadorships (for better, for worse and for…hit or miss), to movie stars dressing as the movie itself. My take is: method dressing is a fun divergence for the most stylish, high-concept films (Dune, Furiosa, even Beetlejuice) that allow stylists to get creative, but are kind of a drag for any old romance or dramedy where a stylist really has to reach for a visual theme. And in either scenario, the focus should be on dressing your client in good clothes that make them look good, not on stretching inspiration past its breaking point to maintain a theme over an entire months-long global press tour.
Anna Marie Tendler’s memoir
I was probably never going to read Men Have Called Her Crazy, but I did request it in netgalley just in case. (The request was denied.) Fortunately, plenty of people have recapped it so I don’t have to (Celebrity Memoir Book Club said it best when Claire said, “What she needs is a slap in the face and a job.”) The tl;dr of it is that the memoir is centered around Tendler’s hatred of men, while recounting how she has spent her entire adult life depending on (sometimes rich and famous) men to support her as she tries and abandons vocation after vocation.
it’s a bit rich to say marriage is a prison when it’s the only (legal) cure for I-don’t-want-to-get-a job-but-I-still-want-money disease
It sounds very much like the many times my mom—who quit her one and only paid job after her first week and married my dad in a rushed wedding because she didn’t want to move to Kentucky with her parents (they moved literally the day after her wedding)—told me to never, ever get married because marriage is terrible. I always wondered, but never asked, what she would recommend instead. She wasn’t going to get a job and she wasn’t going to live with her parents in Kentucky, so it’s a bit rich to say marriage is a prison when it’s the only (legal) cure for I-don’t-want-to-get-a job-but-I-still-want-money disease. Marriage has long been the answer for work-allergic people like Tendler, but then they’ll writing a literal book about how they hate men and marriage when I think they really just resent or are ashamed of their own laziness. In Tendler’s case it’s extra frustrating because of course, women were allowed to have jobs and credit cards the whole time she was coming of age in a way that wasn’t true of boomer women like my mom. Anyway, listen to a podcast about it if you want to be entertained. Sounds like a bad read.
The strawberry problem
How many Rs are in the word “strawberry”? If you said 3, AI will never replace you. If you said 2, you might be a large language model. Not to be confused with the strawberry question, the strawberry problem illuminates a particularly embarrassing failure of AI’s cognitive abilities.
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Not only can AI not correctly count the number of Rs in “strawberry,” but at one point in the video it hallucinates a spelling of the word with extra Rs and still insists there are only two. This TikToker explains how AI can make such a simple mistake as this:
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If there’s one thing I love, it’s watching AI fail. But what’s annoying me most about AI at this particular moment is that while it can’t actually write an article for me, it also can’t take even the most annoying, menial, COUNTING jobs I have to do off my plate because it would never be able to parse the content templates my agency (and many others) use to keep track of copy fields etc. and map them to design templates, which means I’m here manually completing a simple word count for a blog post like a goddamn human calculator. Literally solve a single problem, ChatGPT!
Related posts
Recommendations
Langston Kerman’s special Bad Poetry (directed by John Mulaney and promoted by him on Seth Meyers’ show in a random appearance that was not at all an effort to distract from the release of his ex-wife’s memoir with the thinnest of excuses to appear on television and talk about his new wife.)
The new Amyl and the Sniffers single.
This episode of Factually about American food monopolies, and this one on the FTC’s recent attempts to topple monopolies.