We'll never look at bread the same way again after Fear Street
Plus In My Blood It Runs & I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson
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Number of Alison Roman recipes cooked in lockdown: 3, maybe 4 if you include eating raw radish with butter that’s been left out for probably too long as a recipe????
Number of tabs closed: 0
8 Fear Street tabs
Call me slow, but I truly did not realise that the titular Fear Street of R. L. Stine fame referred to the name of the street itself — renamed Fier Street in the films — not just the emotional highway you will experience while reading/watching/consuming anything Fear Street-related. (By that same token, living on a Great Buckingham Street makes me a king, but I digress).
Speaking about said emotional highway, it’s one that every viewer of Fear Street Part 1: 1994 is currently hurtling down at high speed. I will never look at bread the same way again…
To make matters worse, my local Woolworths has installed a hideous implement where you have to slice the bread yourself via a complex array of switches and toggles. As they say: back in my day…
Suffice to say that I will not be using it:
On the bright side, everyone loves Deena and Sam, who are the definition of ~ queer yearning ~ (AKA literally pausing to declare your love even though you have less than 10 seconds before a group of vengeful ghosts comes to murder you).
And the sharpest of eyes among us will have spotted the Scream references in Fear Street. Let Maya Hawke have her Drew Barrymore moment!!!
At RogerEbert.com, director Leigh Janiak talks about creating a fusion movie-TV form for the Fear Street trilogy — a suite of movies that weren’t just traditional sequels, but multi-layered and interwoven like a miniseries mystery. “Where we ended up feeling like we cracked it was that were were doing something a little new that was this hybrid between movies and traditional television content,” she says. “The journey of [each] movie has some kind of satisfying ending there, but then also it’s pushing us forward. Not all of the threads are tied up. We still have that bigger narrative that we're driving forward, and you really do need to watch the second one and then ultimately the third one to get all of the pieces of the puzzle.”
On The Big Film Buffet this week, it’s our biggest episode yet (if I do say so myself), because Gen and Alexei chat to R. L. STINE!!! He tells us all his dirty secrets and by dirty secrets I mean cute childhood ghost stories because this man is truly wholesome. Listen below!
And if it’s more nostalgia hits you’re after, listen back to the official soundtrack from the film — a love letter (or mixtape) to the 90s.
2 In My Blood It Runs tabs
I had the (very great) fortune of watching this doco in cinemas when it came out, and I swear it was one of those experiences that every director dreams of: watching an entire crowd of people totally silent and transfixed throughout, and then hearing people gushing and/or sobbing in the foyer afterwards. You can recreate that exact experience at home now that In My Blood It Runs is streaming in Australia and New Zealand!
Directed by Maya Newell (who also made the iconically controversial Gayby Baby) it’s all about 10-year-old Indigenous boy Dujuan — a healer, hunter, and multilinguist — and the failures of an educational system blinkered by whiteness.
Watch the doco, then read all about Dujuan being one of the youngest people ever (!!) to address the United Nations Human Rights Council, advocating to raise the age of criminal responsibility.
And here’s everything else you can turn your attention to this NAIDOC week to celebrate Indigenous cultures:
2 I Think You Should Leave tabs
As someone who changes their mind on things frequently, illogically, and without any warning (much to the chagrin of everyone around me), this reflection on WIRED was all it took for me to fall down the Tim-Robinson-shaped rabbit hole. “We’re all plagued by our past mistakes,” the article begins, before launching into a full re-litigation of a now-recanted negative review WIRED once wrote about I Think You Should Leave, a sketch show that’s as absurd as it is perennially relevant. Whatever happens, we’ll always have Tim Robinson in a hot dog costume.
Okay, 1 more tab
Everyone’s saying it: Ari Aster remake High School Musical challenge!