The Truth is Out There: Films for Aquarius Season
Your monthly 💌 from Zodiac Film Club
It’s February and we’re sliding under the wire with our Aquarius recommendations! We hope your love lives and pancakes are everything you’d hoped they would be. If not, you can blame Mars and Pluto (there’s always a planetary scapegoat, if you want one) and take heart that the second half of the month brings more positive vibes, as we enter healing Pisces season and undergo a grounding Virgo full moon.
We just returned from the Final Girls Film Festival in Berlin, where we got to see so many great films and meet a ton of formerly online friends who were so, so nice IRL! Sarah was a jury member and got to deliver a talk on a long-time obsession — vomiting women in horror cinema — to a very kind and receptive audience.
Now we’re in that weird, post-project, liminal phase where it feels like the only thing to look forward to is Twisters, the awaited-by-no-one sequel to Twister (1996), a film that was so important to us in our childhoods that we watched it at every sleepover for several years. But enough about our nostalgic yen for truly silly cinema, let’s get on with the newsletter.
xoxo Zodiac
Lately we’ve been watching…
The French Connection: God, New York really used to be a shithole! Cold, grimy police thriller known for its action sequences, hopeless brutality etc. but really most notable to a modern viewer for its sense of texture: gritty mud, second-hand cars, bulb-yellow or cold-blue lighting, countless shades of brown, terrible teeth.
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: Alas we read the (vastly superior) book first.
Feud: Capote vs The Swans: Watts and Murphy are the new Dern and Lynch.
Fetch/Fugly: 🎭
Fetch: Plating one’s lunchtime sandwich up with a handful of crisps; the U-bahn; the round of ‘would you rather’ some school kids played on the flight home from Berlin in the seat behind us, which went from ‘too hot or too cold?’ to ‘whip up human flesh in a blender and drink it, or chop it up and eat it?’ in one dizzying step.
Fugly: The 100-day cough; Lemsip; incompetence; Oedipal guilt.
Films for Aquarius Season ♒
Aquarians subvert your expectations: they’re water-bearers, but aren’t water signs — they’re air signs instead. Air signs are typically known to be fast-moving and changeable, but Aquarius is a fixed sign, and fixed signs are associated with, well, being fixed. All of this to say that Aquarians are already winning at 5D chess while the rest of us have only just set up our pieces.
Altruistic and fired up with conviction, your Aquarius friend is rarely satisfied with the status quo and is forever questioning why things are the way they are. This month, we're paying homage to the Aquarian ability draw connections no-one else could possibly make and bend reality to suit their ideas. Get out your cork boards, push pins and red string, it's time to dive into the cinematic world of conspiracies.
Our fave Aquarians are: Kim Novak, Tallulah Bankhead, Jeanne Moreau, Laura Dern, Sharon Tate, Gia Carangi and Judy Blume.
From the Saul Bass-designed title sequence to twisty plot and ‘Swinging London’-esque soundtrack (featuring The Zombies no less!), everything about this movie prompts the question: “Why aren’t we calling this film ‘iconic’?” If you fancy, you could watch it with Repulsion in a culture-shock double bill about outsiders in the British capital, or with fellow urban-alienation flick Blow-Up — it’s easily as good as both of those classics. When American single mother Ann Lake arrives to pick her daughter Bunny up from her first day at nursery school, she’s distressed to find her missing. But when the search uncovers very little evidence that Bunny was there in the first place, suspicion starts to fall on Ann herself, and initially sympathetic parties begin to wonder if Bunny ever existed at all…
The whole deal of The X Files is that it’s a psy-op. You think it’s sci-fi and the FBI, but it’s really a scorching romance. Underneath this serious-coded conspiracy thriller, there’s a secret they don’t want you to know: spooks and extra-terrestrials are just the window dressing for two insanely attractive people eye-fucking at every opportunity. FBI agents Mulder and Scully are investigating a domestic bomb threat: could it be a government cover-up for aliens? Or is that just a smokescreen for a love story for the ages? Yes, on one level, the plot has the dream logic of a paranoid 13-year-old geek: gadgets, explosions, and goo. But pull the wool from your eyes: it’s an erotic fantasy about an intelligent, rational woman adored and desired by her loyal partner. Every scene between our two agents is laced with sexual tension, as was the case in the original TV series. Who cares about whether Mulder and Scully prove the government are lying to us? When are they going to do it?????
Speaking of psy-ops, no one has ever done a better job than Steven Soderbergh of convincing the audience they were watching a SERIOUS film about a SERIOUS subject (big pharma, mental health treatment, the crimes of the rich), then revealing at the last moment they were actually watching a SILLY film about... well, we won't spoil it. Suffice it to say that a yuppie New York couple's relationship hits a new low when the wife is prescribed a trial antidepressant by a British psychiatrist (Jude Law using his morally murky, nanny-fucking, mid-career-stage star persona to devastating effect). Is Side Effects immoral? Is it camp? Is it a fun romp? Or is it completely perfect? You decide. No, shut up, obviously don't — we've already decided. Let’s get this newsletter over with quickly, so we can go watch it.
We first watched this French horror late at night on Film4 at a very impressionable age and it marked us for life — its final twist is a bit of a primal scene for us. The wife and mistress of a violent bully enter into an uneasy collusion to solve both their problems, once and for all. But when the deed is done, the body goes missing… Fun fact: Alfred Hitchcock lost the bidding war for the original source novel by a matter of hours, and a few years later snapped up the rights to another book by the same authors, which eventually became Vertigo. Watch the original first, and then, for pudding, you may have the erotic 90s remake starring Sharon Stone and Isabelle Adjani.
Honorable Mentions: The Seventh Victim, The Wicker Man, The Conversation, Blow Out.
Recommended Reading, Watching, Listening 📚
While at the festival we were lucky enough to attend the launch of Alison Peirse's 'Doing Women’s (Global) (Horror) Film History'. Years in the making, the project mentored authors situated all around the world to produce video essays themed around female horror film makers in non-anglophone countries. Zodiaphiles, there's SO much cinema to discover in this project! You can now watch all the videos and read the accompanying essays FOR FREE over at MAI journal.
The Alarmist podcast seeks to find out who is to blame for the world’s greatest tragedies (or sometimes lower-stakes pop cultural ones), and this week’s episode delves into complex-female-character-classic My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997). It’s interesting to listen to host Rebecca Delgado Smith trying to convice her guests that it’s ok for an unlikeable, even totally toxic lead character to exist in a romantic comedy context.
Got two minutes? Here’s a gripping TikTok murder mystery with a stellar celeb cast.
Off-screen Gossip 🍸
Why save for a deposit on a house deposit, when you can purchase Mr Darcy’s wet shirt at auction for a mere £7,000-£10,000? It comes with a signed photograph, natch.
wonderful list, thank you
"extra-terrestrials are just the window dressing for two insanely attractive people eye-fucking at every opportunity" I actually LOL'd at this. Absolutely genius.
And I love Alison, going to head over to that link. TY