December 2020

Book Reviews

Holiday Miracles (or, How I Tried Something New and Learned to Enjoy Christmas Novels)

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I’ve never read a Christmas novel for adults before. In fact, I never considered reading one until I got bored in my local Target and decided to give one a try for the hell of it. And then I spent about a week reading and livetweeting the experience. If you were to ask me why it has taken this long to actually read a book like Jenny Colgan’s Christmas at the Island Hotel, I might have given you the “it’s not my thing” excuse. In many ways, that’s technically true, but given my love of certain types of Christmas movies, it would be technically wrong, too. So the question remains: What did I think of Christmas at the Island Hotel, and did it change my mind about Christmas novels?

Movie Reviews, Movie Roulette

Nostalgic Paris: Misery, Imagination, and Nostalgia in Midnight in Paris

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Perhaps the most potent problem of our modern era is its obsession with nostalgia. In its least malignant form, nostalgia becomes an excessive love of art and fashion playfully removed from the socio-political conditions of its creation. In its most malignant form, nostalgia turns people into cult-like fascists who desire a return to a time that never really existed. Most nostalgia travelers rest somewhere between: fantasizing about going back to something that felt more familiar, even at the expense of the present. And then there’s Midnight in Paris (2011), which seems to relish in misery, imagination, and nostalgia at varying points and for varying purposes. What ultimately does the film say about nostalgia, then?

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