3 & 30: Inherent Vice, Cassandra Jenkins, Summer Playlists, and Book Clubs

Plus: Cibo Matto, Ozu, and SRK.

You’re reading the latest installment of 3 & 30. Every month, we’ll each be sharing one record, one film, and one other wild card cultural product beyond those categories we’ve been loving. (That’s the 3.) As for the 30, we both recently turned 30 and each made a list of our 30 favorite movies. We’ll be going through them all, one movie at a time.

Record of the month

Shawn: Cassandra Jenkins — My Light, My Destroyer

Sure Cassandra Jenkins has made a great record before (2021’s An Overview on Phenomenal Nature), but I can’t say I expected her to fully assert herself as one of the greats this year. (Let alone with Tom Petty heartland rock or glimmering sophistipop.) I’m well on the way to convincing myself this is a masterpiece and will probably write more about it by the end of this year, so for now, let’s run down a few of my favorite moments on the record:

• The smooth, crisp enunciation of “how long will this pain in my chest. last?” on “Only One.”

• The super sweet interlude with her mom, about the stars and a skyscraper-sized asteroid on “Betelgeuse.” I always think “this is so Janet Planet-coded,” based on just the one promo image for that movie (haven’t seen Janet Planet).

• The airy, extremely Nels Cline-y guitar solo that just keeps vaulting over itself in “Aurora, IL.”

• Her poignant, yet mildly derisive writing about William Shatner going to space in the same song. It’s quite rare to write about a recent event so specifically and not elicit an eyeroll from me — she just has that graceful touch.

• When “Omakase” hits its stunning stride in the last refrain.

Special stuff.

Elliott: Cibo Matto — Viva! La Woman

Nowhere by Gregg Araki (a director I think is fine but has the best soundtracks) threw me into a ‘90s trip-hop phase in July. A genre with many records in my personal canon, it's always a treat when a fresh collection of songs emerge into regular rotation, the latest being Viva! La Woman by the Japanese duo Cibo Matto. Few genres are more cinematic than trip-hop (there’s a reason you hear “Glory Box” or Massive Attack in films all the time), and Viva! La Woman is an expressive soundtrack to a film that you can’t help but build in your daydreams. I feel myself sink into its mysteries, and twist and turn when songs erupt into punchy grooves. I'm a fan of Charli's "Apple," but my "Apple," and one of my songs of the summer (after “Caught in the Rain” of course) is the Viva! La Woman opener. In a just world, it would have it's own viral dance too.

Film of the month

Shawn: Floating Weeds (Ozu, 1959)

It feels a little unfair to be such an Ozu novice (just my second so far) and get to see this on beautiful 16mm, courtesy of Pittsburgh Sound and Image. But there’s no prerequisite to a great night at the movies. A remake of his own silent picture, 1934’s A Story of Floating Weeds, this one also follows the head of a traveling theater troupe, visiting the small town where his old mistress and grown son live, the latter of whom believes him to be his uncle. The stark, painterly shots with some of the best blocking you’ll ever see, along with Ozu’s trademark editing and direct conversational shots are a given, but this one is frontloaded with hijinks before the weight of its central moral quandary smacks you. Besides capturing the sweaty, oppressive, AC-less summer heat, as the troupe confronts dwindling audiences and obsolescence, Ozu thoroughly nails the confused limbo following a destabilizing failure.

Elliott: Happy New Year (Farah Khan, 2014)

When people talk about the death of the movie star, they're thinking too domestically. India doesn't have this issue. They also have a thriving ecosystem for movie studios to reliably make great, big-budget movies to build around their stars. Shah Rukh Kahn, possibly the best movie star of the last 30 years (and 2023 Betters nominee), remains the king of Bollywood and shows no signs of slowing down. In the last year, I've joined the millions and millions that worship at the altar of SRK. As Shawn and I embark on a 2014 journey, I caught up with Happy New Year, a movie I'd describe as part Ocean's 11, part Mission: Impossible, part Magic Mike, all locked in a sprightly three-hour Bollywood musical. Directed by legendary choreographer Farah Khan, it's one of the most remarkably choreographed films I've seen. Is there a bit of nationalist messaging? There sure is! But it's so damn fun. There is a literal dance contest during the end credits featuring everybody that worked on the movie.

As a member of the Shah Rukh Khan church, I feel it's my duty to share that nearly all of his big films are on Netflix or Prime. Check out Om Shanti Om or Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge. Or Happy New Year. Or Jawan. Take a Friday night in or a lazy Sunday afternoon and hang with SRK and the gang. Meet the man and be changed.

Wild Card:

Shawn: Reading a terrible book by Bill Clinton and James Patterson

Easily the worst Wild Card entry we’ll ever feature in this column, but I’m very sorry to say that Bill Clinton may have cured my reading drought. I’ve had a couple years now plagued by starting one book, stalling out, starting another one, stalling out, starting another, and then taking roughly a year to finish any of them. Well, a couple of my friends wanted to book club The President Is Missing, Bill Clinton’s fiction debut, (heavily) co-written by James Patterson. I’m only halfway into it so far, but the president (Jon Lincoln Duncan), a widowed, ex-baseball-playing, ex-troop, is slammed by his political opponents for negotiating with a global superterrorist. As the title suggests, he will eventually disappear himself to take matters into his own hands, but not before excruciating encounters with a homeless veteran, police brutality, and emotionally fraught drone strikes. The book is so poorly written, politically unconscionable, and detached from all material reality, and yet. For prolonged stretches at a time (of its nearly 700-page length in the large-print version I checked out at the library), it’s impossible to put down. I’m really not immune to the Pattersonian strategy of stacking extremely short, action-brimming chapters that all build to reveals or cliffhangers of varying consequence. Dude was kinda the original Netflix…and may have cracked open the door for me to read real books again.

Elliott: Annual Dog Daze Summer Playlist

*Opening of Goodfellas Henry Hill voiceover* As far back as I can remember, I've always been making mixtapes.

Well, not actual, physical mixtapes. That was before my time. But I made countless playlists on iTunes that I would then burn onto CDs to be played in the car or distributed to friends. Painstaking attention and meticulous care were always put into the sequencing of songs, even setting custom transitions so tracks would seamlessly bleed into the next. It isn't creating actual music, but assembling these mixes feels like an act of self-expression.

Years later, removed from the iTunes to blank disc era, I haven't changed. Spotify tells me I've made over 500 (!) playlists on that stupid streaming service. My favorite recurring ones these days are what I call my "Dog Daze" mixes — an annual summer playlist that's meant to be played on the hottest days of the year. The songs are hazy and languorous (loads of shoegaze) and aimed towards basking in the sun, where one feels a touch too hot — but when listening to a Dog Daze, feeling a touch too hot feels good.

And speaking of hot: Dog Daze 3 is hot off the presses and dropping today! Huge!! The first one remains the gold standard, one of my best works if I can humbly say so. Dog Daze 2 is more upbeat and dancy, encouraging the sweat to leap off your body with some movement. The latest Dog Daze embraces the sweltering stillness of the high temperatures, feeling dazed but comforted by the heat. Where you can give your brain a rest and descend into a nice warm molasses (3 second crossfades on all playlists recommended for maximum dopamine hit for many of the transitions :)).

And if you want to continue with the Dog Daze mindset...boy do Shawn and I have the perfect movie for you...

30 for 30 #6 — Inherent Vice

Shawn: As we prepare to hop in the time machine for a month’s worth of 2014-centric posts, let’s take a look at our sole 2014 entry on either of our 30 for 30 lists. This is also the only Paul Thomas Anderson film to make the cut, and your most recent pick in the top 30. I guess to start out, what’s your journey been like with Inherent Vice? Was this an instant favorite PTA for you, or did it require a few watches to enter pole position?  

Elliott: Maya Rudolph’s partner was my first favorite filmmaker in the early days of becoming a film obsessive. I’d seen all of his features, most several times, before Inherent Vice, and the Thomas Pynchon adaptation would be the first PTA that I’d get to experience in theaters. Pair that with its trailer, possibly my favorite trailer period, and the hype couldn’t have been higher.

When I finally laid eyes on the finished product, I liked it a hell of a lot. It appeared to be minor PTA, which is better than just about anything out there these days. Still, the gap between it and say The Master or Punch-Drunk Love was vast. On the second viewing, that gap shrunk. When I got my hands on the Blu-ray, I’d have it on all the time in college, watching random 20 minute stretches before bed, or throwing it on when I was doing homework for background noise and inevitably give up on my paper about Socrates and shift my focus to Shasta Fay Hepworth. Inherent Vice became a part of me and lived in me even when I wasn’t watching. Next thing I knew the film joined The Master and Punch-Drunk Love as a big 3. Today, it stands alone. It’s side-splittingly funny and at times unbearably moving. Before I start rambling about how much I love it like a paranoid Doc Sportello, I’ll pause. What was Inherent Vice, a notably dense film that adapts one of the greatest but most challenging to translate to the screen authors, like for you on first viewing? And how do you feel about it now? 

Shawn: I think its early rep as minor PTA let me put it off for several years like a dumbass. Consulting my pre-active-on-Letterboxd logs (a shared spreadsheet with some friends that graded every movie we watched, MLB preseason predictions, assessments of every band we could think of, et al), I first saw it in 2019 — with a fellow IV and PTA obsessive, about 6 feet away from a huge TV in a “hot couch”-y scenario — and loved it. This time, in 2024: no change.

Though his movies are almost all self-evidently great, I’d rarely felt so instantly convinced. From the classic opening shot gazing at the water through Doc’s alleyway, you get a ridiculous run of that Can “Vitamin C” needle drop that hits like a ton of bricks with the title card, our introduction to Chick Planet Massage (with Hong Chau’s A++ delivery of “Oh sure, Glenn! He comes in here. He eats pussy!”), to the astonishing super-imposed shots of Doc and Shasta. Good lord. Never had a PTA film been this brisk, loose, and woozy, with way too many side-splitting moments to list in one place. (Though if you wanna try to, you have the floor.)

Elliott: Good on you for being so instantly onboard! I never questioned just how funny it is, but the byzantine plot (though fairly straightforward by Pynchon’s standards) distracted me from its piercing melancholy that lays bare at the center. Once you’ve read enough Pynchon, you understand that tracking the plot is not the main mission. The beauty is in getting lost in the prose, the convolution part of the point as Doc’s confusion about The Golden Fang and how everything connects becomes a shared experience with the audience. 

Inherent Vice is, to me, primarily a film about a couple of things, and they are sorta one and the same: 1. The girl that got away, they call her Shasta Fay (free bar if any rapper is reading this and wants to use it) and 2. The era that was stolen away. Inherent Vice is set in 1970, just after the Manson murders, just after Nixon had been elected, just after the free-spirited, summer of love 1960s. Shasta is the promising, romantic 1960s that Doc can’t forget and pines for. The flashback where Shasta and Doc are running in rain, set to Neil Young’s “Journey Through the Past” is so joyful, but it’s undercut when we remember this is a memory. And that this will never happen again. I’ve never seen a film get that specific feeling of how painful it is that we can’t re-experience love like Inherent Vice does. It doesn’t stop us from trying, as Doc and Shasta do in a tense build-up that climaxes with aggressive sex. But it’s over. They know it’s over. “This doesn’t mean that we’re back together.”

Shawn: Right on the money. My jaw was completely on the floor during that Ouija board/dope-hunting Neil Young sequence, both for feeling like one of the most romantic things PTA had ever filmed, and capturing this elegiac tone constantly humming beneath the levity. That pervades through much of the movie because, just like you said, it’s the beginning of the end for these free-living halcyon days. At one point, Doc via Sortilège’s voiceover notices the reactionary forces squeezing their way into music scenes and hippie hangouts to reclaim his culture for the worst. “All they could sweep up for the ancient forces of greed and fear? Gee, he thought. I don’t know.” Though mostly played for laughs, you get a few scenes of these intrusions, from the feds (very unsuccessfully) trying to recruit Doc as a COINTELPRO informant and when he’s pulled over for possible Manson-y cult-like activities for being in a car with three other people. It’s the last gasp for these guys, but they’ll still make it incredibly fun to watch.

Elliott: For as sad as I painted the movie to be, this is first and foremost a farce. It’s a total romp and laughfest. The structure of Inherent Vice is essentially amazing scene after amazing scene of characters talking to one another. Anderson’s camera is subtle and still with occasional, ever so slow push-ins toward its actors, reveling in their expressions and banter. It’s a stark contrast from his cocaine era of Boogie Nights and Magnolia. This is a weed movie (smoked throughout and even eaten, nay, engulfed in the film’s most stoned moment). Beyond Phoenix and Waterston’s tremendous turns as Doc and Shasta Fay, the ensemble cast cooks on insanely hot levels. Josh Brolin gives a career-best performance as the sometimes nemesis/sometimes partner of Doc, Bigfoot Bjornsen. Martin Short shows up and steals the show for 10 minutes as mini-slapstick comedy short ensues, PTA briefly channeling his cocaine era again. Hong Chau, Jena Malone, Benicio del Toro, Eric fucking Roberts. And who could forget Joanna Newsom, the movie’s soul, whose voiceover of Pynchon’s prose cuts like a hot knife (speaking of hot knife, some have playfully speculated that PTA’s “one who got away” aka his Shasta Fay was Even Better favorite Fiona Apple. Years after their break-up, he’d direct her “Hot Knife” video).

Inherent Vice isn’t just my favorite film of the past 10 years, it’s also the movie I’ve watched the most since 2014. During this recent revisit, the Blu-ray disc kept skipping. It appeared I had played it to death. The disc lived a good and full life. Of course, I ordered another copy that same night. Not having a working Inherent Vice Blu-ray in my home would feel as wrong as not having a bed. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that on the night the disc stopped working, I didn’t sleep very well.