The Best Costumes of 2000

by Cláudio Alves

Before we say goodbye to 2000 and move forward to the next Smackdown year, 1946, I'd like to take a look at the Best Costume Design Oscar race. Take it as a digestif to our coverage. In any case, this specific lineup offers a remarkably comprehensive overview of some of the category's favorite elements and most glaring blind spots. As always, period work dominates, though there's also space for fantasy and contemporary narratives, intersections of fashion and costume, as well as a non-English-language movie. The nominees were… 

• Anthony Powell, 102 Dalmatians
• Rita Ryack, How the Grinch Stole Christmas
• Jacqueline West, Quills
• Janty Yates, Gladiator ★
• Tim Yip, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

First up, let's look at the period films and, more specifically, our victor.

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Beauty Break: Happy Earth Day

Happy Earth Day! We've been flashing to that indelible image of Kirsten Dunst laying in the grass in The Virgin Suicides since that movie just turned 20 (Kiki has been reminiscing on her Insta). After the jump a minigallery of stars reclining in nature...

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Soundtracking: "The Virgin Suicides"

Chris looks at the music of Sofia Coppola's debut, now a part of The Criterion Collection.

Time has been kind to Sofia Coppola The Virgin Suicides, as effective a critique on the male gaze as anything else in the past twenty years. In Coppola’s gauzy vision of its central Lisbon sisters (as told by neighborhood boys) is a reflection of male idolatry that ignores the voice and emotional reality of real women. While the film is typically remembered for how it visually creates this perspective, it also uses music in interesting ways to subvert male self-serving worship.

The film is haunted by Air’s “Playground Love”, it’s most evocative and film-defining musical passage. It’s an apt song choice, one that tempts you into its pull like the tumble into a teenage crush, all jazzy hormones mired in lyrical thinness. And yet despite its temptation and seemingly feminine sway, its a starkly male brand of lust and the woman on the other end of its proclamations is never more than a vague idea. Naturally, it becomes the theme song to its young male obsession with the unknowable and unknown girls on the receiving end of empty crushes. Coppola sees and hears your  horniness and you willful ignorance, gentlemen, and the film sends out a subtle and cutting middle finger.

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Criterion hints at 2018

Chris here. With the new year brings another instalment of our favorite cinematic visual puzzle: the Criterion Collection's animated hints at the films coming to their lineup this year! While the cat's already out of the bag that this year we will see Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides and Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man will get the cineaste luxury treatment, the always charming and coy drawing below provides some brain teasers of what else we might see. The more obvious guesses include Aki Karismäki's The Other Side of Hope and Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine - can you spot any other titles coming soon from Criterion?

Coppola's Turning World

She was the still point of the turning world, man.

As many of us have begun (finally) seeing The Beguiled, the latest from Sofia Coppola, I was instantly struck by the above line from The Virgin Suicides. It is spoken in reference to Kirsten Dunst's Lux, but it also feels representative of Coppola's work as a whole. Although her cinematic world alters between films, Coppola still seems fascinated by individual characters, individual experiences. 

Many of us are fighting a heat-stricken summer malaise, and for some reason, this thought was comforting. The world keeps turning and rearranging itself, but some things remain the same. May we all find solace in that sentiment as we head into our 4th of July week ahead.