vol. 2, issue 1: crave Archives - cléo

Editor’s Note: Crave

kiva reardon — Thu, 24 Apr 2014 12:56:27 +0000

“I wanna, I wanna, I wanna, I wanna, I wanna really really really wanna zigazig ha.” – Spice Girls As far as expressions of cravings go, the Spice Girls nailed it back in 1996. In their debut single, “Wannabe,” the girls gleefully barked out the above chorus before devolving into gibberish. What better way is […]

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Barely Legal: An Interview with Eliza Hittman

julia cooper — Thu, 24 Apr 2014 12:55:54 +0000

Set in director Eliza Hittman’s native Brooklyn, It Felt Like Love (2013) evokes a place far from the sidewalks of Bedford Avenue or the Greenpoint of Lena Dunham’s Girls, and closer to the working-class borough of Dog Day Afternoon (1975) or Saturday Night Fever (1977). In it, we follow the listless fourteen-year-old Lila (newcomer Gina […]

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Don Jon’s Meaningless Meanings

eleni deacon — Thu, 24 Apr 2014 12:55:15 +0000

One of Don Jon‘s (2013) early pornographic montages ends with a tame—yet significant—money shot. A lip-glossed blonde bends over in a thong and bra, then looks directly into the camera and asks, “You want a meaningful relationship?” The question is not so much about what kind of relationship the viewer wants as what kind of […]

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Bad Eggs: Juzo Itami’s Tampopo

mallory andrews — Thu, 24 Apr 2014 12:53:29 +0000

“The first ramen western!” proclaims the tagline of Juzo Itami’s 1985 food comedy Tampopo. Here, instead of the lonesome cowboy wanderer and his sidekick of the traditional western, we get a pair of Japanese truck drivers: the rugged Tsutomu Yamazaki as Goro and a baby-faced Ken Wantanabe as Gun. They breeze into town for a […]

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No(body) Does it Better: Spike Jonze’s Her

angelo muredda — Thu, 24 Apr 2014 12:52:53 +0000

“Walk us through this idea of falling in love with your software,” BBC host Emily Maitlist asked Spike Jonze during his award season push for Her (2013). Jonze, rarely the prickly sort, carried himself with the same nice-guy passive aggression as Joaquin Phoenix’s sweet-but-distant Theodore Twombly, a wordsmith for a future Los Angeles startup that […]

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“Later On Down the Road”: The Anachronistic Geography of Thelma & Louise

lindsay jensen — Thu, 24 Apr 2014 12:52:17 +0000

Ridley Scott’s Thelma & Louise is often read as a feminist version of the road movie: a gender-swapped response to that ever-beloved genre in which man finds himself on the open road. Yet the film is more than the story of two women adopting masculine roles: Thelma (Geena Davis), Louise (Susan Sarandon), and their 1966 […]

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Twisted sisters: Catherine Breillat’s Fat Girl

zorianna zurba — Thu, 24 Apr 2014 12:51:42 +0000

Fat Girl (2001) is perhaps the quintessential Catherine Breillat film. A crucial figure in new French cinema, Breillat’s works are known as much for their challenging, graphic content as their cold, distanced modes of observation; traditional titillation has no place in her oeuvre. This certainly can be said of Fat Girl, which depicts—with no holds […]

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Thin skinned

kiva reardon — Thu, 24 Apr 2014 12:47:36 +0000

“So be it. This is what I really want. This is the one thing I want. I want to be thin.” – Alisa It’s pizza day at Renfrew, a Florida-based inpatient eating disorder clinic, and no one is happy. A group of women sit around a table silently, eyeing the greasy slices and picking at their […]

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Caught in the Frame

gina telaroli — Thu, 24 Apr 2014 12:38:52 +0000

“There were moments when such scenes delighted Lily, when they gratified her sense of beauty and her craving for the external finish of life; there were others when they have a sharper edge to the meagerness of her own opportunities. This was one of the moments when the sense of contrast was uppermost, and she […]

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vol. 2, issue 1: crave

cléo journal — Thu, 24 Apr 2014 15:36:12 +0000

crave, v. From the Old English crafian (which means to “demand, claim as a right”), the word crave has auspicious origins rooted in resistance. In its earlier manifestations, to crave meant “to do, or that something be done”; it denoted yearning, but also the demand for gratification. In a more contemporary sense, to crave can […]

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