Staircase Wit

  The main protagonist in this Wong Kar-Wai film is a nihilistic fuccboi named York, who seduces beautiful women and coldly casts them aside. It makes you wonder why these women want to stay with him, or why they even all in love with him in the first place. The story may be simple, but the execution is perfect. This is an intense, beautifully shot film. The tone is pensive, brooding, and infinitely sad. The characters' long silences convey their despair, frustration, and nonchalance so vividly. As with all Wong Kar-Wai films, Days of Being Wild is spellbinding and mesmerizing. Everything about it is nostalgic and heartbreaking; there are layers upon layers of missed opportunities, unresolved conflicts, and unanswered questions.

At a time when travel for leisure is extremely difficult if not impossible, Kevin Kwan (writer of Crazy Rich Asians) releases the perfect escape from this seven-month long quarantine. Sex and Vanity is an over-the-top modern rendition of E.M. Forster's A Room With a View. So what if we haven't been to anywhere interesting since March? This novel can take us to a grand wedding in Capri, to lavish apartments with gondolas in New York, to country clubs and trendy bistros in the Upper East Side. To be honest, the characters seem to be a photocopy of the characters in the Crazy Rich Asians trilogy, and the love story is ridiculous and flat at the same time. Sex and Vanity may be the same circus with the same clowns, but just in a different venue, but who cares? It's the same exciting, ostentatious, and entertaining circus and clowns.