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Helen Rosner

@hels.bsky.social

“Zizek if he was a woman and loved sandwiches” New Yorker staff writer, dept. of mastication It’s always Free Palestine 🍉

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Businesslady 🌦️🪶🌄@courtguerra.bsky.social · 23h ago

I just rewatched the Mexico Trilogy (including Rodriguez's commentary & outtakes) so my interest in Antonio Banderas was already at an all-time high, but I was still unprepared by how riveting this was. what a life! & I could *hear* his voice throughout. he's amazingly eloquent but still so grounded

Helen Rosner@hels.bsky.social · 3d ago

I had a long, honestly pretty spectacular conversation with Antonio Banderas (!!!!) and i think you will really enjoy reading it www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

Helen Rosner@hels.bsky.social · yesterday

Asked a friend visiting Cairo to bring back DVDs of some Arabic-dubbed kids’ media we haven’t been able to find either through standard channels or 🏴‍☠️ (Moana, Frozen 2, Bluey, things of that nature) and apparently the response from every shop and vendor was like “lol. what. no one buys DVDs anymore”

Helen Rosner@hels.bsky.social · yesterday

My favorite food on earth when I was a kid was the soggy Caesar salad from the Italian-theme cafeteria at Six Flags Great America (the one kind of across from the entrance to Batman: The Ride) and (this is a compliment) last night I learned that the Gotham Greens Caesar kit replicates it PERFECTLY.

Sarah Emily Duff@sarahemilyduff.bsky.social · 2d ago

‘The Bishop of Málaga came to see the show, and after he said, “I am tempted to say that what I saw was heretical, so that many people will come to see it.” I said, “What do you mean by that?” He said, “That I loved it. Can I go again?”’ @hels.bsky.social interviews Antonio Banderas:

Antonio Banderas’s Acts of Faith

Antonio Banderas on meeting Stephen Sondheim, staging “Godspell” for the Pope, and the thrill, in the new Anthony Bourdain bio-pic, of playing someone “good.”

newyorker.com

Helen Rosner@hels.bsky.social · 3d ago

sidebar, I read an arc of Life of M redentlg and this was kind of what I was hoping it might be about and……. it’s not lol

Helen Rosner@hels.bsky.social · 3d ago

I’m not sure why it feels different from, idk, Steve Jobs or Julia Child—honestly it might just be because I knew Tony irl, and if youve ever been friends with a mega-celeb you know it’s just really weird to balance your private connection to them against a vast & deep public connection. Anyway!

Helen Rosner@hels.bsky.social · 3d ago

tbc I don’t take issue with the fictionalization—Bourdain was a truth guy but he wasn’t a truth-truth guy. Kitchen Confidential is hyperbolic, all his shows used narrative & film techniques that got to big truths by being selective about little ones.

Helen Rosner@hels.bsky.social · 3d ago

I think it was artistically smart to fictionalize the story in “Tony,” but it’s also pretty uncanny to see actual Tony, a real person not that long dead, already having the contours of his life altered and molded into legend-shape—ecstatic truth?—rather than the mess of truth-truth

Helen Rosner@hels.bsky.social · 3d ago

btw the intro to my @newyorkermag interview with Antonio Banderas today is also secretly my capsule review of the new Anthony Bourdain bio-pic, “Tony,” which is way better than I was worried it would be

I saw "Tony," the new bio-pic about Anthony Bourdain, earlier this summer, at a private screening attended largely by people in the world of hospitality and food media, many of whom, myself included, knew the real Bourdain. Food people are normally a raucous, emotive bunch, but there was a tightness in the air as folks arrived and took their seats. Pretty much everyone in the room admitted, in murmurs and whispers, that we were nervous about the film—that it would be superficial, or dehumanizingly hagiographic, or else just sort of clunkily bad, in the way that bio-pics often are, relying overmuch on a viewer's knowledge of who the movie's subject was and would become. But the director of "Tony," Matt Johnson, wisely constrains his story—loosely based on a few early chapters of "Kitchen Confidential," with its narrative arc fairly fictionalized—to one mid-seventies summer. We follow a college-age Bourdain as he bums around Provincetown, trying to be a writer and working his first kitchen job, and the result turns out to be a sharp, intelligent film. ('It's a bildungsroman," a nerdily angelic, beautifully stupid young Tony explains to a panel of white-haired professors in the movie's opening scene, petitioning for funding for a novel he plans to write. It sure is, kid.)The movie-which comes out August 7th—is a star turn for Dominic Sessa, who plays the young Tony with adenoidal swagger. But the most extraordinary thing on the screen is Antonio Banderas, who delivers an astonishing, devastating performance as the proprietor of the restaurant where Bourdain finds work, and on whose porch Tony ends up sleeping for the summer. Chef-the character is nameless, and seemingly unknowable—is a mentor and a foil to Tony, his lined face and graying beard highlighting Tony's youth, his composure framing Tony's jittery ambition. Chef is unbothered by his kitchen staff fighting, yelling, stealing, and openly doing drugs, but he draws the line at any blasphemous utterance of the Lord's name, and he makes Tony join him at church every week as a condition of his ongoing residence in Chef's hammock. Banderas has been, for well over thirty years now, one of our most bombastic, most movie-star movie stars, whether he's brandishing a period-accurate rapier or succumbing to Almodovarian psychodrama. In the very human-scale role of Chef, all that glamour and pageantry seethes just beneath the skin. The movie doesn't shy away from letting Tony make mistakes—at times, the character edges toward outright villainy—and Banderas animates Chef with a contrasting moral clarity whose force feels almost physical.
Helen Rosner@hels.bsky.social · 2w ago

I’m sorry to galleybrag (more like friend-loaned-me-their-galleybrag) but I NEED to talk to other people who’ve finished reading Life of M, it is HURTING ME not to have seventeen to thirty people to talk to about this

Helen Rosner@hels.bsky.social · 2w ago

It’s 7am and I’m at the breakfast buffet at a chain motel in a liminal space off the highway. I just watched a suited businessman lick the syrup off the inside of the peel top of a syrup cup and it felt like a beat from a 1990s soft-rock music video

Tal Lavin@swordsjew.bsky.social · 3w ago

Just after Independence Day, I started thinking about national symbols. Who defaces them, and who becomes them. So I went back to the beginning and wrote about Sean Dunn, aka Sandwich Thrower Guy, and the sandwich he threw - an American Hero: buttondown.com/theswordandt...

Notable Sandwiches #1: American Hero

Welcome back to Notable Sandwiches, the feature where my editor David Swanson and I slip messily through Wikipedia’s List of Notable Sandwiches. This week,...

buttondown.com

Helen Rosner@hels.bsky.social · 3w ago

Finished a re-read of Piranesi and now today is limned by an arcane and beautiful sadness but also I need to go to the store to buy more Bluey pull-ups