Good morning 🐣

We’re spoiled with viewing options nowadays. You could have easily watched the coronation of King Charles III in real time on multiple TV channels and you can still sprint through the highlights on YouTube. (Or you could have skipped it all without a moment’s hesitation.) But when his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, was crowned in 1953, that was a whole ’nother story. Tom Brueggemann for IndieWire recounts the history of trying to get footage across the Atlantic and on broadcast television, a tale involving intrigue, military jets, and sabotage as rivalries between NBC, ABC, and CBS play out over who can get it on the air first. It’s a silly little race that shows just how far technology has come.

A brief intermission 🍿

In this short video, a young man reviews the top five croissants in Paris while oblivious to the strikes and demonstrations currently going on in France. Well worth the watch.

Now watch this 👀

You’ve got a big trip to Europe coming up and you’re frantically trying to decide what to bring? Well bubba, this is the list for you. Forget everything else, these are the essential items to pack for your next Euro trip:

A good book

Nine issues ago we talked about a beautiful little film called “Before Sunrise.” Released in 1995, it was a simple tale about a boy and a girl meeting on a train and spending an entire day together talking about life, love, and everything in between. Nine years later, in 2004, they came out with the sequel “Before Sunset” that answers the question: Did Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Céline (Julie Delpy) really meet up again as they promised they would?

Big spoilers: the answer’s no.

With no phone numbers or addresses, they spent the next nine years wondering what could have been. Jesse is so distraught over his missed connection that he ends up writing a bestselling novel that’s a thinly fictionalized account of their one night together. While on tour promoting his book, fate finally smashes them back together and they spend the rest of the movie rekindling their romance and once again debating the meaning of life.

A sturdy pair of walking shoes

Like any self-respecting sequel, be it horror or action or a dialectical waltz, you’ve gotta pump things up; everything has to be bigger and more extreme. So in this movie you’ve got walking, but you’ve also got other modes of conveyance like boats and cars. There’s also the extensive use of long takes, including one that lasts eleven minutes. It’s practically a Marvel movie at this point.

The original intent was actually to have a much larger budget, but they couldn’t get the funding, so eventually the actors and Richard Linklater (who directed) all worked together compiling earlier drafts of the previous film with bits of dialogue, scenes, and ideas as they popped into their heads, sometimes exchanging stuff over fax. They even incorporated elements of their personal lives, such as Ethan Hawke’s then-recent divorce from Uma Thurman.

A pack of cigarettes to share in a Parisian cafe

As they stroll and sail and drive, Céline and Jesse catch up on each other’s lives. She talks about reading his book and how weird it is to see yourself in someone else’s memory, seeing yourself through their eyes.

They puzzle through hypotheticals, but rather than imagining futures like in the previous film, they imagine alternative pasts: What if they had met up again in Vienna after all? Céline deflects, explaining how each past relationship still hurts her to this day, that she misses the most mundane little things. “You can never replace anyone,” she says, “because everyone is made of such beautiful, specific details.”

They talk about how things change, even in a short span like nine years. They talk about being free from the incessant din of society, of the pros and cons of desire, of the unexpected personalities of monks, of how those who truly want to help people and make things better rarely go into positions of power, that “the true work of improving things is in the little achievements of the day.” They go on a tangent about how too many people enjoy the goal, but not the process. And they fall in love all over again.

A guitar

“Baby, you are gonna miss that plane.”

Until next time! 👋