Latest news with #CelineSong
NZ Herald
7 hours ago
- Entertainment
- NZ Herald
How a salary figure changes everything in Materialists
By making the number explicit, Celine Song's new film reflects modern dating realities in a way rom-coms rarely have before. Almost everyone who sees Materialists, writer-director Celine Song's new spin on the old romantic comedy formula, seems to want to talk about one number: US$80,000 ($132,000). That's how much Lucy
Buzz Feed
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Buzz Feed
Why Celine Song's Authentic Love Stories Matter
Materialists, directed by Celine Song, has hit theatres—and it has audiences split on love and modern-day dating. I saw it and fell in love. Because no matter what the audience says, Celine Song's movies are a thing of beauty, and they evoke something so human, that they make you feel again in the age of desensitization. The film starts with Dakota Johnson's character, Lucy, a matchmaker, trying to find the perfect person who 'checks all the boxes' for her clients. Her clients come up with ridiculous, far-fetched requirements for their person, and Lucy is almost always positive that she can find THE one for them. But over the course of the film, the notion of checking all these requirements breaks down when Lucy realizes that in the search of the soulmate, she never considered love to be a non-negotiable on the table. Lucy is torn between Harry (Pedro Pascal), the wealthy 'unicorn' with a $12 million penthouse, and John (Chris Evans), her kind but financially unstable ex. Though her non-negotiable is that her partner be wealthy, she's unsure of who truly fits for her. She dates Harry, who doesn't put more effort into loving her, but takes her out to luxurious places. However, in the toughest of moments, she finds herself relying on John, who always answers when she calls. The film explores how modern love is heavily influenced by materialism and consumerism. Harry uses his wealth to shower Lucy with luxuries, presuming it was a replacement for genuine affection. Lucy ultimately breaks up with him, realizing that love was never on the table—his money was. In this moment, Celine Song offers us a quiet salvation through her film—reminding us that our worth isn't measured by materialistic values and how we sell ourselves, but by our ability to engage in heartfelt conversations that expose our vulnerabilities. Looking for love that makes us feel seen for who we are, instead of what we are, is the point. And John was the one who saw Lucy as who she was, and not for what she was: a matchmaker. Harry liked her and assumed she knew love because she was a matchmaker, but didn't dig deeper than that. Materialists brings back honest conversations about navigating love—about letting ourselves be vulnerable, even foolish, in love, instead of trying to control it. And it's a wake-up call. Appearing on NYT's podcast Modern Love, Celine Song shared on the recurring theme of the film: "Dating is very difficult and love is very easy, and that's the hardest thing about it. Love when you are in it, it's something you can't help and can't control, and it's just something that happens. And in that way, it's so easy but that's what so difficult about it, and that's you don't have control. And in the modern world, all we want to do is control. Go to the gym, botox—everything is there to increase your value in the stock market of dating." Song believes that love demands complete surrender —a letting go of sorts. Lucy clung to the checkboxes of her ideal match, tethered to worldly expectations. It wasn't until her client confronted her—pointing out she'd matched her with someone she never truly knew, leading to the unfortunate event—that Lucy realized the man she was building for her clients never existed. And if he never existed, how could love ever exist in that relationship? Trust me, I get it—no one wants to face the discomfort of love becoming a marketplace. We've grown numb, treating potential partners like products to be sold. Gen Z and millenials are holding onto standards and expectations from people before even attempting to know the person they are meeting. Having high standards is good, but not from the get-go. Given that, the internet is claiming that the film is serving the 'broke man propaganda'—where the girl chooses love with the broke guy over the rich one. This narrative feeds into the idea of giving less importance to love and entirely focusing on material aspects, supporting the idea of love as a capitalist commodity. And for those who saw the film, the plot clearly goes against this notion. "It's quite fashionable to be classist to each other..." is what Song has to say about the 'broke man propaganda' allegations. Song believes in "love at first conversation." To her, love is about being humbled as well as adored, and being totally fine with all of it. Letting go is allowing yourself to feel love and not avoid it by trying to control your emotions. Love is a language, many say. Between Lucy and John, it was the lingering gaze, the unspoken understanding, and the quiet pull toward what felt like home—a connection where few words were needed, yet everything was heard. It was their own language of love, which was natural and easy. It was why Lucy always found herself relying on John, all the way till the end. Sure many fans were let down expecting the How To Lose A Guy in 10 Days romantic comedy, but I strongly belief alongside Song, that this kind of film was much needed for us. The film is messy, uncomfortable, raw, romantic, sad, hopeful—a mixture of emotions which threw audiences off. And that's why its so beautiful—it is what love is really like. It's something we all had forgotten, before Materialists came along.
The Guardian
a day ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Past Lives to The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes – the seven best films to watch on TV this week
With Celine Song's new film Materialists on the brink of release, now is the perfect time to revisit the film that put her on the map. Past Lives is an extraordinary piece of work about a woman forced to re-examine her entire sense of self when an old love reappears, long after she has moved on. It's a film that aches with longing. It's knotty with the mess of cultural identity. All three of its leads do tremendous, heartbreaking work, but Greta Lee deserved an Oscar for her outstanding central performance. That she didn't even receive a nomination is utterly baffling. Nevertheless, consider this an update to Brief Encounter, only with a less infuriatingly paternalistic ending. Sunday 29 June, 10pm, BBC Two Ed Zwick's recent memoir Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions has much to recommend it (not least the astonishing bridge-burning chapter about his involvement with Shakespeare in Love), but chief among its qualities is how much it will make you want to rewatch Glory. Zwick's film about an African American regiment in the civil war is a true epic. The script swings for the fences. Cinematically it spills from the screen. And, let's not forget, this is the movie that announced Denzel Washington as a major presence. He still may not have bettered this performance. Saturday 28 June, 12:30am, Channel 4 Starting life as a short John Cheever story in the New Yorker, The Swimmer does its best to defy as many conventions as it can. Burt Lancaster plays Ned Merrill, an ad executive who one day decides to 'swim home' by clambering in and out of every pool he passes. Along the way he attempts to seduce a string of women, refers to himself in ever more grandiose terms and begins to detach from the easy suburbia he finds himself in. Before long he has spiralled out of control. Dark and hallucinogenic, it's perhaps the best midlife crisis movie ever made. Monday 30 June, 4:55pm, Film4 This needs to be said upfront: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes is a musical. Even though the film's publicity really did not want you to know about it, this is a film where Rachel Zegler will not stop singing. But forewarned is forearmed, and once the shock of the genre has worn off, what's left might be the best Hunger Games movie yet. A prequel, this is an origin story for Coriolanus Snow (the authoritarian ruler played in previous movies by Donald Sutherland), so it gets to exist in the moral murk more happily than the rest of the series. Tuesday 1 July, Netflix Sign up to What's On Get the best TV reviews, news and features in your inbox every Monday after newsletter promotion Long before The King's Speech made him an A-lister (and even longer before Cats blew his career to smithereens), Tom Hooper made arguably his best film. A wilfully inaccurate biopic of Brian Clough's ill-fated stint as manager of Leeds United in 1974, the film is like a tug of war between a headstrong individual and an immovable corporation. It is truly fantastic, with Michael Sheen operating at the highest possible level as the cocky, obstinate Clough. A wonderful celebration of a complex man. Tuesday 1 July, 12am, BBC Two Strongly in the running for the most gleefully preposterous film of the decade, Heads of State is a movie about the American president and the British prime minister. What's preposterous is that they are respectively played by John Cena and Idris Elba. Even more preposterously, it's an action buddy comedy by Ilya Naishuller, the director of Nobody. Did the world need a film where the leaders of the western world are stranded in the middle of nowhere and have to machine-gun their way out in a whirlwind of quips? Absolutely not. But the most preposterous thing of all is that it somehow works. Wednesday 2 July, Prime Video If you couldn't get enough of Heads of State, here's a film that must have at least partially inspired it. Although it suffered at the time from comparisons to Olympus Has Fallen – Gerard Butler's dour action film about a terrorist attack on the presidential residence – White House Down is a far lighter affair. Sure, the same things happen, but this has Channing Tatum instead of Butler, and he's intent on delivering all his lines with the biggest wink imaginable. This is an impossibly silly film and, if you're drunk enough, it forms a perfect double bill with Heads of State. Friday 4 July, 9pm, E4
Sydney Morning Herald
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
Are our must-have love lists killing our chance at happiness?
In the final moments of Celine Song's debut feature film, Past Lives, a woman closes the door to a cab taking her childhood love, a man who represented a lifelong 'what if?', to the airport to fly from New York back to Korea, where he lives and she grew up. The camera follows her down the street to the stoop where her husband sits waiting. The first time I watched it, the cinema lights came up soundtracked to my heaving sobs. The second time I saw the film, I excused myself from the cinema before it reached that scene, because I feared the post-screening Q&A I was hosting with the writer-director would be embarrassing and damp. A deeply romantic, patient and quiet film, Past Lives went on to top many of the year's 'best of' lists and earn Oscar attention. It cemented me as a fan of Song for life. Then it was announced that her follow-up would be another romantic drama positioning one woman between two men who represent bigger choices than just affection and passion. Materialists is in Australian cinemas now, and before bundling up in half a dozen layers to see it on Sunday night, I'd heard the director had pulled off another feat and that the marketing of Materialists as a fluffy rom-com about a big-city matchmaker played by Dakota Johnson was something of a Trojan horse. The real story was a treatise on modern dating and what our outsized expectations for partners does to our chance at relationships. My curiosity was piqued. As the perpetually single one, I've learned to tune out the inquiries from well-meaning friends who've never had to swipe left or right, have never had to scroll through profiles of men in their late 30s who are still 'not sure' if they want to have children. Every attempted date organised with a man whose profile bleats about how 'no one on this app actually wants to meet in person!' and who unmatches me the day we've made plans to do just that makes me more hardened towards the whole process … until a month or two later I decide to reinvest because what is there to lose. People these days, I've been conditioned to believe, don't meet by chance any more. They don't meet as children or at artist residencies, like Nora in Past Lives did with the two men she felt split between. Loading I've been asked, by those friends spared from the Hinge trenches, what I want in a partner – and then been scolded for not having high enough standards when my answer was simply, 'taller than me and has a job'. (After every year on the apps, even those criteria become less 'dealbreakers' and more 'nice to haves'.) Lucy, Johnson's character in Materialists, notes down similar expectations of her clients when they first meet. Men in their late 40s looking for women under 25. Women who make $80k a year on the hunt for a man making more than $300k. Men wanting a 'fit' woman – which, of course, has nothing to do with strength or cardiovascular health or time spent in the gym, but is instead code for 'not fat'. Women not looking twice at men under 180 centimetres. Lucy's similarly calloused to the whole enterprise. Her clients are seen as either 'high value' or delusional. She personally believes that romance is a numbers game – specifically the numbers in a prospective partner's bank account. What her career – and the collective time we singles are spending on miserable, hopeless apps – has missed is the surprise and spontaneity underpinning so many of the good relationships, the ones that don't just get the chance to begin, but last. A friend of mine drunkenly declared she'd marry a man she saw in line at Hungry Jack's one night. They took their wedding photos outside that takeaway spot years later. If another friend had not gone to a house party, who knows if she'd have a baby and a mortgage with the guy she met there. I was the officiant, early this year, of the wedding between two friends who were dancing near each other at a pub when one of them worked up the courage to put their number in the other's phone (and barely remembered afterwards). No criteria or checklists or forensic accounting or seeing how someone (literally) measures up. Just chemistry that an app or matchmaker can never dream of conjuring up. It's almost enough to give a sceptical human barnacle some hope. Almost.
The Age
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Age
Are our must-have love lists killing our chance at happiness?
In the final moments of Celine Song's debut feature film, Past Lives, a woman closes the door to a cab taking her childhood love, a man who represented a lifelong 'what if?', to the airport to fly from New York back to Korea, where he lives and she grew up. The camera follows her down the street to the stoop where her husband sits waiting. The first time I watched it, the cinema lights came up soundtracked to my heaving sobs. The second time I saw the film, I excused myself from the cinema before it reached that scene, because I feared the post-screening Q&A I was hosting with the writer-director would be embarrassing and damp. A deeply romantic, patient and quiet film, Past Lives went on to top many of the year's 'best of' lists and earn Oscar attention. It cemented me as a fan of Song for life. Then it was announced that her follow-up would be another romantic drama positioning one woman between two men who represent bigger choices than just affection and passion. Materialists is in Australian cinemas now, and before bundling up in half a dozen layers to see it on Sunday night, I'd heard the director had pulled off another feat and that the marketing of Materialists as a fluffy rom-com about a big-city matchmaker played by Dakota Johnson was something of a Trojan horse. The real story was a treatise on modern dating and what our outsized expectations for partners does to our chance at relationships. My curiosity was piqued. As the perpetually single one, I've learned to tune out the inquiries from well-meaning friends who've never had to swipe left or right, have never had to scroll through profiles of men in their late 30s who are still 'not sure' if they want to have children. Every attempted date organised with a man whose profile bleats about how 'no one on this app actually wants to meet in person!' and who unmatches me the day we've made plans to do just that makes me more hardened towards the whole process … until a month or two later I decide to reinvest because what is there to lose. People these days, I've been conditioned to believe, don't meet by chance any more. They don't meet as children or at artist residencies, like Nora in Past Lives did with the two men she felt split between. Loading I've been asked, by those friends spared from the Hinge trenches, what I want in a partner – and then been scolded for not having high enough standards when my answer was simply, 'taller than me and has a job'. (After every year on the apps, even those criteria become less 'dealbreakers' and more 'nice to haves'.) Lucy, Johnson's character in Materialists, notes down similar expectations of her clients when they first meet. Men in their late 40s looking for women under 25. Women who make $80k a year on the hunt for a man making more than $300k. Men wanting a 'fit' woman – which, of course, has nothing to do with strength or cardiovascular health or time spent in the gym, but is instead code for 'not fat'. Women not looking twice at men under 180 centimetres. Lucy's similarly calloused to the whole enterprise. Her clients are seen as either 'high value' or delusional. She personally believes that romance is a numbers game – specifically the numbers in a prospective partner's bank account. What her career – and the collective time we singles are spending on miserable, hopeless apps – has missed is the surprise and spontaneity underpinning so many of the good relationships, the ones that don't just get the chance to begin, but last. A friend of mine drunkenly declared she'd marry a man she saw in line at Hungry Jack's one night. They took their wedding photos outside that takeaway spot years later. If another friend had not gone to a house party, who knows if she'd have a baby and a mortgage with the guy she met there. I was the officiant, early this year, of the wedding between two friends who were dancing near each other at a pub when one of them worked up the courage to put their number in the other's phone (and barely remembered afterwards). No criteria or checklists or forensic accounting or seeing how someone (literally) measures up. Just chemistry that an app or matchmaker can never dream of conjuring up. It's almost enough to give a sceptical human barnacle some hope. Almost.
