So far, June 2024 is turning out to be quite the oppositional Gemini rollercoaster. It’s meant to be summer and it certainly is not. Bad news turns out to be good news, good news is tempered by bad. Things we were dreading turn out fine, things we were looking forward to unexpectedly sting us. We’re sensitive little beings and having the universe do us hot and cold like this has triggered our emotional paralysis, hence the lateness of this newsletter (anxious and sassy are not natural bedfellows).

Here at Zodiac, we’re also riven by warring factions on opposite sides of the Red Eye (2005) camp. The schism: Does Rachel McAdams (initially) want to bang Cillian Murphy? Sarah says ‘yes’, Bella says ‘no’. It hasn’t quite got to the point of handbags at dawn, primarily because we love a dissenting view, but also because dying on a hill for a film nearly 20 years after its release is preposterous. And yet… All of this to say that, for Gemini season, we are taking opposites very seriously, as well as dreaming up ways to fly the hell away from our challenges, c.f. our astrological film selections below.

xoxo Zodiac

Lately we’ve been watching…

Alice, Sweet Alice - Don’t Look Now but with Catholic-inflected sibling rivalry!

Dexter - Rewatching this 00s show and finding serial killers and casual misogyny oddly comforting.

Evil Under the Sun - Still affected by the insane food shots for no reason. Who would attend a Zodiac cocktail party with this theme?

Drylongso - Good looking, tonally confusing (complimentary) and just very enjoyable, thanks for having us T A P E Collective. Last chance to catch it next Tuesday.

We love it when you comment or dm and tell us what you’re watching, or that you heartily disagree with us. xoxo

National treasure/Freaks my nut out

National treasure: Saying “thrice”, fountain pens, sticky tab page markers, birdsong identifying apps, slip dresses, Somia from Natwest’s Direct Debit team who solved a wildly frustrating mystery for Sarah earlier this week (give that girl a bonus, Natwest).

Freaks my nut out: Saying “three times”, ink smudges, the dramatic uptick in the amount of dog poo on the street (clean up after your pets!!!), that it’s cold in June, the uphill struggle to get ideas out of your head and into reality.

Films for Gemini Season ♉️

Geminis are our easy-breezy air sign friends, known for talking fast and thinking even faster. There’s no-one better to invite to a dinner party than your Gemini friend— they have all the conversational gambits you could wish for and, propelled onwards like champagne bubbles, they’ll never outstay their welcome (as they’ve got another party to attend, darling).

The Zodiac’s social butterflies are easily bored, always seeking new thrills and bursts of adrenaline. To hold the astral twins’ attention and complement their airy attitudes, this month’s films are all about flying.

Gemini babes include: Marilyn Monroe, Brooke Shields, Natalie Portman, the Olsen twins, Stevie Nicks, Zoe Saldana and Helena Bonham Carter.

Red Eye (2005)

Bella in the blue corner… Picture this: you’re a single woman on the way home from your grandmother’s funeral, chatting to your divorced dad who keeps sending you self-help books you didn’t ask for. Your flight’s delayed, you’re tired from grieving and the cheap wine you drank at the wake, work calls you because your concierge colleague can’t handle bog-standard boomer gripes, then a male passenger attempts to ingratiate himself with you. Granted, he’s Cillian Murphy, so his piercing blue eyes and cut-glass cheekbones make up for the fact that he’s bothering you with pseudo-pickup-artist questions, but you could really do without it. You finally get to board and just your luck, he’s in the seat next to yours. You steel yourself for hours of trying to shut the conversation down politely… but it turns out he’s a terrorist! Probably quite refreshing to know the bad vibes you got were real, rather than something your patronising dad would write off as, “Oh, he’s just showing interest in you.”

Sarah in the red corner… Don’t get mad at me but Cillian Murphy is problematically very hot and sexy in this early-2000s thriller about an assault survivor battling a terrorist on a late-night flight. I wonder if director Wes Craven was tempted to fling the script and all common sense into a blender and have the two leads forget their differences and bang in that airplane bathroom. Why would such a handsome man become a terrorist anyway when there are surely lots of other career options open to him? All thirstiness aside though, I think the desirable baddie is a deliberate choice, sometimes you’re drawn — like a helpless moth to a sexy flame — towards repeating patterns of trauma and abuse. And very occasionally, repeating the pattern affords you the opportunity to creatively dispatch that trauma and abuse with a Dracula-topped ballpoint and your old hockey stick.

The Night They Took Miss Beautiful (1977)

The writers were undoubtedly coked out of their minds when they came up with this one, a made-for-TV movie plot if ever we heard one: a seaplane carrying five beauty pageant contestants and a vial of a lethal virus gets hijacked by a Symbionese Liberation Army-type militant group. Featuring funky boom-chicka-boom chase music, sobbing beauty queens, a pageant mom pimp, and a Groucho Marx impression from a deeply unexpected quarter, it’s possibly the least serious aeroplane disaster movie ever (apart from Snakes on a Plane). An excellent contemporaneous review from People magazine: "Terrorists hold a planeload of beauty pageant finalists for ransom in this TV movie... Better they should keep them."

The Thief of Bagdad (1940)

So good we had to screenshot it twice. Can’t believe we slept so long on this Technicolor fantasy that counts Michael Powell as one of its six directors (troubled production history), and has quaint in-camera special effects that almost match the stop-motion brilliance of Jason and the Argonauts (1963) [celebrated in Zodiac’s 2021 Sagittarius newsletter if you’re a long-time subscriber]. Sadly, as with other films of this time period, there is uncomfortable use of brown-face, but the film also pleasingly co-stars legendary Indian actor Sabu, who rather steals the show from drippy co-lead John Justin, who wants to spend the whole movie saving a princess rather than going on adventures and exploring the unspoken sexual tension of their bromance further. Geminis and other fans of flight will enjoy the, not one, not two, but three flying scenes, featuring a flying horse, flying genie and flying carpet respectively. Earth and water signs will appreciate a female character who, when things don’t go her way, simply goes to sleep and refuses to wake up for months.

Top Gun (1986)

We couldn’t let Pride month go by without recommending the accidentally gayest film of all time. It’s basically Tom of Finland of the skies: tanned, muscly, virile men in uniform gaze in awe at one another. When not in uniform, they’re fresh out of the shower, white towels slung around their groins, or playing a spot of Club Tropicana-style beach volleyball. Kelly McGillis is a fantastic beard, but the real sexual tension lies between Tom “Maverick” Cruise (we wanna say Aries, Leo rising) and Val “Iceman’ Kilmer (Capricorn, Virgo rising) — a soaring enemies to lovers arc if we’ve ever seen one.

Honourable Mentions: Porco Rosso (1992), Snakes on a Plane (2006), View From the Top (2003), Mothman Prophecies (2002).

Tip Jar 🫙

Recommended Reading, Watching, Listening 📚

‘The Summer Before the Dark’ by Doris Lessing

This 1973 entry into the ‘frustrated woman has a dissociative episode’ pantheon is perfect reading for any disaffected sunbed lounging you have planned for your summer holidays.

World of Interiors

Just get any issue: every standfirst or opening salvo is a triumph of alliteration and assonance, such as these, from the June 2024 issue: “a pile of peas, gleaming like green pearls. Such a prize demands snaffling on the spot or else hurrying home into princely pairings,” or “Now, some might say that the only truly acceptable place for tassels is on a preppy loafer or swinging burlesque-style from a pair of nipples.”

Jean Cocteau speaks to the year 2000

“The really remarkable man should be invisible” is a maxim that lives rent-free in our heads. Also rattling around there is the assertion that the main use for penicillin is saving the lives of bullfighters.

Off-screen Gossip 🍸

Reward offered for further information about the story behind this tweet - we need to know more about this low-stakes British film exhibition-scene drama. Our working theories include either someone interpreting the film’s closing credits as satanic instructions to kill, or some pearl-clutching bore asking whether sex scenes are truly necessary (an eye-rollingly tedious strain of discourse, in our view).