Spring has sparked some zippy, Aries-like thoughts in the Zodiac hive brain lately. Like, we really miss front-of-book journalism. For Gen-Z and Alpha readers (the ones who can still read), FoB articles were those fun, bite-sized pieces you used to find at the front of magazines—ranging from 250 words to a perfectly crafted couple of sentences. It’s paradoxical that, in the era of the shortest attention spans known to man, longread essays are also proliferating wildly. Welcome to the world of writers without editors.

We love writing this newsletter, but it’s a lot of work and you’ve already got a lot to read. So, we’ve decided to give it a golden-age-of-journalism inspired FoB makeover1.

Xoxo Zodiac

Films for Aries Season ♈

Your Aries-aspected friend is busy doing her dreams and ideas. She doesn't have time to watch two films, she doesn't have time to read this newsletter, she didn't even have time to properly read that text you sent her before she replied to it anyway, just to get it off her To Do List. As a gift to the rushed rams of the Zodiac, here's a duo of opening scenes that are short films in themselves.

Beau Travail (1999)

The Turkish dancefloor banger, the gorgeous girls making eye contact with the camera, the way everything that’s going to be revealed about these characters over the next 90 minutes is already shown to us in this opening 80 seconds: Denis Lavant’s melancholic longing, Grégoire Colins’ beauty and unknowability… that other guy’s distracting sexiness, considering he doesn’t have that big a role2. As loyal readers know, we’ve been fixated on this film, and this scene in particular, for years now, but it’s hard to explain why it captivates us so. Perhaps if we could dance in a slightly naff discotheque with the French Foreign Legion just once, we’d be able to move on…

Sexy Beast (2000)

A man stretches out on a sunlounger, waxing rhapsodic about the sizzling state of his formerly pasty flesh. Suddenly, into the idyll of his Spanish villa, arrives a boulder, rolling down the mountain, crash landing in his swimming pool, smashing its tiled twin hearts and signalling doom. The opening scene of Sexy Beast is perfect for Spring 2025: no sooner has the sun lifted our winter-worn hearts, than we're hit with Mercury Retrograde, a firey solar eclipse, and, here on planet Earth, a global financial crisis so great it might cause the end of capitalism. Chin up, order some calamari and ride it straight to hell. Lovely opening titles too.

Reading: The Tokyo Zodiac Murders—we like our crime novels like we like our cinema newsletters, astrology-inspired.

Watching: Michelle Tractenberg’s specific brand of genius 💔. She was the Millennial Joan Collins.

Listening: If we were running a Roger Corman-style production company, we would long ago have cobbled together a Budots trendsploitation movie shot in Davao City with a ragtag Fillipino crew and a script written in 48 hours. As it is, we’re just listening to the playlists on NTS.

Free Film Idea

A sequel to Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, except it’s about this non-dom woman who is being forced to move to Italy despite her paralysing fear of carbohydrates. Because more films should end with guillotines.