Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We sometimes share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some we found this month.

—Sophie Haigney, web editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, assistant editor

From A. S. Hamrah’s Last Week in End Times Cinema (Semiotexte), a daily bulletin of movie news:

April 28, 2024

Selling point of Deadpool & Wolverine is that it doesn’t require any “Marvel homework”

WBD and Amazon “may have unknowingly” used North Korean companies for animation work on two of their TV series

Studios have begun hiring some directors based on the Rotten Tomatoes scores of their recent movies

Kalshi, a financial exchange and predictive-market company, offers a betting product for Rotten Tomatoes scores. “Now anyone can make money by being a movie critic,” is how they sell it

WBD CEO David Zaslav’s $49.7 million salary is more than the entire operating budget of WBD’s Turner Classic Movies, flagship channel of American film history

Instead of reporting subscriber numbers, Netflix will use a new metric they call “Fandom,” which is based on how many people watch trailers or parts of trailers on their platform. “Over six billion impressions every month,” they claim, as if that means anything

Comedian–Unfrosted director Jerry Seinfeld says “the movie business is over,” replaced by “depression, malaise, confusion—disorientation.” This succinct, not untrue statement has got him mocked on social media

Jean-Luc Godard’s last film, Scénarios, completed the day before he died, will debut at Cannes, then be distributed and sold by an NFT company, Roadstead

Rapper-director Kanye West launching adult entertainment studio, Yeezy Porn

Writer-director Aaron Sorkin is planning an antidisinformation J6 movie that is also a sequel to The Social Network

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom star Chris Pratt and wife Katherine Schwarzenegger, author of the book The Gift of Forgiveness: Inspiring Stories from Those Who Have Overcome the Unforgivable, have torn down the architecturally significant modernist Zimmerman House in Brentwood, built 1950. The couple purchased the house for $12.5 million and will replace it with a 15,000-square-foot “modern farmhouse”-style mansion

A saggy, older, deflated appearance is characteristic of the emaciation now known in Hollywood as “Ozempic face,” named after the prescription weight-loss drug that’s overprescribed in Los Angeles. Using too much of it too quickly is causing an endemic zombielike look, with sunken eyes and gaunt cheeks

Things Change writer-director David Mamet insists his two actor daughters, Zosia and Clara, are not nepo babies, because learning from being on set earned them a spot in the bigs. “They haven’t benefited from any type of privilege,” he says

Writer-director-actor Ben Stiller announces he was shocked no one liked Zoolander 2. The comedy sequel came out in 2016

Lucasfilm has partnered with a dairy company to make and sell Star Wars Blue Milk. Formerly only available at Disney theme parks, the liquid food product will be sold in grocery stores and through DoorDash

Tram derails at Universal Studios Hollywood as it passes too quickly through the Jurassic Park exhibit. Fifteen injured, some seriously. California Highway Patrol investigating.

From Anika Jade Levy’s novel Flat Earth (Catapult):

Do you two want to go for a ride? Boy #I asked.

What about our phones? Frances asked.

Dry bag, said Boy #2.

Do you know how many debutantes die in jet ski accidents every year? I said.

You two don’t exactly look like you’re coming over on the Mayflower, said Boy #1.

Frances happens to be from a prominent Southern family, I informed them.

I need to get to a gallery opening. Could you drop us off in Lower Manhattan? Frances asked.

And they agreed.

 

Boy #1 pulled his jet ski up, made himself perpendicular to the rocky beach.

Boy #2 kneeled so that Frances could take his hand and step onto his knee.

I stepped out of my low heels and put them into my purse. I reached out to take the toned arm of Boy #1.
Then the boys pointed their jet skis toward the city.

From Cynthia Zarin’s novel Estate (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux):

Notes for a novel: he was a man who liked women who did not have children, but now, two of the women he loves have children, while a third wants to have a child. Mine are always with me, their hands on me, even now when she is tired and we are reading in bed, Pom will slip her hand into the neck of my blouse, her lips moving. Even George relaxes as he sits very close to me. Sometimes, very late at night, he comes in when he is home from school and gets into bed with me. Tell me, I say. Listen, Mama, you are not listening, Louie complains. I ­remember asking you if Valeria was planning to leave her husband, and you said with irritation, I don’t know, shaking your head. It is not a question I would ask now. The other afternoon when it was getting time for you to leave, I pulled your pink-­and-­white striped shirt from the chair and put it on. I was cold. But I had been eyeing that shirt for a while, and wanted my bare skin inside it. For a small man you have broad shoulders, and the shirt was big on me.

From the On The Calculations of Volume (Book III) (New Directions), translated by Barbara J. Haveland, the third installment in Solvej Balle’s time-loop trilogy:

I shop sporadically. I drift in and out of the house. I pull out the box of provisions from under my bed and find supplies I don’t remember buying. I fetch cans from the kitchen, leeks from the garden and onions from the shed, buy odds and ends on brief trips to town. My day is jumbled, indecisive. I climb out the window or slip silently out the door. I hurry around the side of the house as Thomas comes down the stairs. In a few seconds, I am out of sight.