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I'm pretty uneducated about rap, but I go on a binge every so often, mostly of female rappers. Today I want to share one of my favorites.

Glorilla is from Memphis, Tennessee, and is primarily known for her party jams. She has released several EPs and mixtapes and finally last year her first proper album, Glorious, which is nominated for a Grammy for best rap album.

I find her charming for a bunch of reasons:
- Distinctive husky voice and a thick, delightful accent. (I love how many syllables she can put into "ass.")
- Smiley and doesn't take herself too seriously. She always comes across like she's having fun.
- Raps about a wide variety of topics in a wide variety of emotional registers. I appreciate the mix of bravado and vulnerability.
- Loves her female friends. Has them in her videos, does songs with them, does songs about them, mentions them casually in songs.
- She's also just very hot, okay. (See: Special)

Most of all, she feels effortlessly genuine. At no point does she come across like she's trying to be anyone other than who she is.

Some personal fave tracks of mine:
- TGIF, Tomorrow 2 (ft her cousin Cardi B), and F.N.F. As I said, her biggest songs are her party jams, and these are the best ones IMO. TGIF has a great beat that sounds almost apocalyptic, which makes perfect sense to me with the opening lines of It's 7pm Friday / It's 95 degrees. You're right, if it's still that hot by 7 in the evening, that DOES feel like the world is ending, lol.

- Intro to her album Glorious. It's short but really captures that sense of genuineness I get from her.

- Accent by Megan Thee Stallion ft Glorilla. Again, doesn't take herself too seriously. "I throw an R in any word that got a U in it" is an accurate description of her accent. Incredible.

- Don't Deserve is Glorilla rapping about and to a friend whose boyfriend doesn't treat her well. I really like how this isn't just a "he's shit, hurry up and dump him" song, but has lines like It's time to find yourself again, this n* got you lost / You can do it, friend, I know you can, my fingers crossed. There's a lot of empathy in it, along with the concern.

- Wrong One, a collab with Glorilla and four other female rappers. Another one where it feels like everyone's having a good time, and gave me some more female rappers to look up. The music video is delightful.

Impromptu (1991). Writer George Sand (Judy Davis) strives to avoid past lovers, romance the man of her dreams (Chopin, played by Hugh Grant), and find peace and quiet to write novels.

The movie's strongest point is its cast. I'd not seen Judy Davis before but absolutely fell in love with her here, and Bernadette Peters as the scheming one-time BFF is wonderful, at first charming and later pitiable. Emma Thompson has a smaller, purely comedic part as a duchess desperate to become a patron of the arts, and she's also delightful. There are also some male actors, and they were fine. (I know everyone loves Julian Sands, and he's very nice to look at, but I'm unpersuaded by his acting chops.)

Wikipedia calls this movie a "historical film," which conveniently saves anyone from having to identify the tone. Is it a comedy? A romance? A drama? Possibly all of the above? I enjoyed it for the actors and the discussion of the arts, and I'm interested to learn more about George Sand, but it felt like a movie that wasn't entirely sure what it wanted to be.

I was inspired to watch this because of sophiahelix's excellent Yuletide fic for it, which I enjoyed even more rereading after seeing the movie.

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The Secret Agent (2025). A research scientist in 1970s Brazil is targeted by a corrupt capitalist and hides out under a false name while trying to get the documents for him and his son to flee the country.

My understanding of this movie going in was that it was a 70s-esque thriller, but a very slow burn. I guess that's not untrue, exactly, but "slow burn" is a bit optimistic tbh. I can appreciate the artistic craftsmanship on display here, and as a portrait of people going about their daily lives amidst pervasive corruption, it was very good. I also enjoyed the occasional cuts to the present day of two women transcribing cassette tapes recorded during the main action of the movie, and how that juxtaposition worked of tension in the past vs reconstructing the events fifty years later. OTOH, I found the left turn in narrative structure towards the end pretty unsatisfying.

Overall, I get what the movie was doing, and I think it did it well; I just wasn't into it.

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The Testament of Ann Lee (2026). The Shakers were an off-shoot of the Quakers who, per the movie, were given to physical motion ("shaking") as a form of worship leading to religious ecstasy and who eventually adopted a doctrine of total abstinence. Amanda Seyfried stars as Ann Lee, the English prophet of the Shaker sect who leads them to America in the mid-1700s. Also it's kind of a musical?

I've seen people say that Robert Eggers's movie The Witch is a horror story from within a Puritan worldview, and I've never quite been able to wrap my head around that framing, but Testament of Ann Lee is 1000% a story about a fringe religious sect from the sect's POV. If you've ever wanted folk horror without the horror part, this movie is it. The script is heavily inspired by contemporary accounts of Lee by her followers, and the movie is entirely committed to that version of events, complete with visions and apparent miracles.

The movie is gorgeous, and so much of it is given over to the religious music and dance that in places it feels more like an experience than a narrative. It's more interested in conveying the emotional life of these characters than in strict realism, so some of it feels heightened in a way that I really liked, without trying to be deliberately distracting. So for example, at one point in one of the climactic musical sequences, an electric guitar comes in. That heightened approach makes the extensive musical worship sequences feel organic and necessary, which is why I hesitate to call the movie a musical in the conventional sense; the music and dancing is almost entirely diagetic, even if choreographed to a degree unlikely in real life.

If it's not apparent by now, I loved this. Beautifully shot, incredible integration of the worship sequences, Seyfried was incredible. It was great to see a movie where the weird prophet was a woman and yet the movie still treats her with utter seriousness. There were moments where I could have done with a bit more on-screen illustration of events that get relegated to voiceover, but it's a small quibble.

I found a quote from director Mona Fastvold that she initially struggled to find support for the project due to "zero interest" form the industry, to which I can only say, no shit. I honestly have no idea how this got made, but I'm so glad it did. I have never had a movie experience like this before.