Modern Beauty Trends: In: Milan’s Drones, Puppies, and Severed Heads

Monday, February 26, 2018

In: Milan’s Drones, Puppies, and Severed Heads | Out: The NRA

Natalie Portman has her own mother! experience at the box office. Meanwhile, both the Olympics and Milan Fashion Week are over.
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“I was born to make mistakes. I ain’t scared to take the weight,” —Erykah Badu

Black Panther, Again

Annihilation, Unfortunately

Annihilation wasn’t quite Natalie Portman’s mother! Its opening weekend box office take was a bit higher ($11 million to the Jennifer Lawrence film’s $7.5 million), as was the critical appraisal (a Rotten Tomatoes score of 86, compared to mother!’s 69). It also managed to avoid mother!’s almost unheard of CinemaScore of “F”, but Annihilation’s “C” is nothing to write home about. Still, both films represent a major studio (Paramount), giving sizeable budgets to challenging auteurs to channel their uncompromised vision with an Oscar-winning actress onboard, and in both cases they ended with a notable divide between critics and audiences and disappointing commercial results (Paramount actually sold Annihilation’s international rights directly to Netflix as a way to hedge losses, in part because of the spook it got with mother!). Though, in Annihilation’s case, we don’t think the critics were wrong in dubbing it something close to a sci-fi masterpiece. A lot of people will come to discover and appreciate director Alex Garland’s film even if they didn’t immediately do so on opening weekend, and a lot of those people will be upset they didn’t see it on the big screen. If challenging, artsy, breathtakingly beautiful sci-fi is your thing, go out and see it because it probably won’t stick around in theaters long. Elsewhere, Black Panther continues to rack up milestones: Its $108 million take is the second-highest second week performance in Hollywood history. Game Night, meanwhile, is one of those rare R-rated comedies where everything went right (good reviews and audience reception); the only criticism of its $16.6 million opening weekend performance is that it might have done better with a different release strategy—like, say, staying well out of the shadow of a blockbuster Marvel movie.

Youthful Milan (and Drones on the Runway)

Stodginess

So much for the notion that Milan Fashion Week is the fashion week that gives a little too much deference to tradition; Gucci had models carrying replicas of their own heads, Tod’s had models carrying puppies, Dolce & Gabbana had drones carrying handbags, and Prada had a black model opening its show for the first time in 20 years. Indeed, even outside of the stunts on various runways, the once stodgy city is having something of a youthful creative renaissance in all matters of design (read up on some of the city’s promising young design luminaries here). Underscoring the youthful moment, Tommy Hilfiger and Gigi Hadid’s collaborative fashion spectacular touched down for its final stop in Milan this season after stints in New York, Los Angeles, and London. Hadid packed the model lineup with all of her fellow buzzy, young, pretty friends and family members. See the best of Milan Fashion Week from behind the scenes, here, and the best street style with plenty of breakaway pants, here.

The Marjory Stoneman Douglas High Kids

The NRA

Speaking of Milan and youthful righteousness, Gucci was just one of a handful of companies who made a stand this past week. At the urging of creative director Alessandro Michele, the company donated $500,000 to the March for Our Lives rally for gun control, organized by the young survivors of the shooting in Parkland, Florida. George and Amal Clooney and Oprah have also donated sizeable amounts. Meanwhile, companies ranging from Hertz to Delta to MetLife have cut ties with the NRA (those ties ranged from simply offering discounts to members to being in more direct business with the organization). The outspoken Marjory Stoneman Douglas High kids, meanwhile, continue to make waves by publicly and passionately calling for sensible gun reform and a ban on semi-automatic weapons, and the public is behind them. A new poll finds record support for those positions: 70 percent of Americans say they support tougher gun laws (up from 52 percent in October) and 57 percent now support a ban on the sale and manufacture of high-powered weapons like the AR-15. Particularly popular is banning those under 21 from buying guns, so much so that in a surprising turnaround—given the notoriously pro-gun stance of the Republican party of Florida—Governor Rick Scott now supports such a measure.

Tessa Thompson

@TessaMaeThompson

Commercial performance aside, Tessa Thompson did appear in the two of the most talked about cultural moments of the week: Annihilation and Janelle Monáe’s super sexy “Make Me Feel” video. Now, when’s Westworld coming back?