Design of the Week | The Lure
I need to start off by saying how incredibly fortunate I feel to live in a city with a world class art institution like the Wexner Center for the Arts. Yes, they partnered with us for the film programming for The Flyover Fest and sell our books in their shop, but I've also seen work there that has been some of the greatest inspiration to me personally, including an exhibit of Noah Purifoy's art, the James Baldwin documentary I Am Not Your Negro, and most recently the 2015 Polish film, The Lure. It was preceded by a short film by Mike Olenick called The Cure, which was bizarre and kitschy and stylized in an interesting way.
The Lure is the best movie I've seen in years. Written by Robert Bolesto and directed by Agnieszka Smoczynska, The Lure follows a pair of teenage mermaids who one night are lured ashore by the cute guitarist of a club band playing along the water's edge. The girls grow legs, but when water is dripped on them their tails grow back. They wander onto dry land and are discovered during a fucking incredible sequence—where, while watching I was consumed by an utter confluence of laughter and awe—by the club owner. (These aren't just clubs like discotheques you might associate with Europe, but include cabaret, catchy live music, and food-service, which according to The A.V. Club are based on the "'dancing restaurants' that were popular in Poland during the late Communist era.")
The girls, who provide their names as Gold and Silver, become members of the club band, who also accept them into their odd and incestuous makeshift family. It isn't long before Silver falls for the cute guitarist, and in a bid to be with him forever, sets out to have her lower-half surgically replaced with a human bottom. However, Gold warns her that if she does so, she will lose her voice, and that if the guitarist marries someone else then Silver will transform to sea-foam by sunrise the morning after the wedding.
A few pertinent details I haven't even mentioned yet: the girls are vampires and The Lure is a musical.
All of the above combined with the visual eye-candy and rad style, this is a movie you need to see. I'm going to steal someone's thumb to give The Lure three thumbs up.
You probably recognize based on some of the books we've published, like Grace Krilanovich's The Orange Eats Creeps or Bennett Sims's two books—A Questionable Shape and the forthcoming White Dialogues—as well as J.D. Wilkes's The Vine That Ate the South, that I'm into work that melds high- and low-brow. Each of the aforementioned books does so in a different and distinctive way, but I'm way into it.
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