Architectural Digest

Barring out with The Brutalist.

The last time I watched an Adrien Brody movie, he was rapping.

It was 2021’s Clean, a low-budget revenger also starring White Boy Rick, the Chechen mob boss from Barry, and RZA.

Intentionally dark ‘n dour, but with higher aspirations than the usual bullet-based content Hulu (or whomever) will algorithmically slot alongside it.

AB not only co-wrote, produced and scored the thing, but decided to drop a verse over his own track for the end credits. Beatbox enthusiast Tom Hardy also grabbed the mic to close out his Venom sequel that year; in both cases, I unironically respect it.

All of this to ask:

Is Brody… the brodie?

I’ve been hung up on his musical hobbies ever since a two-decade-old The FADER profile snuck in an aside about getting busy on the Yamaha QY-70.

Miho Hatori also rocks the pocket sequencer in her Triple 5 Soul ad a few pages earlier. What a time to be alive!

Anyway, there’s still only one Academy Award winner with production credits on a C-Rayz Walz album. (Plain Pat what up!)

Would love a CD-R of the “A Ranger” instrumentals that supposedly impressed several (since disgraced) ‘00s rap moguls, as well as the trap playlist Brody currently works out to before treading the boards.

I share these profoundly Nick-ian anecdotes and side quests to underscore the fact that, during the three-and-a-half hour runtime of The Brutalist, I thought about absolutely none of them.

Cinema!

(FYI, wrote this before the Golden Globes.)

Our boy put his whole Le Corbussy in it.

The title character is not based on any particular Bauhaus alumn; he’s an amalgam of Mies van der Rohe, Marcel Breuer and László Moholy-Nagy, among others.

But The Brutalist isn’t really *about* architecture. It’s not a “great man” biopic, or A24’s Oppenheimer. The period references are neither flexes nor easter eggs, but necessary textures in an engrossing, richly detailed character study.

Rap Adrien expatriated the mind garden the moment his moody, mesmerizing László Tóth walked off the ship at Ellis Island.

It’s no solo act; the cast is fantastic across the board (particularly Guy Pearce’s layered, Ted Turner-y nemesis), with ambitious technical craft to match.

Score, sets, cinematography… u know we got fonts in here!

Brady Corbet’s storytelling choices made me lean in (literally, there’s a safety bar in front of the seats in Village East’s big screen that completely blocks all subtitles depending on how you sit), and the Big Ideas that he and creative/life partner Mona Fastvold play with — art, commerce, love, identity — continue to rattle around my brain pan.

“A history that feels very present.”

I thoroughly enjoyed watching The Brutalist, thinking about The Brutalist, and devouring the full spectrum of takes. The film was an immersive, novelistic experience — and, recency bias aside, my favorite of 2024.

Still need to know what a gwaan with that beat tape tho…

David Miller “Just In The Way” — truly love when folks drop personal favs in their year-end recaps. I shared some Eyedress / Bbtrickz for the Herb Sundays roundup; Tyler The Creator’s list featured this deep cut from an unreleased album by teenage Teddy Riley protegé David Miller (plus: justice for Tommy Richman! Coyote should be appreciated like a Star Trak loosie, not judged as a half-hearted bid for pop stardom. T gets it…)

RIP Dr. Ruth & Donahue — any new Wesley Morris essay is a treat. “I miss the talk show that Donahue reinvented. I miss the way Dr. Ruth talked about sex… they believed in us, that we were all interesting, that we could be trustworthy panelists in the discourse of being alive.”

k3, “ms. crashout” — gun props make me itch but I suppose I’m ok with axes. More NoahSoCold insanity for the terminally online.

Do You Remember When The All-American Rejects Were Saved by Bionicles? — “20 years ago, LEGO pretended a band were kidnapped in order to sell action figures, and it worked.”

Method Man’s Kean College Sweatshirt — too many gems to individually list from the newly-launched Video Stock Archives account, so let’s go with Meth repping Union County higher education (NJ bonus beat: E-Town Concrete “Drones For Xmas,” too late for the holiday stack but still hit heavy sled rotation).

Playlists updated…