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  • Elk Rapids students make prom more climate friendly with upcycled dresses

    Elk Rapids students make prom more climate friendly with upcycled dresses

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    This coverage is made possible through a partnership with IPR and Grist, a nonprofit independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future.

    • Elk Rapids high school students are working to cut down on fast fashion in their community — starting with prom.

    • The fashion industry contributes up to 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions, produces millions of tons of waste and consumes billions of tons of water.

    • Experts say such efforts can help raise awareness about the connection between buying habits, fashion and the environment.

    On a Saturday in February, high school senior Kaylee Lemmien sifts through dresses at Tinker Tailor, a small shop in downtown Elk Rapids.

    “I’d call this a mermaid, sequin, light blue gown with a tulle skirt. It’s got a lace-up back, kind of open,” she says. “Very pretty.”

    Tinker Tailor usually alters clothes but on this day, it’s selling prom dresses.

    The dresses are short and long, and come in all sorts of fabrics and adornments — neon pink satin, muted lilac, sequins, zebra stripes, rhinestones.

    The garments have been donated and consigned by people around the region, with the goal of giving them a new life at prom this spring.

    The Eco Club at Elk Rapids High School worked with the store and the volunteer group Green Elk Rapids to coordinate the event, called Sustainable Style. It’s an effort to cut back on fast fashion.

    “Fast fashion is a trend which is driven by newness,” said Shipra Gupta, an associate professor of marketing at the University of Illinois Springfield. “It tends to treat its products like food that spoils quickly.”

    Estimates of the fashion industry’s environmental and climate impacts vary; the United Nations has said the industry creates anywhere from 2% to 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

    The industry also creates up to 20% of the world’s wastewater, and the Columbia Climate School has reported that it consumes around 93 billion metric tons of water annually, while 53 million metric tons of clothing are incinerated or thrown away.

    Fast fashion is especially damaging, because it encourages people to cycle through clothing quickly. And that business model has had serious implications; a 2017 Ellen MacArthur Foundation report found that clothing production had doubled between 2000 and 2015, even as the amount of times an item was worn declined.

    “Fast fashion is a driver for American consumer behavior,” Gupta said.

    Constantly seeing new items in stores can trigger a desire to buy more. Gupta said younger people are particularly susceptible to this, because they’re still forming and exploring their identities.

    One way to shift that mindset is to focus on individual styles.

    “You are more likely to buy or wear something that is true to your identity, true to your style,” she said. “You are more likely to keep it for a longer time and you are less likely to purchase as frequently as if you were a fashion-oriented consumer.”

    Donating clothes isn’t necessarily environmentally friendly. For instance, if the clothes are in poor condition it can contribute to environmental pollution, because those garments often get thrown away.

    In Elk Rapids, students hope that events like Sustainable Style can cut back on consumption locally, providing a responsible place to donate and buy used evening wear.

    “You try really hard to be eco-friendly — don’t use single-use plastic, recycle, compost — everything,” Macaluso said.

    But sometimes there aren’t any options, especially in small towns.

    “Then you kind of have to drive to Grand Rapids, and you have to go to a mall and you have to buy a new dress,” she said. “So I think this just provides another option. Another opportunity to say, ‘Oh, I have a chance here to help the environment a little bit. So I’m going to take it.’”

    In the past, students searched far and wide for dresses, traveling to hubs like Grand Rapids, a two-hour drive south.

    Kaylee Lemmien, who was shopping for dresses and is also a member of the Eco Club, said that along with reducing the need to buy new garments it creates an opportunity to stay closer to home.

    “Not having to go down to Grand Rapids and spend that money on gas and do all of that stuff is really, really nice and freeing,” she said. “This is just such a cool idea.”

    Perhaps most importantly, initiatives like these can help others think about how fashion impacts the environment.

    “I think it’s very meaningful, because it starts to engage consumers, especially the young generation,” said Sheng Lu, an associate professor of fashion and apparel studies at the University of Delaware. Even though this effort is relatively small, it could help people think differently about fashion and the environment, and even inspire other communities to do the same.

    And it has encouraged other community members to get involved.

    “I honestly was pretty nervous coming in here,” said sophomore Addison Looney, who was shopping with her mom. “But there were a lot of great selections… I was pretty indecisive about it. But I picked it out.”

    The dress is a soft lavender with beading in the front. Addison’s mom, Sara, said they were looking forward to the event.

    “Knowing this is just a great opportunity to shop local, and to obviously save money,” she said. “But also just the resale aspect of it — to just kind of keep dresses going, because they’re usually a one-time use.”

    Macaluso, the Eco Club president, said they’ve been able to stoke interest in buying used clothing. The prom event led Tinker Tailor to set up a “Dress Vault” in the store so people can continue consigning, donating and shopping for secondhand items.

    “I think it really just builds off that idea of — hey, these dresses didn’t go bad, they haven’t expired,” she said. “And they can find a new home.”

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    Izzy Ross, Interlochen Public Radio

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  • Killers of the Flower Moon: Does it do right by Native Americans?

    Killers of the Flower Moon: Does it do right by Native Americans?

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    (Image credit: Apple TV+)

    Martin Scorsese’s latest film has been heralded as a big moment for Native American representation on screen – but is it really progress? Indigenous commentator Kate Nelson gives her view.

    A

    As a Native American woman, I admit I was both excited and apprehensive to see Killers of the Flower Moon, Martin Scorsese’s new film about the brutal 1920s murders of the Osage people over their oil-rich Oklahoma reservation lands. I’m not Osage, but I’m also no stranger to the atrocities that Indigenous peoples across Turtle Island have endured, including attempted eradication, forced assimilation, and the purposeful decimation of our traditional ways of life. Even today, the lingering effects of colonialism plague our communities. We die younger, experience inordinate violence, and suffer disproportionate rates of poverty, disease, addiction, and suicide.

    More like this:
    – How the Osage murders were nearly erased from history

    – Why Martin Scorsese fears for the future of cinema

    – The TV universe that has electrified the US

    Adding insult to injury, we’re rarely authentically represented in media. That is, when Native characters are shown at all, which is less than 1% of the time in US TV and film, according to recent studies.

    Killers of the Flower Moon showcases a whole host of Native American talent – but doesn't tell the story from their perspective (Credit: Apple TV+)

    Killers of the Flower Moon showcases a whole host of Native American talent – but doesn’t tell the story from their perspective (Credit: Apple TV+)

    As writer and actor Franklin Sioux Bob, a member of the Oglala Lakota tribe, told me about his experience of depictions of South Dakota’s destitute Pine Ridge Reservation, “Most white directors just want to show the poverty porn.” (His recent film, War Pony, which he co-wrote with fellow tribal member Bill Reddy and directors Riley Keough and Gina Gammell, was a corrective to that.) Put another way, our stories have been told about us rather than by us, often resulting in problematic portrayals that feed into stereotypes and paint us as relics of the past.

    For months, Killers of the Flower Moon has been heralded as the movie that would change all of that – the first feature film to honestly depict Indigenous genocide. Scorsese has been commended for earning the trust of Osage tribal leaders and engaging them to shepherd their horrific history onto the silver screen. As I settled into my cinema seat to take in the three-and-a-half-hour epic, I couldn’t help but wonder: did Scorsese get it right?

    A mixed bag

    The answer to that is complicated. First, it’s an undeniable accomplishment that this movie was made by a major studio with a major player like Scorsese. So too is the fact that the famed filmmaker had the wherewithal to rework the script from its source material, David Grann’s bestselling book Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, to focus less on the FBI investigation and more on the Osage plight. And I can’t overstate how absolutely thrilling it is to see so many Native talents on the big screen, including Lily Gladstone – winning acclaim for her portrayal of Osage survivor Mollie Burkhart, whose family was targeted – but also Tantoo Cardinal, Cara Jade Myers, JaNae Collins, Jillian Dion, Tatanka Means, and many others.

    But doing the story justice in its fullest, richest form would mean centring the Indigenous experience, which the film fails to do. I was relieved to hear Osage language consultant Christopher Cote, who worked on the movie, express this exact sentiment at the Los Angeles premiere. “I really wanted this to be from the perspective of Mollie and what her family experienced, but I think it would take an Osage to do that,” he said. Herein lies the paradox: Native Americans can both be elated that our stories are finally being told yet still wish they were told from our perspective.

    Instead of shining the spotlight on Gladstone’s Mollie, the filmfocuses on her husband (Leonardo DiCaprio) as he schemes alongside his uncle (Robert De Niro) to steal her family’s oil riches. On the face of it, this is not a wholly wrong or unexpected approach, especially considering Scorsese’s back catalogue, with its focus on corrupt men. But it does position the white perpetrators as the protagonists of the plotline while pushing the Osage people to the periphery. The movie also noticeably neglects to mention the harmful federal policies that have oppressed and exploited Indigenous communities, such as the acts that exiled the Osage to Oklahoma in the first place.

    VIDEO: Behind the scenes with Scorsese and his most iconic actors

    Here’s where it gets even more complicated. One could argue that the only way to accurately tell Native stories is to have Native creators tell them. After all, the acclaimed TV series Reservation Dogs, which recently finished its third and final season, proved how powerful that approach can be, with its all-Indigenous team of writers, directors, and regular actors.

    But I’m not naïve to the fact that there’s a sizeable segment of society that’s far more likely to watch Killers of the Flower Moon or even Yellowstone than they are to tune into Rez Dogs. Or the reality that white male directors and showrunners like Scorsese and Yellowstone’s Taylor Sheridan have access to opportunities and resources that many Native creatives sadly don’t. Which leads us to this question: is it better to have Americans – who have largely remained ignorant to Indigenous injustices – see some authentic Native representation, even from a white gaze, rather than none at all?

    The progress needed

    However, Gladstone herself has debunked this false dichotomy. “There’s that double-edged sword,” she told Vulture. “You want to have more Natives writing Native stories; you also want the masters to pay attention to what’s going on. American history is not history without Native history.”

    Wrestling with my thoughts about the film, I sought counsel from trailblazing playwright Larissa FastHorse, a member of the Sicangu Lakota tribe and the first Native woman to produce a play on Broadway. “I believe non-Indigenous creators can help tell Native stories as long as they’re uplifting tribal communities and giving them voice in the process,” she explained to me.

    Recently ended TV series Reservation Dogs benefited from an all-Indigenous cast and creative team (Credit: Alamy/FX)

    Recently ended TV series Reservation Dogs benefited from an all-Indigenous cast and creative team (Credit: Alamy/FX)

    Despite my disappointment about the disproportionate screen time DiCaprio and De Niro receive relative to Gladstone and her Native co-stars, it’s irrefutable that Scorsese has achieved that. “The film lays bare the truth and injustices done to us, while challenging history not to be repeated,” Osage Principal Chief Geoffrey Standing Bear said in a statement. “We honour our ancestors who endured this time by continuing to survive and ensuring our future.”

    In the end, righting all of Hollywood’s historical wrongs is a heavy lift, even for a heavy hitter like Scorsese. And that’s not what he set out to do here, even if it’s the unrealistic expectation many people have unwittingly mapped onto this movie.

    So when it comes to Native representation, is Killers of the Flower Moon perfect? No. Is it progress? Yes. The film meaningfully moves the entertainment industry forward, making a strong statement that it’s no longer acceptable to extract valuable assets from Indigenous communities – whether that be our stories or our natural resources – without our consent and input. Let’s hope this is the first of many feature films produced by and with Indigenous peoples that tell our stories in all their uncensored, uncomfortable, and undeniably complex beauty.

    Killers of the Flower Moon is out now

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  • Why William Friedkin’s undersung masterpiece Sorcerer represents everything Hollywood has lost

    Why William Friedkin’s undersung masterpiece Sorcerer represents everything Hollywood has lost

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    An ambitious, budget-busting adventure-thriller set in a South American oil refinery town and its surrounding mountainous jungle, Sorcerer was intended as a loose remake of Henri-Georges Cluozot’s undisputed 1951 classic Wages of Fear. It was also well-poised to be a gargantuan flop when it was released the same summer weekend as George Lucas’ much more straightforward blockbuster Star Wars.

    But that box office battle belied the spellbinding, strange, existential thriller itself: it was a terse, brilliantly hewn film, made with hard graft and featuring real rainforest exploits, soaked in endless tropical rain and humid sweat. It also had a fatalistic spirit that made it the most seventies of 70s movies (ie there were no requisite narrative resolutions, never mind happy ones.)

    A masterclass in tension

    The tense story – as with Wages of Fear – is of criminals on the lam who go on what may well be a suicide mission to transport a truck full of highly explosive nitroglycerine down a treacherous road.

    The opening prologues of the film take us to New Jersey, where Jackie Scanlon (Roy Scheider, Jaws star and the closest to a big Hollywood name the film had) is involved in the heist of a local church; Paris, where Victor Manzon (Bruno Cremer) is a banker involved in business fraud and on the verge of being ruined; Mexico, where Nilo (Francisco Rabal) is a mysterious hitman, and Jerusalem, where Kassem (Amidou), a terrorist, has blown up a bank. As a result of their misdeeds, all four have ended up in the remote Colombian village of Porvenir, and when there is an explosion at the local  oil refinery and dynamite is needed to quell the continuous fire, the adventure of the story begins.

    With combined funds from both Paramount and Universal Studios, Friedkin – who was essentially given carte blanche after the astronomical box office success of The Exorcist – marched into the jungles of the Dominican Republic, sometimes halting production to literally build roads through the wilderness. Various crew members were bed-ridden with malaria and other tropical maladies, and the unpredictable weather led to costly delays.

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  • Planet of the Bass: How a ridiculous Eurodance parody song became the most addictive song of the summer

    Planet of the Bass: How a ridiculous Eurodance parody song became the most addictive song of the summer

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    Planet of the Bass is the brainchild of Kyle Gordon, a New York-based comedian who has been portraying DJ Crazy Times since his university days. Discussing the character’s backstory with GQ, Gordon said: “I would say he’s of ambiguous Eastern European origin, and I would say he’s a very hyper-sexualised, late-’90s Eurodance DJ and rapper.” Ms Biljana Electronica is also a fictional figure. She is voiced by singer Chrissi Poland, but played in the original TikTok video by actress and influencer Audrey Trullinger. This is a witty flourish, Gotto notes, because it “harks back to Eurodance groups like Black Box and Corona who often relied on models [who didn’t sing on the tracks] for their visuals and promo performances”. Gordon has since doubled down on this dissonance by posting a second Planet of the Bass video in which Mara Olney lip-syncs to Poland’s vocals. In fact, there is now even a third video featuring another lip-syncing star, influencer Sabrina Brier, though this one perhaps runs the risk of overworking the joke. “The OG Biljana Electronica simply set the bar too high,” one fan commented on TikTok.

    This possible misstep aside, Gordon’s parody is also pitch-perfect because it is palpably affectionate. When Danish Eurodance act Aqua commented on his TikTok video, “Wait, is this play about us???” – a reference to the much-memed line from HBO teen drama Euphoria – Gordon replied with high praise, calling their 1997 debut Aquarium “one of the greatest dance albums of all time”. Gordon definitely owes the Danish band a debt: the way Ms Biljana Electronica’s melodious vocals dovetail with DJ Crazy Times’ macho raps echo the dynamics of Aqua members Lene Nystrøm and René Dif. Indeed, Gordon also told GQ he had a “hunch” that Aqua’s signature hit Barbie Girl would enjoy a revival this summer because of Greta Gerwig’s super-hyped Barbie movie, thereby paving the way for his own Eurodance riff. His instincts were spot on: rappers Ice Spice and Nicki Minaj used Barbie Girl as the basis for Barbie World, a hit single from the film’s soundtrack.

    The Eurodance revival boom

    However, Planet of the Bass is also benefiting from a broader renewed appreciation for Eurodance, which has been spearheaded by contemporary pop and dance artists. Earlier this summer, Minaj and singer Kim Petras cracked the Billboard Hot 100 and UK Top 40 with Alone, a pop-rap track that cleverly interpolates Alice Deejay’s Eurodance anthem Better Off Alone. Last autumn, DJ-producer David Guetta and singer Bebe Rexha topped the UK singles chart and climbed to number four in the US with I’m Good (Blue), which samples and interpolates Eiffel 65’s Eurodance classic Blue (Da Ba Dee). These new hits have proved the enduring popularity of a genre that was once dismissed as shallow and disposable. “In the 1990s, Eurodance existed in the shadow of grunge and then Britpop, which were seen by many as ‘proper music’,” notes Gotto. “There has always been snobbery around it.”

    I’m Good (Blue) became a bona fide chart hit after going viral on TikTok – the same trajectory Gordon will be hoping Planet of the Bass achieves when it is released as a single on 15th August. It is surely no accident that Eurodance is finding a home on TikTok. The video-sharing app is particularly popular with Gen Z, an age group that has grown up with multi-genre streaming playlists and less entrenched ideas about what constitutes musical credibility. Whereas Eurodance was generally viewed as inferior to guitar-based rock music in the 1990s, it is now less likely to be perceived as a “guilty pleasure”.

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  • The joy of Ken: Can Barbie’s Ryan Gosling really win an Oscar?

    The joy of Ken: Can Barbie’s Ryan Gosling really win an Oscar?

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    Gosling’s other skill is that even in Ken’s most deluded acts, it’s difficult to truly hate him. He’s ultimately a misguided, slightly pathetic and pitiable character, as he peacocks around, trying to work out who he is after years in Barbie’s shadow, before acknowledging his vulnerability. Gerwig told the LA Times that she was taken by Gosling’s open-heartedness in portraying Ken’s journey: “He was freeing masculinity for everyone on set in this extraordinary way. And these men [on set] loved it. I think they felt released.”

    What makes Gosling’s performance feel so revelatory is that he’s an actor so associated with films of a dark or bleaker nature; brooding, troubled characters like in Drive and A Place Beyond the Pines, or men struggling with addiction on the edge of society as in Blue Valentine and Half Nelson. He can do light entertainment, as he so skilfully showed in rom-coms Crazy Stupid Love and the all-singing, all dancing La La Land, as well as underrated comedy-thriller The Nice Guys. But he’s never been quite this much fun.

    Is comedy given its awards due?

    Given that his turn as Ken in Barbie is as close to perfect as you’d want an out-and-out comedy performance to be, some people are already suggesting that this role could take him to Academy Award glory. Jamie Jirak from ComicBook.com was first out of the gate, suggesting on Twitter last week after an early screening: “Give Ryan Gosling an Oscar nomination, I’m dead serious!”, a sentiment echoed this week by Lucy Ford in British GQ, who affirmed “He should honestly be nominated for an Oscar”.

    Is it fanciful thinking to think he could even go ahead and win? History shows that actors in comedies rarely succeed at the Oscars when pitted against those in emotionally wrought dramas and biopics, the likes of Marisa Tomei in My Cousin Vinny and Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets being exceptions. And of the actors who have won for comic roles, few have given performances quite as absurd, exaggerated and plain silly as Gosling. Then again, given the way Barbenheimer – the box-office battle between Barbie and Christopher Nolan’s nuclear bomb epic Oppenheimer – both released tomorrow – has gripped the world, it might be that Academy Awards voters are keen to see this duel play out once again at the podium, with a host of nominations for both. 

    But while film critic Ellen E Jones thought Gosling “smashed it” as Ken, she doesn’t think this will hold much sway with the Academy. “I don’t fancy Ryan’s chances much at the Oscars,” she tells BBC Culture. “Firstly because, even though we’re in this era of Awards show reform, supposedly in line with social changes in the world more generally, I believe the tedious self-seriousness which surrounds these ceremonies will be the last thing to go… and for that reason a brilliantly hilarious performance like Gosling’s will not be rewarded.” She also makes the point that “the optics of giving a man an award for what is so pointedly a feminist film are a bit off”.

    Certainly though, with Ken, Gosling has cemented himself as one of Hollywood’s most versatile actors. Oscar or no Oscar, he can be assured that, to paraphrase the slogan on his pastel-coloured fleece top in Barbie; he’s more than Ken-ough.

    Barbie is released in cinemas internationally on 21 July

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  • How 2013 film The Congress predicted Hollywood’s current AI crisis

    How 2013 film The Congress predicted Hollywood’s current AI crisis

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    The Congress was partially based on Stanislaw Lem’s 1971 sci-fi novel The Futurological Congress, but the Hollywood AI plot, which takes up roughly the first third of the film, is entirely Folman’s. After Robin is scanned – in a remarkable performance, Wright stands inside a glass globe filled with lights and scanners and goes through emotions from sadness to laughter – the film leaps 20 years ahead and becomes fully animated, with Robin entering a boldly-drawn world of primary colours. The story begins to echo Lem’s vision of a hero who visits a conference where hallucinogenic drugs in the water make him question reality. Here, the animated Robin is set to speak at a conference as a prime example of an AI movie star.

    Even as the film shifts to focus on the broader issue of fantasy vs reality, though, Folman predicts further into Hollywood’s future. Now the animated Green says movies themselves are about to be eliminated, replaced by a chemical that will allow users to experience life as if they were their favourite actors like Robin. The script writers and animators who are creating the very world Robin and Green are in will lose their jobs to AI, he says, reflecting yet another potent, real-life fear.

    The Congress tells us that it was entirely possible to have seen the AI crisis coming. If only both sides on Hollywood’s faultline today had paid more attention to that obscure little film from a decade ago.

    The Congress is available to stream on Peacock, The Roku Channel, Pluto, and Amazon in the US and on Amazon and ITVX in the UK.

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