<![CDATA[KATHRYN GREENE

<![CDATA[KATHRYN GREENE - Blog]]>Thu, 10 Sep 2026 05:03:47 -0700Weebly<![CDATA[My Year in Movies: 2018]]>Fri, 11 Jan 2019 08:00:00 GMThttps://www.kathryngreenewrites.com/blog/my-year-in-movies-2018Years can be measured in minutes, strife, cups of coffee, or...movies. Here are all of the films I saw for the first time in 2018.

All the movies I watched for the first time in 2018:

1. Kill Bill Vol. 1 & 2

Pulp Fiction is one of my favorites and my friends and I decided to watch both Kill Bill parts, starting at 2 am. Tarantino's films are so different from everything else, I instantly loved it.

2. Thoroughbreds

After a spa day with my friends, we didn't want the day to end so decided to go see Thoroughbreds, a movie we thought was about cliquey WASPs. Before the movie, I thought, "Why are the only trailers playing before this horror films? Oh no." Five minutes in with no music but sparse dialogue and a creepy occasional plucky sound effect I knew that the movie wasn't what we thought we were seeing.

3. Oceans' 8

Was this as good as the George Clooney Ocean's films? No. But Sandra Bullock is arguably peaking in her career the last 10-15 years and I'm here for it. My friends and I saw this in theaters when it came out.

4. Ingrid Goes West

This dark comedy is probably the best parodies of the Instagram influencer lifestyle. Unhinged girl Ingrid takes the money her mom left her after passing away and moves to California to become best friends with her favorite influencer. It works...until it doesn't.

5. A Simple Favor

Blake Lively is like That Girl in high school that's not necessarily popular just insanely beautiful and looks good in absolutely everything. And her character is supposed to be inexplicably beautiful so you don't even question her. Who else could play this but Lively?

6. A Star is Born

I guess A Star is Born was to me in 2018 was what La La Land was to me in 2017 in that I saw it in theaters more than once. Three to be exact. It wasn't because I was obsessed (that was La La Land) but different people wanted to see it and I wanted to share the experience with them. I did love it a lot though.

7. Scarface

What's to say about Scarface that hasn't been said before? It's a goddamn masterpiece. I watched it for the first time this year and was in awe.

8. Casino

I had no idea what this movie was about. I saw casinos and I saw Scorsese, but god this one was intense. My favorite line was Stone having a breakdown over her marriage. "I never should have married him. He's a Gemini."

9. Risky Business

Everyone knows the couch jumping scene but I was shocked to watch this and find out it's about a high schooler getting involved in a prostitution ring?

10. Crazy Rich Asians

I saw this in theaters in Brooklyn decidedly last-last minute on a Saturday night while my friend and I were having drinks at Esquina. All of our friends had been raving about it, so we happened to look up showtimes, saw one was starting in five minutes, got the bill and ran several blocks to the theater.

11. Hot Summer Nights

Hot Summer Nights has to be the most boring movie involving a drug ring ever made. The barely-existent plot was a bad Timothee Chalamet follow-up to Call Me By Your Name.

12. Leaving Las Vegas

This was one of the most heart-wrenching films I've ever seen, disturbing on levels like Requiem for a Dream. It's the best Cage has ever been and the saddest parts with the little details. Pay attention to what his character eats in the film. He manages an ice chip at a big dinner, just like real late-stage alcoholics.

13. Blue Velvet

By all accounts, I should like this movie. I'm into totally oddball ones like Eyes Wide Shut, but Blue Velvet is without a doubt the weirdest movie I've ever seen and one that seem to drag on for about four hours. I was so committed to seeing this classic that I didn't give up and shut it off, just so I could say I've seen it. But I wish I hadn't.

14. Mamma Mia! and Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again

I hated Mamma Mia! and yet somehow got talked into seeing the sequel in theaters and didn't nearly hate it as much as the first one. Dare I say I actually caught myself singing along and listening to the soundtrack during subway commutes for several weeks after? It's so harmless and summery I couldn't' say no and sometimes you just need things to not be deep.

15. Call Me By Your Name

Nothing stuck with me at the end of CMBYN than the final scene of Elio just staring straight at the camera, crying. My friend that I watched this with, said, "What everyone is missing is that Elio isn't gay. Not at all. He just found someone that he was in love with, that was his person. It didn't matter who he was."

]]><![CDATA[The Ship Has Sailed]]>Mon, 07 May 2018 17:44:35 GMThttps://www.kathryngreenewrites.com/blog/the-ship-has-sailedIn this essay, I write about the idea of having "a place." Why everyone should have one at some point in their 20s and why you'll outgrow it – and that's okay.

The idea of having "a place" is fed to us through our steady and lifelong pop culture diet. Friends has Central Perk. How I Met Your Mother has McLaren's and most conspicuously, Cheers has Cheers.

When I was 18, I thought often about finding "the place" where my friends and I would hang out when got older. It wasn't until four years later, when I found myself out of college and living in Kansas City that I found "the" place of my own. The Ship.

Built in the 1930s, there were times in its history that it operated more as a speakeasy, open irregularly and only to those who knew where to look. Though today it operates on the right side of the law, it is obscured in Kansas City's industrial West Bottoms. Were it not for the flashing neon purple sign (which can still be missed from a bad angle) acting as a welcoming beacon, it might be impossible to find.

The buildings surrounding it are all abandoned, save for the few that come alive around Halloween like a Edgar Allen Poe-themed haunted house. "DIE!" yells a seasonal hand-painted sign on the side of its brick facade. If you bike or run through the area in the daytime, junkyard dogs are notoriously close and might chase you. So I have heard. I – like most people I'm sure – have never seen The Ship in the light of day.

Every uber I ordered to deliver myself to the bar had never heard of it. "The WHAT?" Every driver would say. Followed by "Now where is it?" The GPS, even in 2016 and 2017 would fail, getting you to an intersection that railroad tracks ran through. "You have arrived," the robotic voice would say, but this was only ever the beginning, a prompt for you to hand-direct your driver to its actual location.

The Ship has uneven floorboards, rotgut liquor in its $4 vodka cranberries (that's 24/7 pricing, not happy hour), a shelf of cigarettes lined up for sale behind the bar, and for those who know to ask, a strong supply of frozen painkillers in the back. Everyone congregates on the patio, which has a glowing orange aura, a mixture of heat lamps and the burning ends of everyone's cigarettes. Some people might be social smokers, but there, you're a Ship Smoker, even if you never touch tobacco in any other setting. There's no median patron age, and nothing about it makes much sense other than people are there to have a good time for good time's sake.

When I lived in Kansas City, a trio of us went every week. Sometimes twice. To me, The Ship is a lot of things. It's my early twenties. It's my life in Kansas City for the year and nine months that I lived there. I went there for the last time on New Year's Eve, when 2017 became 2018. And in a way it is where, and in that auld lang syne moment, I said goodbye to that phase of my life forever. I have yet to go back.

After I moved to New York at age 24, going to The Ship when I returned home was still exciting, three and four months out. And then, one time on one trip, it all felt different. Oftentimes when you visit somewhere as a child (a relative's home or museum) you remember it as enormous and exciting. When you visit it when you're older, it is always a letdown. "This is it?" You ask yourself. But the place hasn't changed, just your perspective.

Of the trio of us, I'm in New York, another is in Denver and the other stayed in Kansas City. Now we're all in different phases of our lives and the chances of all three of us being in KC at the same time again are slim. Even if we were, who is to say we would go to The Ship? After all, who are our 26-year-old selves to go back and try to be our 22-year-old selves? The Ship and our Ship Days are better off a ship in a bottle, preserved, corked and left on a shelf – best admired from a distance, stories to be told another day.

And that's just the thing about finding your place, if and when you finally do. Places are just the spaces that help us find our own place in the world, a tangible structure to carry our memories for us, representing a phase in our lives. After all, even Frasier left Boston, trading beers at Cheers for cappuccinos at Cafe Nervosa. You grow up and grow out of one thing and into another and before you know it you've left your own Cheers days behind. And you'll be okay with it, because as we move through life, there will always be a new "place," shared in different company, in different cities.

]]><![CDATA[My Year in Movies: 2017]]>Thu, 04 Jan 2018 08:00:00 GMThttps://www.kathryngreenewrites.com/blog/my-year-in-movies-2017

As of January 4, I've lived in New York for one year. While I could measure my year in friendships, slices of pizza, or the $20,000 I've spent in rent money, movies are perhaps the best measure because when I think about the ones I've seen for the first time this year I remember where I was, who I was with, and the emotions I felt. From a snowy night near Central Park to a flight from Dallas to Kansas City, here are the movies I watched in 2017:

1. La La Land (2016)

I will forever associate La La Land with 2017. Not only did I see it in theaters four times and once in IMAX, I listened to the soundtrack in about every corner and subway station of Manhattan. My friend and I went it saw it after I got a call from my best friend saying "La La Land ruined my entire life." Translation: it was amazing. So we went and saw it that night in Times Square. And we had mixed reactions and didn't leave loving it. So what happened? We were walking home and played the soundtrack on my phones. The music was incredible and we decided to give it a second viewing. And then we loved it.

2. Midnight in Paris (2011)

After going home (to Kansas City) for the first time since moving to New York, I had a connecting flight from Dallas to NYC. Remembering Midnight in Paris was nominated for a lot of Oscars years earlier, I decided to watch it. I'd never seen a Woody Allen movie before this one, and I was surprised by his style. It was more straightforward and less arthouse than I thought it would be. Midnight in Paris deals mainly with the concept of a golden age. Is there one? It's easy to make the past idyllic because you weren't there, but is anything really ever perfect? The answer is an unsurprising no.

3. Cafe Society (2016)

On the same flight with enough time to kill after watching Midnight in Paris to see one more movie, I decided to watch Cafe Society, which I have to say I liked a lot less than Midnight in Paris. Kristen Stewart and Steve Carrell? I found the casting choices odd and the storyline completely predictable but now I've seen two Woody Allen films.

6. Place Beyond the Pines (2012)

On some Sunday night, I saw Place Beyond the Pines was on Netflix and decided to watch it. I have to be honest, 99% of my interest in seeing this was for tattooed Ryan Gosling. SPOILER ALERT his character dies not even halfway through the movie and I liked his character so much I completely lost interest and barely watched the rest of it.

8. Night of the Living Dead (1968)

My roommates and I decided to get Shake Shack to go and spend a night watching horror movies, which kicked off with Night of the Living Dead. We all wanted the main blonde character to get killed off immediately she was so helpless and annoying but damn if it she didn't make it almost the whole way through. I learned that the whole concept of zombies literally was invented by this film and it was nice to see a horror classic. We all screamed at the ending but decided we still liked it.

9. Requiem for a Dream (2000)

Pretty much anything you hear about Requiem for a Dream includes some mention of how the movie puts you off drugs completely or should be required viewing for teenagers. This movie exhausted me and if it was the intention of the director (I'm sure it was) to literally make you feel like you were on drugs by watching it, well then, mission accomplished. I was stressed, I wanted them to get their lives together, I was anxious when they fucked up and yet still invested in them. The most horrifying storyline of all of them (yes in spite of amputation AND prison) was the woman who became addicted to speed and lost her actual mind. I'm pretty sure I watched the credits with my mouth open.

10. Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

I had absolutely no idea what this movie was about just that it was Stanley Kubrick's and starred Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman when they were still married. And I have found others that agree, yes, Eyes Wide Shut is a perfect Christmas movie. I was utterly fascinated by this film and how creepy it was. Probably one of the best parts of watching this movie was reading about all the conspiracies surrounding it. And apparently Stanley Kubrick went to great lengths to recreate New York, but I could immediately tell the setting was not actually NYC due to street signs with random names but I guess most people wouldn't notice that.

11. Ladybird (2017)

I'll never forget the day I saw this movie for the first time. It was snowing heavily outside, the first NYC snow of winter and my friends and I smartly decided to do SantaCon by going to a SantaCon pregame and then going home. A couple peppermint schnapps-hot chocolates later, my roommate and I took the train to Columbus Circle before being kicked off amidst disrupted lines and realizing there was no way for us to get home aside from walking. So we did. We picked up tickets for a 4:10 showing of Lady Bird and went to Cafe Lalo for lunch to kill some time first. When the movie ended, we turned to look at each other and we were both crying. It made me think about my relationship with my parents and my mom, and for both of us, we thought about our own future relationships with our yet-to-exist families. If nothing else, this movie literally made me get my finances in shape, decide to finally save some money and not be a complete idiot with spending because I don't want to have financial instability when trying to raise a family.

12. Three Billboards...Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017)

While I was home for Christmas, my friend at brunch recommended this movie and I probably trust his taste in film more than any other friend of mine. Most of my friends don't really watch movies, and if they do, they don't watch them the same way I do. What can I say about this one except I had no context going in and was on the edge of my seat the entire time. I think this movie was most powerful for me in terms of how small towns operate. I've lived in two tiny southern towns and they can be cult-like in their mentality, a huge theme in Three Billboards.

13. The Only Living Boy in New York

The plot of this movie was so ridiculous, I don't think anyone I've talked to actually enjoyed it, however, the animated opening and the few lines about living in New York were excellent.

Thomas Webb: I don't know man. You've experienced the world. ...
W.F. Gerald: New York is the world.

It is and it's hard to explain it to anyone who doesn't live here. This movie was a completely throwaway but it's always fun to watch movies set in New York and recognize little places along the way.

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