ISSUE #135
BEAM FROM THE BOOTH | GRAND RAPIDS FILM SOCIETY
[EDITED BY: SPENCER EVERHART & GRIFFIN SHERIDAN]
Welcome back to BEAM FROM THE BOOTH, the official newsletter of the GRAND RAPIDS FILM SOCIETY!
TOMORROW NIGHT (3/26) at 7:00pm, our ARTIST SHOWCASE series returns with our event ATOMIC CINEMA WITH MATTHEW PAUL EVERITT. Join us for an evening with Everitt and Paris-based literary journal Souvenir Magazine’s Editor-in-Chief Kyle Berlin to discuss Matthew’s article, “Atomic Cinema: How the Magic of Film Led to the Making of the Bomb.”
Speaking of our own Matt Everitt, he is also featured in this issue with a very pressing matter. Find that, as well as our final video report for the 2026 awards season, below!
AWARDS SEASON 2026
VIDEO: OSCARS RECAP & BALLOT RESULTS
[BY: ANNA DAVIS & KYLE MACCIOMEI]
Our final Oscar Report of the 98th Academy Awards is here! Find out the results of our GRFS community Oscar Ballots alongside award ceremony reflections in the video above.
If you’d like to nominate someone else in the community for a future spotlight, please fill out this form.
KING JULIEN’S MARRIAGE STORY
(AND THE ABILITY TO FIND YOURSELF UNREASONABLY PLEASED)
[BY: MATTHEW PAUL EVERITT]
I love how well Noah Baumbach can write a devastating break-up scene between two lovers.
Her, a performer who wanted to follow the opportunities that would grow her craft and career. Him, an egotistical New Yorker who refused to make it work anywhere else. Mocking barbs thrown with abandon, targeting the things they used to love about each other. He storms out, yelling “It’s obvious I’m just an emotional whoopee cushion, for you to sit on!” And with those words, the fiery romance between King Julien and Sonya the Circus Bear reaches its bitter conclusion.
It’s been speculated that Noah Baumbach took the job of re-writing Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted in 2010 to pay for his divorce from Jennifer Jason Leigh. He’d reflect on that stage of his life more publicly in his 2019 film Marriage Story, but the fallout first hit the screen with Madagascar 3 in the doomed love affair between King Julien and Sonya.
From love at first sight...to the strengthened dedication to one another...to its final demise, Baumbach uses his typically sharp understanding of relational dynamics and...
Shit. I’m doing it again. My habit is to breakdown the characters, the subtext, so on and so on (which this film does in fact do really well). But to go high-brow is to sterilize the magic with minute detail and reason. The more I try to describe why scenes of a megalomaniacal lemur and a circus bear falling in love might be the funniest thing I’ve ever seen, the more I question my own sanity.
But damnit, I must try: the best scene in the movie plays out with the clarity and simplicity of a silent film. Sonya breaks her beloved tricycle outside the Vatican. King Julien wants to ease her pain and reveals that at his earlier audience with the Pope, he had smooched his ring right off his finger and is now in possession of a Papal ring (?!).
That would have been enough to delight me for a lifetime, but Baumbach dials it up ever further. King Julien and Sonya walk down the block to the Ducati shop, where King Julien simps so hard he trades the ring for a new Ducati for Sonya. They haul ass out of there, popping wheelies down the Roman streets, mere moments before the police show up to catch the shop owner holding the stolen ring.
Did I need to know M3 was written by Noah Baumbach to let myself love it with such abandon? Unfortunately, yes. It has taken me a long time to acknowledge that my love of Tarkovksy, Bresson, and Tarr does not preclude my unreasonable desire to move it, move it.
That’s why I’m glad this piece is coming out during our March Madness competition. I’ve noticed some comments on the GRFS Discord about including certain movies, implying some films are more worthy of being screened in a theater than others, and — even worse — denigrating other peoples taste for just wanting to see certain movies on the big screen.
Roger Ebert addressed the issue in his review of The Mummy back in 1999, and did it with enough clarity and simplicity it’s easy to see why he won the Pulitzer Prize when he was 32: “There is within me an unslaked hunger for preposterous adventure movies...The Mummy is a movie like that. There is hardly a thing I can say in its favor, except that I was cheered by nearly every minute of it. I cannot argue for the script, the direction, the acting or even the mummy, but I can say that I was not bored and sometimes I was unreasonably pleased. There is a little immaturity stuck away in the crannies of even the most judicious of us, and we should treasure it.” (emphasis added)
We appreciate you taking the time to read this installment of BEAM and truly hope you’ll continue to do so. Be sure to subscribe to get a new issue in your inbox every week.
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Look for ISSUE #136 in your inbox NEXT WEEK!
Until then, friends...
