stevie nicks said to watch ‘storks,’ so i did.
The 73-year-old music icon recently called the 2016 animated film her “answer to depression.” It couldn’t hurt, right?
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Well, I don’t know about you folks but the last (almost) two months since I last wrote in this space (sorry!) have been a doozy. As we stare down the two-year anniversary next month of the official start of the global pandemic, the best days are a struggle and the less said about the worst days the better. And we can’t even have nice things like the once-every-four-years Olympic figure skating competition without it all being majorly overshadowed by a major doping scandal.
And yet, through it all, there are meals to cook and trash to take out. Zoom meetings to lead and performance reviews to deliver. Some days it feels like it’s all downhill after successfully guessing the day’s Wordle (whose new owner The New York Times is apparently, according to some, doing its best to ruin even this tiny burst of dopamine).
So, how are we to carry on? If you ask Stevie Nicks, according to a lengthy interview recently published with Tavi Gevinson in The New Yorker, the key to happiness is a 2016 animated movie called Storks.
According to Nicks, Storks — which stars Andy Samberg as an ambitious package-delivering stork employed by a company that years ago, you may have guessed, deliver babies — is her favorite movie and she’s “watched it six times.” What exactly makes it so great? Well, Nicks told Gevinson:
“You just have to buy this movie and have it on replay at all times. It’s a cartoon, but it’s a massive movie of life and love and sadness and tragedy.”
Now, to be clear, I’m not a huge connoisseur of the animated movie genre. I’ve never seen a full Frozen movie and the only new-release Disney film I’ve watched over the past three years was Soul. But who am I to question the mental health advice of a rock legend?
The other night, my husband and I ordered in and pressed play on the film (which is, as of this date, streaming on Hulu).
As Nicks explained in the interview, the entire film is built around the partnership between a career-obsessed stork (named Junior) and seemingly the only human who works at the package-delivery distribution center (a girl named Tulip). In a series of chaotic events, the two accidentally create a baby, and they set upon a journey to deliver that baby to the family whose son wrote a letter addressed to the factory requesting it.
Along the way, the movie has everything and you’ll want to skip this paragraph if you don’t want to read any “spoilers” for this five-year-old film. You’ve got a rebranding of getting fired as being “liberated.” There’s Kelsey Grammer voicing the villainous stork-CEO who falls to his untimely death. There’s Keegan-Michael Kay and Jordan Peele as a pair of gay wolves who attempt to thwart the baby-delivering mission. And you’ve got Danny Trejo voicing the role of Jasper, a stork who once tried to keep one of the to-be-delivered babies (Tulip) for himself. The central message at the heart of it all? To “find your flock.”
Honestly, the whole movie — executive produced by former Trump Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, as it turns out — was kind of all over the place and I’m not shocked it received a tepid response from critics and audiences alike. But that said it is the perfectly mindless and sentimental movie to stream on a Saturday night while ignoring more zeitgeist-friendly (but incredibly depressing) fare like Euphoria or Station Eleven. Actually, the more I think about it… I think I actually loved it? I can certainly think of worse ways to spend the roughly 83-minute runtime.
I can also absolutely see why Nicks loves the movie. Picturing everyone’s favorite geriatric white witch taking it in with delights reminds me of the time I saw her in concert in December 2016, during her “24 Karat Gold” tour stop at the United Center. Midway through her set, Nicks passionately performed a haunting newer song I was not familiar with. I was brought to tears. And then, Nicks revealed what had inspired her to write the song in 2008, after a seven-year hiatus from recording:
“I saw the second movie of the Twilight saga and I went to the piano and I wrote this song,” she told the audience in Chicago. “When I finished it, I knew my assistant was lurking somewhere and I said, ‘I’m going to make a record now.’ And it changed my life.”
So yes, inspiration can strike in the unlikeliest of places, whether it’s the “tragic beauty” of the love between Bella and Edward or something as simple as the “stupid little walks” we go on for our “stupid mental health,” don’t forget to, as Nicks puts it, “do some fun things. Do something that really makes you happy.” Even if it’s a seriously silly little animated film.
Read: According to The Cut, “a vibe shift is coming.” What exactly does that mean? Well, there are trucker hats and True Religion jeans involved, but it’s also something bigger than that. And while we’re on the topic of New York magazine properties, Vulture also semi-recently published two perfect examples of possibly my favorite genre of internet writing: the low-stakes celebrity investigation. The first — “Did Dakota Johnson Lock People in a Cafe?” — came out on January 26, and the second — an investigation of what (the since-broken up) Aaron Rodgers and Shailene Woodley “agree to disagree on” in their relationship — dropped last month as well.
Watch: I’d be remiss to not spotlight by problematic favorite sport — figure skating — here, and I must say that even with the controversy of the Russian Olympic Committee’s doping and bizarre backstage melodrama captured on camera, the figure skating events in Beijing were incredible to watch. From the excellence of Donovan Carrillo, Mexico’s first Olympic figure skater in 30 years, to the boundary-busting of Timothy LeDuc, the first nonbinary Winter Olympian, there was plenty of history made and accomplishments worth celebrating. One of those moments was the gold medal-winning performance of American Nathan Chen — five quads and all — to the music of Elton John, who congratulated Chen himself.
Eat: I’ve been making a lot of Julia Turshen’s curried lentils over the past few months, and found it to come in very handy when I’m burnt out on takeout options but don’t have the energy to cook something more elaborate. Comprised almost entirely of pantry staples, this dish is both satisfying and simple: Just chop up your shallot (a.k.a. a queer onion), garlic and ginger, toast your spices and you’re almost done. (Another shoutout: Turshen’s debut cookbook, Small Victories, has lots of recipes like this.)
Listen: New Orleans Americana band Hurray for the Riff Raff just released their newest album, Life on Earth, and it’s all I’ve been listening to over the past week. Fronted by Alynda Segarra, the project feels like their most ambitious one yet, and it couldn’t come at a better time. It’s raw, urgent “nature punk” expertly crafted for our dystopian world. Give a listen to “Pierced Arrows” below.