Reading Week opens up doors of possibilities for McGill students: It can lead to a tropical vacation, a time of productivity and self-reflection, or a much needed moment to simply relax and enjoy life’s simple pleasures. Rest assured, The McGill Tribune did a ton of relaxing, which involved catching up on our favourite movies, music, and vlogs. 

Emmymadeinjapan

Brianna Cheng

For the past three years, Reading Week for me has meant returning home to my family and watching movies with my parents, only for my mom to fall asleep 10 minutes in. Though we are (usually) best friends, we often fail to agree on our viewing preferences. But, this year, we sat elbow to elbow every day watching emmymadeinjapan. At 1.85 million subscribers, emmymadeinjapan is a Youtube channel that documents the culinary adventures of Emmy, a home cook from Rhode Island who finds joy in creating or recreating unthinkable recipes or testing widely unknown ingredients. Some of her videos include making a cake out of instant ramen, shaping ice cream into the shape of fried chicken, and creating edible towels. Emmy is hilarious, inventive and heart-warming. But most of all, Emmy’s channel is something my mom and I can enjoy together in my sliver of time away from McGill.  

Beanpole

Joey Caplan

Everyone is talking about Portrait of a Lady on Fire, but the only essential 2019 foreign historical fiction film revolving around the relationship between two women is Beanpole. The film is both an exploration of how WWII devastated the landscape of Russia and a complicated story of obsession, power, and guilt. Its disturbingly explicit take on some of the subject matter involved makes Beanpole a difficult but rewarding experience, which also sums up my Reading Week spent catching up on overdue assignments.

‘Stupid Love’ by Lady Gaga

Jonathan Giammaria

For days the anticipation for Lady Gaga’s new single, “Stupid Love,” built up. At midnight on Feb. 27, the single dropped. It’s an eclectic bop where Gaga’s belts out her pleas for love amidst electronic synth riffs. The next day, Gaga released the accompanying music video. In it, pink Kindness Punks dance it out to impeccable choreography to bring peace to warring, polychromatic desert tribes and restore balance to CHROMATICA. “Stupid Love” is hectic and absurd. It’s the melding of auteurism and pop that Gaga has striven for throughout her entire career. It’s a bizarre fever dream, a return to form for Mother Monster, and I haven’t stopped listening to it since its release. Gaga, as we came to know her in the early 2010’s, is back. 

When Harry Met Sally

Lydie Hua

Having never been to New York City, I felt like I needed to prepare myself mentally for the trip I was to take this Reading Week, and think about what it is I really knew about the fabled metropolis. Most importantly, I knew that this city was where my parents met and where they got married exactly 20 years ago on March 6. This notion brought me back to the classic that is the movie When Harry Met Sally. One of the wittier Rom-Coms of the late 1980s, I found that when rewatching it on the ride there, this movie was still just as good as I remembered. For the rest of the week, I found myself exploring Washington Square Park, and looking for where in the Metropolitan museum, Harry asks Sally on a date, or for the streets Harry runs through at the end of the movie. Much to my disappointment though, the final and best scene of the movie was actually shot in Los Angeles