June, Consumed
The Bear, The Other Two, Asteroid City, Books... and more....
A beautiful thing about no longer being in college (I’M NO LONGER IN COLLEGE!!!) is suddenly I have time to consume some media I want to consume every single day! It’s beautiful, and magical, and I realize I’ve been starved, and now I’ve been devouring. When I was young, and would devour, I used to make video reviews of everything I read and watched on youtube– I want to do that same thing now, but obviously very different. Writing about all of them would be too daunting, so here are just some of the things of note that I consumed in June.
SPOILERS FOR ALL… but like not really.
THE OTHER TWO (HBO) (I won’t call it MAX, yet)
I knew this show would change me during the pilot, when a character says she broke up with her ex because he was always dabbing, and 10 minutes later he’s introduced by dabbing. Perfectly stupid. I binged the first two seasons with an insatiable hunger. I texted every person I knew about it. My co-workers, who do not watch the show, know all the main character’s names, and my favorite bits they do. My family stans ChaseDreams.
So the recent news about HR complaints from the show runners wasn’t exactly good news, for anyone, but especially for ME the CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE!! But honestly, season three already wasn’t getting me out of my seat the way the first two did. The early show was incredibly sharp with its comedy– so many jokes felt fresh and new, but also grounded in real cultural observation that can be so, so hard to get right in comedy. Wait just a second too long, make an observation just a bit to simple, and the joke is immediately dated and cheap. The long gap in production (due to covid) really slowed the show down, and it’s attempts to catch up on the past few years of culture fell flat. All of covid production should’ve been covered in a 12 second cut away gag– especially since covid procedure has become so uncommon in most spaces, that I don’t believe a TV special would even be testing its guests anymore (which is a major plot device for episode 8). An episode dedicated to weirdo billionaires felt like a mediocre tweet about Elon Musk stretched, painfully, into a 15 minute B plot. They do a long, barely funny musical number (and reprise) just cuz… they wanted to do the SNL Diner Lobster bit?
The writers also got a bit too self indulgent in their references– an ENTIRE episode dedicated to a Pleasantville parody? A take on The Truman Show? A borderline painful, seemingly never ending gag of Cary’s boyfriend always method acting so they can make fun of every type of gay movie? It’s not that I hate references across the board (Cary’s Call Me By Your Name episode closer in season 2 is a series highlight)– it’s just that I can only take so much. Especially when it feels like there isn’t an underlying joke– we’re just doing the gray makeup scene from Pleasantville again for the fun of it, I guess.
Just a few days ago, it was promptly dropped online that there wouldn’t be a fourth season. Based on the trajectory the show was on, that may be a good thing– but they did manage deliver on an okay-ish final episode. It still hangs open, so many plot doors left awkwardly wide for another season. Very little true, full conclusion for the show and the characters as a whole. Could be worse– could be a LOT better too. But the best thing would actually have been if the creators didn’t create a toxic work place!
The Other Two, you are my beautiful, messy, summer love affair. I will never, ever forget the good times– they were “My Brother’s Gay” by ChaseDreams. -XX
REALITY (2023)
I think this would’ve been great in theaters. On my tiny laptop I couldn’t feel the suspense. Some fundamental piece was missing, something about who Reality was and why she ticked. It’s also very, very hard to make real dialogue sound good when you’re acting– there’s a reason that dialogue usually isn’t written with the intention of being totally “natural”. People talk weird!! The actors did a great job here, but it still stuck in a couple places. Decent overall though. The pink screen thing was so corny I would’ve turned the movie off there if I wasn’t so close to the end.
THE BEAR (FX), SEASON 2
Somehow, everyone has been convinced this is prestige dramedy. By those standards, it sucks. It’s melodramatic, cliche, and every other joke is eye-rollingly unoriginal. But by the standards I choose to watch it (elevated soap opera) it rocks! The actors all kill with their stupid little monologues. The romantic tension is nail-biting (unless it’s between Carmy and Claire, the most Nice Woman ever put to screen). The visual style, if extremely predictable, is nice– I like an extreme close up with a bokeh background as much as the next guy. The sad moments are sad, and quiet moments (like Marcus putting lotion on his mother’s hands in the opening scene, or Tina singing at a karaoke bar) are beautiful. I, like everyone else, have a crazy crush on Ayo Edibiri. I also want Carm and Sydney to kiss with a kind of wild fervor I haven’t experienced since early high school. There is a lot of good in this show, and there is also a lot of meh. If I don’t think about how it’s an Emmy contender, I do fine.
This tweet kinda sums it up for me. I will obviously be watching season 3, but I won’t be staying up dreaming about it.
ARE YOU THERE GOD? IT’S ME, MARGARET. (2023)
One of my favorite books as a child, because I am exactly like everyone else. Slightly idealized in a way that makes the striking moments almost scary, like horror, like real, bad, memories of childhood. Incredibly sweet and real, and I love the inclusion of more of the mother’s (and even a sliver of the grandmother’s) perspective. Rachel McAdams is obviously absolutely killing it, providing a new It Mom for cool expecting parents to put on their pinterest boards for years to come, but all the child actors also really hold their own– especially Elle Graham, who plays Nancy with an admiral amount of understanding and nuance. She is both genuinely mean and annoying, and genuinely sympathetic and understandable. I always found that really interesting as a kid, and I love that it doesn’t get lost in this adaptation. The exploration of religion is as relevant as ever, even if I always have thought that Margaret is, in the ways that matter, Jewish.
THE IDOL (HBO)
Yeah, yeah, we’re all on twitter, we’ve all seen the memes about how Abel is such a bad actor that the fact he was allowed to star in HBO’s “new hit” should be a career ender for everyone who supported it. It’s “borderline pornographic” and “violent” and “Lily Rose Depp can’t act”. Some of these things are true-ish, some of them are blatantly wrong (Lily Rose Depp is the closest thing the show has to a saving grace, truly elevating the good moments and managing her best with the bad). The sex is cringe in a way that’s actually so intense I think in some moments it must be intentional? That Levinson is trying to break some tension by pointing out how stupid dirty talk sounds– but I also know that isn’t the case. It’s a huge, massive failure, which is ironic since it’s a show about a bunch of people trying to avoid financial ruin by creating squeamishly sexual and objectifying pieces of art via Jocelyn (Depp).
So all of that is stupid, but what’s been really bothering me the most is that it’s shot on film. Which, duh. Anything that’s anything has the classic, artistic haze of 35mm. But The Idol feels like one of the few things shot on film that would benefit from being shot digitally– it’s a show about the digital world, a type of celebrity that only became fully formed in the public consciousness in the past few decades. The aesthetic is confused and muddled all around– Jocelyn and Tedros wear modern clothes, live in sleek celebrity homes, surround themselves with distinctly 21st century entourages. But then they drive through LA in a red vintage car, play at the grand piano placed awkwardly in the middle of Jocelyn’s living room, and return to sitting in front of screens… bathed in that specific blue-ish white of a computer.
I guess when so much of the selling point of this show is the aesthetic, it bugs me when it feels so unintentionally off. But the show sucks, we all know it, it’s dead in the water. I doubt the finale is going to pull a 180 and change everyone’s minds, so I’m not even waiting on it to write this. On to the next!
BAD WAITRESS by BECCA SCHUH
I discovered this essay on twitter the day after starting my food service job (again). Wait, LJ, you’re working a food service job? Why didn’t you mention it when talking about The Bear? I’ll tell you why, because it’s nothing like The Bear– it’s stressful, sure, but with none of the “work family” or “noble service” aspects. Maybe that does truly exist in high end fine dining, I don’t care, but it sure as hell doesn’t in my experience and I know it doesn’t in most other people’s experiences too.
I have my fair share of needing to try to romanticize the work in order to power through it, but sometimes it feels condescending– one can only watch Waitress (2007) so many times. And Schuh’s writing is anything but condescending. This essay feels real, and prophetic, and terrifying, and comforting. It feels like seeing my present and my future, and it’s glorious and painful and I’m obsessed with it. I think about it almost every shift– specifically about how, not only physically and emotionally demanding food service is, but how inherently embarrassing it is. Embarrassment seems to be a part of most work (or maybe I’m a person who gets embarrassed too easily) but there is something about a job where it’s relatively frequent to be yelled at over the temperature of a sandwich, either by your customer or your boss, that puts an especially tough stone in one’s throat.
Schuh is cynical, but honest, and slices her way through years of work and memories and mishaps and mistreatment with a hot knife. I’ve read it three times. You should too!!
THE NEW ME by HALLE BUTLER
I started this book without knowing what it was about– it’s about the horrors of entry level corporate jobs. It was amazing to read while sending out applications for entry level corporate jobs. I do love a “Woman Rotting” novel, which this certainly is, even if it’s pretty middle of the road. Reading many negative reviews that it’s just a girl whining actually made me like it better– let the girl whine, goddamn it! Don’t you know she’s facing the inescapable horror of capitalism and the death of youth? 3 stars.
ASTEROID CITY (2023)
Guys… it’s true… Moonrise Kingdom was the movie that made me want to make movies. I LOVE Wes, and I will never apologize, and I’m really glad that a.) he’s over a little hiccup (Isle of Dogs, cough cough) and b.) we as a culture are on his side again– reducing his films to hollow indie twee-ness was never the correct take. This is really playing to his strengths, just beautiful to look at, and about the kind of people that I believe talk in his signature cadence (science nerds, army people, sad artists). It’s also asking some bigger questions than Moonrise Kingdom and his other early work, about the world, and art’s place in it, and artists’ places in art.
I appreciate the fact that he’s making the thinkers over the feelers now, and I’m still obsessed on many levels (especially the play. I LOOOOVE plays guys) but I don’t know if I’ll ever love something like this the way I love the gut-punchers. Maybe when I’m older, and I’m more of a thinker than a feeler, I’ll get it. Will I ever become a thinker over a feeler? We’ll see…
That being said, I still felt quite a bit in this one. Especially about a certain little guy… you’ll know the one.
PAST LIVES (2023)
Stop the presses!!! I enjoyed a slow meditative drama about love and what we mean to each other!!! Tender and beautiful and heartbreaking and faith-restoring. Managed to put into to words my philosophy on love and life in a way that I didn’t even fully realize was my philosophy before. Greta Lee is both immensely talented and distractingly beautiful. Despite a few hiccups (it’s a directorial debut, come on– of course it’s going to cut back to them standing the same way as kids as they are as adults) I was absolutely sold, stomach tight and heart beating along side the characters through the whole thing. My mom and I turned to each other at the end and both started crying at the exact same moment. I love when playwrights make movies that are basically plays– they get what stories are all about.
THE FRIEND by SIGRID NUNEZ
I started reading this book in April, and worked through it as slowly as possible– both because it’s incredibly, bone-hurtingly sad, and because it’s beautiful and rich and each page can be read over again and again and more good stuff can be gleaned from it. It’s about grief and love and dogs, but most of all it’s about storytelling, and how and why to tell stories– specifically in the form of novels. Everything about it felt very lived in, which I can only assume is due to a lot of drawing from life– but that feels cheap and rude to say about Nunez, who’s pen is clearly sharp enough that she can create something real and heartbreaking and heartfelt without needing to draw from her own experience. I finally finished it on my phone, about a hundred feet from the Eiffel Tower, and looked up around at all the people near me, and felt very sad and hopeful and alive. Just as all good books should make one feel.
THE INSTRUMENTALIST by ZADIE SMITH
This is an article in the New York Review of Books, a thing I absolutely never read, so I had a free article, which meant I could read this! Yippee! If you also have a free article, and have also seen Tar (I can’t figure out how to get the accent above the a on my computer, and I refuse to google it rn), I highly suggest reading it. This came out several months ago, but recently made the rounds again on twitter. I read it at New Haven Union Station while waiting for a connection, and was so engrossed I almost missed my train.
Tar is a tough nut of a movie, one that I like partially because I left the theater feeling like I only half understood it. There are seemingly infinite ways to pick it apart, a text so rich and dense and complicated in a way that almost begs for video essays, and good old written essays like this one. I’d seen several takes on Tar being about time and aging (my favorite being this video essay from the wonderful Ms. Fish) but never laid out so bare in a generational context. Smith’s analysis of the famous Bach fight, and her suggestion for how the two generations could’ve come together through it, is a bit that I still think about frequently, even a couple weeks later.
It’s an honest, but gentle look at a very tough movie dealing with a very tough problem, that feels especially special in a time that most movie criticism I see online is so starkly black and white, good or bad– I’ve seen so many “takes” on twitter that Tar, specifically, is Morally Bad or Objectively Good. Both of these are boring things to say, and I want to end the conversation the second I read them– but Smith makes me want to keep talking.