This is a Newsletter #30
Hi everyone,
Welcome to the newsletter….#30…..the big three zero. three times ten. eleven times four minus fourteen…when you start a newsletter, you’re like….I bet it’ll make it to 30….and guess what, sometimes you’re right. This is one of those times. Also lots of the newsletters weren’t numbered. Anyway. Thank you to our loyal subscribers and also to our disloyal subscribers.
This month, I (Brad….Bradley….you know, that guy) wrote books, movies, and sports. Rachel wrote TV, reality TV, music, and her recs….60% of the work for the same pay ($0). What a despicable operation.
I’ve been reading some crime-ier books this year, trying to, I don’t know, learn about plot or something. Don’t know if I’ve learned anything but I have enjoyed them. First one was Age of Vice by Deepti Kapoor. Set at the turn-of-the-century, it’s about the criminal families trying to hold on to control of rapidly changing cities in India. The book sprawls out into a lot of directions but it’s swirls around a sort of failson Godfather plot. It’s biggest strength lies in its ability to make the gangster characters really, really despicable and still sort of attractive at the same time. This is not like, new, but I felt the opposite pulls especially strongly here.
Next on the list were A Murder of Quality by John le Carre and Blood Grove by Walter Mosley, both good and fun. le Carre’s intro to A Murder of Quality is like “this isn’t that good.” which is funny.
My favorite of the bunch, which is sort of backed into this category, was Dr. No by Percival Everett, an extremely fun and also extremely strange story about a professor who specializes in the concept of Nothing who gets recruited by an aspiring Bond villain. The lingual and narrative tricks involved in unpacking the concept of nothing are the best parts of the book but a close second was Everett’s portrayal of how annoying it would be to be around a Bond villain, staying at all in their weird lairs and dealing with their stupid rules. It is scary and dangerous and life threatening but it’s also very annoying. A really fun dimension.
Like all right-thinking people, I consider the Jordan’s Furniture Sunbrella IMAX theater in Reading, MA to be the holiest site on God’s green earth. Seeing a movie there is an exceptional experience. Before the movie starts, this guy explains all the features of the projecting and speaker system.
And the screen is huge and the sound is loud and it just rules.
So, I was excited to head out on the Sabbath and see Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania. But I wasn’t really excited to see the movie because the last several years of Marvel movies have been really bad and forgettable. And because the execution of all the quantum realm and multiverse stuff has absolutely sucked. And because it really looked, visually, like total dog shit in the commercials.
But we’re sitting at the Jordan’s Furniture Sunbrella IMAX in Reading, MA and Jordan from Jordan’s Furniture has explained the state-of-the-art features of the theater and so lets try and have a good time. They show the trailer for Creed III and Jonathan Majors is leaning on a Rolls Royce and doing pull-ups and saying he’s “coming back for everything.” And Jonathan Majors is about to be in Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania and he is such a magnetic actor and I can get excited about that. I like Paul Rudd. I like Michael Douglas. I like Michelle Pfeiffer. I like Kathryn Newton. Evangeline Lilly is a bad person and a terrible actress but maybe she won’t be in it that much. I like comic books and this seems like it has the potential to be very comic book-y in a way that these big blockbuster comic book movies sometimes aren’t. So let’s have a good time.
But then, well, the movie starts. The thing, basically from minute one, just fucking sucks. The movie starts by spitting in your face, revealing what seemed like b-roll of the San Francisco skyline to be an image on the side of a bus. The only exterior shots that take place in “San Francisco” are literally on one street. But I am sure the cast and crew had several great days in some of Atlanta’s finest warehouses.
There’s just not that much to say. It is the worst looking movie I have ever seen. Just no attention at all paid to light or texture or anything else. The close-ups look like the actor has a fake zoom background. The script is terrible and disjointed and nonsensical and unconvincing. People do things that don’t make any sense. Huge dramatic moments are entirely built on people walking too slowly for no reason. Jokes are undercut immediately by hugely serious follow-ups that cut off all oxygen. Long explanatory passages end with a character doing the opposite thing for no discernible reason. A full 50% of the dialogue is some going “wait, what???” The other 50% makes you mutter “shut the fuck up” under your breathe.
The film is utterly incoherent, but it is committed wholeheartedly to one thing: setting its actors up to fail at all costs. Despite dozens of movies primarily built on actors acting against nothing in an empty environment, Feige and co. seems worse than ever at helping them succeed. Every star and several supporting players flail hopelessly trying to deliver serious lines with any sort of force or feeling. When they do have a chance to succeed, the scenes are edited to shreds so you couldn’t possibly tell anyway.
It is easy to handwave this as just like, well it’s the MCU and those movies aren’t good. And that is increasingly true. I am conscious of stealing hater-valor and so to restate my overall view, I really liked, as a group, the first few chunks of Marvel movies. I like comic books and I like blockbusters and up until Infinity War I was having a pretty good time! But they have, overall, gotten much worse. So, like I said, easy to handwave.
But Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania is worse than that. It’s just a mess, a Donald-Trump-Diet-Coke filmmaking ethos: "it’s okay, they’ll still keep drinking this garbage.”
I, Rachel, am taking this section over for this month and perhaps forever! This is mostly because Brad keeps saying passionately at parties and on Twitter and to me in the house that “all TV is terrible and movies are always better, making TV is for losers.” He started a draft for this section but literally couldn’t muster the energy to finish it:
One problem with doing a show that is in large part an homage to another show is that the other show is often better and the other show is also often available to watch.
This was going to be about the show Poker Face, and thank god he gave up this section, because he is wrong. Brad and I are HUGE Columbo-heads now, stream Columbo on Peacock, but I am also a big fan of Poker Face and don’t think they need to be at odds. Columbo is the world’s greatest detective show, and Poker Face is a Columbo homage where Natasha Lyonne travels America and solves a different crime every episode. If that sounds interesting at all to you, I think you will love it.
I got a lot of ads in a row one day for Extraordinary on Hulu, so I thought, okay sure. But because I don’t watch much on my phone with sound, when we turned on the first episode, surprise! It’s a British show. Fun extra element there, and I think it’s much better and edgier than it would have been if a U.S. company made the same show. (Although, we did make Powerless, a similar concept, which I loved and was so sad to immediately lose, so what do I know.) Extraordinary is about a young Irish woman living in London who is in the very small minority of people who didn’t develop a superpower on or shortly after their 18th birthday. We follow her and her superpowered friends and family and hookups around town. It is really quick and very funny and we watched it all in a day and I absolutely loved it. Already renewed for season two, can’t wait.
Another show we really liked was unfortunately already canceled, but if you want to go watch one season of a good sitcom, stream Reboot on Hulu, starring a fave of mine, Rachel Bloom. (As many of you know, other Rachels are my natural enemy, so this is a meaningful recommendation.) Newsletter subscriber Myles came to our Halloween party alone (yikes, no friends much?), and every time I passed by him in our kitchen, he was pitching a different group of strangers on the show. If more of us were like Myles, maybe this wouldn’t have been canceled.
We’re also watching The Last of Us, but tbh a lot of my motivation is just knowing what y’all are talking about. I was a Walking Dead girl back in the day, and I feel some loyalty to that, zombie-wise. But it’s fine! Better than Yellowjackets, the last buzzy thing we felt compelled to watch, which we could not make it more than one episode into. (Brad said this at a party last summer and was called a misogynist lol — excuse me, I have trained my husband to be a misandrist!!)
We’re also rewatching The Mindy Project, and it’s funnier than I remembered, and I already liked it!
A show that had a lot of promise for me was Peacock’s The Traitors, which is a “guess who’s working against the group” game with half regular people and half reality TV stars. It was unfortunately boring and not good. I have heard the UK one is better. I have heard of people liking the Peacock one, and to those people I say: there is so much more and better competition TV out there for you.
A favorite reality show of mine and Brad’s has been Are You The One, a dating competition show previously on MTV, with a new season now streaming on Paramount+. The premise is that everyone in the group has one predetermined “perfect match” based on their personality/goals/life/whatever, and every week, the group has the opportunity to pair up and see how many pairs are matches (but not WHO those pairs are) in hopes of getting 100% right and winning a bunch of money. They get like 10 tries, and either the whole group wins or no one wins. They try their best to cast dummies and don’t let them have pens/paper to try to avoid anyone figuring out the correct pairs with logic over love. This streaming season, the show has a much more…Netflix-y vibe? It’s international instead of mostly American (so much for perfect matches; these people are not going to stay together across oceans!!), it feels glossier and more influencer-y than usual, and the cast seems older and even moreso interested in being famous over ~connection~, which makes the drama seem both sadder and more manufactured. So far I’m not impressed. There’s also a new host, and I was very attached to the old host. Sad.
The Challenge just concluded a 3-hour finale! It was a good season. The premise was “Ride or Dies,” so everyone was in pairs with their alleged ride-or-die partner — however, at least two of the men brought women that they’d met truly like…once or twice. Get female friends, Fessy and Johnny!! Actually, Fessy, please don’t subject a woman to your personality, I can’t stand you. There was a rookie this season from Love Island U.S. (Olivia), and I wasn’t a fan of hers when she was on Love Island, but I am a BIG FAN now. She’s so cool and tough. In the final, she accidentally sling-shotted a golf ball directly into her skull at like 100 mph, breaking her nose and cracking her face and skull in four other places. I don’t want to say she “took it like a champ” because it was due to a reckless lack of safety precaution by the production team that could have led to her death (doctors said if it had hit her in the eye instead of the nose, it would have gone straight through her brain and killed her), but omg this girl is very athletic and very tough. I hope she is on many more seasons.
“You betraaayed me,” - Olivia Rodrigo’s traitor, which is about me after I listened to Sabrina Carpenter’s new album straight through half a dozen times in a week.
As always, “new album” here means “album that came out at least six months before the distribution of this newsletter.” Sabrina Carpenter’s “emails I can’t send” was released in July 2022, but I listened to it for the first time in December.
If you managed to miss the greatest Disney love triangle since Miley Cyrus/Selena Gomez/Nick Jonas, Olivia Rodrigo smashed onto the scene with her song driver’s license in 2021, which went as viral as a song can go and prompted all her new fans to ask, “Who is being discussed in this heartbreaking song?” and conclude that it was Olivia’s rumored ex-boyfriend Joshua Bassett and his rumored new girlfriend Sabrina Carpenter. Olivia then released the breakup album of the decade, featuring many references to an ex and his new girl. This…did not go great online for Joshua and Sabrina. He responded with a terrible song called “Lie Lie Lie,” and she responded with a meh song called “Skin,” as in “don’t get under my skin.” I surveyed the offerings and emerged happily Team Olivia.
Now — the scene of the crime: I was listening to music on Spotify, and when my queue ran out of songs, Spotify played “Read Your Mind” by Sabrina Carpenter, and I thought…this is interesting. This is fun. I was interested enough — and had recently been seeing a lot of TikTok’s from Sabrina Carpenter’s tour — that I thought, okay, let’s do this, and listened to the album.
I love it! I think it’s really fun pop with nice lyrics and some very catchy tunes! My favorites are:
Read Your Mind
bet u wanna
Nonsense
Fast Times
Bad for Business
Honorable mention to all the other songs, no skips in my opinion! My favorite lyric is from “how many things,” where she says about a former lover she can’t stop thinking about “You used a fork once / turns out forks are fucking everywhere.” She takes another tab at addressing the Olivia/Joshua drama on “because i liked a boy,” which is a big improvement on “Skin” and one of Brad’s favorites off the album.
And yeah, half the songs on the album are lowercase and half are camel case. I went on Reddit specifically to try to find out why and the potential answers were limited and underwhelming. I expect this album to dominate my 2023 Spotify Wrapped; I have listened to it an unbelievable amount of times.
I am and have always been a “get yourself a little treat” person. If there is a pastry for sale, I will most likely be purchasing it. I sometimes find myself with a light assortment of treats in the house — a croissant and a scone, a few cookies, a half dozen bagels, a mini loaf of banana bread (not all at once!!). These things would typically sit in a brown bag on our counter or in our fridge, and occasionally, the out-of-sight-ness of of it all would lead to the treat being FORGOTTEN! This just wouldn’t do.
So I bought a cake stand! Was I in part just looking for a reason to buy something from Estelle Colored Glass? Yes. I bought a beautiful green glass cake stand, and now all of the house treats go directly into the stand for display and eventual consumption. I find this both absolutely delightful and practical. Empty, it sparks joy. Full, it sparks more joy. I cannot recommend this enough.
What do I want? As a sports fan, what do I want? Last season, the Chicago Bulls were a thrill and a half. DeMar DeRozan was hitting jumpers with twelve hands in his face, jumpers with no time left on the clock, jumpers while he was sleeping. Zach Lavine was one of the most efficient shooters in the league. Lonzo Ball was the second best quarterback in the world behind Patrick Mahomes. The team was first in the East for a long time. It was obvious that this was not real. They were not, obviously, the best team in the East. They were not going to win the East, much less the championship. This was fine because it fucking ruled watching DeRozan hit a shot that filled the aisles of Gainbridge Fieldhouse with gallons of tears.
This year, things are different. They feel more different than they are, but things are still different. Lonzo Ball has a knee injury that has kept him out for a long time and may keep him out forever. Zach Lavine seems to have spent the first part of the season recovering from offseason knee surgery. Nikola Vucevic sometimes looks like an unstoppable worldbeater and sometimes looks like a black hole. Some young guys are playing too much and other young guys not enough and none of them seem to really be getting better. Former Bull Lauri Markkanen is an all-star in Utah. The whole thing is just a bummer and sucks.
Last season was so refreshing and cool because the team had a somewhat prolonged period of tanking irrelevance. Prior to that, I had wanted them to tank. They were stuck in the NBA middleground, not good enough to matter, not bad enough to improve in the draft. The tank sucked but more than that, it took too long and netted to little. So, last year was great! But now, well, it’s not great. The team isn’t really any fun and they certainly aren’t going to win anything. This group, as currently constituted, might not even make the playoffs. But blowing it up, at least theoretically, is such a depressing prospect. That just happened and it was not fun!
Elsewhere in Chicago, the Cubs and Bears are both kinda maybe sorta playing footsie with turning the corner. The Sky had one of the worst offseasons any team has ever had (I am not too close to it, I am very objective! They lost Candace Parker (a top-ten-all-time player) and Courtney Vandersloot (her entire 12-year WNBA career had been with the Sky, currently 3rd all-time in career assists, has the top five best APG seasons and is the career APG leader) in free agency!!!).