Obsessions This Week: July 23-29, 2023
This week and every week's theme is 🩷💙 bisexual torment 🩷💙
💃🏼 Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again remains the greatest film of the 21st century.
Barbie and Oppenheimer were sold out in every theater near me, so this past Monday, my friend Julian and I went to see this 2018 classic on a very weird rooftop cinema instead. Real ones know: Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again is the greatest piece of art that Hollywood has ever made. Oh, did you think that honor went to The Godfather Part II? GUESS WHAT, IT IS THE SAME MOVIE. Ol Parker and Richard Curtis together are today’s Francis Ford Coppola! I said what I said!
I first saw Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again! in theaters with my sister, and we immediately brought our mother back to experience it. Cher’s cameo is the funniest thing to ever happen in a movie. We did not stop laughing for days afterward. Only film bros who hate women avoid this movie, and that is a fact.
Some day soon I will get to see Barbenheimer, but for now, I am consoling myself by reading Anne Helen Petersen’s and Fran Hoepfner’s expert takes about the whole cultural moment, both of which I heartily recommend.
I can’t yet speak to Barbie, but Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again is thankfully a movie that delights in women: the bonds between them, their beauty at every age, their choice to have sex and children if and when and how they want to have sex and children. It’s profoundly rare, in our Puritan-inflected media, to have a lead female character who has casual flings for fun three times in one movie and then gets to choose a wanted motherhood from that experience, without facing any punishment for her abandon. Like I always say, romcoms are my favorite form of science fiction.
🏴☠️ Is season two of Our Flag Means Death coming in October?
The now-defunct website Catapult published an entire essay I wrote about how this show changed my worldview last year. As a consequence, my DMs are now a repository for similarly-minded folks to obsess and share gossip (thank you, Camryn). As I said in that piece, “The plot loosely resembles what would have happened if Jack Sparrow’s eyeliner became sentient and joined Muppets Treasure Island. That said, the plot is secondary.” The allure of this HBO Max sitcom is at least, in part, its community of rabid fans (of which I am most certainly a part).
The rumor about season two potentially airing in October came on Twitter via showrunner David Jenkins guesting on a podcast, so treat it with a grain of salt—oh, who am I kidding? Cue up the Fleetwood Mac and bust out the nose juice!
Chances are, I will not stop obsessing over the gay pirates in the near or distant future, so thanks for coming along for the ride.
🦄 Leftist Frank makes me smile.
I first saw their illustrations on a mug in the apartment I’m subletting, and while I haven’t yet bought anything for myself, I’ve been eyeing the orca-centric “Sink the Rich” tank and the “Workers of the World” Care Bears sticker for weeks now. There’s something about these Lisa Frank-inspired socialist graphics that tickle the nineties kid in me.
My stylist (and stylish) friend Niki has convinced me to stop buying fast fashion for environmental reasons, as well as clothing with text on it for fashion reasons, but the me of five years ago would have bought one of these shirts and worn nothing else for a year. I just think they’re neat, and I’d like a memento of this great idea before the artist gets sued.
🥹 My friend’s dog, Bruno, is the Platonic ideal of a dog.
Look at him! He looks like a toy! I have met Bruno, and he is the sweet and charming love-bug you would expect. He is too pure for this world and I am obsessed with him.
🪽 If you follow me anywhere else online, you already know.
Even though I bet a dear friend dinner that Neil Gaiman wouldn’t have the chutzpah, I was wrong (!), and Good Omens’ second season managed to do the thing. It’s hard to watch a show I love commit complicated fan service in the aggressively cruel vein of forerunners like Sherlock and Killing Eve, but I certainly owe Jenna a meal, and perhaps a series of stiff drinks. We live in a time of miracles, babes.
My sweet, smart Oberlin friend Anna Menta wrote about it over at Decider under the appropriate headline, “‘Good Omens 2’ Delivers Exactly What Fans Want — While Still Pissing Them Off.” My take was less nuanced:
🔥 Other media I metabolized this week:
The Friend, a 2018 novel by Sigrid Nunez, has reminded me that getting depressed is how I have a good time. The truth is, friendships are the relationships at the center of my life, and I appreciate when this lifestyle is treated with the attention it deserves. Thanks to my new friend Tracy, herself a writer, for the book recommendation, and to my friend Leah for the link to The Atlantic piece linked above. “It is because a person has a sense of humor that we feel that we can trust them,” the book quotes Milan Kundera as having said (though I could not verify). So true, bestie.
Ted Lasso’s Brett Goldstein and Canadian comic Mae Martin are waging a war against my ovaries by making out on stage for no reason. I haven’t been able to yet score tickets to their shows in L.A. because they sell out THAT FAST. Apparently, everyone else in this city is similarly hypnotized by whatever is going on there.
Several so-called friends recommended the nauseating new Serial podcast The Retrievals, so I listened to the first three episodes. This horror show is about an IVF clinic nurse at Yale who stole fentanyl and gave patients saline solution instead while they had their eggs harvested, and explores the fallout of the painful procedure on the victims. I was in physical discomfort listening to this exploration of women’s pain and how it goes ignored. Hard to put this one under “obsessions this week,” but I can’t stop thinking about it, so it counts.
A friend sent me Idina Menzel’s new bizarre TikTok dancing videos, ostensibly to promote her new song, in which the wickedly talented Adele Dazeem herself bobs stiffly in suburban drag to what everyone on her team really clearly hoped would be a summer anthem. I’m honestly here for it, but I’m not known for my music taste!
Material Girls, the new podcast from the folks at Witch Please (where my favorite sister is a producer), posted their inaugural episode about the ghostwritten memoir Spare. It’s a great materialist critique of a book I could not get through.
I saw Theater Camp (masked!) in a real-life movie theater on Thursday with my friend Sarah and was delighted by an unexpected Amy Sedaris cameo. As Letterboxd reviewer Broadway4me said, the movie itself was “good enough to forgive Ben Platt for Dear Evan Hansen.”
Do you want more of this? Less of this? @ me in the comments, text me, call me, email me, or find me in my studio in L.A. to yell at/with me about anything you like.
You know, when you talk about good TV shows, I always feel dismayed that I hardly ever watch TV anymore. But I know why--it's because it's like cake for me--I think I'll eat one slice, but I'll eat the whole thing, and wonder where the day went. I am still curious about your love of the second Mamma Mia, and your review makes me want to see it again!
Good to keep up with the zeitgeist. Your thoughts on Barbie needed before I can see it.