10 Gut Reactions to the Harry Styles FanFic Movie
Plus 6 takeaways from the 'Dance Moms' Reunion Special
10 Gut Reactions to the Harry Styles FanFic Movie The Idea of You
If I knew 12 years ago that a vigorous Wattpad presence would be the ticket to fame and fortune, I would have been like, “fuck jazz band” and spent all my extracurricular hours writing smut about the will-they-won’t-they couple from Bones.
But just because something makes a lot of money, doesn’t mean it’s good. I was fully planning to hate-watch Anne Hathaway’s new straight-to-streaming film The Idea of You, a rom-com based on a book based on a horny fanfic fantasy about a mom who ends up dating Harry Styles. But to my surprise and delight, it ended up being… kind of a bop?
I guess when you have Bezos money to pay for an Oscar-winner, you can elevate your mommy porn to new heights. (I’ll keep that in mind when I try to find a streamer for my debut novel, To The Bone(r).) Here are 10 deep, insightful thoughts and probing, unanswered questions from the cinematic experience that is The Idea of You:
1. Solo camping is never a plan of sound mind, and it’s not going to be fun!
You can’t even get yourself to thumb through “Camping For Dummies” for 15 minutes, and you think you’re going to magically transform into Reese Witherspoon in Wild?
BFFR. You’re gonna spend 75 minutes trying to pitch a tent, have a sad PB&J for dinner while you ruminate about your divorce, and endure a sleepless night where you spaz at every twig snap worried that Hannibal Lecter and his bear best friend have come to make a s’more out of your face.
2. I need to know Daniel and Eva’s pickleball stats.
Do they rank in the state of California? Does Daniel make his entire firm attend summer pickleball retreats so he can show off his dink shot? Is their post-pickle sex fueled by their electricity on the court, or do they suffer through a painfully silent car ride home after losing to Bill and Marsha?
3. Solène’s trespassing meet-cute is pretty privilege at its most egregious.
A 10 knocks on a pop star’s trailer bathroom door and gets offered a kombucha and a quickie. A 7 knocks on a pop star’s trailer bathroom door and is arrested for stalking and put on a no-fly list.
4. Solène def watched those TikToks where people act out pretending not to know their celebrity crush.
Timo-tay Chall-o-may?? No, I don’t think we’ve met before. You’re an actor? Would I have seen any of the shows you’ve been in?
5. Is Solène’s friend’s Glendale warehouse painting not the ugliest effing skirt you’ve ever seen?
Solène is so fucking pretentious, she buys her linens directly from a flax farm in Nepal, yet somehow, a Lisa Frank homework folder of a painting makes her feel “everything.” Her daughter is right to question if she’s housing a tin of organic gummies, because that would be the only viable excuse.
The Six Biggest Takeaways from the ‘Dance Moms’ Reunion
Beginning in 2011 as a small-budget, six-episode documentary about the competitive children’s dance world, Dance Moms quickly exploded into a cultural phenomenon. It was always appointment viewing for me, because even though elements like the competitions they attended were later revealed to be fake, the emotional core always felt way more real than any reality show from that time.
Abby Lee Miller basically ran a cult out of her Pittsburgh studio, using psychological tactics to pit her young students against each other, undermine them at every turn, and shun any mom who didn’t agree with her antics or tried to advocate for her daughter. Unless you were out here trying to bribe her with a bench, you were a snake, a rat, a sneak, roadkill, etc.
Now in their early 20s, six of the former members, Paige, Brooke, Chloe, Kendall, Kalani, and JoJo, came together in their Bravo best to rehash their childhood trauma through the lens of young adulthood.
If you didn’t feel like sitting through the two-hour broadcast, here were my six biggest takeaways (and no, Jill was not asked #RosaParksGate):
While Maddie, Mackenzie, and Nia didn’t attend the reunion, Maddie did host a surprise party at her house in LA for Paige the night before. Pretty much everyone and their mother (lol) thinks that this was less about her unwavering friendship with Paige (let’s be real) and more about ensuring that no one shit-talked Maddie the next day. After Maddie made everyone 818 espresso martinis and let you join her impromptu FaceTime with Hailey Bieber, how could you??
Chloe almost backed out of the special. It’s taken her ten years to get over how Abby treated her during her forced rivalry with Maddie and she was anxious about reliving it publicly. She fully believes that in the infamous “Two Girls, One Solo” episode, Abby told the judges to lower her scores after she beat Maddie.
(Fun fact, some Reddit sleuthing revealed that the dances weren’t completely identical – Maddie did a front aerial while Chloe only did a side aerial, giving Maddie a small boost in difficulty).
Kelly is maybe the most traumatized. Her “I-Never-Said-That-Dingbat-Listen-Get-Your-Finger-Out-Of-My-Face” fight with Abby still haunts her to this day, because she feels like she ruined Brooke and Paige’s lives and dance careers. She also believes it contributed to the downfall of her marriage, and wonders if she had chosen snakey suckup Melissa’s alliance over loudmouth cockatoo Christi, everything would’ve ended up differently.
Brooke and Paige seem at peace with how it all shook out. Paige says if she had been in Kelly’s position, she would have been “ten times worse” trying to protect her kids, and Brooke says she got what she always wanted — going to high school football games.
Jessalyn was paranoid that Abby would sabotage JoJo’s career. While the show is edited to make it look like JoJo abruptly left the studio after being assigned a ballet duet she knew she wouldn’t be able to execute, that was only a small piece of it.
At the same time, JoJo got an offer from Nickelodeon that conflicted with Dance Moms, fueling Jess’s paranoia that if Abby got wind of JoJo’s other opportunities, she would use her powers to set JoJo up to fail at competitions with dances that made her look bad (e.g. the ballet).
Hilarious in retrospect, given that JoJo’s entire publicity strategy is making herself the butt of a joke. I don’t think the girl who scream-sang “Traitor” in her car is too concerned about looking uncool.
If pre-law doesn’t work out for Kendall, she should become a producer. She played Andy Cohen in the center chair and kept things moving with the hard-hitting questions, asking JoJo if she regretted making her embarrassing Justin-Bieber-looking TikTok where she blasted Christi for calling Gianna “not nice” on like her Zoom book club, then Baraba Waltered it up with Chloe: “do you forgive Abby?”
We’re about to suffer through 22 more JoJo Siwa songs in the near future. And that’s fitting, because JoJo would not SHUT UP for the entire time she was onstage, sucking the air out of the room, making 5,000 “my little Kendall” jokes that no one laughed at, and always being the first to answer a question despite only being on the show for a season and a half. We literally hear from JoJo all the time — let us hear from the non-famous girls who didn’t just do a two-hour sit-down with Alex Cooper.
Watching: The Fall Guy
Eating: Kyuramen
Reading: “The Diminishing Returns of Having Good Taste” (The Atlantic)