Behind every hot girl there is a deep history with bermuda shorts
Azealia Banks vs. Matty Healy, Kim Cattrall's Return, and Uncultured's May Slays.
Succession, Barry, Yellowjackets, and Survivor are all over in the same week. What am I supposed to do now? Read???
The Low-Brow Lowdown
Kim Cattrall to reprise her role as Samantha Jones. Variety confirmed that Kim I-Hate-SJP-With-A-Burning-Passion Cattrall will appear in the upcoming second season of And Just Like That…, despite the actress claiming for years that she’d rather swallow her own load than return to the Sex and the City universe.
Notably, she didn’t film with any of the cast of members face to face, and will only appear as one side of a phone conversation with her sworn nemesis, that hypocrite Sarah Jessica Parker.
Maybe she played the ultimate long game to swindle HBO into giving her enough money to buy up Shiv and Tom’s Manhattan duplex.
And speaking of, Sarah Snook’s baby has arrived. She shared to Instagram that she watched the final episode of Succession with her IRL newborn. Glad to see the eleven nannies haven’t yet taken over.
Al Pacino also has a bun in the oven. The oven of his 29-year-old girlfriend, to be specific. She’s been previously linked to elders Mick Jagger and Clint Eastwood, but this time she finally sealed the deal — bloodline secured!
Benedict Cumberbatch survives psycho chef attack. A former chef at a “notable restaurant” attempted to break into Benedict Cumberbatch’s London home this week, screaming “I know you’ve moved here” while attacking the intercom system with his fishing knife.
What is up with chefs these days? The Horses saga and now this?! Restaurants clearly need to add a Calm App subscription to their employee perks package.
Elizabeth Holmes begins prison sentence. She’s at the same minimum-security Texas prison where Jen Shah is serving out her sentence. Honestly, with how floppy the new RHONY season looks maybe they could start a Real Housewives of Bryan FPC spinoff.
Jason Oppenheim splits from Marie Lou Nurk. We all knew she was just a Chrishell rebound! Ideally, he and Mary get back together after she finally realizes that Romain is an insecure little lad who hates strong women.
Azealia Banks skewers Matty Healy. In a series of heated Instagram stories, Azealia tore into the 1975 frontman following his comments about rapper Ice Spice.
In a PODCAST RECORDING in February, Matty Healy had laughed at comments made about Ice Spice sounding like “a chubby Chinese woman” while participating in derogatory Chinese accent impressions. He apologized during a concert a few months later, but recently walked back the severity of the incident in his new New Yorker profile, criticizing the fans who were offended by his behavior.
This prompted Azealia Banks to step in writing the following gold:
“Does Matt Healy know that no one thinks The 1975 makes good music and that he’s a lame poser with a trash cliche band name that actually means nothing. . .He’s clearly so pressed that a black girl who knows nothing about him or his music is making more moves and more money than him.”
She also went on to warn Taylor Swift that he probably has scabies. Ruthless!
Uncultured’s May Slays
I’m such a sad, predictable person that one of the small highlights of my day is signing onto Letterboxd and logging the movies I’ve watched. It’s just so satisfying, even though I pretty much give everything three and a half stars. Triangle of Sadness? 3 1/2 stars. Detective Pikachu? 3 1/2 stars.
Anyway, here are the movies, pods, shows, etc. that I liked the most from the past month.
Reality
This new HBO movie came out a couple days ago starring Sydney Sweeney as Reality Winner, an NSA whistleblower.
It’s less of a movie and more of a reenactment — every line of dialogue is recited verbatim from the real life transcript between Winner and the FBI agents interrogating her in her home in Augusta.
Even the most banal moments feel unrelentingly tense as the power dynamic between Winner and the agents continually shifts.
Sydney Sweeney once again proves that she’s a Serious Actress™, and honestly Euphoria is cheapening her image rn.
You Hurt My Feelings
Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s new film is centered around every creative’s greatest fear: overhearing their significant other saying that their latest work is trash.
More broadly, You Hurt My Feelings explores late-in-life career dissatisfaction and concern about if we’re even good at the profession we’ve spent the last thirty years of our lives devoted to. I feel like marketing protein bars or whatever else I do in a day is meaningless all the time, so it’s super great to see that this existential ennui will continue for the rest of my life.
You don’t need to rush to the theaters to see this, but it will be a perfectly good streaming movie. Plus, it’s only 90 minutes, which adds an extra half star.
Scamanda Podcast
I know that the scammer train has kind of left the station, but if you still have room in your heart for one more white lady sociopath, this pod is for you.
Scamanda tells the story of a woman named Amanda (obvi) who straight up marries her dear family friend’s ex-husband, stabs her in the front battling for sole custody of her now step-daughter, and then pretends to have cancer to scam her family and friends out of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
I’ve only hit the first two episodes so far, but I’m guessing there is much more to come. It’s also narrated by this British journalist whose accent totally sounds like the host of one of those super exploitative British reality shows, like when they make the anorexic girl and the morbidly obese girl switch diets for a week to learn from each other (???).
Undercover Underage
I’m largely pissed about HBO Max becoming Max — I like shitty TV as much if not more than the next guy, but there’s something patently off-putting about The Sopranos sitting proudly next to Dr. Pimple Popper.
That said, I’ve been super into the Investigation Discovery series Undercover Underage, which is essentially a modernized version of To Catch a Predator. It chronicles the day-to-day investigations of a nonprofit organization called SOSA, (Safety from Online Sex Abuse) which deploys decoys of underage girls to engage with and identify pedophiles, often leading to their eventual arrest.
The org operates in a fake suburban house as their headquarters, and each decoy has an elaborate persona and backstory to make them feel as believable as possible. The detective work that these civilians do is insanely good — like, scouring the Instagram accounts of every wedding venue in a certain city in the hopes of finding a wedding photo that matched the profile picture of a predator where it looked like he was the best man. And it worked!!
I could seriously watch a million episodes of this. FIVE STARS.
Gordon Ramsay’s Food Stars
This is another absolute banger. If you thought Gordon Ramsay couldn’t possibly make another version of the same show, think again!
Gordon Ramsay’s Food Stars takes fifteen food entrepreneurs and drops them in a Master Chef meets The Apprentice meets Shark Tank battle for a $250,000 investment from Gordon himself.
Each week, they compete in a different challenge designed to showcase their business acumen, people skills, culinary expertise, etc.
As someone who enjoys cooking competitions but is more interested in the fame and fortune than the food, this is a big slay!
Prekend Wrapped
Watching: The Boogeyman — I am once again bullying my non-horror friends into attending horror fare. It builds character!
Reading: “The Thorny Social Politics of Location Sharing” (Vox)
Listening: I’ve probably listened to “Hits Different” sixteen hundred times. Half because I love the song, other half because I love Taylor’s commitment to the grind.
