This week:
- There was so much news this week, and all of it swirled in my head at the same time. So a little change of format: This week, you’re all getting one long rant.
We Need to Download About This Week
When I was a kid, my uncle gave me a top, one of those toys that spins, but this one was unique: It spun longer and faster. The whole point of it was that it seemed like, to a child’s wonder, it was never going to stop spinning. I left the room to get a chocolate milk and never checked back. As far as I know, that top is still spinning now, decades later.
That was a novelty. This is a trauma.
My head is doing revolutions never before known to men over the relentlessness of the news this week. Usually, I’m making some histrionic joke about the thunderstorm of farts that is coming from the White House and the Capitol when I say things like this. But this time, it’s actually about the tornado of pop culture nonsense that’s been happening.
(Political news is not innocent this week; an alternate version of this lede had my eyes bouncing up and down over the headlines like Bryon Noem’s t---ies.)
It’s to the point that, still today, I keep anxiously checking time stamps on articles’ publishing dates and social media posts to make sure they weren’t April Fool’s jokes. (The worst day ever. If you made an April Fool’s joke this year—in this climate????!!!!—God has some things to say to you.)
I’m reminded of the classic The Honeymooners joke, where Ralph would get so exasperated over, well, everything that he would, steam coming out of his ears, shout at his wife, “To the moon, Alice!” How fitting, then, that’s exactly where we’re going. And what perfect commentary on our times, that it’s with a broken toilet and Outlook isn’t working. It’s your worst work-from-home day come to life, but in space!
Let’s start, I guess, with the big movie release of the weekend, The Drama starring Zendaya and Robert Pattinson. It’s a very hip-sounding film from A24, the distributor that seems like it was probably sneaking cigarettes in the handicap stall in high school. It’s also, as was made clear in blaring headlines this last week, a bit controversial.
This is a spoiler alert, I guess, though what I’m about to say isn’t really a twist as much as it is the entire premise of the film, even though, for what now seem like obvious reasons, the plot point was completely absent from the marketing and press interviews. So be warned anyway.
Early in the film, Pattinson and Zendaya’s characters are about to get married, and at a tasting with their best friends, they play a silly parlor game where each has to name the worst thing they’ve ever done.
The frivolity comes to a screeching halt when Zendaya’s soon-to-be-bride confesses that, when she was a teenager, she planned a school shooting, going so far as to bring the rifle to the building, but then chickened out. Her fiancé, you might imagine, suddenly has mixed feelings about the whole til death do us part thing.
The movie does some really interesting things with this, to be fair, which some people will champion and some will mock. But, if you just read that plot point for the first time and did a spittake with your coffee, same! My eyes leaped out of their sockets and ran the Boston Marathon after they first read that.
I don’t even know what to move on to next after that. I guess the Summer House drama?
There are two kinds of people in this world: the ones who have not walked into a room this week without saying “so about Amanda and West…” before hello, and the people who have no idea what I’m talking about. To the latter, I need you to hear me when I say this is some of the juiciest reality TV drama I’ve encountered in my [redacted] years of tracking reality TV drama.
All of this relates to the Bravo show, Summer House: A cast member who just separated from her husband and credited her BFF with helping her through the pain is now dating another cast member who that BFF dated and who also was bros with her husband.
That spinning top…
My favorite part of the story is that the “BFF” in the tangled web, Ciara Miller, was photographed looking distraught, slumped on the sidewalk, in a gorgeous white dress against the wall of a Hermès store in New York, minutes after the news broke. If that’s not the chicest thing I’ve ever heard.
And when it comes to Bravo and reality TV, can we talk about The Real Housewives of Rhode Island, in which there’s a self-proclaimed “sugar baby” whose husband spends six months of the year in Miami with his other girlfriend, but she has another boyfriend, so she doesn’t mind? And she’s not the same cast member who is accused of being a swinger, or the one who is married to the man her sister once dated, or the one whose husband is having an affair, or the one who was on The Bachelor, or the one who used to be a local news traffic reporter?
Let’s talk too, speaking of Bravo, about how Jen Shah, of The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City and “being in prison” fame, is now the nation’s most trusted source on all things Ghislaine Maxwell. The latest is that the House Oversight Committee wants to interview Shah about Maxwell. And you all said reality TV didn’t matter.
What else do we have… Oh, there’s Meryl Streep, who, to ground us from the maelstrom of chaos, has been an absolute delight this week.
She’s stilettos deep into the press tour for The Devil Wears Prada 2, a film that I do not believe could possibly be good, but still have every hope and dream for anyway. I’ve sat through enough abysmal Marvel sequels to be justified in calling a Meryl Streep franchise a masterpiece, sight unseen. And it might actually be! I haven’t seen it!
Streep was on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert this week, and the sheer glee with which she talked about how much money was invested in the budget of The Devil Wears Prada 2, whereas the first one was written off as a “chick flick” and was basically begging for favors, is infectious. That she’s tickled to be fronting a movie that is such a big deal is evident. She even wore the famous cerulean blue sweater that Anne Hathaway sported in the first film, inspiring the classic monologue, for the interview. She gets it.
Then, as if all that wasn’t fun enough on its own, she was asked if she’d do a third Mamma Mia! movie and replied, “Damn yes.” The most cliché gay thing about me is how unabashedly obsessed I am with Mamma Mia!, so you can imagine the salsa dance my heart did after hearing this. My only question: Why do we keep getting teased a third movie? Everyone (me and Meryl Streep) wants it!!! Make it happen!
Thankfully, there was one thing that happened this week that was jarring enough to finally make my head—and that top—stop spinning, like a discourse version of a record scratch.
That would be the audacity of anyone to speak ill of Bruce Springsteen.
The Boss kicked off his, what he’s calling, “very political” new tour, and, as such, made a passionate speech criticizing policies of the current administration that are antithetical to the America that he has been documenting through song all these years. In response, as is his wont, Trump channeled the worst 3-year-old you know and threw a whiny tantrum.
The whole act is toddler-esque in that you know it’s going to happen, you roll your eyes when it does, you know it’s meaningless, you can mostly ignore it, and yet…it’s still just loud enough to be annoying.
I don’t know what political advantage there is in criticizing Bruce Springsteen, the person that just, regardless of affiliation or tax bracket, just about every American loves. But what really got me was the criticism of Bruce’s looks, saying he resembles a “dried up prune.”
First of all, better a dried-up one than one that looks like it’s been soaking in milk for a week to look barely rehydrated. Let’s not throw raisins in glass houses.
Second of all, having recently seen Springsteen in concert, that man is a bona fide stud.
He is 76 and sprints back and forth across that stage, whereas at half his age, I had to take a seat midway through because my legs were tired from…standing. To have a portion of Springsteen’s energy and a fraction of his good looks at that age, well, let’s hope I one day come upon a magical troll under a bridge who grants wishes. Because it would be a miracle otherwise.
It’s been, suffice it to say, a week. So I’m going to end it doing the only thing that calms me: Reading an interview with Brian Cox where he just talks s--t about everyone in Hollywood.
More From The Daily Beast’s Obsessed
I hung out with the Real Housewives of Rhode Island cast and Andy Cohen at the show’s premiere. They are wild. Read more.
A man with no pants stole my heart. Had the most fun conversation with Ghosts star Asher Grodman. Watch here.
Do you feel like you have no idea what’s going on with the Summer House drama? I’ve written you this handy guide. Read more.
What to Watch This Week
The Boys: This has been the most retrograde–and therefore best—superhero TV series of the decade. (Wed. on Prime Video)
The Testaments: A Handmaid’s Tale sequel that is, well, way too timely. (Wed. on Hulu)
Hacks: I haven’t watched the screeners yet, but how could it not be good??? (Thurs. on HBO Max)
What to Skip This Week
Your Friends & Neighbors: According to my friend and colleague Nick Schager, there’s a really good show in here somewhere. (Now on Apple TV)
The Drama: I mean, you read that spoiler. You decide if it’s for you. (Now in theaters)
