We'll Always Have Easttown
Lindsay Lohan hits the slopes with Netflix, Mare says goodbye to Easttown, Normani strings us along, Troye Sivan gets his cheeks out, and more rated Top Shelf to Low Brow!
Happy Memorial Day, today I am memorializing that it has been five years since the day I tripped on a rat that skittered across my Converse while I was walking home. New York is the city of dreams, baby!
For starters, no I have not yet seen Cruella, but it’s on the docket. For seconders, tomorrow is my birthday, and while I’m certainly not where I hoped I would be right now, but miraculously not feeling terrible about it. If all goes according to plan over the next few weeks, I’ll be experiencing some much-needed life shakeups (moving! visiting my in-laws who are not really my in-laws but I don’t know what to call them other than that! money coming in!) that will hopefully help get me out of the year-long rut that I’ve been in. I feel strangely positive? A remarkable feeling. Anyway blah blah blah, I know, just go on, big head!
Top Shelf, Low Brow: May 24 — May 30
Lindsay Lohan emerges from among the shadows to make her long-awaited return
I think it’s nice that when Netflix announced that they had signed Lindsay Lohan to a new holiday romcom, the world showed its support in droves. Well, most of the world. My boyfriend’s first reaction to the film, in which Lohan’s character is described as a “spoiled hotel heiress who gets amnesia after a skiing accident and finds herself in the care of a handsome, blue-collar lodge owner and his precocious daughter in the days leading up to Christmas,” was, “Really? I don’t think like that seems like a very good way to honor Natasha Richardson’s memory.” If you’ll remember, Richardson, who played Lohan’s mother in her feature film debut The Parent Trap, died in 2009 following complications after a skiing accident.
And while, yes, that is an unfortunate coincidence, we will be supporting Lindsay Lohan’s Overboard on the slopes! I greatly look forward to seeing Lohan starring in a comedy for the first time since the straight-to-ABC Family flop Labor Pains in 2009. This is what she was meant to do! Her expert comedic timing has gone to waste for years. And while I’ve certainly enjoyed her rare, late-period dramatic turns as a spoiled L.A. actress embroiled in a murderous relationship in The Canyons and wife of a deceased politician with a deep smoker’s growl who also happens to be a descendent from a long line of vampires in the campsterpiece Among The Shadows — which many articles failed to mention entirely, for better or worse — I’m excited to see Lohan return to her roots! I hope there’s a scene where Lohan is out on a snowy veranda, après-ski, chiefing cigs in front of Christmas lights after finding out about her true identity and contemplating if she should return to the heiress life or stay through New Year’s with her new love. It would only be right…
(Rating: Top Shelf)
Mare of Easttown has finished…and therefore, so has my will to go on
This is for my peoples who just lost somebody: your best friend, your baby, your Mare, or your Lori. Put your vapes way up high, we will never say bye (no, no, no)!
For what it’s worth, I genuinely loved every second of Mare of Easttown that wasn’t just Jean Smart palying Fruit Ninja or Kate Winslet drinking Wawa coffee. I thought it was one of the absolute best miniseries to come out of America in a long time, especially considering that it’s an original screenplay and not adapted from a book or a reboot of other intellectual property. There is still so much art to be tapped from original ideas and we need studios to be funding more of it! Mare is a perfect example. Aside from that, I’ve always been particularly interested in media that tackles grief and how we cope with the extremely different varieties of it that we encounter through life, and I thought Mare’s way of depicting the struggle of grieving was really exceptional — just really kind, thoroughly felt storytelling. Not to mention that it was interwoven with a genuinely gripping mystery that never felt like it was being played for shock value or social media reactions. It all had to make sense and be worth it in the end, and it was!
Kate Winslet dusted Nicole Kidman in The Undoing so hard it’s kind of unbelievable. Nicole rode that one on a curly, red wig alone, and frankly, it could never live up to what Kate was throwing down every week on Mare.
(Rating: Top Shelf)
Gwen Stefani just doesn’t get it
We all want Gwen Stefani to do better, to be better. Not just musically, but aesthetically and personally. So it doesn’t exactly bode well for Stefani when, currently in the middle of an era where she could desperately use some good press while trying to peddle an abysmal Kidz Bop single, she’s as reluctant as ever to make a firm statement about…well, anything. In her new cover story for PAPER, Gwen dances around questions about politics and cultural appropriation, topics that she could easily put to bed if she just prepared a few answers once and for all.
Is she a Republican?
“I think it's pretty obvious who I am,” Gwen tells PAPER before making it totally murky about who she is. “I've been around forever. I started my band because we were really influenced by ska, which was a movement that happened in the late '70s, and it was really all about people coming together. The first song I ever wrote was a song called ‘Different People,’ which was on the Obama playlist, you know, a song about everyone being different and being the same and loving each other. The very first song I wrote.”
Cool. That says nothing concrete. So maybe she’ll say something about her years of cultural appropriation, something that she could easily express regret for as a performer who didn’t know better in a totally different, less socially conscious time? Nope, can’t have that either.
“If we didn't buy and sell and trade our cultures in, we wouldn't have so much beauty, you know?” she says. “We learn from each other, we share from each other, we grow from each other. And all these rules are just dividing us more and more.”
Kinda…spoken like a Republican! Kind of spoken like someone unwilling to listen to any of the figureheads from the several cultures she has plucked from over the years about why it could possibly be considered myopic behavior. Maybe Gwen under the microscope is a place she’s just not comfortable being, much less creating from. I’d certainly say that it’s telling that her ability to make interesting art has floundered since it became much easier to call artists out publicly for cultural insensitivity. But hey, don’t take it from me, take it from “Slow Clap” on The Voice, somehow even worse live!
(Rating: Low Brow)
Mr. Mendes…I’m not saying anything!
Shawn Mendes, who is straight, got a new tattoo last week that says, “GOOD BOY.”
Again I’m not saying anything. I will note that he also has a tattoo on his hand of a swallow.
I’M NOT SAYING ANYTHING!!!!!!!
I hope this STRAIGHT ALLY and his GIRLFRIEND enjoy Pride month!!!
Normani will be “releasing” new music “this summer”
Whether or not I personally believe that after having been teased and strung along for almost two years is another story. Is my assumption that she only answered a total of seven questions for W because she had to hurry back to the studio to put the finishing touches on a new single totally naive? Almost certainly. Is sustaining myself on constant disappointment part of the game when unwaveringly supporting pop girls? Absolutely.
(Rating: I can’t rate this anything because there are zero new details available about ANYTHING, but I can say Happy Birthday, Normani!)
The Bennifer Beat continues
Couple goals <3
I am fucking obsessed with this line about J.Lo’s gym activity from the Page Six blurb which sounds like it was fed directly to the writer from J.Lo herself:
Earlier this week, a source told Page Six that the “On the Floor” singer “looked fit as could be” while working out “harder than most girls half her age”…“A few models work out while she is there, and they have all started working out harder because they see how hard J.Lo works out! She is motivating other members just with her work ethic.”
This photo, in particular, is truly something special. I’m obsessed with it. It looks like Jen wanted to play a sexy game of hide and seek and Ben forgot he was had to look for her when by the time he had counted to fifty. Truly gorgeous staging here.
(Rating: Still going Top Shelf strong!)
It’s time for the Twinkulator
After writing about this thong for a month in this newsletter, he finally turned around. Horny summer continues, baby!!!!!!
My screen-addicted hotties are back July 8th!
Thank god Kristen Bell never turns down a check because if she was more selective about her projects, we may have to endure a Gossip Girl reboot without the voice herself, and that would just be an utter tanker. Although I voiced some of my sole hesitations for the reboot of one of my favorite shows of all time a few weeks ago, I’m palpably excited. I live to see actors in their mid-20s playing high school students and being absolutely vile to each other, it’s what keeps me not only alive but thriving. It’s my lifeblood. When a full trailer drops, you will hear my screams from Brooklyn, no matter where you are in the world. Just put your ear to a window a listen.
(Rating: Top Shelf)
Preserving this online like a fossil in amber for millions of years to come
That’s all for this week! Not a lot going on, but hey, it’s a holiday and I can only report on what’s available for me to cover! If you haven’t yet read Friday’s letter to find out What’s In and What’s Out for Summer 2021, I suggest you do that before you start carrying around iced coffee like an absolutely out-of-touch poser! Just kidding. But hot coffee forever. I hope you all have a lovely week and I’ll see you back here on Friday! 💖