| Everything we can't stop loving, hating, and thinking about this week in pop culture.
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Everything we can't stop loving, hating, and thinking about this week in pop culture.
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It's Time to Watch The Curse |
The Showtime series The Curse is a delightful watch, presuming you enjoy having your soul dig its way out of your skin using nothing but its fingernails, then violently grab your shoulders and start shaking you while screaming, "Why in God's name are you forcing me to watch this?!?!?!" That's a high compliment (I think) to what I assume is the intention of the series, which is to make you feel such discomfort and, occasionally, disturbed that the vibes along will make you start itching like you have a rash. The finale airs this Sunday night, which means that now is the perfect time to binge the previous nine episodes and catch up, like I've been doing this week. Is it an enjoyable experience? I can only speak to my journey, which began with, "What in the world is this show," then morphed into, "This show is making me feel so uneasy," and finally, "Every fiber of my being needs to find out what is going to happen, because I feel like it is going to be so dark."
The biggest takeaway from that journey, however, is that, my God, Emma Stone is incredible in this. It's possibly the best performance of her career, which is high praise, as she is currently picking up Best Actress trophies this award season for another towering performance: her career-best film work in Poor Things.
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Her character in The Curse, Whitney, is a fascinating contrast to Bella, her role in the fantastical universe of Poor Things. Whitney is both one of the most relatable and knowable people I've seen on TV in a long time, and also quite possibly one of the worst humans to appear in any show. That she is so familiar and recognizable, yet so quietly despicable—well, that's all part of that discomfort I mentioned. (There's a lot of "oh, you're horrible" that's tinged with a wincing "but yeah girl, I get it" that happens when you watch.) A description of The Curse makes the series sound both more mundane and more bizarre than it actually is, which is what makes it so unique. Unfathomably, as the episodes go on, both of those extremes are amplified; it's a wild, strange ride. Whitney and Asher (Nathan Fielder, delivering a similarly stunning acting performance) are a married couple who are filming at first a pilot, and then a full-season order of a new HGTV series in New Mexico. Called Fliplanthropy, it aims to show how the houses they're renovating incorporate revolutionary—and totally bizarre—eco-friendly technology, and how the couple plans for the buyers of these new constructions to coexist with and bolster the local Indigenous community. The duo are as shrewd as they are, at times, hapless, as it's revealed over time how at odds their craven ambition is with their supposed noble intentions. As far as the series goes, the impetus for that unraveling is the suspicion that a curse has been placed on Asher by a local girl during the filming of the pilot. Whether Asher buys into this is mirrored in the viewing experience, coloring every cringe-inducing or legitimately upsetting development with a darkness and foreboding inevitability: If he, and thus his relationship with Whitney, really is cursed, how bleak will things become?
The struggle to get everything right in the filming of Fliplanthrophy runs in tandem with the breakdown of Whitney and Asher's marriage. It's obvious from the jump how devoted Asher is to Whitney, and how Whitney's supposed happiness is derived from having total power over Asher. To a viewer, it's at once a shockingly toxic dynamic, but also one that's, if not universally relatable, again, recognizable—and, dare I say, understandable. It's a fascinating relationship. They are incredibly close and intimate, each other's closest confidantes and entirely codependent. Yet that closeness is also weaponized. They're so aware of their deep connection that they're able to use it in reverse: to alienate each other.
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There are twists and wild sequences that happen as the series goes on that it serves no one to spoil. (Though be sure to check out our recaps here.) But watching Whitney's true colors surface through Stone's performance—so grounded that the calculatedness, moral compromising, and nefariousness reads concerningly normal—is a visceral experience. Each new development snowballs to the point that it feels like you're fleeing from it as it speeds toward you down a hill, like in a cartoon.
It shouldn't be surprising when good actors do good acting. Emma Stone is one of the best actors working today. Nonetheless, there's something about a performer as endearing as she is—a leading lady who's very much among America's Sweethearts—playing a role like this that seems revelatory. So, in context of The Curse, consider it praise when I say: I've never enjoyed being so turned off by a character or a performance more.
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Not to be all "cranky millennial with a grudge," but I can't get over that the marketing for the new Mean Girls movie musical sells it as, "This isn't your mother's Mean Girls." Especially now that I've seen it and can say definitively: This is exactly your mother's Mean Girls. (The marketing assumes that either your mother was a pre-teen mom or you are somehow the target audience for this new movie, despite being only six years old.) Two things are true about the new Mean Girls: It is incredibly entertaining—a blast to watch, because Mean Girls is a blast to watch, and this is, again, exactly the same movie. But the extent to which it is exactly the same script, with exactly the same staging, with exactly the same aesthetic, and, in some cases, exactly the same actors is impossible to shake; I had fun, but couldn't get over how pointless and unimaginative the entire project was. The pipeline here is that Mean Girls was based on a book, which became a 2003 movie, which was then turned into a 2018 musical, which is now a 2023 movie based on a musical based on a movie based on a book. (After The Color Purple, this is the second such project in just a month. 30 Rock's Jenna Maroney has some competition.) |
If I were to rank these iterations on the book, I'd say the original movie is better than the new movie musical, which is better than the Broadway musical—which is a low bar, considering the calling card of a good musical is "having good songs," which it does not. The audience I saw the new film with seemed similarly flummoxed. They giggled at all the laugh lines that were delivered verbatim in the same cadence with the same framing as the original. They applauded for Renée Rapp after Regina's song "World Burn," and ate up everything that Jaquel Spivey, the new Damian, was serving. They also burst out laughing almost every single time a character started singing, suggesting that disguising the fact that this is a musical in trailers was either incredibly shrewd or entirely foolworthy.
Movies are remade all the time. Musicals are revived often. The same is true of movie musicals. The difference is that there is usually some new interpretation that's expected. Maybe there's something to be said by revisiting the material in a modern time, or something to be excavated from a different perspective or, at the very least, visual style. That's what irks me about the whole "this isn't your mother's Mean Girls" thing. There's no attempt to make this resonate in any new, interesting way for another generation, aside from a TikTok montage and getting rid of the racist and problematic jokes from the original script. I can't reiterate enough the extent to which the scenes—sometimes down to the costumes—are exactly the same in this movie. Yes, there are songs. But the effect is as if someone remade The Devil Wears Prada with new, young stars, and then every four minutes, there was a ditty about belts looking the same or a production number about cube-of-cheese diets before returning to reciting the original script exactly as you remember it. Is that a good time? Sure, I guess. Again, the new Mean Girls is a fun watch. But is there a point to it? |
The Most Important Parts of the Golden Globes |
This year's Golden Globes ceremony was one of the least entertaining award shows I've ever had to watch. I'm a gay man. Watching and loving award shows is 40 percent of my entire personality. That the telecast was so bad hurts.
So instead of rehashing that disaster, let me point you toward the Golden Globes moments that happened outside the ceremony that made me very happy.
Here is Brie Larson crying while meeting Jennifer Lopez, telling J. Lo that Selena is the reason she became an actor:
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Here is The Holdovers winner Paul Giamatti with his Golden Globe at In and Out after the show: |
Here are my two husbands Jonathan Bailey and Andrew Scott posing together. I'm off-camera, also in a white suit, as we had plans to recreate the "You Don't Own Me" finale from First Wives Club later that evening: |
The Bear cast reacting to Jeremy Allen White's Calvin Klein underwear ad when asked about it by literally every news outlet by begging, pleading for people to stop showing them photos of their coworker naked is perfect: |
Why was Jared Leto alone at his table behind Oprah, and what was he plotting?: |
Do yourself a favor and watch this video of the citizens of Osage Nation reacting to Lily Gladstone's win: |
And finally, here is the Girls reunion I've been waiting six years for: |
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I don't often empathize with celebrities, but I imagine award season has to be exhausting. Especially at this time of year, they're at ceremonies, galas, tributes, and other red carpet events every single day. But they're also seeing all of their fellow celebrities, who are being forced to do the same thing. My question has always been: What are these people talking about when they see each other?
That's why I'm grateful for Marc Shaiman, the legendary composer and lyricist who, while posting photos from this week's Governors Awards, casually dropped this amazing story about his encounter with Glenn Close in an Instagram caption: |
The (incredibly fun) Broadway musical Gutenberg! features a bit near the end where an audience member joins the stage to play the part of a theater producer, and usually that person is famous. The show's social media page has been posting photos and footage of some of its guest stars, but one from this week would have had me dead on the floor, had I been in the audience: Anne Hathaway and Anna Wintour appeared together, with dialogue acknowledging that The Devil Wears Prada was based on Anna. |
More From The Daily Beast's Obsessed | An old yearbook photo showing that Killers of the Flower Moon star Lily Gladstone was voted Most Likely to Win an Oscar has gone viral. But her classmate also won the superlative alongside her—we found and talked to him. Read more. What is anyone getting out of Dave Chappelle's transphobic jokes at this point—including Dave Chappelle? Read more.
For All Mankind can be relied on for season finales that will make you gasp and sob. Here's all the details behind this season's big twist. Read more.
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Self Reliance: Jake Johnson is incapable of being anything but charming. (Now on Hulu) Ted: We can't believe it either, but the new Ted series made us laugh out loud. (Now on Peacock) The Beekeeper: It's so ridiculous that you have to stan. One line literally includes "to bee, or not to bee." (Now in theaters)
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| Mean Girls: I wish I could bake a cake filled with rainbows and smiles and everyone would eat and be happy. Instead, I had to watch the new Mean Girls. (Now in theaters) Monsieur Spade: Clive Owen is so hot and cool, so why isn't Clive Owen in this new show also so hot and cool? (Sun. on AMC) Lift: The new Kevin Hart movie's most egregious heist is of the two hours you'll never get back. (Now on Netflix)
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