No One Moves Me Quite Like Me, I Guess

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On the Menu

• The People’s Princess of Ireland Returns to SNL

• Taylor Swift and Her Nails Are Going to the Super Bowl

• The Weekly Husband Report

• What I Watched in January

• On My Reading List This Weekend

The People’s Princess of Ireland Returns to SNL

Solidifying her rapidly-rising star, Edebiri will be joined by Jennifer Lopez on SNL this evening. However, the excitement over the people’s princess of Ireland hosting the variety show has been overshadowed by a resurfaced 2020 interview in which Edebiri called JLo’s career “one long scam,” which…lol. I’m sure they’ll find a way to reference it, because Edebiri is a writer herself and permanently online (She’s also friends with the Please Don’t Destroy guys who gave us the self-referential “Nepo Truce” short last week). However, as Edebiri ascends further up the Hollywood ladder, she will likely start pulling away from having such an accessible presence. Her infamous Letterboxd reviews will likely be the first to go as she starts to hobnob with the people she used to watch from afar. We’re already seeing this with the way her style is evolving past kooky and into ingénue territory. She’s not going anywhere, and I’m here for it.

As for the SNL of it all, I’ll be curious to see if the other people’s princess of Ireland, Ben Affleck, shows up to support JLo. People online are always looking into their marriage: they say she’s aggressive and controlling, and they say he’s being manipulated into being with her despite his clear love for his ex, Jennifer Garner. Also lol, because gossip connoisseurs will recall that Affleck’s relationship with SNL producer Lindsay Shookus had some…overlap with his marriage to Garner. Now that Shookus has left SNL, it would be an opportune time for Affleck to stop by to help promote JLo’s Cloud Atlas remake (which he co-wrote!)

The TNT Super Bowl

In case you thought the Kelce Brothers were inescapable last year during the Kelce Bowl, welcome to 2024. I wrote about the fervent reaction to the Taylor Swift x Travis Kelce collab a few months ago, and things have only ramped up since. Last week, Kelce’s team—the Kansas City Chiefs—won the AFC Championship, clinching their spot at the Super Bowl next weekend. In case you also hadn’t heard, Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour will be in Japan the day before the Super Bowl, and everyone in the world is wondering: will she make it? Fear not, even the embassy of Japan insists that it’s possible. The moment the Chiefs won, the underground powers that be—which are more powerful than you or I will ever comprehend—instantly activated an invisible network that will bend space and time in order to get her there. The Swifties’ oracle branch have already foretold it in the stars: it will be her 13th time attending a Chiefs game, so it’s already a done deal. But will the nails join her?

Thankfully

Hunter Harris

has already said everything there is to say about the unsettling “local” press-on nails Swift debuted last week. I recognize these nails: they are the exact manicure of the woman I met at my first job in 2012 who has been stuck in time ever since. She lives in a small town, coaches volleyball, and still uses Facebook like a blog to complain about her husband and kids. In other words, she is everything Swift might be if she hadn’t veered off into to world-domination territory. But Hunter makes a great point: perhaps it’s not so much that Swift “has” to maintain a non-threatening image as the image maintains her.

I was chatting with coworkers of all different ages last week, and I was amazed at how all of them seemed to have a singular idea of what Swift was like. A middle-aged male manager told me, completely straight-faced, that Taylor was getting old and she was ready to start a family, which had always been her dream. Where he got this information, I will never know, but it’s completely emblematic of a woman who’s built her career on appearing more accessible than she truly is. Everyone in the world feels like they know her, could be friends with her, and could maybe even save her, if she just gave them the chance.

The Weekly Husband Report

I mentioned last week that Pookie is looking absolutely fire, but what you may not know, is that Pookie is also under fire, this time for resurfaced Antebellum-themed photos. Just goes to show, what goes up must come down, and TikTok is not a safe space for being a wife guy of any kind, especially if you’ve ever posed with a Confederate flag.

What I Watched in January

I finally invested in a Criterion membership and I’ve been insufferable ever since. Historically a Rough Month, this January was no different, with two back-to-back head colds and cold spells in the -40°C (I love the prairies I love the prairies…) but on the plus side, I had a great month with movies.

1. Rope (Hitchcock, 1948) — For fans of The Secret History and/or James Stewart (me), this one featured grad students up to no good, as usual. Stunning example of how much tension can be derived from staying in one location for the entire film, bottlenecking the pressure until the truths these men hold dear come crashing down.

2. Adam’s Rib (Cukor, 1949) — Hepburn and Tracy are perfect as a proto-feminist wife and her lug of a husband. A lovely portrayal of a warm, intellectual relationship, which veers off into reactionary territory when the couple must go up against each other in court to defend their staunch beliefs about gender and marriage. An early hint of what was to come in both Anatomy of a Murder and Anatomy of a Fall.

3. Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold (Dunne, 2017) — Now that’s a marriage story. I wrote earlier this month about how this documentary provided both new light and new distance to Didion’s work by highlighting her approach to life as through the eyes of a writer first and foremost. When the director, her nephew Griffin Dunne, asks about the time she encountered a toddler on LSD (which she wrote about in Slouching Towards Bethlehem), her response is: “Well, it was…it was gold.” Later, in response to her nephew’s questioning about her decision to mention her marriage troubles in a one-off line in The White Album, she shrugs, “You used the material.” Life is material.

4. La Collectionneuse (Rohmer, 1967) — Let me tell you, if I ended up in a secluded holiday home with two grumpy art-world men that hated me and wanted to sleep with me, I simply would have left. When the men shame Haydée as a “collector” of sexual conquests, she replies, “I find happiness where I can.” She is the most honest of all the characters, straightforward about her desires, which they refuse to understand out of grotesque insolence. Veering on enraging, this film highlights the way men seek to dominate the sexual lives of women they covet.

5. North by Northwest (Hitchcock, 1959) — Technicolor dreamboat and exactly what movies should be: suspenseful, captivating, artfully-shot, and starring a reticent Cary Grant.

6. Past Lives (Song, 2023) (Rewatch) — Yes exactly. Justine for Celine Song and Greta Lee, you deserved the kind of support Barbie had.

7. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (Ritt, 1965) — An incredibly bleak Cold War-era film; you’ll want to prepare yourself for that ending. I cannot believe this came out the same year The Beatles were running around stoned for Help!

8. Anatomy of a Murder (Preminger, 1959) — According to my sources, this is the most accurate portrayal of courtroom procedure shot on film, and it wasn’t even boring. Move over Suits!

9. Anatomy of a Fall (Triet, 2023) (Rewatch) — You already know how I feel.

10. Marriage Story (Baumbach, 2019) — My least favourite of this month’s marriage stories. Everything felt lifeless, and it was hard not to read it as thinly-veiled husband autofiction, a rare subgenre in which the entire world is working against one innocent man. Kind of wished the movie had been about Laura Dern’s sexy-on-purpose lawyer character.

11. The Heartbreak Kid (May, 1972) — Elaine May! This film should not be as hard to find online as it is. Perfect visual storytelling, from the way the asshole main character constantly finds himself on the outside of groups, to the way his attention just veers towards whoever is shiniest. Another great marriage story.

12. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Nichols, 1966) — Perhaps the ultimate marriage story. I shared most of thoughts on this one here. I still can’t stop thinking about the layers of regret, repression, and rage mixed into the whip-smart dialogue. Or how the older and angrier Martha contrasts with her sweet young foil Honey, both of them childless (one by choice and one by circumstance); and how they come to reflect different aspects of their husbands'’ sexualities. George sees Martha as a reminder of his impotence and failure to please her, but to the younger Nick, she is a symbol of the power he seeks to hold, making his failed seduction of her all the more humiliating. Just perfect characterization all around; I can’t wait to revisit this one.

13. Barbie (Gerwig, 2023) (Rewatch) — I won’t bore you with more than what I already said on TikTok. This is a fun movie, akin to eating bubblegum that loses its flavour after two minutes. On rewatch I think it was always meant to be more of a love letter to the power of imagination and classic cinema than a broader indictment of the patriarchy. And I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, but making a billion dollars is not a virtue worthy of reward in itself…

14. Party Girl (Mayer, 1995) — What I wanted Poor Things to be. An ode to the library and grad school and the power of knowledge!

15. The Daytrippers (Mottola, 1996) — The Parker Posey Collection on Criterion came through this month. My favourite part was the increasingly absurd novel idea Liev Schrieber keeps trying to describe in segments throughout the stuffy car ride; very early-Mistress America. My Letterboxd review:

13. Smooth Talk (Chopra, 1985) — Girlhood as a Kafka-esque transformation story, only this time it’s society revealing itself to the girl, transforming her from within. A haunting hint of what was to come in White Oleander and all of Sofia Coppola’s filmography. And not to objectivity Laura Dern, but those shoulders… She really was destined to be a (nepo) star, huh?

14. Jacqueline Novak: Get On Your Knees (Lyonne, 2024) — Unreal. I want to live in Jacqueline Novak’s brain, where lines like “I grew tired from being in a constant state of enchantment… I wanted to take the moon for granted like other girls” do not prompt an eyeroll but instead a wide-eye gasp. No one’s doing it like her. My other favourites lines: “It is a nightmare for an intellectual like myself to be incarnate at all frankly.” “To me, the vulva is beautiful in the way that a tattered flag is beautiful, its frayed edges telling of how ideals met actualities.” “Frankly no one moves me quite like me, I guess. First I’m moved and then I’m moved at the very depth of my capacity to be moved.”

On My Reading List This Weekend

• Rebecca Jennings argues that everyone’s a sellout now (Vox)

• How The Viall Files became Meet the Press for reality TV (Vulture)

• Why “lives of the wives” books won’t save us (Bustle)

• How to invent a perfect college applicant (Intelligencer)

• Childcare as a radical organizing tool for mothers (Dissent)

• Oh no: Why Demi Lovato sang Heart Attack at a heart disease event (Rolling Stone)