This Week in Pop Culture: May 17, 2024

Netflix's abysmal Mother of the Bride, another whole slew of books, Billie Eilish's new album, and more in this week's pop culture round-up.

Happy Friday, friends. I hope you survived the week and are looking forward to something fun this weekend. I have a scary list of spring cleaning tasks that I’ve been slowly working my way through and I’ve been avoiding cleaning the outside of our windows, but I think this weekend might finally be time. But I’m also hoping to spend time outside doing things that are more fun than scrubbing glass. Let’s get into some of the stuff that caught my interest online this week:

I’ve been really enjoying these photos of Emma D’Arcy and Olivia Cooke ahead of season 2 of House of the Dragon over at Entertainment Weekly:

The interview itself is pretty fluffy (it is EW, after all), but I was interested to learn how much Olivia Cooke hated that she and D’Arcy went viral after that infamous “Negroni sbagliato with prosecco in it” interview that launched a million TikTok memes:¹

@streamonmaxI'll take one of each. #houseofthedragon

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

House of the Dragon is back on June 16, but in the meantime, these promo shots will sustain me:

In other news, yet another college commencement speech has gone viral because of how bad it was. I’m not going to link to the video of the actual speech because that thumb of a man doesn’t deserve any more attention, but I’ve been thinking a lot about the internet’s response to Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker’s hateful, abhorrent commencement speech at Benedictine College over the weekend:

Imagine standing in front of a crowd of graduating students in the year 2024, addressing the women in the crowd, and telling them that their hard work over the last 4+ years meant nothing because they should instead be looking forward to becoming wives and mothers!² And then quoting a Taylor Swift lyric³ (in this case, he didn’t say her name, instead calling her “my teammate’s girlfriend”) to further make your point! Was he not expecting to unleash the power of the Swifties (as well as the general internet), or was that his intention all along?⁴

Lots of great points being made in this TikTok about quoting a 34-year-old unmarried woman with no kids who is a literal billionaire:

@justwaynecreativeReplying to @watermelon12280 isnt ironic? Quoting Taylor Swift, Harrison Butker

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

I also loved this clip of Patrick Mahomes doubling down on the fact that he doesn’t talk to Butker at all, despite the fact that they’ve been teammates since they both started on the Chiefs in 2017:

@ladydragonjjEmbarassing

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

Anyway! Do I think this skidmark of a human being will face any real consequences for this abysmal speech? Nope! I also don’t think Benedictine College will, though they should! What an embarrassing way for your institution to make a name for itself at a time when college enrollment is way down.

Here’s the rest of the pop culture that took up space in my brain this week:

---

What I Read:⁵

Girl Underwater by Claire Kells: Avery loves the water. A swimmer on her university’s nationally ranked swim team, she’s settled into the groove of young adulthood. When her flight home for Thanksgiving goes down in the Colorado Rockies, there are only five survivors: Avery, three little boys, and Colin Shea, a teammate she’s been avoiding since her first day of freshman year. They must work together to survive, but after they’re rescued, Avery finds that her hard work has just begun as she deals with PTSD and conflicted emotions about her own survival.

I discovered this novel on a thread about people’s worst book hangovers, and I really went into it thinking I’d love it. Spoiler alert: I did not! I’m not sure if it was the fact that it felt like YA fiction (with the exception that the characters are in college and have really advanced survival skills) or that the characterization and plot felt half-baked, but it just didn’t work for me at all. I’m not opposed to a survival story that features a romance - Tracy Garvis Graves’s On the Island does it very well - but the survival story here felt underdeveloped. The alternating chapters between how they survived and the aftermath slowed down the plot and made the second half, in particular, hard to get through. A miss for me.

Fever Dream by Samantha Schweblin: A woman named Amanda is dying in a hospital clinic. Next to her is a young boy named David, but he is not her child and she is not his mother. Together, they tell a story of how they ended up in the clinic as they both grapple with the fact that the end has come for Amanda.

I read Fever Dream in one breathless sitting in my backyard. Tight prose (translated by the prolific Megan McDowell) and a tense story that the reader is dropped into immediately make this slim novel’s pages fly by. A real Pandora’s Box of horrors await in this slyly told literary thriller that’s more interested in examining maternal love and fear and our vulnerability in a world teeming with unseen and unimagined threats than it is in explaining in detail what has actually happened to the book’s characters. I think I loved this, though it wasn’t an easy read - it got under my skin and I’ll be thinking about it for a long time.

The Moon that Turns You Back by Hala Alyan: A poetry collection that contains multiple voices and memories, Alyan’s latest poetry collection examines the concept of displacement: both from a physical home and from one’s own body. Traveling from Beirut to Jerusalem to the U.S. to Kuwait, Alyan examines the lasting bonds of family even in the face of grief.

Much more experimental than I was anticipating, I read Palestinian-American Alyan’s latest collection of poetry over the course of a couple of days. I appreciated how she played around with the form of her poems on the page and found many of the lines arresting. Her work has always explored diaspora; here she seems even more disillusioned with the state of the world. There’s a lot of rumination on despair here: Alyan writes about miscarriage and an ectopic pregnancy and how both can make a person feel separated from their own body. Not an easy collection (I think The Twenty-Ninth Year was perhaps more cohesive?), but one that will stick with me.

A Summer Affair by Elin Hilderbrand: Claire has always had a problem with boundaries, and as a result, she’s spent her life taking on too much. On the surface, her life is perfect: she has a devoted husband and beautiful children, and a career as an artist. When she agrees to chair Nantucket’s biggest social event of the year, it pushes her into the orbit of a rich man named Lock Dixon, and the two can’t ignore the chemistry they have. But as the gala draws closer, Claire finds herself losing her grip on control of her life.

Elin Hilderbrand is really hit or miss for me when it comes to her books.⁶ This one - the first in her Nantucket quartet⁷ - was more of a miss, unfortunately. I found that there were too many characters to track, and that it was way too long! I enjoyed bits of it - there’s a section where two characters planning the annual gala go back and forth in email and one of them is an absolute nightmare - but I really felt like a lot of the book could have been trimmed down. The most fun I had was checking out the number of Goodreads reviewers who gave this book a 1-star rating because they were horrified by the fact that fictional characters cheated. Fiction writing does not mean that the author is condoning the actions of their characters! Say it louder for the folks in the back! Also, how boring would it be if everyone in a novel was perfect and good? Good grief.

---

What I Watched:

Mother of the Bride (Netflix): When a woman’s daughter announces her engagement, she travels to the destination wedding only to discover her daughter’s groom-to-be is the son of her college sweetheart.

Woof. I thought this was written by AI until I looked it up and it was the same screenwriter who penned all three of the Princess Switch movies, so…basically the same thing. My expectations for this were pretty low, but they somehow still didn’t clear the bar. It’s too bad, because the cast is stacked with people who are competent-to-great in terms of acting ability, but no one is bringing their A-game here, and it shows! Utterly lacking any charisma, absolutely charmless, and every scene in this movie is something you’ve seen done at least a half dozen times before, only somehow this time is worse. It’s only 90 minutes, but it feels much, much longer.

This is the reason Netflix’s 1.5x speed feature exists. A skip!

---

What I Listened To:

Billie Eilish, HIT ME HARD AND SOFT: This album is, after a couple of listens through, great!⁸ Eilish’s third studio album - her first in three years - is more playful sounding than much of her music that’s come before, but there’s a palpable anger simmering under the surface of many of the songs, too. It’s also much more explicitly queer than her previous albums, which makes sense, since Eilish (sort of) publicly came out last year. Alternating between upbeat synth-pop beats and confessional ballads, the album is full of Eilish’s struggles with fame, with public scrutiny over her looks, and her inability to have a private romantic life.

The album is a tightly written 10 songs, clocking in just under 45 minutes, and as a result, it goes down very smoothly and feels like a cohesive story.⁹ I’m still sinking into the songs on the album, but an early stand-out is the whisper-then-scream banger “THE GREATEST”:

I also really like “L’AMOUR DE MA VIE”:

On the whole it’s an experimental, weird, wonderful pop album that deserves to be listened to and considered. I’m looking forward to spending more time with it and would not be surprised at all if it ends up being one of my favorite albums of the year.

---

What I’m Looking Forward To:

It Ends With Us (Theaters, August 9): After overcoming a traumatic childhood, Lily Bloom¹⁰ is on track to open her dream flower shop when she meets the charming neurosurgeon Ryle Kincaid¹¹ and the two fall in love. But Ryle has a violent streak, and Lily struggles with the fact that they might be repeating familial patterns. When her first love, Atlas Corrigan¹² comes back into her life, she must figure out how to stand on her own.

To say that I’m “looking forward” to this is a bit of an embellishment: I’m a certified Colleen Hoover hater, and this movie is based on one of her wildly popular “romances,” a book that I have read.¹³ The production was plagued with all sorts of production problems (including trying to continue filming during the WGA/SAG strikes) and backlash about the casting and some leaked photos of wild wardrobe choices. There was also that whole thing where Hoover had to apologize and pull a coloring book based on the book because people reacted badly to it. Anyway, I think this movie will be VERY bad (and I will not pay money to see it in theaters) but I will absolutely watch it when it ends up on streaming because I’m a glutton for punishment and I love mess.

Fancy Dance (Apple TV+, June 28): Jax has cared for her niece Roki since her sister’s disappearance. When her custody of Roki is threatened, the two take a road trip to search for Roki’s mother ahead of a big powwow. This is a Lily Gladstone fan newsletter and this looks really powerful and excellently acted (also: directed by a woman)!

Wicked (Theaters, Thanksgiving): The origin story of the Wicked Witch and Glinda the Good Witch is finally coming to the big screen. I know I’ve dropped the teaser trailer here before and featured some stunning promotional shots of the cast, but we got the full theatrical trailer this week and it looks so fun and so unhinged:

Thelma (Theaters, June 21): When 93-year-old Thelma loses $10,000 to a scammer over the phone pretending to be her grandson, she gets the help of a friend (and his motorized scooter) to trek across L.A. to get her money back. Hailed as June Squib’s first leading role (she also did the majority of her own stunts in this movie), the cast is stacked and this looks so heartfelt and funny.

---

That’s it for this week! I’ll be back next week with more book recommendations, thoughts on whatever TV I end up watching (will I get through Bridgerton season 2 so that I can start the third season?), and so much more.

If you enjoyed this newsletter, please consider tapping the heart at the top or bottom of it - it helps my work be found by other people. I hope you have a great weekend, and thanks, as always, for reading!

1. I am ashamed to admit that I still say, “oh, stunnin’” at least once a week. I can’t help it.

2. This is not the only viral story this week where women are being told how to live. Have you seen the disastrous Bumble billboard yet?

3. Hilariously, he used a quote from Bejeweled, a song that is famously about dumping a man in order to continue excelling at your career. You can’t make this shit up!

4. I don’t actually think this dude is smart enough to have planned this, but who knows. Butker has always held these misogynistic and bigoted views - he just has more eyes on him now.

5. Much like last week, I read a lot this week. It’s partly due to nice weather and wanting to be outside, and partly due to the fact that I really think we’re in a drought of TV/movies I want to watch. It ebbs and flows!

6. 28 Summers is her best book - it broke my heart when I read it years ago and I still think about it often.

7. The last of which, Swan Song, is set to be released this summer and is rumored to be her last novel based in Nantucket ever. The information professional in me tried to find a reputable source about what this means and found conflicting information - she’s allegedly working on several novels with her daughter. Who knows.

8. I wasn’t really worried, but still.

9. Is this shade? It might be, but it’s not necessarily intentional.

10. If you think this name is bad, keep reading!

11. RYLE! Pronounced like KYLE!

12. Colleen Hoover is really out here picking the worst names for her characters and I LOVE IT.

13. I have read an embarrassing number of her books and have liked exactly zero of them. I can’t explain it - I know what I’m getting is going to be bad every time - but I have to experience it for myself. It’s lose-lose, every time.