This Week in Pop Culture: May 31, 2024

Some new-ish horror movie recs, books in 3 different genres, and so much more in this week's pop culture round-up.

Happy Friday, friends! I hope you survived the short(er) week and are looking forward to the weekend. I can hardly believe that June is (nearly) here - I can already tell that summer is going to go by so fast. I’m hoping to spend some time this weekend on a patio with friends, but the weather is looking a little iffy, so we’ll have to see. This is really the last weekend where my schedule isn’t jam-packed with social events or travel until July, so I’m trying to relish a slower pace. Whatever you have planned, I hope you’re looking forward to it.

It was a pretty slow news week, celebrity gossip-wise.¹ I don’t feel as though I spent less time online than usual, but I certainly feel as though fewer stories captured my attention this week. I did enjoy reading this “New Hollywood A-List” list from The Hollywood Reporter, though. The article talks about the fact that these “new” A-list stars eschew the superhero franchises and gravitate towards a bigger variety of roles, but also made note of the fact that the list is still largely white-y white white:

And while the New A-List may be diverse in terms of talents and personas, there’s one area where that’s certainly not the case: actual diversity. Despite pushes toward inclusion, the mostly white names exemplify how studios have failed to radically change the paradigm. (The next quickly ascending tier includes actors like Kingsley Ben-Adir, Damson Idris and Ayo Edebiri, so there’s still hope.)

People on the list include Glen Powell, Zendaya, Austin Butler, Paul Mescal, Jenna Ortega, and Sydney Sweeney.

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I guess everything is coming up The Hollywood Reporter this week, because I also really enjoyed their Comedy Actress Roundtable, featuring Kristen Wiig, Maya Rudolph, Quinta Brunson, Ego Nwodim, Michelle Buteau, and Renee Elise Goldsberry.

This round-robin interview/conversation covers all sorts of topics, like navigating Hollywood as a plus-size woman, being a Black creator, being a woman in comedy, and so much more. It’s a very funny and very illuminating interview. I love all of them, but can we just take a moment to appreciate how great Michelle Buteau looks?

The transcript of the interview is great, but if you’d like to, you can watch the entire interview here:

Before we get into the rest of the pop culture that took up space in my brain this week, a very funny moment of zen, given the breaking news this week:

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What I Read:

This American Ex-Wife: How I Ended My Marriage and Started My Life by Lyz Lenz: Lenz marries (sorry) sociological research and literature with stories about her own life and marriage to examine the gender politics of marriage and divorce in America today. Arguing that divorce can actually allow women to take back their power, Lenz offers a look at what needs to change for marriage to work for everyone.

I really like Lenz’s newsletter “Men Yell at Me,”² and she’s been promoting her newest book pretty heavily for a while, so I got the audiobook from my library and tore through it in about a day and a half. And…I have complicated feelings about this one! On the one hand, it’s my own fault for not realizing that Lenz didn’t write a straightforward memoir about the end of her marriage so much as she provides some details about her life while giving us some feminism 101 talking points. On the other hand, the way Lenz cherry-picked details about the collapse of her marriage is really frustrating, and the broad brush she uses to paint a picture of the current state of heterosexual marriage leaves a lot of nuance and detail out.

Lenz continually writes about her marriage as if it is the experience of most American women, but the truth is that she married a conservative, Christian man straight out of college, and stayed with him for more than a decade, despite the fact that he voted for Trump and doesn’t like gay people, the latter of which seems to have only horrified her after many years together, which is…kind of wild?³ There’s a missed opportunity within the book’s pages to examine how her own values changed from her evangelical upbringing, and how that played into the breakdown of their relationship, but that doesn’t happen. Instead of examining how we might improve marriage (or even imagine a world in which marriage doesn’t exist), Lenz repeatedly tells women to leave their marriages. There’s an unshakable confidence here that doesn’t feel earned, and there are moments of smugness that I found really chafing. Happy that she’s happy but I do not think this book succeeds in what it’s attempting to do!

This Summer Will Be Different by Carley Fortune: When Lucy rents a beach house on Prince Edward Island, she meets a local named Felix who shows her a really good time. But when she realizes he’s her best friend’s younger brother, they vow to stay away from one another. Easier said than done: every year, she falls back into a pattern with Felix, but she swears to keep feelings out of the equation. That proves harder to do than she anticipated, and the two will have to reckon with what’s between them.

A perfect summer read in every possible way, Fortune’s latest offers plenty of angst, steamy romance, and a gorgeous setting. When I tell you that Fortune writes about Prince Edward Island in such a way that it made me want to book a trip there immediately, I’m not joking! The rest of it was a fairly enjoyable reading experience - the character of Felix is very appealing and the chemistry between him and Lucy crackles on the page, even if I struggled with the fact that all of the characters felt a little under-developed to me. I loved the exploration of the friendship between Lucy and her best friend and how they were both struggling with it changing as their lives changed. It won’t surpass Fortune’s debut for me, but I liked it a lot more than her sophomore effort.

The Likeness by Tana French: After a near-death experience on the job, detective Cassie Maddox transferred out of the Murder squad in an attempt to gain control of her life back. When she gets called to the scene of a murder, she’s shocked to find that the murdered girl looks exactly like her. Her ID says that she’s Lexie Madison, the same identity that Cassie used years before while undercover. With no leads on the murder, Cassie’s old boss sends Cassie in undercover to attempt to lure the killer out to finish the job.

I read In the Woods, the first book in French’s beloved Dublin Murder Squad series, years ago for a book club that has long since disbanded. Continuing on with the series has always been a goal, but as readers of this newsletter can probably guess, I don’t get to a lot of my backlist because I tend to gravitate towards new releases. But I was able to get the audiobook of this from the library while I wait for my Spotify audiobook hours to renew,⁴ and I found myself wholly immersed in the world French created. I truly did not know where this book would go, plot-wise, and loved getting drawn into the grad students alongside Cassie as she tries to figure out what happened to Lexie. My quibbles with this one are the same as with the first in the series: I think French has a tendency to overwrite (the audiobook clocks in at over 22 hours), and some parts of the plot strain credulity - but it hardly matters because you get sucked into what the characters are up to so quickly. Recommended, especially if you like your thrillers on the gothic side or with a twist of dark academia.

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What I Watched:

Abigail (Rental): When a group of criminals are tasked with kidnapping the 12-year-old ballerina daughter of a powerful figure in the underworld (just go with it), they soon discover that they might have bitten off more than they can chew. Trapped with her in an isolated mansion overnight, the group realizes that Abigail is not a girl so much as a vampire.

It’s no secret that I’ve been in a bit of a movie and TV rut, and I tried switching genres this week to see if it would help. I settled on horror, because the movies tend to be relatively short⁵ and fast-paced. This was very silly (and would have been very fun in a packed theater), and while I thought the cast was on the whole very good, it did not manage to maintain any semblance of suspense because the movie gives away the ~twist~ so early! Maybe it doesn’t matter for a movie like this, which is basically a supernatural retelling of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None?⁶ Either way, this was fun but forgettable.

I.S.S. (Rental): When the astronauts onboard the International Space Station witness what they think is a conflict breaking out on earth, the U.S. and Russian folks on board receive instructions to take control by any means necessary.

Have you even heard of this movie? I’m guessing the answer is no, because it seems to have arrived with almost zero fanfare. I’m not sure if it’s because it doesn’t star any huge names (apologies to both Ariana DeBose and Chris Messina) or if it’s because it’s just a solid middle-of-the-road space thriller, or if it was just unceremoniously dumped onto the VOD/rental services without any promotion. But it was mostly fine, if a little forgettable? It’s a tightly paced movie and has some genuinely tense moments, and I appreciate the fact that the whole thing takes place in a single location, making the viewer feel as claustrophobic as the astronauts in the movie. Not a lot of this will stay with me, though - recommended as background noise while you fold laundry or something - I wouldn’t pay full rental price for it (I’m certain it’ll appear on Hulu or another streamer in a few months).

Immaculate (Rental): When an American nun moves to the remote Italian countryside to join a new convent, she’s hoping for a fresh start. But it isn’t long before she realizes her new home has terrible secrets - and she might be in serious danger.

This genuinely scary and absolutely unhinged movie is another perfect example of something that probably works best in a crowded theater (as opposed to on my couch on a Saturday afternoon). I really thought this was going to be one thing and then the movie took a turn and it became a different, much dumber thing, but I had a lot of fun watching it! There’s a scene near the end where Sydney Sweeney is covered in blood and screams bloody murder for like four minutes straight and it’s pure unhinged camp cinema. I had a lot of fun and would recommend watching this with someone else so you can laugh and scream together.

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What I Listened To:

Nelly Furtado’s Tiny Desk Concert: Furtado’s debut album, Whoa, Nelly! was a pivotal album of my adolescence: it was the soundtrack of my life when I first got my driver’s license and it remains to this day a favorite album, steeped in nostalgia for me. I loved watching this Tiny Desk Concert that encapsulated a lot of her (25 year) career so far. She looks like she’s having so much fun (and she looks great):

Shaboozey featuring Noah Cyrus, “My Fault”: I might not love Noah Cyrus’s no-eyebrows look, but I love her voice. She’s great in harmony here with Shaboozey, an artist who combines hip-hop, rock, country and Americana to make a sound that is uniquely his own. He was featured (twice) on Beyonce’s Cowboy Carter, which is how I discovered him, but I’m digging this extremely sad, cryin’-in-my-beer duet between him and Cyrus. It immediately went onto my “Writing My Feelings” playlist and I fear will be in heavy rotation as I continue to struggle through a first draft of a manuscript that isn’t coming together the way I’d hoped. If you’re looking for another Noah Cyrus duet that’s worth your time, I also love her song “July” with Leon Bridges.

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What I’m Looking Forward To:

The Bear, Season 3 (Hulu, June 27):⁷ Oh yeah, we’re back, baby! Our favorite dysfunctional kitchen crew is back for the third season of Hulu’s wildly popular show, and I can’t wait! It looks like a lot is happening this season, and I’m here for all of it:

A Family Affair (Netflix, June 28): When her movie star boss starts dating her mom, a woman has to reckon with the fact that it has consequences for them all. This seems like The Idea of You but with much broader comedy and worse wigs?⁸ Either way, I will be seated!

Kinds of Kindness (Theaters, June 21): Described as a “triptych fable,” the latest movie from Yorgos Lanthimos follows several people all searching for something. The cast is stellar and though this teaser trailer doesn’t give us much to go on, I’m very interested to see this!

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That’s it for this week! I’ll be back next week with more summer reads, preliminary thoughts on Charli XCX’s new album, and so much more. Have a great weekend and thanks, as always, for reading!

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1. Maybe it’s because I’m ancient, but I cannot bring myself to care about Millie Bobby Brown marrying Jon Bon Jovi’s kid!

2. I’m not linking it here because I don’t like to tag writers when I’m not going to gush about their work. It just feels weird to be like, “Hey you! I didn’t like this thing you worked on really hard and I WANT YOU TO KNOW IT!”

3. She also talks a lot about how he was bad in bed, and I kind of feel like that could have stayed in the drafts - and hope her ex-husband never reads this book!

4. I love getting 15 hours of audiobooks a month because it allows me to “skip” the line for library holds on books I really want to listen to, but those 15 hours go so fast, and you will never catch me paying Spotify additional $$$ for audiobooks when I can get that shit for free at my library.

5. Here at Pop Culture Personality, we advocate for a tight 90 minutes when it comes to film.

6. The movie doesn’t even try to hide this - there’s a callout to the book on a shelf at one point.

7. I’ll be in San Diego for a professional conference and have already threatened my husband with divorce if he even thinks about watching the show without me.

8. What is going on with Nicole Kidman’s hair?