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It's Armageddon Summer! These Distractions Will Help You Survive It...

Jun 18

Dear Wags,

Courage, among pack animals, is rare. What more evidence do we need than the congressional hearings into the events of Jan. 6? We are quick to pounce on weakness and hypocrisy when we see it in enemies. It’s much harder—perhaps it’s never been more difficult—to recognize bravery on the other side of the battlefield. We live in a time when moderation, conciliation, and intellectual independence are mocked as wobbliness. Bullying, a practice we supposedly abhor but all engage in, is ubiquitous. When empathy is derided as wobbliness, we can hardly be surprised by the results.

Wag is not here to rally you to the barricades, but to keep you acquainted with the qualities that make you so worthwhile. You are as capable of kindness and understanding as you of dunking or clapping back. With the barest nudge, you can handle complexity, and when the chips are down, you are fearsomely brave. The cowardice and dishonesty exposed in our recent constitutional crisis aren’t limited to a handful of corrupt villains. We loathe these qualities in others because we recognize them in ourselves. Resist those mundane frailties in little ways: Speak your mind when you disagree, and praise others for their fortitude when they do the same. It won’t fix civilization, but it’s a nice start. And now, some bonbons of diversion for a stifling week in June.

Yours Ever,

If the entertainment business is in a fragmented state, trade media has mirrored this implosion. In addition to the old staples of the industry, there are now a shrapnel spray newsletters covering the Hollywood as a business as opposed to celebrities as personalities (the latter category is moribund). The theory behind behind some of these enterprises seems to be that we are a country of 375 million studio execs, all eager to pay a premium to get the latest on a shuffle at Netflix. We have a favorite in this scrum, but if we were a VC on Page Mill Road, we might be asking ourselves: What does consolidation in a fractious mini-universe of content look like? Will legacy titles, owned by Low Key Jay Penske, gobble up all the upstarts, or can a field of rivals share such a small sandbox? Peak Newsletterdom, like the streaming industry so slavishly covers, inevitably will give way to a winnowing down; There aren’t enough trade ads or paid subscribers to sustain it. When the smoke clears, the survivors will try to grow their audiences by grabbing readers from the declining glossy brands that cover Hollywood. In other words, if Condé Nast is swallowed by a giant fissure in the earth’s crust, why can’t a trade-oriented entity become its successor? That’s a real gambit. Now let’s step back and see what happens. — Sid Falco

Pictures

Good Luck to You, Leo Brand (Hulu). Mrs. Robinson, are you trying awfully hard to be seduced? Wag Suprema Emma Thompson is a woman of a particular vintage who has never had an orgasm, so she hires handy young fellow (Daryl McCormick) to help her out. Leo hit the g-spot of Sundance. Now it arrives to work its magic on you. Because it may come up: it’s not at all like the bestselling Vladimir, by Julia May Jonas, which also works the older woman/younger man lane (you really ought to read that).

Cha Cha Real Smooth (AppleTV+). Wag Cooper Raiff dropped out of Occidental to make movies, not launch a tech startup, a wee sign that the Hollywood dream endures. His tale of a drifting twentysomething who becomes a bar mitzvah party fluffer was another Sundance darling. Dakota Johnson (never better) is the lonely woman he falls for, while Vanessa Burghardt is a real discovery as her daughter, who is on the autism spectrum. More fun than line dancing.

Laughs

Rutherford Falls (Peacock). NBC comedy, cozy afghan of entertainment, does not get snugglier than Falls. We return to a New England town filled with oddballs led by Jana Schmieding, the flummoxed curator of the local Native American cultural center. Ed Helms is the heir to the burg’s complicated colonial legacy and Michael Greyeyes has the time of his life as the amoral chairman of the reservation casino.

Spy Game

The Old Man (FX/Hulu). Sir Jeff Bridges is an advertisement for an active retirement as a former CIA agent, living alone with very large dogs, who outwits, outmuscles, and outshoots squads of younger operatives deployed by another cranky old man (Sir John Lithgow). Old scores from Jeff’s past work in Afghanistan must be settled! Amy Brenneman is his sympathetic landlady.

Cautionary Tale

The Martha Mitchell Effect (Netflix). I’m convinced if it hadn’t been for Martha, there would be no Watergate. So said Richard Nixon of Wag Emerita Martha Beall Mitchell, who said exactly what was on her mind. It made her a celebrity, got her into very hot water with the GOP, and was her undoing. The so-called Mouth of the South was fearless and funny, but she suffered terribly for it. A doc for this moment.

With Pippa and Huck

The Summer I turned Pretty (Amazon Prime). Wag Jenny Han, queen of Y/A, is back with an adaptation of her bestselling book series, about a girl on the cusp of everything (Lola Tung) torn by her affection for two brothers while summering in mythical, extremely photogenic Cousins Beach. — Katherine Danziger

Memoir

Did ye hear Séamas O'Reilly grew up in a very crowded house in Derry, stuffed to the rafters with sharp-tongued siblings (10, in fact), and that the lot of them lost their mam? Did ye hear about their harried daddy, who drove them around in a beaten up bus nicknamed the O’Reilly Mobile? Did ye hear they were a screamingly funny brood of miscreants? Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? is a bleak, hilarious, grand Irish story.

Fiction

Wag Emeritus Lem Billings met John F. Kennedy at Choate and became his lifelong friend and confidante, with his own room in the White House. He was scrupulously discreet, fiercely loyal, and very privately gay. Brilliant Louis Bayard reimagines his life and relationship with Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis in Jackie & Me. It’s a witty, humane tale of an unlikely friendship in Camelot.

Nonfiction

Remember the mall? It was a fun spot, a few exits down the highway, with little shops sandwiched between two anchor department stores. It’s where teens met up to find trouble, seniors went to power walk, and a nation indulged in retail therapy and escape. That 20th Century agora, maligned and romanticized, has found a champion in Wag Alexandra Lange. Meet Me By the Fountain; An Inside History of the Mall charts the rise, fall, and possible revival of an American institution. You are right to miss schlepping there. — Stacy Hamilton

What do the British do best? Apologize, obviously. But also: scandals. Why, there must already be 2 million podcasts about this! Smarties Alice Levine and Matt Forde stand out from the crowd because they are very funny (their back-and-forth even brightens up the poisoning of former KGB man Alexander Litvinenko). The chatty pair cover familiar ground— Profumo, phone hacking, Jeffrey Archer—but slather on the salt and vinegar of irreverence, another thing British people do very well. It’s delicious. — Norman Josiffe

I believe that miracles are true/ I believe the smallest flowers bloom/I believe just give it a little room. Yaya Bey, raised in Queens, now making very assured R&B in Brooklyn, is going to help you go with the flow. alright is a dusk after a heat wave tune, with funky keyboards that remind us of Songs in the Key of Life. It all conjures up fire escapes, ceiling fans and city summers long past. Let her take you there.

Foals come from modern Oxfordshire, but Life is Yours could have been popped into a Walkman in 1984. It’s (new) New Wave, pinging and bopping like a single by ABC. This dance party track just might convince you happy days are here again. Molly Ringwald would like it.— Andie Walsh

There was a time when knowledge of French cinema was a mark of sophistication, and the big stars the New Wave made an impression not just on Hollywood, but the entire English-speaking world. Jean-Louis Trintignat, who died on June 17 at 91, starred in some of the greatest French movies of all time, but he was never as famous as his peers Alain Delon or Jean-Paul Belmondo, because unlike them, he had an introspective, even reticent presence onscreen. The son of an industrialist, he initially studied law before finding his way into acting, and starred opposite Brigitte Bardot in Roger Vadim’s And God Created Woman (1955). Mandatory military service in Algeria disrupted his career, but Claude Lelouch’s A Man and a Woman (1966), with Anouk Aimée, became an enormous, beloved hit. Over a long career, Trintignat worked in Italy and America, and in Krzysztof Kieślowski's Three Colors: Red (1994) and Michel Haneke’s Amour (2012). Lelouch’s The Best Years of a Life (2019) reunited him with Aimée in a sequel to the movie that him a star; it was his final film. To the end, he was humble about his life and work. “The best actors in the world are those who feel the most and show the least,” he once said. That depth of emotion came through in every part he played. —Anne Gauthier

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