Barbie & Wednesday Addams, Nepo Babies?
Plus more royal drama, filmmaker Taylor Swift, Oppenheimer, and the best and worst gift guides!
This week I flew home to Texas to spend some beloved extended time with Mom and Dad, and Ben went to spend some time with the new 192-minute CGI Ocean Documentary Avatar movie! I can’t decide if I will EVER spend 3 hours and 12 minutes of my life watching Planet Earth with a script written by first-graders, but maybe!
On the one hand, it is by all accounts gorgeous, cinematic, and mind-boggling. And I can’t escape the fact that I watched the first Avatar in theaters at least twice?! [It was because of a boy.] On the other hand: Dialogue that makes the Fast & Furious franchise sound like Shakespeare? I doth protest!
Anyhoo, I am full up with Christmas cheer and family gatherings so this week we just have some silly News things I have thoughts about, plus a lot of unbridled praise for Netflix’s Wednesday, which is just the sort of easy watching that the holidays call for.
Anything you’re comfort-watching this holiday season that I can partake?
In the News
Vulture drags the Nepo Babies.
I mean, as you know if you’ve been on TikTok at all this year, the entire Internet has been dragging Nepo Babies for all of 2022. Nepo Babies are the children of famous people, but the term really has no spectrum to it. You can be Timothée Hal Chalamet, the nephew of the director of Leprechaun 2, or you can be Lily-Rose Depp, the daughter of one of the most famous men to ever live, and you’re both gonna get dragged!!
The main problem is when the Nepo Babies get on TikTok from their Beverly Hills mansion to say, “I had JUST AS HARD a time getting here as YOU DID!!” Meanwhile, the casting director at every audition is literally crying and hugging them and thanking them so much for their time.
Anyhoo, you can read about the Babies and their Detractors in the excellent article from Vulture, or you can read through Tweet reactions at Buzzfeed. Which is real journalism? You decide!!
Royal Drama
Seen above, the original model of Nepo Babies—aka Royals—
bravelycompulsorily smiling their way through the “Together at Christmas” taping on the same day that the second half of Netflix’s Harry and Meghan dropped — in which Harry heart-breakingly explains that a likely insurmountable rift now exists between the two brothers.While Harry and Meghan can really give the impression they think they’re the first people in the world to — pick your fave — have a long-distance relationship, worry about money, go camping, have trouble balancing work and kids, fight with their families, etc., — and while some of what they're suffering can feel very “OMG we lived in a COTTAGE with only TWELVE ROOMS, we nearly DIED!!” — it’s true he actually has NOT had a normal life and they actually HAVE had an extremely difficult and scary time of it, and William seems to have done nothing to help, and in fact may have made it MUCH worse, if Harry is to be believed. And I do belive them. And so does Oprah! [Though, it must be said, she has believed a lot.]
As mentioned, the second half of the Harry & Meghan documentary dropped, and I haven’t had the time or the stomach to watch 3 more hours of it! God bless them, though! Some old white man wrote some appalling things about Meghan in one of the worst of the British tabloids — and let it be a reminder to us that even if someone is ~*~annoying~*~ and produces a six-hour life story that is nothing if not hagiographic, that person still deserves to have a life! Also, racist, sexist tabloids still need to STOP! Okay, I’m done!
Taylor Swift is writing and directing a movie!
May the Lord bless her endeavors, and may it be better than her previous filmmaking excursions! [3 separate links because Taylor gave us some real stinkers, and God gave me Ctrl+K!]
Matt is out of GBBO.
Saints of Baking be praised! All I’m saying is Annie from Bridesmaids could’ve told us in 2011 that he should not come within 5 miles of people who love baking!!
Who should replace him and why should it be the nun from Derry Girls?
The Barbie (2023) AND Oppenheimer (2023) teasers dropped, and, people of Earth, we are not ready!!
Greta understood the assignment!! Get ready for the gays and girls to make this our entire personality in 2023!!
And this one will be the 2023 personality of all the boys you knew in college who are now buying tickets to that Death Cab for Cutie/Postal Service joint tour. [But the way I gasped one long gasp this entire teaser!!!??!?!?]
The Goop Gift Guide
For most of the year, Gwyneth Paltrow’s lifestyle brand, Goop, flits at the periphery of my subconscious like an effervescent, well-manicured spirit. But every holiday season, I wake up one morning, my heart beating, my mind already crafting proletariat hate tweets, knowing that Goop is dropping their annual Holiday Gift Guide.
If you need a frame of reference, the Goop Holiday Gift Guide is basically like an aspirational reimagining of what Serena van der Woodsen and Blair Waldorf might gift each other for Christmas. If you want to pay $5,000 for a 2-oz jar of face-cream made from "goddess crystals," look no further!!
A few standout gags this year:
A $420 Gucci Doggie-Poop-Bag Bag! To carry your dog’s bags of poop in style!
Actual Poop! For a mere $75, you can gift your loved ones with “free-range compost.”
A $239 Baguette Bag! You know, to carry one single baguette home each day! [I haven’t watched it, but I feel certain that Emily in Paris would do this.]
A lot of sex dungeon stuff, most of which I won’t link because my Gran sometimes reads this, and I can’t stomach that. HOWEVER, I can’t resist sharing the $28,500 boudoir chair and the $1,750 “Cowgirl Sex Machine”. [Accompanied by the note that the item is, in fact, Final Sale!
SafetyHygiene first!]Goop’s
infamous “This Smells Like My Vagina” scent, which feels like public health misinformation because, not to be graphic, but if it smells like flowers or spice or any other smell that you could put in a CANDLE, you should go to the hospital IMMEDIATELY!!!
In conclusion, don’t buy anything from this guide, please. Its very existence is a crime against humanity.
Monica Padman’s Gift Guide
As a palate cleanser to Goop: Monica Padman from Armchair Expert did her second annual gift guide across five Instagram posts. I don’t know if I’ll end up buying any of her suggestions, but I loved reading through them. She’s such a lovely person and a fantastic writer.
Watching - Wednesday on Netflix
Me and everybody love it! That’s all!
Sure, some critics are calling it “formulaic” and “unimaginative,” but others are calling it “perfect” — and I’d say it’s somewhere dead in the middle. But mostly it’s delightful! Yes, it’s old IP, and it keeps to familiar tropes [Gossip Girl but make it Hogwarts?], but hey, there’s a reason the tropes work?!
Plus, Jenna Ortega is magic and Christmas is a time for nostalgia.
I love Wednesday Addams, and I love the little beekeeper boy with the retainer, and I love New England Hogwarts for Weird Kids, and I love Brienne of Tarth as a school principal with a taste for monochrome haute couture paired with a bold red lip, and I love Christina Ricci playing Christina Ricci, Dorm Mom!!!!
If you miss Harry Potter and just want a loveable, warm show about loyalty and family and friendship and acceptance and inclusion — that is also a murder mystery — Wednesday fits the bill. [It’s also very Queen’s Gambit vibes, as my mom pointed out!]
But don’t take my word for it: Wednesday is now Netflix’s second most-watched English-language title of all time, behind Stranger Things Season 4. [It was briefly at number three behind the “Dahmer” show, which I still refuse to watch because I saw y’all with all those horny tweets about a known serial murderer-slash-cannibal, and we are not doing that in MY HOME!] If we expand beyond English-language, Wednesday is third overall, with Squid Game at the top.
I need your thoughts on Paddy Considine being snubbed of a Golden Globe nomination. Absolute travesty!
$75 free range compost sounds like an excellent in law gift 😂