Cate Blanchett is Making Me Question Reality
And Timothée Chalamet is saving NYC!
Coming on a Tuesday because I spent the weekend cosplaying as a WAG (Wife And Girlfriend of Ben who played in a soccer tournament for Yale alumni, which neither of us are), AND Monday was the “Sports Equinox,” meaning every sport ESPN ever invented was in action, AND this is happening concurrently with awards-season movies and TV, AND an election!!?! Margin? I don’t know her!
Happy Halloween!!
There are three types of people when it comes to Halloween costumes:
The best kind: Elaborate costume planners. I aspire to be you but am constantly finding myself caught off guard by holidays. Heidi Klum is their Queen.
The middle kind: Those of us who have a thing we can kind of turn into a Halloween costume on demand. A Jason Voorhees hockey mask; a witch hat; cat ears; a closet full of clothing flowy enough to pass for witch/fortune teller/drama teacher/etc. This is me. Our Queen is Mr. Napkin-Head.
The worst: People who don’t celebrate. Sorry but there’s a special place in hell for people who refuse to participate in hell’s holiday! You have no Queen, and you have no God!!! [Maybe I went overboard there, but I’m not retracting it.]
Which one are you? And what is your costume this year?1 I am, as God intended when they gave me curly hair with a white streak, a witch yet again.
Table of Contents
This week we are catching up and gabbing about a little bit of everything:
Timothée Chalamet news
Other random entertainment news
Trailer of the Week
Grading this Saturday Night Live season so far
Waxing philosophical about that new Cate Blanchett show on Apple
In the News — Timothée Chalamet Edition
🎶 Hey haters, new Chalamet as young Bob Dylan trailer dropped! This movie will test the friendships of Chalamaniacs [me] and Dylanologists [most of my besties]. Do we believe this is his actual singing voice, as advertised?? It’s wild to me that this is the second role he’s taken that might’ve made more sense for Jeremy Allen White…
🎸 Oh nvm, Jeremy Allen White couldn’t play Bob Dylan because he was too busy BEING BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN. Check out the first look!
🏓 Thought we were done with Timothée Chalamet? Nope! He will be starring alongside Fran Drescher and Gwyneth Paltrow in “Marty Supreme,” a film about a ping pong pro in the 1950s. The internet went nuts when this photo surfaced:
And finally, saving the best for last…
On Sunday, Timothée Chalamet made a surprise appearance at a Timothée Chalamet lookalike contest in Washington Square Park where the cash prize was $50! He did not enter the contest, but took photos with a screaming mob and then went about his day doing whatever it is heartthrobs do on Sunday afternoons.
My takeaway from all of this is that noted New Yorker Timothée Chalamet is doing more for the City of New York than its OWN MAYOR and all of its male sports teams! Did you know the Giants, Yankees, AND Knicks all lost on Monday night whilst our mayor faces criminal charges?? It’s not easy to be that disappointing! Timothée Hal Chalamet, the New York Liberty, and bodega cats are the only things holding this city together.
In Other Celebrity and Movie News
🌟 Julia Roberts is a Dave Matthews Band fan. A friend of mine said, “That makes sense, they both peaked in the 90s.” What Julia said, “The first time I ever danced with my husband was almost 25 years ago to a Dave Matthews Band song. That was a winning combination as I have been swooning over my husband and this band ever since.”
[Though let us not forget she married her husband after — maybe?? — starting an affair with him while he was still married and she was dating *checks notes* Benjamin Bratt. Wow, she really did peak in the 90s.]
🎤 One video to watch this week: Adele crying and hugging Celine Dion in the audience of her concert. Some things in life are always pure.
💃🏻 Oh and if you aren’t following Ilona Maher on Dancing With the Stars, are you even trying to be happy?
😳 I made a brief explainer about why Beyonce, Taylor Swift, and Kanye are back on conspiracy TikTok. I love TikTok but sometimes we need to put our phones in a lockbox for an hour or two.
🙈 I completely missed this in June when Glen Powell went on a podcast and told a story about how his sister went on a date with a cannibal. Except it didn’t happen to his sister, and it is, in fact, a fairly well-known urban myth. When Buzzfeed fact-checked, Powell tweeted that he had thought for years it was true of his sister! Hilarious, but I can’t decide if I think he’s A) really dumb for that, B) still lying about it, or C) a “Believe Women” icon. Maybe all of the above!
📸 Zendaya is back on red carpets wearing dresses and being protected by her small but powerful boyfriend Spider-Man Tom Holland. I have reached exactly “She must be freezing in that dress” years of age, but I will always welcome any Zendaya clickbait the algorithm chooses to give me.
🎞️ Speaking of Tom Holland, he got plucked to be Christopher Nolan’s [Oppenheimer, Dunkirk, Tenet, Interstellar, The Dark Knight, Inception] next muse! No wonder he’s practicing up on being a “dudes being dudes” kind of dude. [Protecting his girlfriend from paparazzi.]
😱 Horror directors give their favorite horror scenes of all time. As an avid reader of horror movie plots on Wikipedia, I loved this!
Wake Up Babe, New Severance Season 2 Trailer Just Dropped
I’m not gonna lie, this gave me pause. It gave me, “Sophomore Slump.” But who am I to judge based on one teaser trailer!?
“Saturday Night Live” Grades So Far
If you’re thinking, “SNL just isn’t good anymore,” you are IN THE PAST, babe! SNL is good! Entering its 50th season, the stakes were high, and so far, the team has generally delivered, with four solid outings. Let’s rank them:
#4 — Jean Smart / Jelly Roll. Standout sketch: Spirit Halloween.
#3 — Michael Keaton / Billie Eilish. Standout sketch: Shop TV: Halloween Cookies.
#2 — Nate Bargatze / Coldplay. Standout sketch: Washington’s Dream 2. (The original is still the BEST.)
#1 — Ariana Grande / Stevie Nicks. Standout sketch: Bridesmaid Speech is the one that deservedly went viral, but I also LOVED how unhinged Ariana was in Charades with Mom and her character in Castrati was an instant classic/meme.
The Ariana one was a nearly no-skips episode. She and her Disney upbringing just know how to deliver an assignment.
Next Up: John Mullaney and Chappell Roan on Nov. 2!
So Much Art Right Now is About Distrusting Reality
Time for me to do my favorite thing: Wax philosophical about TV shows!
A friend texted me the other day after sending a Reel and asking “Is this satire?” [a DIFFERENT friend from the one I wrote about three weeks ago!] —
“It’s getting hard for me to trust anything anymore. 😂 Between Gen Z satire and AI and true crime, nothing is safe.”
This feeling is everywhere right now, isn’t it? Is this serious? Is this satire? Is this real? Is this AI?
We’re in this shared soup of an election poisoned with one of the major parties’ inability to accept reality, our collective anxiety about AI and conspiracy theories, about different versions of political reality. Is the NFL scripted? Did Beyonce assassinate her competitors? Can I believe what my eyes are seeing and my ears are hearing?
Of course, the same standards for sanity apply here as they always have: Examine the source, seek counsel, be skeptical but not cynical, ground yourself with real relationships, be willing to be wrong and change your mind.
But it seems like this idea of delusion is looming large in the psyche of filmmakers, too. So many movies and TV right now are framed through delusions, false realities, dream states, hallucinations. And that’s the idea behind the new Alfonso Cuarón and Cate Blanchett show on AppleTV: Disclaimer*.
The show itself has drawn wildly opposite reviews: People either think it’s turgid drivel or nuanced art. I land in the latter camp somewhat: It’s absorbing but flawed, though I have to withhold my final opinion for when the finale comes out.
But I’m interested in it almost more as a part of this trend I’m seeing everywhere: Art that questions how we define reality, how we can know if we’re experiencing reality or not. “Beware of narrative and form,” the show starts in voiceover. “It can bring us closer to the truth, but also has the great power to manipulate.”
In the show, we follow Cate Blanchett, a famed documentarian who suddenly finds herself the subject of a novel digging up a secret she’s hidden for years. As you watch, you realize that you can’t trust what you’re seeing — that the flashbacks are merely reconstructions of memories and fantasies through different characters’ perspectives. Cuarón, to varying degrees of success, is toying with our assumptions and expectations, and often is straight-up lying to us.
I’m kind of into it.
On the downside: The show beats you over the head with all this, with narrations that feel overwrought. It’s slow, to the point I was wondering if I could just fast-forward to get to What Actually Happpened. It’s also VERY explicit and voyeuristic. [The justification being we’re inside some creepy male characters’ heads and participating with them in their creepy gaze. Like I said, not subtle!]
On the upside: It’s gorgeous. A feast for the eyes, with elite performances. It’s Prestige TV with a capital P, deploying people at the height of their craft.
I’m devouring it even though it’s testing my patience and doing too much and too little at the same time.
My brain is tingling with the thought that Alfonso Cuarón, too, is concerned about a future in which we can’t tell reality from fantasy. But that perhaps that has been the human condition from the start.
If this was a book club, I would end thusly: A couple other shows I’m watching that are tinkering with perception and reality are Agatha All Along and Grotesquerie. Have you run into this theme? Any shows you’ve enjoyed or recommend in this vein?
That’s all for this week! I hope you enjoyed, and would love to hear your opinions, Halloween traditions, or whatever is on your mind! If you have time, drop a heart or a comment to help me grow. 💜
Vulture is doing the important journalism of rounding up all the celebrity Halloween costumes.