Dìdi's Quiet Power & Catching Up on TV News

Plus, Sabrina Carpenter and the "Pop Girlie" era in which we exist

Today, we’re hitting some entertainment headlines about upcoming TV and movies, a quick science corner, a reflection on Sabrina Carpenter, and the lovely film Dìdi.

This week, I watched Troy for the first time and concluded it is still the greatest exegesis on the theme of Brad Pitt’s a*s that we have. And not a whole lot more!

I also watched half of Madame Web before it put me to sleep, and it was the most incoherent movie I’ve ever seen — and I had just watched Troy. Madame Web felt like a daytime TV cop procedural wrapped up in a bad episode of Gilmore Girls wrapped up in a commercial for milk. I kind of enjoyed it!?

I’m behind on NEW movies, though, and there are several I’d like to catch in theaters before they leave:

• Trap: M. Night Shyamalan’s Josh Hartnett vehicle.

• Deadpool & Wolverine: I know I’ll enjoy it but Marvel just makes me want to take a nap these days.

• It Ends With Us: Sike! I’m not going to see this, as outlined last week.

• Sing Sing: Colman Domingo stars in this already-beloved film about incarcerated men creating theater. Domingo is not just the best-dressed person on every red carpet he graces, but a Best Actor in the making.

• Alien: Romulus: I have heard it described as “acid blood eats through everything”! Sign me up!!! I’m thinking about doing a rewatch of the entire franchise. Good/bad idea?

• Blink Twice: Zoë Kravitz’s directorial debut that looks kind of like Get Out if it was set at Coachella. Her boyfriend, Channing Tatum, stars.

Before we dive in, a question: What’s the most incoherent movie you’ve ever seen? And did you enjoy it anyway? Also, what do you remember about Troy?

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Entertainment News I Care About

📺 Genre TV is thriving, with some of the best sci-fi/dystopia shows of the past couple years teasing sequel seasons:

• Silo: November 15. (With Steve Zahn added to the cast!)

• Squid Game: December 26. The day after Christmas, as God intended! Happy holidays hunting!

• Severance: January 17, 2025. (With new cast members including Gwendoline Christie and Alia Shawkat.)

• The Last of Us: They hit us with the annoyingly vague: “2025.”

Netflix responds to questions about Squid Game SEASON 2.

🪷 White Lotus season 3 photos came out, and people noticed a “poverty filter” going strong. Filmmaker [and Reader!] Daniel Tucker explained it to me: Picture any film scene set in developing countries like Mexico or the Middle East — the image is often yellow or washed out rather than full color like real life. Oh, and Eastern European countries are often blue-filtered. There’s an element where these filters help create a mood, but there’s a bigger element where it seems both biased and biasing.

Then there’s the element with a franchise like White Lotus, a satire, where the filter could be intentionally commenting on that bias. But to me, that’s a little too subtle for the typical viewer and ends up playing into stereotypes instead?

🦸🏽‍♂️ Can Pedro Pascal and Cousin Richie save the Fantastic Four? The new cast also includes Vanessa Kirby and Eddie from Stranger Things. Whether the internet’s daddy and heart-of-gold cousin are enough to salvage this historically unwatchable franchise remains to be seen. The degree of difficulty is “Michael B. Jordan himself was in the last remake (2015), and we all literally forgot it existed.”¹

🦹🏼‍♀️ Disney had “D23” this month, where they celebrate their overlordship creativity and announce their next era of projects. In this case, a parade of sequels and remakes: Avatar 3, Incredibles 3, Frozen 3, Toy Story 5, another Tron, Ironheart, and more. Plus, announcements about theme park additions like a Tropical Americas section of Disney World [like the house from Encanto], Cars and Monsters Inc. attractions, and a “Villains Land” being added to Magic Kingdom!

• Question: Which Disney villain is the GOAT (greatest of all time) for you? Ben says Ursula because of “all the queer and drag culture she spawned” [what an ally!?], and I’m going Cruella de Vil. The name, the nails, the cigarette holder, the sheer puppy-skinning insanity!?!

🎭 The director of the Lady Gaga movie, Joker: Folie à Deux, insists that it’s “not a musical” — by describing it with the Encyclopedia Britannica’s definition of a musical: “Most of the music in the movie is really just dialogue. It’s just Arthur not having the words to say what he wants to say, so he sings them instead.” Honey, I don’t know if you haven’t seen Les Mis or whatever, but that’s a musical!

👴🏼 Brad Pitt is older than Tim Walz. That’s all!

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Science Corner

• THERE IS WATER ON MARS. I REPEAT: THERE IS WATER ON MARS. And that, my friends, is what they call Something I’ve waited my entire life to hear and also, weirdly, The first time Elon Musk and I probably tweeted about the same thing. [Speaking of: If anyone on earth was an alien cosplaying as a human, who would it be, and why is it definitely Elon Musk?]

• Stuck in space. Remember those astronauts I wrote about who did a hair-raising [sorry lol] press conference about being stuck on the ISS because their spaceship broke? Well, it turns out they can’t come back until 2025 when — you guessed it — Elon Musk’s spaceship will be available to take them back to Earth.

Thanks to reader Megan for this incredible input last time I wrote about the stranded astronauts.

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Listening — Sabrina Carpenter and the new era of “pop girlie” solidarity

If you are interested in culture at all — or have a 14-year-old in your house — you know that 2024 is the year of the “pop girlies.”

Several of our top female music stars released new music this year: Beyoncé and Taylor Swift at the helm, Billie Eilish, Charli XCX, Megan Thee Stallion, Ariana Grande, Tyla, Dua Lipa, Ice Spice, Lorde, Kacey Musgraves, Normani, and perhaps most notably of all the rise of Chappell Roan [who has some really interesting stuff to say about how horrible it’s been to get so famous so fast].

And this week: Sabrina Carpenter. I’ve been listening to her album “Short n’ Sweet” — which is a delightful cross-section of bubble-gummy pop and country-ish twang — nonstop.

But what I’m most interested in is this: The fresh imagining, re-packaging, and commodification of female solidarity. And I don’t necessarily mean that negatively. Instead of the Taylor Swift vs. Katy Perry or Madonna vs. Gaga days of yore, the cool girls are, at least on the surface, “women supporting women.”

The newest music video from Sabrina is a perfect example: It’s ostensibly about girl-on-girl crime but ends in the girls literally kissing and making up.² It’s also a winky reference to movies like Death Becomes Her and Kill Bill, which are in themselves creative, campy explorations of female rivalry and the oppressive expectations our culture places on women, beauty, gender, etc.

A deeper and more honest exploration of all this is Charli XCX’s “Girl, so confusing featuring lorde,” which processes the impact of female rivalry in realtime: Charli and Lorde both get honest about how they’ve held each other at a distance, felt jealousy, felt self-hatred, felt compared and contrasted unfairly, and then come together to say “F*** that, I’m so sorry I treated you that way.”

Lorde’s line, “It’s just self-defense until you’re building a weapon,” echoes in my head a lot lately.

Let’s be clear-eyed about this: It’s not like I think the pop women have heroically ended sexism. Ironically, what first made Sabrina Carpenter famous was being the rumored target of Olivia Rodrigo’s “Driver’s License,” as “that blonde girl” who stole Olivia’s boyfriend. So, like … we’re not bringing about world peace here.

But I like the era we’re in. If I had a teenage daughter, I would NEVER let her watch that music video, but I’d be glad that when she snuck it behind my back, she saw two gals learning how to work out their differences [after impaling each other lol].

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Watching: Dìdi

Dìdi is a coming-of-age film about a 13-year-old Taiwanese American boy going through a summer of both change and challenge. It’s also a love letter to 2008 and the MySpace of it all when social media was new and punk rock.

It’s a simple movie with a simple premise and yet it is somehow so very resonant. Emotionally true, funny, engaging, immersing. I enjoyed it. It’s already generating awards buzz for Joan Chen, who plays the mom, and it was the surprise winner of the “Audience Award” at Sundance, which means the festivalgoers picked it as their favorite.

I tend to get extremely anxious watching movies about teenagers because I am just so worried about their little baby feelings and their little baby brains and their little baby inability to make safe decisions. [Is this why I don’t have kids??] And this one did stress me out, but it was also so funny, so kind, so real.

Keep an eye out for when it hits a streamer near you.

That’s all for this week, folks! Thank you SO much for joining me here, it really means a lot and makes my life better. I’d love to hear your thoughts and opinions and what you’re watching, reading, or listening to!

1. [Hot Take: Chris Evans as Captain America? Tired. Chris Evans as the Human Torch in the original Fantastic Four (2005)? WIRED! ]

2. [Which…queer baiting…? A whole other conversation to be had there.]