New Movies Galore, Teen Horror Fun in Yellowjackets, & What's Making You Happy

What I'm Watching, Reading, & Listening To This Week

Happy 2022, coming at you from the ailing couch of a woman freshly Boosted!! I appear to have one of those enviable immune systems that goes absolutely balls to the wall when it senses the tiniest threat of Covid, and/or the constitution of a frail Victorian child. Either way, I’m super thankful for vaccines that work and for TV and movies to get me through couch days.

Two other things making me happy this week:

• This article from McSweeney’s titled “A NOTE OF REASSURANCE FROM YOUR SCHOOL DISTRICT REGARDING OUR UPDATED OMICRON POLICIES.” [Thanks to IRL NYC teacher Rich Brown for sending that one!]

• Twitter’s new obsession with Elmo beefing with a pet rock named Rocco. Elmo is a sassy king and I never knew it??

I would love to hear from the Readers: What’s making YOU happy this week? We’re staring down several months of winter blues and sun lamps, so I’d love to hear anything funny or joyful or binge-worthy you’ve got queued up. Drop a comment and let the rest of us know!

Now on to the week’s topics! Remember I try to set it up so you can easily scan through to the categories you care about.

Movies - Don’t Look Up & The Lost Daughter

In 2022, I’ll be breaking up most of my “Watching” segments into two separate categories, one for Movies and one for TV. There’s just so much coming out right now and no end in sight! I only have one life to live, and only one post per week to live it!

I watched a lot of movies over Christmas break, including the blockbuster hits: Spider-Man: No Way Home [review—nostalgia factor: thumbs up! plot: thumbs meh! Marisa Tomei’s jeans: thumbs way up!] and Matrix 4 [review—all hail Jonathan Groff’s performance, in which he was so engrossed he allegedly peed himself! This is the man famous for spitting through his King George parts in Hamilton! Legend!].

But here are the two slightly less-blockbuster movies I recommend checking out:

1. Don’t Look Up - For a fun time

Sorry to the critics, who for some coastal-elite reason hated this movie, but this was SUCH FUN.

Don’t come to this for a think piece! Come to it for farce! Come for Jonah Hill playing a character he describes as: “if Fyre Festival was a person”! Come for Cleveland-chic Timothée Chalamet playing a pothead with a surprising reverence for his Evangelical roots! Come for blowhard cable news anchor Cate Blanchett pouring herself white wine as the world ends and drawling, “Let’s just drink and talk shit about people.”

It’s dumb and warm and funny and gets serious only in the right, most poignant ways.

2. The Lost Daughter - For a tough-to-watch thinker that lingers

This is the new movie starring Olivia Coleman and directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal that’s getting a lot of awards-season buzz. If you like High Art that’s somehow simultaneously slow, stressful, AND sad, this is the movie for you!

It wasn’t a “fun” watch, but it was a good watch. We need more movies about women’s interior lives, and this one is about the burden of motherhood and what happens for women who find that it’s crushing them.

If you watch this, please let me know what you think happened at the end because Ben and I disagree.

3. New Movies I Haven’t Seen but Am Happy to Predict Whether They’re Worth Watching:

Because SO MANY new movies are out, I thought I’d give a quick and dirty rundown of the notable ones and fall on my own metaphorical sword of probably horrible predictions:

• Nightmare Alley: aka the one where Bradley Cooper, Cate Blanchett, and a load of other Oscar darlings play murdery creepy white circus people in the 1940s. Sorry, but sounds like the energy of one of those pretentious college parties where everyone pretends to know who Schopenhauer was. Barf.

• Swan Song: Mahershala Ali has a terminal illness and might clone himself, which is another way of saying A Walk to Remember meets Black Mirror, which is another way of saying this movie will not be fun, BUT: Mahershala 💕.

• Being the Ricardos: This is supposedly good, but who are these people saying, “Yes, I would like to see Nicole ‘Serious As a Heart Attack’ Kidman play the funniest lady who ever lived?”

• The Tragedy of Macbeth: Outstanding, probably. But this, along with Belfast and C’mon C’mon, is shot in black and white and I just have one thing to say to that which is: Stop.

• Belfast: From what I can tell, this movie is about the guy from 50 Shades and the woman from Outlander trying to get their kid out of war-torn Belfast. Dame Judi Dench is also here. But *sigh* it’s in black and white so I cannot do it.

• C’mon C’mon: Why. Are. We. Doing. Movies. in. Black. and. White. Have you ever heard of this incredible innovation, Technicolor!??? [But this movie is supposed to be UH-mazing so I will probably watch.]

• Licorice Pizza: I’m extremely annoyed that I will probably end up watching this.

• West Side Story: Sorry, I can’t sit through a single minute more of that dumb sad boring story about the sad teens who die, written by old white men.

• The Power of the Dog: If you want to see Benedict Cumberbatch be an evil cowboy, this would be a good starting point? The Oscar buzz around this movie is deafening, but I can’t get in the mood.

Wow, congratulations for making it through my excessively long Movies section!! You owe yourself a treat! Relax your shoulders, loosen your jaw, grab a glass of wine, and join me in our next section: TV SHOWS.

TV - Yellowjackets on Showtime*

*[I’m watching through Amazon Prime.]

Okay, knowing my audience, nobody is going to take me up on this recommendation, but oh my gosh I am obsessed with this show!!!!!!!!!! If you like your TV a little dark [okay, “very”!] and a little creepy [okay, “very”!], watch this!

The premise, without giving too much away: In 1996, a high-school girls’ soccer team is headed to Nationals when their plane crashes in the Canadian wilderness. The ones left alive have to survive out there for over a year — and shit apparently gets real Lord of the Flies but with more exposed bones and viscera. That’s half of the show. The other half flashes forward to the present day where the survivors are living with the fallout of the trauma and trying to hide what they did from the world.

It’s a little bit Squid Game, a little bit Lost, a little bit Black Mirror. While the subject matter is obviously incredibly dark, they balance it well with stylish 90s nostalgia and a huge dose of humor and well-drawn characters. It’s horror, but it’s shockingly fun, too?? [Don’t cancel me please.]

I will caution that if you don’t want to see someone’s face get eaten by a wolf, this might not be the show for you. *dejectedly watches everyone leave*

Listening - Sweet Bobby podcast

[Thank you to my friend Melanie Berg for this recommendation!]

It’s not enough to say that this is a podcast about “catfishing” — that thing where someone pretends to be someone else online and cons another person into coughing up love, money, or some other valued asset.

I mean, technically it is. Sweet Bobby is a six-episode true-crime series about possibly the most sophisticated catfishing case of all time. But something about calling it “catfishing” doesn’t capture the insanity of this story. “Catfishing” makes me think of something shitty but essentially harmless — like a prank, like someone kind of lying on their dating profile. But this was a crime that spanned over ten years and unraveled a woman’s life. And SHE is the one helping tell this story which to me is so courageous. [Also, you DO find out who did it!]

The story is crazy!!! I DEVOURED it and I can’t stop thinking about it!!!!

Reading - Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid

This was THE book of the summer in 2021, but as we’ve discussed ad nauseam, I don’t read books, and when I do, I’m six months late.

That said, I prefer my “beach reads” in the winter anyway, when it’s 28 degrees outside, and NYC is one big slush lagoon, and Vitamin D has left the building, and you’re slowly becoming that guy in The Raven sitting in your armchair yelling at birds that aren’t really there.

Like I said: The perfect time to read about sexy people prancing around Malibu in bikinis and setting things on fire! So when I saw Malibu Rising with its bright-blue-ocean cover at the airport bookstore, I paid the outrageous $32 and my firstborn child and dove right in!

Verdict: It’s a fun beach read for a cold January day. Loving it.

Congrats for making it through the first Hannah’s Weekly of 2022! Thank you SO much for being here! Drop a comment and let me know what you liked, what you disagree with, or what you think I should watch, read, or listen to next!